Beside the Point

One of the tortured arguments during the bloodletting over single-member districts at City Council last week went like this: The city risks changing its election system from the so-called "gentlemen's agreement" (unofficially ensuring two minority seats) without knowing certainly what the outcome would be. Never mind that the agreement is both arbitrary and unenforceable – but hey, that's not to say we can't create a new one if we make the switch!

You could spend hours untangling that knot alone.

Or how about the deep historical ironies at work – namely, African-American City Council Member Sheryl Cole's passionate defense of a system instituted years ago to simultaneously install – and marginalize – African-American council members.

As Austin was reminded through a widely disseminated e-mail from San Antonio attorney David Van Os – who once argued the lawsuit to end Austin's at-large council system – the gentlemen at the heart of the gentlemen's agreement, reserving the Place 2 and Place 6 council seats for Latino and African-American candidates, weren't card-carrying members of the Rainbow Coalition. Instead, Van Os bluntly describes how in the early 1970s, "the white business community" decided not to back Anglo candidates in either race: "The specific motivation was to let the 'Blacks and Mexicans' have one seat each in order for the city to be able to defend [against] the voting rights lawsuits that everybody knew were coming, and thus preserve the at-large system. [The gentlemen's agreement] was not for the purpose of ceding representation to the communities of color, it was for the purpose of maintaining the at-large system." (The letter, posted to austinchronicle.com/newsdesk, deconstructs how seemingly banal charter changes – like the 1950s-era switch to our current "place" system – arose from white-supremacist wishes to preserve the existing power structure; it's well worth reading.)

Tempers can easily flare when discussing race and politics; to their credit, Cole and Mike Martinez, the Place 6 and Place 2 members on opposite sides of the debate, kept things admirably civil – even if their hotheaded colleague Brewster McCracken couldn't quite manage it. The poison pills in the item they debated – Cole's well-intentioned but poorly drafted proposal establishing onerous criteria to be met before putting single-member districts to the voters – spurred debate on and off the dais. Former Mayor Gus Garcia, chair of the Charter Revision Committee charged with examining districts, bristled at McCracken's innuendo-strewn depiction of the committee process as one "that disguises," "a secret," leaving council and voters "in the dark," and a done deal, with Martinez supposedly preselecting a map for passage. When Garcia tried to interject from the floor, Mayor Will Wynn thundered, "With all due respect, you are out of line." (A chastened Garcia later apologized.)

The argument was unnecessary, really, as Martinez had pointed out moments earlier that McCracken's scaremongering was "factually incorrect." "The only reason Council Member McCracken doesn't have a map is because he didn't go online to download a map. ... It's been online since October. It's still there if you want to take a look at it." He also clarified he hadn't made a proposal but personally preferred one proposed map to the others under consideration (a six-district, two at-large system coming to nine members, including mayor).

Under most circumstances, that would have been enough. After a detailed districting discussion with former Department of Justice voting wonk Gerry Hebert, who reported that one of Cole's requirements – getting a map "precleared" by the DOJ before a vote – was legally impossible, it was clear the late hour (just before midnight) didn't portend an agreeable resolution. Voicing concern with some of the Cole resolution's language – and also raising additional questions of his own – Wynn offered to act as intermediary between Cole and Martinez in drafting an amenable resolution by March 20.

But then McCracken unleashed another self-serving diatribe against districts, culminating in a Tourette's-style litany of their potential to engender "redistricting, special interests ... factional, pork-barrel, ward-style politics." "I wasn't going to say anything," responded Martinez. "This hasn't been easy," he said of the accusations hurled his way, which included secrecy, dividing communities, even gerrymandering districts to keep the current council members in their places. "This is not about incumbency, where we live – it's about accountability." After wrangling over whether to table or postpone Cole's resolution, council settled on the latter – with Wynn's assurances that it would return in a radically altered form. Leffingwell abstained, while Martinez voted for it wearily, describing the resolution's "whereas" clauses as "false" and "inaccurate." And with that, the love-in ended, 6-0-1.

 

Nothing seems quite as hair-trigger on the agenda today (Thursday), thank heavens. Item 38 encourages film, video, and digital production – just in time for a likely decision on whether proposed megastudios Villa Muse can build outside the city's extraterritorial jurisdiction. (Today, March 6, is the studio's self-imposed deadline, after which the developers cum producers threaten to take their green screens and go home.) And completing the entertainment trifecta is an item granting some $170,000 in expenditures and waivers for street closures, park use, and police overtime to the billion-dollar economic engine that is South by Southwest.

Count that on your abacus.  

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Direct pitches and demos to wdunbar@austinchronicle.com.