Dunbar's Revealing Farewell

Dear Editor,
    Thank you, Wells Dunbar, for your farewell “City Hall Hustle” column [News, Dec. 30]. It accurately reflected your amiable, sometimes humorous approach to city politics. It also reflected that you were generally more at home with the powers-that-be than with the neighborhood, environmental, social justice, and civil rights activists working to make Austin more sustainable, just, and transparent.
    With the belated discovery of what you suggested was Daryl Slusher’s old Austin Chronicle file on Water Treatment Plant No. 4, you managed to again hint at a big story while not bothering to tell it. Actually covering City Hall requires real work. Better to trivialize those emails and files than to have to read through them all and try to figure out what’s really going on. It is certainly easier and acceptable for News Editor Michael King, for example, to rely on what Water Utility executive Slusher, Mayor Lee Leffingwell, and other top city officials tell us we need to know.
    Since all those details require too much time and readers probably don’t really care, it’s always been easier to stick to the surface and concerns about the “big picture.” Your concern about keeping Austin affordable was always admirable. Not so admirable was failing to connect the dots between skyrocketing water utility rates disproportionately landing on low-income and low-volume water users and small businesses and the WTP4 boondoggle.
    By handing off the WTP4 file to Michael King, I’m sure you realized that you were faithfully assuring that the contents of the file – and the triple role of Slusher as former Chronicle reporter, former City Council member, and current Water Utility WTP4 salesman – remained unexamined by our successors.
    Thank you, though, for being a nice guy and an engaging writer, and for revealing perhaps more about Austin than you intended.