Is last week’s budget adoption still not done?
Despite City Council’s yeoman’s performance slogging through its first adoption since the Open Meetings Act fracas (read: the first one post interoffice communication), it looks like social service contracting – one of the flash points this budget season and an ongoing concern since council decided to competitively rebid the city’s nonprofit contracts – may return again to the dais this Thursday, Sept. 22.
There are 15 items listed on the Health and Human Services portion of the council agenda. Timed to anticipate the city’s new fiscal year (starting Oct. 1), several items reallocate lump sums to groups outside of the rebidding process, per council initiative. HIV/AIDS services, for instance, were always funded outside the collection of individual contracts that the city has sought to overhaul for the first time in more than a decade. But conversely, Item 24 extends funding for those existing, individual social service contracts for six months while the city continues to competitively re-evaluate nonprofit contracts. (The final list of new contracts will come to council for approval next month.)
But an interesting wrinkle in social service land emerged at this week’s Tuesday work session. It began with council Health and Human Services committee member Mike Martinez noting Item 30, which reallocates roughly $309,000 in leftover funds from our current, soon-to-expire fiscal year for three groups: permanent supportive housing providers Green Doors; the Council on At-Risk Youth; and Immigration Counseling and Outreach Services. But Martinez then said he had just learned those groups were initially included in the omnibus contract extension that is Item 24, and that by moving them out, additional HHS funds had been freed up, to the tune of about $110,000. “I can see the wheels are turning already in anticipation,” Mayor Lee Leffingwell wryly noted.
If the nonprofit debate wasn’t already complicated enough, Kathie Tovo and Laura Morrison also voiced their frustration with vaguely defined lobbying rules that prohibited conversations between council members and nonprofit advocates during the contract reboot. The rules now sound somewhat more clearly defined, with the edict coming from the city that council members, while unable to discuss needs directly with board members or employees, can discuss matters with advocates who don’t fit those categories. However, Morrison noted “a lot of frustration” over the heretofore ill-defined prohibition, saying she had asked for “fine-point clarification several months ago.”
While it doesn’t look like council will be forced to spend that surplus all today – they can simply move it into HHS to be spent on pressing needs in the near future – Martinez urged council to act quickly to “identify crucial gaps instead of just kicking the can further down the road.” Leffingwell named some of his own priorities, including bumping up funding for the Austin Travis County Mental Health Mental Retardation Center, aka Integral Care, from six months (as stipulated in Item 28) to a whole year. Martinez plans to call a special meeting of the HHS committee to discuss the windfall, and we’re certain it will be briefer than council’s budget adoption. …
Spring Forward, Fall Back
… Or briefer than council’s Tuesday executive session, as the work session was largely spent conferring with legal counsel behind closed doors. We’re sure ample time was dedicated to the likely centerpiece of today’s meeting: a decision on whether the city should hold a May election itself (without or with minimal county support) or move it to November, as allowed under Senate Bill 100. As we wrote recently (“City Hall Hustle: When’s the Next City Election?,” Sept. 2), SB 100 alters the federal primary calendar, potentially clustering spring elections impossibly close, and an outside estimate of what it might cost the city to buy equipment and conduct their own election could reach nearly $7 million. With 2012 being a mayoral election year, the political stakes are particularly high. We expect more discussion on this one.
Also on the agenda: execution of a 25-year wind power purchase deal, this one with Iberdrola Renewables for 200 megawatts and $725 million, the third such wind buy in two weeks; a $77,740 severance settlement between the city and Deputy City Clerk Yvonne Spence, whose job was apparently made redundant in an office reorganization, according to the backup documents; an item from Morrison, Tovo, and Chris Riley creating a joint task force of the Resource Management Commission, Water and Wastewater Commission, and Impact Fee Advisory Committee “to develop recommendations for a tiered, progressive Revenue Stability fee structure and short and long-term financial plans to strengthen the financial stability of Austin Water Utility;” and a presentation of “schematic designs,” but no big conceptual art, for Austin’s new Central Library.
The Hustle’s kicking schematics on Twitter @CityHallHustle.
This article appears in September 23 • 2011.