City Hall Hustle: He's Making a List ...

Maybe it's the dropping temperatures, the dwindling daylight, or the Hustle's own deadline stress, but there's always something rushed about this time of year – a mildly frantic sense there's only so much time left.

That's certainly the case at City Hall – as the nights grow longer, so do the meetings. Today (Thursday), City Council oversees a policy-heavy agenda. "Items From Council" – the agenda portion generally covering policy prescriptions and usually a handful of initiatives – stretches 17 items long this week, laden with a set of ambitious policy proposals like Item 60. Currently, the council agenda is submitted on Wed­nes­day, the week before Thurs­day council meetings – though in practice it doesn't appear online until Fri­day. Item 60 would move the posting requirement up to Fridays a week earlier – 13 days before the meet­ing. "We're basically extending by a week the time both the public and the council will have to look at the agenda items and study them," says Mayor Lee Leffingwell.

For those keeping track, the change fulfills part of Leffing­well's campaign promise for structural, good-government changes, going along with his streamlining of the meeting structure, and the debatable decision to prevent citizen communication regulars from speaking at every meeting. (Plans to hold council meetings outside of City Hall are waiting on in-house station Channel 6's capacity to "hold full-blown, live, telecast meetings" outside chambers.) Moving zoning hearings from 4pm to 2pm, for instance, is being used as "a sort of pilot program," says Leffingwell, as the council may move 6pm public hearings to 4pm, to cut down on dead time. (As with zoning, controversial discussions could be postponed to a "time certain" 6pm hearing, allowing speakers to arrive after work.) Other promises fulfilled include the naming of the mayor's "community cabinet" of business and community leaders, slated to meet again in December, and the "Go Local" initiative, whereby local construction companies are awarded extra points when bidding on city contracts, in an attempt to keep more money in the city limits.

Nevertheless, the mayor still has several campaign promises left. A transportation bond election is at the top of the list. Leffingwell says the reconvened Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization transit working group is working toward "a transportation bond election as early as November 2010, including a rail component. We've got some work to do on a mass transit component," he says, conceding Capital Metro's rail fail "hasn't helped at all." He hopes the reconstituted Cap Metro board "can get their act together quickly and restore some degree of public credibility," but he also notes that "it's not written in stone anywhere" that it has to be Cap Metro who operates circulator rail – or even commuter rail, for that matter. He mentions the Lone Star Rail District's LSTAR service as a potential vendor.

Another "big ticket item" is AustinCorps, an AmeriCorps-style internship program, expected to roll out in 2010. Expanding online government, including posting the city's finances online in a searchable format, is another goal. With Phase II of the city's ­website redesign – the actual website construction – likely seeing a contract vote in December, the mayor's office hopes to have the complete reboot finished by the end of 2010. Meanwhile, a breezy in-house redesign of the site appeared last week.

A promised "green collar" jobs council is also afoot, although Leffingwell says the city may go "piggybacking" on efforts from the Austin Chamber of Com­merce's Green Job Task Force initiative, also pulling in groups of educators like Austin Community College and nonprofits like American YouthWorks. Lastly, there's the campaign proposal of selling optional carbon offset credits to Austin Energy customers, which Leffingwell says they're "holding off" on until AE finalizes future generation plans and federal cap-and-trade legislation is enacted. "They're slower than we are," he says of Capitol Hill.

While the mayor's office checks off its to-do list, plenty of other issues line the council agenda. Other items from council include:

• forming a board to solicit applications for a citizen spot on the Capital Metro board (Item 62);

• endorsing plans for the new Health and Human Services Department campus cum animal shelter at Levander Loop, including affordable housing and parks and recreation facilities (Item 63);

• extending the deadline from January 2010 to April 2010 for the Citizens Water Conser­va­tion Implementa­tion Task Force to present its recommendations (Item 66);

• adopting policy goals and creating a working group for urban "pocket parks" (Item 68); and

• creating a car-free event next spring "that connects ­runners, skaters and cyclists" (Item 70).

• Zoning sees second and third readings of Congress Avenue Baptist Church's proposed rezoning (Item 84), and first reading as French foodie find Justine's Brasserie (on East Fifth) seeks rezoning to mixed-use (Items 91 and 92).

It ain't Christmas yet, but everyone at the city's already making their lists.

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