The Sunday Survey, 5/23/10

This week on NewsDesk: Smith gets axed, the Cactus Cafe gets KUT (or vice versa), and Cap Metro looks for a new chief

Wait long enough in news, and the inevitable will always happen. Two long-awaited decisions were handed down this week: First, what would happen to the Cactus Cafe and, second, whose head would roll over the KeyPoint report into the shooting of Nathaniel Sanders II.

On Wednesday, UT's Texas Union management announced the broadest of broad outlines of a plan to split the cafe with KUT. While the press corps was scrabbling to get that news in before deadline, City Manager Marc Ott called a press conference to announce that City Attorney David Smith was retiring. However, the fall-out and response shows this matter is probably far, far from over.

There was a bright spot for council: On Thursday, on behalf of the city, Mayor Lee Leffingwell received the EPA's 2010 Clean Air Excellence Award in Transportation Efficiency Innovations for the pilot phase of the car2go program, which rolled out fully on Friday.

Beyond city hall, it was a big week for transportation planning as CapMetro flew in the two finalists to become the transit agency's new CEO (Linda S. Watson, CEO of Central Florida's LYNX transit agency, and New York-based transport consultant Deborah Wathen Finn.) Continuing the public input theme, on Thursday CapMetro said it will be holding a series of public budget development meetings in June.

That's the CapMetro news: What's been happening at the Capitol? While the national media had fixated on the shameless conservative rewriting of the text book standards by the State Board of Education, most state agencies were confronted with the grim realities of the state's collapsing budget, as Gov. Rick Perry announced that he wanted $1.2 billion back.