Beside The Point

Those serene folks at 7 Steps for a Better Austin have been reminding us, "Austin is what you make it." With their recovery-chic name – what happened to the five missing steps that would bring it to an even dozen? – and that motivational admonition, our inner David Crosby wonders if AA's "Keep coming back – it works if you work it!" was their initial choice.

Speaking of recovery, City Council is positively teetotaling at today's Thursday meeting, their last before next week's election – it's as if Wynn's campaigning binge on behalf of the props has put them off the stuff for good. The centerpiece of the scant agenda is the 2pm presentation of the downtown circulator study by land-development savant Charles Heimsath. The presentation should prove especially interesting for Lee Leffingwell and Brewster McCracken, Capital Metro board members both. At their Monday board meeting, the pair was rebuffed in their efforts to ensure that Cap Metro's Leander rail line would be staffed with union employees, on a 4-2 vote (see p.32); the council members told me if the protracted labor pains at the company continue, it's likely the city's plan for circulator rail (or at least Cap Metro's stake in running it) will be stillborn. Said McCracken: "If Capital Metro's going down this course of outsourcing all union jobs, and at the same time wants the city and the county, and possibly the state, to pay for the [commuter rail line], it begs the question: how does Capital Metro have a role in the urban rail system?" The board will have time to mull that over, as McCracken flies to Chicago today for the "Rail~Volution 2006" conference. We promised the council member we'd mock the conference title, but … it's just too easy.

Less a laughing matter is the return of the traffic-light cameras, better known to the anti-New World Order crowd as the Snapshot of the Beast. The dais gang is revising the city ordinance to make tickets-in-the-mail civil offenses (vs. the current criminal offense of getting pulled over and ticketed) and requesting proposals from would-be digital crime-stoppers. If they bear out throughout a 60-day "pilot study," the panoptic-peepers will be rewarded with a five-year contract. While she sees this earlier proposal of hers bear fruit (actually, cameras), Jennifer Kim also presents a new item at council today, proposing "a program along the MoPac corridor using home-energy improvements as a method to aid traffic noise mitigation." Can we assume this means picking out drive-time commuters at random and using them as insulation?