It’s been a minute since my last column, during which Spencer Cronk got fired and City Council told the police union to pound sand and Greg Abbott gave a creepy State of the State speech from a TV studio in San Marcos, and other stuff besides. The void got filled on Twitter, at least, by my column from January 11, 2002, a few days after Jesús Garza resigned as city manager to join the Lower Colorado River Authority in what proved to be a short-term gig from which he moved to Seton Healthcare, back when it was important that respected community leaders and not just hospital admin types (now from Ascension, fast becoming a byword for trash Big Health Care) manage that organization’s community relationships.
That column was unusually long, because I probably rolled all of my City Hall reporting from what was supposed to be a feature into my column when the news broke sooner than expected. There are lots of quotes and stage-setting for the next big story arc, as a very charismatic lifetime Austin city employee named Toby Futrell ascended the final steps to the city manager stage. At that point, the late Gus Garcia, himself returning to Council after retirement, had been mayor for only a few weeks, having won a special election so Kirk Watson could resign to run for Texas attorney general against Greg Abbott, then a justice on the Texas Supreme Court. (“Long-running soap opera,” is what I’m saying.) Garza’s resignation was widely expected as the other shoe dropping on the end of the first Watson era.
Any Angry Member, Any Time
We knew at least six weeks ago that Cronk’s job hung in the balance of a Council where any one angry member could probably get five more votes to fire him at any time. So who do you decide to piss off the most, who the least? That’s the sort of thing you’d be deciding if you were in that kind of deep hole at your workplace, yes? The fact that these are also political decisions, made in public, should not be a surprise to a city administrator. You should piss off Kirk Watson the least since he’s elected citywide and as mayor is held responsible for your fuckups, even if you didn’t look through my Chronicle archives like other people did, Spencer, and learn something about the man’s political skills and sensitivities. Instead Cronk decided that Watson was bluffing, maybe.
Anyway, Watson became that one member after Winter Storm Mara, and after the police contract debacle Cronk was toast. I’m guessing this timeline means that one of the very first things Watson did after weathering the ice storm was call his old running buddy Jesús Garza, who has been retired from Seton for some time now, and line up his services as a trusted interim city manager before beginning the public, political performance of firing Cronk. Either that, or they just cooked it up over beers one night; the Kirk Watson I know could go either way. There had been some talk that Futrell’s deputy Laura Huffman, who recently stepped down from leading the Greater Austin Chamber, would be an option, but she and Watson didn’t work hand in hand at City Hall as he and Garza did. So this move was both unexpected and totally obvious.
Flashback After Flashback
Some cracked wise last week about Watson doing what a million-dollar election campaign in 2021 (Proposition F) could not and delivering unto Austin a “strong mayor” form of government. Actually, what Watson’s done helps explain why a broad coalition emerged (including the Chronicle) to shoot down the poorly thought-out Prop F: A broadly unified Council and a mayor with political skill can easily take control of an issue to deliver on the will of the public, without amending the City Charter to change the ways available to Austinites to make that will manifest. Political skills are valuable in big-city leadership; when Austin’s mayors have possessed them, the city manager could afford to be less adept. (We often said as much about Watson and Garza at the end of the century.) When they haven’t, the burden has fallen upon managers to pick up the slack, as Futrell did in the Aughts.
The manager between Futrell and Cronk, Marc Ott, really was a detached, apolitical technocrat, which was OK for the last at-large Council, whose members and staffs possessed substantial political skill. That all went away with 10-1, where each council member now represents significant communities of interest but simply cannot do what the mayor can. Watson’s predecessor Steve Adler also saw his role as apolitical, which solved some problems and exacerbated others. Spencer Cronk kinda tried to be political but it’s not his skill set as a Bloomberg-trained technocrat himself.
The last city manager to get dumped like Cronk was the one before Garza, Camille Barnett, who lost her job amid the financial collapse of Brackenridge Hospital, which is a whole ‘nother story that we’ll have to come back to another time. Moral of that story: Do not let your boss be surprised by bad news.
This article appears in February 24 • 2023.