Council: Adventures in Secrecy

Mayor Pro Tem Kathie Tovo (Photo by John Anderson)

It's a quiet week at Point Woebegone (aka City Hall), as City Council has concluded its regular business for Novem­ber, and, with Thanksgiving next week, isn't scheduled to meet formally again until Dec. 7 (with a work session Dec. 5). There's a chance of a quorum this afternoon (Thursday, Nov. 16), as several council members may attend today's 3pm City Hall meeting of the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition (ECHO).

Also, in light of the ongoing search for a new city manager, there's the possibility that council members will be conferring privately to review additional candidates – if that's the implication of a vague Sunday posting by Mayor Steve Adler and Mayor Pro Tem Kathie Tovo on the Council message board. "Our search firm reiterates that we should be honored to have a very impressive group of candidates for the position of City Manager because this speaks well of the high esteem in which the City of Austin is held," reads the brief post. "That said, a candidate has withdrawn and the search firm recommends we spend 1 or 2 additional weeks reviewing other potential candidates to ensure that we have the finest and most diverse candidate pool. As such, the search firm also recommends we not release candidate names until sometime later this month."

No additional details are provided, but the message contradicts the discussion at the Nov. 9 Council meeting, which anticipated that the names of a group of semifinalists would be released either last Friday or Monday. Stephen Newton of the search consultant firm Russell Reynolds Associates suggested at that time that the eventual "finalists" would engage the "community" in some way – although, he continued, "We have not collectively decided what the word 'community' means, but it will be members of the staff, public, and so forth, for you to decide at a later date." So it remains unclear whether that would be through an actual public meeting or something more private, say, with only the members of the City Manager Search Advisory Task Force. Nor do we know which candidate withdrew, or why – nor even precisely how many semifinalists remain.

Maybe we'll learn that eventually, although all of this backstage maneuvering occurs in the wake of Council's farcical attempts to maintain interview confidentiality at the Airport Hilton (and nearby), and the consequent unmasking of five candidates by Statesman reporters Elizabeth Findell and Phil Jankowski. Based on their reporting, the five known semifinalists are: Daniel Alfonso, Miami city manager; Spencer Cronk, Minneapolis city coordinator; Howard Lazarus, Ann Arbor city administrator (and former Public Works director for the city of Austin); Maura Black Sullivan, chief operating officer of Chattanooga; and Jim Twombly, former Tulsa city manager. Meanwhile, the city's attorneys have asked the Attor­ney General's Office to opine on whether the full list of names and identities must be released, and the Statesman has sued over the Benny Hill-style chase sequence at ABIA and its possible violations of the Open Meetings Act.

Not content to hide only that ball, the city has also asked the A.G. to rule on a different open records request – filed by us – concerning any city collaboration with the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce submission in response to the Request for Proposals for a Central Texas location for Amazon.com Inc.'s second headquarters ("HQ2"). Earlier, we had been told by the Mayor's Office that any contribution from the city was only as an information resource for the Chamber – apparently, whatever information the city provided is considered too sensitive for prying public eyes.

In his letter to the A.G., Assistant City Attorney Neal Fal­goust cites competition for its bid with "237 other regions in North America," arguing, "Disclosing this information would harm the City's ability to compete against other regions by revealing its strategy and proposal." Did we promise the moon, or just the Moonlight Towers?