Naked City

Ted Siff (Photo By John Anderson)

Ted Siff has resigned from the Austin Parks Foundation to return to his publishing roots, a profession he left in the early Nineties when he discovered that one could actually get paid for loving nature.

"I have two loves – parks and publishing," Siff said, sounding as though the two worlds were perfectly interchangeable. They are to Siff, who closed out his last week as the executive director of the Parks Foundation on Feb. 18 and two days later started his new job as chief operating officer of the Texas School Administrators' Legal Digest, a small publishing and conference-producing company. "I'm not going anywhere," he insisted. "I'm just changing jobs."

In other words, Siff will continue crusading for more open space on a voluntary basis, just as he did before he left publishing the first time. Siff's print years took in Texas Monthly, then a young magazine when he joined as associate publisher in 1976; he worked there until 1987. Siff has also run his own shop, a political newsletter called the Quorum Report, which publisher Harvey Kronberg has since developed into an online survival tool for politicians, lobbyists, reporters, and junkies.

In 1989, Siff got involved with Citizens for Open Space, then a fairly informal group of friends that included Beverly Griffith, Brigid Shea (both went on to become Austin City Council members), and George Cofer, now executive director of the Hill Country Conservancy. "Things were much more laid back then than they are now," he said. "We never got precisely a [designated] green space for the region, but certainly that is what's reflected in the Envision Central Texas plan." The ECT road map is a community-driven vision of how and where growth should be directed in Central Texas.

In 1991, Siff was hired to run the Austin office of the Trust for Public Land, where he began speaking out for more funding to improve what he viewed as a shameful scarcity of state-owned parks in Texas. During that stint Siff was also serving as a board director of the Austin Parks Foundation, a nonprofit that works to put a healthier shade of green on the city map. The foundation has played active roles in several successful city bond measures, including $20 million for the Barton Creek Wilderness Park, $40.5 million for the Destination Park and Green Space initiative, and $10 million for the ambitious Roy G. Guerrero Colorado River Park in East Austin. When the foundation's executive director's position came open with the departure of Tim Fulton in 2001, Siff stepped in to provide a seamless transition as Fulton's successor. Under Siff, the foundation has furthered and initiated several innovative programs, including Partners for Parks (which works in tandem with the city's Adopt-a-Park program) and the "wireless" parks endeavor that allows people to fire up their computers in the lap of nature. "We try to lead and be creative and initiate ideas," Siff said.

But don't think for a moment that Siff is leaving the "we" reference behind with his departure. Witness: "This [new job] doesn't diminish my interest one iota in parks. I'll always be a parks pal."