Hispanic Pass Over

illustration by Doug Potter

It's not every council meeting that the mayor gets called a "pendejo," at least not within earshot anyway. Gavino Fernandez, who represents El Concilio, an East Austin organization of neighborhood groups, flung the expletive at Kirk Watson while expressing his anger over council's failure to appoint a Hispanic to the Planning Commission. Calling Kirk Watson an "asshole" in English would surely have garnered Fernandez the boot from chambers, but the mayor chose to ignore the Spanish equivalent and instead calmly listened on. Watson says he perfectly understood Fernandez's meaning, but decided to let the comment pass. With recent rhetoric demonizing environmentalists as the purveyors of racial injustice, it's not hard to understand why Watson would want to downplay any discussion including the words "green council" and "racist."

For his part, Fernandez denies he was calling anyone a "pendejo"; rather, he says that he was explaining that the Hispanic community was calling El Concilio "pendejos" for endorsing Anglo Councilmember Bill Spelman instead of Hispanic Manuel Zuniga in last season's race for the traditionally Hispanic Place 5 seat. "That just goes to tell you the importance of having Latinos on boards and commissions so they can clearly interpret what is said," Fernandez says. "I wanted to make the point to Bill that I took a lot of flack and he paid me back by appointing someone besides a Latino to the planning commission."

The flack is just beginning to fly for Spelman, Watson, and the rest of the council, and they should probably get used to it. No Hispanic representation on the Planning Commission means that Planning Commission decisions will likely be under attack from minority groups until the next round of council appointments in 1998. This time around, Councilmembers Daryl Slusher, Beverly Griffith, Jackie Goodman, Gus Garcia, and Bill Spelman each got to appoint one member to the nine-member commission. Next year, Watson and Willie Lewis will add their choices, along with two members appointed by council consensus.

For the past three terms of the commission, Garcia had chosen newspaper publisher Cathy Vasquez-Revilla as his appointee. But Vasquez-Revilla was never the politically correct choice for Garcia (as he is fond of pointing out), despite her ethnicity, because of her alliance with real estate developer Jim Bob Moffett. And the May elections saw Vasquez-Revilla campaigning for Spelman's opponent, homebuilder Manuel Zuniga, and criticizing Garcia's lack of support for the Hispanic candidate.

This time around, the scenery has changed. Garcia bucked tradition when he broke the so-called gentlemen's agreement and vacated the Place 5 seat to move to Place 2. That Garcia broke with tradition again by appointing Asian American businessman Ray Vrudhala to the Planning Commission instead of a Hispanic should come as no surprise -- it was the fulfillment of a promise Garcia made to his many Asian American campaign contributors, who suggested Vrudhala's appointment. But it is, perhaps, surprising to see Place 5 rookie Spelman, the first Anglo to occupy the seat in more than two decades, pass up the opportunity to curry favor with Hispanics by selecting a white woman.

Spelman's appointee, Rachel Rawlins, is an environmental lawyer, and he says experience was the significant factor in his choice. "I wanted my representative to be someone who had enough background and knowledge to do justice to SB1704 and annexation," he says, citing two legal snarls which the commission will be facing in 1998. It also stands to reason that Spelman replaced Planning Commission member Mike Rivera with Rawlins, regardless of their races. Rivera, (who did not apply for a reappointment), is an engineer who was appointed by former Councilmember Ronney Reynolds; Rawlins is a green-leaning lawyer focused on enviro issues.

The new makeup of the commission will mark the first time since the mid-Seventies that it has been without Hispanic representation. That could prove significant in the coming year, especially following the successful East Austin Overlay and the BFI Recycling zoning rollback, both of which were championed by Vasquez-Revilla. Spelman points out that he did not completely overlook her; he appointed the La Prensa publisher to the Environmental Justice Task Force. "She knows too much to be bumped," says Spelman, "and I mean that in a good way." Of the eight appointments to other, albeit less powerful, boards and commissions Spelman made last week, half were Hispanics -- including putting Fernandez on the Citizens' Planning Implementation Committee.

The commissions controversy segues nicely into Garcia's next pet project -- the creation of single-member districts, under which voters of a particular area would elect their own representative, rather than all councilmembers being elected citywide. Garcia says he is no longer interested in being the token Hispanic appointing other token Hispanics to commissions, and that single-member districts would alleviate that situation. "If we could have councilmembers from all parts of the city, maybe we could have a Planning Commission from all parts of the city," he says.

However, Garcia may find that his single-member push could serve to open up another can of racial controversy. El Concilio's Fernandez is gearing up with other minority groups to oppose it. Fernandez argues that a single-member district system would squeeze minorities' current broad-based representation by all seven at-large councilmembers down to just one. "We're real reluctant to be placed in a situation where we become more segregated," Fernandez says. "My chances are much greater if I have seven chips in my pocket than if I have just one."

Garcia points out that not only do most other major cities in the U.S. operate with some form of single-member districts, but that it would be cheaper too. "The strength of single-member districts is that it's a government closer to the people," he says. He adds that he could have won a single-member election for $5,000 instead of the $110,000 he ended up spending in May.

"That can be addressed through campaign finance reform," counters Fernandez. Oh yeah, campaign finance reform -- that other political can of worms. Garcia might be forced to push single-member districts onto the ballot in November if the Austinites for a Little Less Corruption (ALLC) get their way. The group gathered 29,271 signatures in 1996 to put campaign finance reform on the ballot last May, but its request was thwarted by the city clerk's office, which ruled that the signatures were not valid for a variety of questionable technical reasons. ALLC has been fighting the city on that ruling in court for months, and it looks like the group will not only win its case to send the issue to the voters, but the judge may even order the city to post the issue on the ballot in the November Travis County bond election.

Since campaign finance and single-member districts would both be city charter revisions, they would need to be voted on at the same time since the city charter can only be revised every two years. If the single-member issue doesn't make it to the ballot at the same time campaign finance does, the wait will mean another at-large council election in May 1999. Considering Garcia's stump "I hope we've seen the last at-large-election" speech, he'd better be ready for a letdown. Any successful change to single-member districts would require a massive education/PR campaign, and November is just around the corner. After all, Austin has already voted it down five times in 25 years, the last being May 1994.

Still, supporters of single-member districts think it has a better chance this time around. The "death-bed converts" among traditional opponents from outlying areas may actually push the measure through this time around. "The central city has always been for single-member districts, and now there's a lot of people who voted against us who are going to join them," predicts Spelman.

Opponents such as Fernandez say that the council should find other ways to improve the system. "Austin is a `city of ideas,'" he says. "We should march forward and find how to include all the community in the political process."

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This Week at Council: Hot topics coming up today are what to do with our city health clinics, Mueller Airport parking fee hikes, the annexation of Regency Village, and the selection of two pilot neighborhoods for the Neighborhood Planning Project. Want to take a crack at the proposed 1997-98 budget before it's adopted on September 17? There's a public hearing at council chambers on Monday, Sept. 8 from 3-9pm.