Assuming something weird doesn’t happen that would force a mayoral runoff in December, Kirk Watson will only preside over, at the most, three more council meetings, each one filled with suspense: Will the Baptists beat the clock?
Right now, the mayor’s vote alone stands between neighbors in Hyde Park and their decade-long quest to rein in Hyde Park Baptist Church’s endless expansions, with their deleterious effect on the North Central Austin neighborhood. The proposed Hyde Park Neighborhood Conservation Combining District (NCCD) would, as part of a neighborhood-wide plan, rezone the church’s property (in conjunction with its own NCCD) against the Baptists’ wishes. That takes six votes, and right now Hyde Parkers only have five, and they don’t expect to get Danny Thomas’ vote (since he’s a minister and is highly unlikely to vote against a church).
That leaves Watson, who has not managed to convince folks in Hyde Park, many of whom backed him staunchly when he ran for mayor, that his support of the Baptists has anything to do with principle. Regardless of his reasons, the effort to vote down the Hyde Park NCCD as quickly as possible — before Mayor Apparent Gus Garcia gets a chance to vote for it, if he is so inclined — took a further absurd turn at last week’s council meeting.
The NCCD ordinance would have passed on second reading (of three) on consent and without discussion, except the mayor felt the need to comment on procedural questions raised at the first reading — specifically, whether the Baptists could declare victory and go home, as they would like, or needed to wait until all three readings. This prompted Council Member Raul Alvarez (also a lawyer) to move, with Mayor Pro Tem Jackie Goodman’s second, to postpone the whole deal until city legal staff could straighten the mess out, which was the opposite of what the mayor wanted, or at least of what the Baptists wanted. This motion only took the usual four votes, and a nonplussed Watson ended up voting against an effort to answer the question he asked.
Since there’s no council meeting this week, that puts the Baptists’ date with destiny perilously close to Watson’s witching hour, which may be as soon as Nov. 1. (The new mayor would be sworn in as soon as votes from the special election are canvassed, which might be before, or at, the council’s scheduled meeting on Nov. 8.) Any further attempts by the mayor to check Hyde Park off his list would be unseemly — especially since Hyde Parkers say the ordinance isn’t fully written.
Now, lame ducks often toss hot potatoes into their successors’ hands, so maybe the mayor is displaying rare courage here. But in this twilight of the Watson Era, do we want the council doing anything more laborious than making proclamations and waiving street closure fees? Hyde Park is an obvious case, because without Watson’s rear guard action, the Baptists would lose. But council agendas of late have been studded with issues on which city’s staff work is not yet done (the Seton/Brackenridge deal is a case in point), and that would seem to bear closer examination, preferably by council members who will live with the results of their decisions while the mayor is down in Laredo having himself sewn to Tony Sanchez’s coattails.
Council Member for Life?
Not that Daryl Slusher couldn’t think of anything else to do with himself, but he has made official his aim to bust term limits. Under the 1994 voter-approved charter amendment, if Slusher, Goodman, and Beverly Griffith want to run again in May 2002, they need the signatures of 5% of Austin’s registered voters, or about 18,000 people, which Slusher concedes is “a formidable task.”
According to the Texas Election Code, it would only require one-half of 1% of the people who voted in the last mayoral election, which is about 180 people now and will likely be far less after Nov. 6. But that would cause lawyers to get involved, which is to be discouraged. And it’s more honorable, if you’re flouting the will of the voters who imposed term limits, to use the method those voters prescribed for the flouting. (Slusher, Goodman, and Griffith could also simply switch seats, since their “places” are fictional anyway, but that would be even more cynical.)
So we should be glad to see Slusher and his volunteers collecting signatures at the usual hot spots. Of course, such efforts might be better spent repealing term limits entirely, rather than forcing candidates effectively to run twice. The May 2002 ballot will likely include charter amendments, and along with campaign finance reform and single-member districts, maybe we can get rid of this undemocratic and inefficient practice.
We Correct Ourselves
Our bad. We did our quick-and-dirty calculations with the wrong numbers and wrote last week that it would be two decades before Austin was a majority-minority city. City demographer Ryan Robinson, who should know, notes it should only be in two years. We may have been correct to say that Austin will be a majority Latino city in two decades, but we yield the floor on any further demographic prognostications to people who get paid for it. Thank you, Mr. Robinson. (He also points out that Austin in 1900 only had 23,000 people, which is a lot less than we said, but in that case the truth makes our point — that even a much smaller city than today’s Austin could benefit from single-member districts, as we had in 1900 — stronger rather than weaker.)This article appears in October 19 • 2001.