Council Has Much Business to Attend to Before Its Break

City Council has only two meetings remaining before it goes out on summer break, returning July 28 to kick off budget season. Today’s session, June 9, has a 125-item agenda of hurry-up business, though one big one – Item 65, to extend the workforce protections now standard in city contracts to Austin Energy‘s renewable power contracts – appears per the Council message board to to be on hold until next week (and an executive session) at the prompting of Council Member Leslie Pool.

The very next item (66) is the Adler/Alter plan to tweak compatibility standards that Austin Sanders details here; it and its sibling Item 80 (vertical mixed use) will probably take the most time, but won’t comprise all the land use business on tap, even excluding the zoning cases. There’s a firm push in Item 69 (sponsored by CM Ann Kitchen) to get city executives to create a process for “planning at a district level” in time to fund it during budget negotiations in August. This doesn’t refer to Council’s 10 districts, but is common planning jargon for geographies between “neighborhoods” and “communities” (or “cities”). Council voted to do this back in 2019, specifically to work on the activity centers in the Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan, and nothing happened. So now it’s asking less nicely.

The zoning agenda includes a few cases we’ve covered before, including last call for the 200 Academy project that aims to resurrect the old Austin Opera House (Item 103); second reading for revisions to the plans governing East 11th and 12th streets (Items 118-19), where the sticking point is allowing (more) bars on 12th; and, hilariously, the Crestview Gate (if you know, you know) (Item 100). Of the new stuff, the marquee case is the Cady Lofts (Item 93), a proposed supportive housing property with 100 studio units to be built on three lots on E. 39th Street, a block or so from I-35 (and from the Chronicle offices).

Staff has recommended less intense multifamily zoning (MF-4) than the developer requested, though apparently this would not preclude the project from going forward. The Hancock Neighborhood Association had put in a lot of effort to oppose the case, which they feel was sprung upon them without adequate notice. However, the Austin Justice Coalition pushed hard in the other direction when the case hit Planning Commission, seeing Cady Lofts as a test vote for Council’s willingness to bruise central-city homeowners’ feelings to meet the city’s housing goals, and to be serious about making its mobility corridors more dense. Realizing the case is not going their way, HNA on June 2 adopted a new resolution supporting the project, with some reservations. Things are not so copacetic in the superficially similar Frank­lin Common case (Item 105), on the Eastside next to Morris Williams Golf Course, where a valid petition is in play; the originally proposed 143 units (43 affordable) has already been winnowed down as negotiations between the developer and the J.J. Seabrook neighborhood continue.

Several items of interest concern Down­town, including the reauthorization of the Downtown Austin Alliance and the public improvement district – an assessment on property owners – that funds it (Item 81); the DAA is also proposing to change its boundaries to abandon the state-owned properties north of 15th Street. Item 123, sponsored by CM Kathie Tovo, asks City Manager Spencer Cronk to earmark $500,000 in the upcoming budget for “placemaking and placekeeping” in the Rainey Street Historic District. The city was supposed to be collecting funds for this purpose from developers on Rainey for years but never did, so now it has to come out of Cronk’s pocket, so to speak.

A few blocks away, Item 124 asks for a specific code amendment that would allow Stream Realty Partners, which since 2019 has acquired 30-plus properties on East Sixth Street, to build up to 140 feet in height between Neches and Sabine, where much of that property is clustered. Tovo is not one of the co-sponsors of this item, although it’s in her district and interacts greatly with her Safer Sixth Street plans, as Stream envisions a grownup mix of 18-hour uses where now lie shot bars. She is, however, asking (Item 67) for expedited purchase of additional surveillance cameras to be deployed on Dirty Sixth, as well as a survey of bar owners asking whether they want and would use city-purchased handheld metal detection wands. We’ll take a deeper dive into a future Safer Sixth Street next week.

What else? Item 11 officially appropriates the $95 million remaining in the city’s direct-aid funds under the American Rescue Plan, which as decreed last year is mostly going to homelessness services. More ARP money is likely to come the city’s way from the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, and Council will hold a required public hearing (Item 85) on the city’s plans for $11 million in grant funding therewith, which follow its established strategy: Acquire properties such as motels, convert them into bridge shelters, and then convert them into permanent supportive housing. The operator of Austin’s current bridge shelters, Front Steps, is up for another $1.1 million in “one-time” funding (Item 47), also 100% covered by Bidenbucks. And in an item that’s long overdue, Council is being asked (Item 43) to amend the city’s civil rights ordinances to prohibit discrimination on the basis of hairstyle, a proxy for racial bias aimed at Black women over the generations.

This article appears in June 10 • 2022.