Last Thursday, as the City Council clock clicked inexorably past 10pm, Will Wynn initially made the pro forma motion to allow the meeting to continue into the night. As soon as the words left his mouth, the mayor backtracked. “Actually, you know what,” Wynn chortled, “in their final meeting, Mayor Pro Tem [Danny Thomas] moves to waive rules to go past 10pm, seconded by Council Member [Raul] Alvarez.” Believe it or not, there were big laughs all around. In all humor, yes, even in that toothlessly wonky type that politicos trade in, there’s an element of truth – at that point, the departing members were entering their final descent into a long, unwieldy evening, and the mayor decided to make them pay. The joke, in fact, truly was on them: Their constituency just wasn’t quite ready for goodbye – Alvarez, Thomas, and all their fellows were kept up until 3:30 the next morning.
A host of sticky issues – water conservation, mobile food stands, and especially the McMansion ordinance – pushed adjournment inevitably into the wee hours. But there were also a couple of hours for “proclamations,” including heartfelt but seemingly endless farewells to Thomas, Alvarez, and everybody they worked with, knew, or once heard tell of. So they can sleep this Thursday.
The most anticipated item, the finalized 2006 bond-election language, took considerably less time for deliberation – if you could even call it that. Wynn began delivering platitudes to the process, including a shout-out to Envision Central Texas. He initially pushed the bond election from May to November officially in order to examine how to better meet ECT’s goals of managing growth in Austin’s eastern corridor (there was also the little matter of the charter-amendment battle). After some hemming and hawing, beyond the aquifer lands, ECT got essentially nothing in the package.
Now, in the endgame, femme finance Betty Dunkerley announced the two major pieces of news at the outset – that stretching the finance timeline from six to seven years would seal the property-tax increase at 1.88 cents (below the previously discussed two cents). The extra inning also means more money – $31 million more, boosting the package to $567 million. To divvy up the extra scratch, council drove through the seven proposed ballot propositions staff drafted for them, first stop being drainage and open space. The $125 million package had drawn consternation for its relatively paltry $30 million in aquifer-land acquisition; a $20 million shot in the arm, largest of all the adds, made the amount considerably higher than the Bond Election Advisory Committee’s own aquifer recommendation, said Lee Leffingwell. He didn’t mention that the BEAC also allotted $20 million for land in East Austin and SH 130; the freshly tilled concept of allotting the funds solely for the aquifer, delivered by the dais’ designated environmentalist, looks increasingly like a ploy to ensure support from a rebuffed enviro community.
Next, the parks prop saw a smaller repurposing. With Wynn bemoaning several smaller projects in the package he categorized as maintenance (things like playscape, pool, and HVAC repairs), Thomas moved to cut the package by $2 million, channeling those expenses into the annual budget; he then added back half a million to restore the Eastside’s historic Rosewood Park house. Jennifer Kim added the same amount each for both the Elizabet Ney Museum and the Susanna Dickinson home, leaving the overall total decreased by $500,000.
Affordable housing was goosed to $55 million, followed by cultural facilities: $1.5 million added for an African-American cultural and heritage facility. A bit more surprising was the $5-million check cut to the Mexic-Arte museum. Alvarez called the amount “only a portion” of the $15-or-so-million anticipated in building costs, but thought it a “good way to show support.” An alternate way to show support – language from Brewster McCracken turning the funds (designated “Community and Cultural Facilities”) into challenge grants available for matching, got hung up on a technicality – but in his final meeting, Alvarez had brought home the jamon.
“We took longer than usual, but I think it was appropriate,” said Wynn of the bond process. At that point in the morning, we had no idea.
2006 Bond Election Propositions
Prop 1: Transportation $103,100,000
Prop 2: Drainage & Water Quality Protection $145,000,000 (+$20m)
Prop 3: Parks Facilities & Parkland $84,700,000 (-$500,000)
Prop 4: Community & Cultural Facilities $31,500,000 (+$6.5m)
Prop 5: Affordable Housing $55,000,000 (+$5m)
Prop 6: Central Library $90,000,000
Prop 7: Public Safety Facilities $58,100,000
Total: $567,400,000
This article appears in June 16 • 2006.