Beside the Point

He wasn't exactly Jack Bauer – there were no nerve gas releases nor slit throats in City Council chambers last week – but it was up to Assistant City Manager Rudy Garza to lead council through a rough 24. Actually, it was 76 hours that Garza painstakingly relived, recounting the inadequate official response to the May 4 (and following) power outage that affected 52,000 citizens. The edge-of-your-pillow, white-knuckle doze-fest was requested by Mayor Wynn to explain the city's reaction – or lack thereof – to the spring storms, which left hundreds of customers, many of them in the toniest West Austin neighborhoods, in the dark as late as May 8 following the storm and its aftershocks.

Unlike our favorite real-time, civil-liberties shredding entertainment (the Fox TV show, not the local Prop. 1 debate), Garza didn't get much help at all from his unflappable geek goddess, his computer compañera Chloe – excuse us – Toby Futrell, who repeatedly interjected at points she felt needed further elucidation. To her, and the city's, credit, Austin Energy crews did snap to work immediately, in dangerous conditions, after the initial outage, but due to miscommunication underestimated the exploding emergency workload. The arrival of further storms over the weekend didn't help – in the end, there were some 2,000 outage points, an electrician's nightmare.

Garza ended his presentation not like Bauer – on a slow boat to Shanghai – but with recommendations for future power-failure plans. The most prominent is a call system, to which the powerless – if they can get to a working phone – can dial in, enter neighborhood info, and get a rough estimate of their wait time.

Waiting turned out to be last week's predominant theme. With the first public hearing over the revised 2006 bond proposals on the agenda (as it eventuated, some time in the middle of the night), excruciatingly preceded by a procession of speakers addressing a neighborhood appeal of the Zoning Commission's approval of the Champion Partners commercial development planned for Loop 360 at RM 2222, you'd think council might find a way to get the lead out. Think again. The gang has been roundly vilified for delaying contentious public hearings long into the night, sending speakers packing from exhaustion as the hours tick off. You'd think council might, I don't know – perhaps save parading every single city department head in front of the Channel 6 cameras for a less contentious day. Not so – the proclamation-happy gang personally led the parade, in official obeisance to Employee Appreciation Week.

After the Loopy zoning debacle sputtered painfully to a stop after first-reading approval, and the tow-truck lobby hitched up and winched off a couple of hours, the 101 bond advocates officially registered to speak had self-selected down to a couple dozen who began talking at a quarter after midnight. There was little surprise here: several speakers in support of land acquisition (cut from $92.3 million to $50 in city staff recommendations), affordable housing (cut less, but also to $50m), the Mexic-Arte Museum, and a new central library (both grimly holding at their pre-revision numbers of $5m and $90m, respectively). The only minor fireworks flamed when Bond Election Advisory Committee outreach chair Mike Clark-Madison took the podium.

The staunch library advocate (and former Chronicle city editor) applauded the library funds holding firm, while advocating creativity in boosting open space and housing bucks. It was also obvious something else was troubling his perpetually furrowed brow; he ended with the admonition that "the bond election advisory committee does still exist. We will be happy to help." The not terribly subtle message was that Clark-Madison and the Bondsmates were irked regarding the city staff's (council's?) more mysterious tweaks to the package – namely, axing the to-be-leveraged funding for Hyde Park's Elisabet Ney Museum, while adding unvouched-for Asian American Cultural Center earmarks – listed under the dubious auspice of "citizen initiatives." The committee's objections were also more general – if you spent well over half a year balancing the city's bond ledgers, only to watch the blackboard abruptly erased and rewritten, you'd be a little pissed too.

No doubt council will have its own defenses up and ready. To paraphrase President Logan: They did it for the sake of the city!

The bond hearings continue today (Thursday), so there must be another controversial measure sure to engender additional hours of testimony. That would be the second reading of the ordinance transferring Roy's Taxi's franchise to Yellow Cab, earning the ire of dozens of Roy's drivers. Also on the agenda are revisions to the small, minority, and women-owned business ordinances. The Mibby-Wibby Love-In was scheduled for last week but was held over in the shadow of Hispanic Chamber of Commerce concerns that the revisions could have unforeseen negative consequences; with any luck, the disagreements have since been ironed out.

Lastly, Brewster McCracken's fundamental-pharmacist-thwacker enters the light, with a proposed requirement that any city-contracted pharmacy fill all prescriptions (including birth control) "without delay and discrimination."

Let's hope the admonishment also applies to today's hearings.