What Did Austin Do to Dennis?

When Rep. Dennis Bonnen, R-Angleton, opened today's House Environmental Resources Committee meeting by saying the first bill on the agenda was not an Austin-bashing exercise, he was probably right. The same could not be said for his management of the meeting.

The committee was supposed to be discussing House Bill 2910, a bill intended to prevent the city of Austin from dumping the residue from fresh-water treatment in a Cedar Park quarry. But Bonnen took every opportunity to attack Austin and its employees. He criticized obviously flustered Assistant City Manager Rudy Garza for almost every answer, asked a city engineer about policy decisions from 1987 that they were neither old enough nor qualified to talk about, regularly asked a second question before the witness had answered the first one, and even harangued an attorney for the city over their handwriting on their witness affidavit. He also kept calling the material to be dumped sludge, even after the committee was given a sample that showed it to be a brownish-gray powder, mostly calcium carbonate with residue from filtering lake water, including iron and aluminum.

Representatives and residents of Cedar Park received no such criticism.

Bonnen said the bill was just about making Austin be a good neighbor and expecting it to respect Cedar Park's desire to be ecologically minded like Austin. But there were audible gasps when the supposedly fair-minded committee chair said, "If the city of Austin had shown a level of consistency, this bill would never have got out of committee, and we'd be done."