A Council’s Work Is Never Done

City Council has a heavy workload this week, what with budget prep, committee meetings, and the regular order of ongoing business. The pressure is showing.

Council held another FY2016 budget work session Monday – mornings only, Monday and Wednesday, as there are other fish to fry. They managed to work through three of the five scheduled departmental presentations – which doesn’t bode well for Wednesday, when five more are already on tap. Public budget hearings are scheduled for Aug. 20 and Aug. 27 (that is, beginning at Thursday’s regular meeting), and members are hoping to have heard all the presentations before the public begins to weigh in.

That will take some doing.

Of the five departments scheduled for Monday’s review – Austin Water, Austin Resource Recovery, Human Resources, Communications and Technology Management, and Fleet Services – Council managed to work through the first three. With five more on tap for Wednesday (including Austin Energy), it’ll be a tight fit.

Matters were slowed by a couple of dust-ups. District 7 Council Member Leslie Pool and D6 CM Don Zimmerman briefly exchanged opinions on current watering restrictions – Pool supporting current Stage 2 restrictions (one watering a week), Zimmerman arguing for a return to Stage 1 (twice a week). Later, D5 CM Ann Kitchen took on City Attorney Anne Morgan over the state law requiring budget adoption directly following public hearings – did that mean all amendment decisions on a single day (scheduled for Sept. 8)? (Morgan promised more info.) And then D8 CM Ellen Troxclair reamed out Asst. City Manager Mark Washington for his Human Resources presentation, which she heard as simply an extended defense of management’s proposed across-the-board 3% raise for non-public safety city employees – Troxclair wants to cut-and-tier that raise. Washington quietly suggested that if Council wants a different policy, it is free to propose one, or else direct the staff to present alternatives.

The fairly tense exchange between Morgan and Kitchen prompted Zimmerman to describe the entire budget process as “completely backward,” stacked in favor of more departmental spending and against Council input, and “it needs to be changed before next year.” In a rare moment, Ott responded directly to Zimmerman, defending his departmental managers as having behaved “professionally” and doing their jobs in presenting the city budget, and that Council had its own policy decisions to make. [See update below.]

The immediate upshot of these exchanges was simple: the work session ran out of time, with members having to leave, several for other meetings. In the end, the group decided to entertain all seven remaining departmental presentations on Wednesday morning, with a firm allocation of 20 minutes to each one. Sort of like speed-dating.

Council meets today (Tuesday, Aug. 18, 9am), regular work session; Wednesday, Aug. 19, 9:30am, budget work session; Thursday, Aug. 20, 10am, regular meeting. Council meeting details can be found here. Committee meeting schedules and agendas are here.

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Update: This post has been corrected to reflect an accurate chronology; the Kitchen/Morgan exchange was followed by the Zimmerman/Ott exchange.