Point Austin: Futrell's Farewell
Not much suspense, but plenty of melodrama
By Michael King, Fri., July 20, 2007

I'm flogging the column's prescience this week, because on Tuesday the local media treated Futrell's inevitable (and belated) announcement as just this side of Longhorn recruit signing day and as supposedly ending the "rumors" concerning Futrell's retirement. Futrell herself wrote, "I had originally intended to publicly announce my plans in early September after the 2008 budget adoption, but I've decided to put an end to what feels like mounting media frenzy and conjecture." In the first place, it isn't a "rumor" if everybody knows it – and Futrell had publicly indicated her intentions to step down shortly after her annual review, in April. And secondly, a September announcement would have made a hash of any deliberative council timetable to hire a successor before the municipal campaign season, as Futrell herself acknowledges two sentences later: "This [announcement] will give the Council eight months to complete a national search ... and leaves another two months for notice requirements and potential slippage in that schedule."
It took nearly a year to find a new police chief and a year not to find a director for the water utility – 10 months for a new city manager is hardly too much to ask.
Cue the Sharks
Frankly, what's been more puzzling about Futrell's farewell is not that she's retiring – she's said on the record several times that 30 years as a city employee and a half-dozen as city manager is more than enough – than the elongated tap dance that has surrounded her announcement, as well as the melodramatic backstory now leaking from multiple sources at City Hall. I wouldn't even bother rehearsing this charade (and embarrassing some of the principal players) if the words "mounting media frenzy" hadn't prominently disfigured Futrell's self-serving announcement.
If anybody's frenzy is at issue here, it's the city manager's own.
According to several reliable witnesses, here's what happened. During council's April executive review, Futrell made it clear that she expected this to be her final personal job review as well as her last budget season. Accordingly, council members began privately (but not secretly, since there was no secret) discussing succession planning, including an eventual national search for a successor, which would be publicly announced shortly before the summer hiatus. But when Futrell was told that the search was headed for a June council agenda, she "freaked out" – several sources report her loud and even hysterical objections, featuring real tears. Reportedly, she pleaded that she wanted more time to make her own announcement to her staff members, and the request was readily (if somewhat confoundedly) granted.
And then nothing happened.
Now, if her memo is to be believed, Futrell apparently expected the City Council to sit politely on its hands until September – one told me as recently as a week ago, "It's Toby's call" – wondering when and if they would be allowed to discuss publicly, in a professional manner, what everybody knew was happening and moreover what is the city's most powerful position and the council's most important hiring decision.
Then came, out of the blue, Tony Plohetski's "brother-in-law-by-marriage" scoop in the Statesman, and the editors' extremely strenuous overinterpretation of that story and Futrell's response to it, even sternly encouraging her departure. The editorial was over-the-top, but from long and shameful practice mainstream editors have exquisite noses for the precise moment a public official – until then treated with politic deference – has become a lame duck. Call it a real taste for blood in the water.
From here, I'm only speculating – but it appears that even Futrell's closest council ally, Dunkerley, and perhaps Futrell herself, began to realize that this entirely unnecessary ordeal was no longer worth prolonging and decided to acknowledge the elephant in the drawing room. Thus came Dunkerley's suggested schedule last week, followed Monday by Futrell's official announcement.
Take a Breath Already
We're regularly contacted by official and unofficial sources pissed about something the city has done – that's where many news stories begin, and satisfied citizens don't call reporters – but ordinarily I try to resist personalizing what are usually institutional, structural, or singular failures. It's grimly amusing to hear people who once proclaimed Futrell walks on water now speak of her disdainfully as "Queen Toby." Futrell has every reason to be very proud of her long city of Austin tenure and many accomplishments, and she's been no slouch as a city manager. (Her congratulatory memo is here, and it's only intermittently hyperbolic. I encourage you to read it.) I'll point only to her performance during the hurricane evacuee emergencies, when her indefatigable nature and visible dedication helped thousands of people and rightfully made the whole city proud. But this time, her legendary determination always to be in control of absolutely everything has spectacularly backfired. What should have been the start of a triumphal march has begun with a pointless and unnecessary pratfall.
In the last couple of weeks, I have heard Futrell recite a half-dozen times that as city manager she has been working "100 to 120 hours a week." If that's true (and I have no reason to doubt it), it helps account for her increasingly eerie 1,000-yard stare. It's also the sign of something seriously wrong in the way things are currently run at City Hall. If the next city manager has to routinely work those kinds of hours, it means the elected officials on the City Council are frankly making a botch of policy and procedures for the whole city staff and are not doing the job they are elected to do. They need to take back authority, along with responsibility for what ultimately happens in this city. Then they won't be blindsided by stuff they should have handled directly in the first place.
For the record: Last week, due to a confusion in my own notes, I clumsily misattributed a statement by Betty Dunkerley concerning Futrell's remarkable city career – "it's a Cinderella story in itself" – to Brewster McCracken. McCracken also had effusive praise for Futrell, but that quote was not his. I apologize to the council members (who had generously ignored my mistake) and to my readers.
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