Austin @ Large: Austin at Large: Governing Boards

Only weeks after his term began, we already know what Mayor Gus Garcia's legacy will -- or could, or should -- be. He doesn't have any money to spend. His colleagues' main priority is to gather signatures to run again, or to run again, or to run to succeed him. But whoever takes over the reins in June 2003 -- if Garcia indeed gives them up -- may well preside over a city government that works better than it does today.

Yes, reform is in the air, though nobody calls it that. By the end of Garcia's term, we will almost assuredly have public financing of council campaigns, which will hopefully be for single-member districts. Both items will likely be on the May 2002 ballot, along with incumbents Daryl Slusher, Jackie Goodman, and Beverly Griffith, should they each convince 20,000 of their closest friends they're worthy to run again. (Maybe we can repeal our absurd and undemocratic term-limit scheme, or at least reform that, at the same time. Just a thought.)

These reforms, proponents hope, would bring people more in line with their city government, which -- being designed for a community half our size -- has struggled for decades with an accountability problem. The stopgap solution has been to interpose more than five dozen citizen boards and commissions between the tiny City Council and the huge municipal bureaucracy, but that system likewise needs reform. Last spring, under the aegis of Council Member Will Wynn, the council, with fully acknowledged irony, appointed a commission to study commissions, chaired by Wynn's predecessor on the dais, Bill Spelman.

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Thoroughly Committed

The "commission commission," as Spelman calls it, is only a few housekeeping tasks away from presenting its recommendations for reform. (Key among these is checking the group's suggested changes against the results of a survey of more than 200 citizens.) What the task force -- which includes current and former city board members and reps from the city manager, city clerk, city auditor, and law department -- will recommend is a far cry from what some hoped and others feared when Wynn first hatched this idea.

"A lot of the concern people felt -- that this task force was a cover for eliminating a huge number of boards and commissions -- turned out to be unfounded," Spelman says. He expects to call for eliminating only about 10 boards -- obvious cases where groups have outlived their original function, or haven't met in the past two years, or so on.

"We're not talking about getting rid of anything that anyone much cares about," Spelman adds. The Spelman group is also supposed to recommend new boards to cover gaps in citizen oversight of City Hall. "There's a lot of discussion about how we have more boards and commissions than anybody else," Spelman says. "And while that sounds like a good applause line, if you look at everything we're required to have by state law, or by federal contract, or because we otherwise need them, there aren't that many vanity boards."

A bigger problem is the lack of consistency between boards -- how many members, appointed how, representing whom, to do what. Commission members and city staffers typically feel the other doesn't understand why a citizen board exists -- should it advise on long-term policy, or should it be granting or withholding the people's blessing to operational decisions?

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We Commish, Therefore We Are

The mess of ad hoc ordinances that created the city commissions does not answer such questions, or even simpler ones like what constitutes a quorum or how officers are to be chosen. Meanwhile, the city clerk's office, which needs to fill the more than 500 slots on these boards, tears its hair out as appointment after appointment founders on the political shoals. The Spelman task force -- specifically John Steiner from the city law department -- aimed to produce a rational "template" to govern the boards. (A separate template would guide the council as it creates new, short-term task forces.)

Though what gets adopted will probably not be all that Steiner suggests, the outcome will be to reconfigure existing boards. Many would lose members, and many would end up with different job descriptions than they have now. This "got people up in arms," Spelman says, "trying to make the objectives all the same; [some] feel it's sinister in that staff is trying to make their portfolios less aggressive and more benign."

Most controversial is the call for a bona fide sunset review system. The council is already supposed to periodically ensure that each board is still useful, but there are no consequences if it doesn't. Steiner's draft language would require a sunset review every five years, and an actual vote to continue the board's existence, or the commission would go away.

"That has people [on the boards] feeling they need to justify their own existence," Spelman notes, which would not be an incentive to dispassionate citizen oversight. "But if there's no requirement for the council to do the review, it won't happen. I never did it. The real argument is over ... what we can do to ensure that it takes place without causing the tremendous anxiety of calling into question whether the board continues to exist."