You’ll be forgiven for wondering if you stumbled through a time warp after a look at next week’s draft City Council agenda (for Thursday, June 6; no meeting this week, work session June 4). It sure appears suspiciously like the May 23 agenda, when Council stayed up to the wee hours of the morning to hear a lot of public input – and then postponed or punted much of the pending list until June. Some of the delay was expected – members have worn to the nub the debate over Austin Energy governance and worked it over a bit more after midnight. The latest wrinkle is no independent board at all – just a subcommittee of the whole, meaning Council will be governing AE pretty much as it always has, but occasionally in a different room.
In the preceding work session, most members wanted nothing to do with the subcommittee; by the time they took up the subject after midnight, they were all volunteering for the job. Seems like yet another byproduct of “open meetings syndrome“; since Council members seldom talk to each other outside of formal meetings anymore (even Adelaide Deputy Lord Mayor Michael Llewellyn-Smith joked about having to meet them singly), the level of mutual trust on the dais has steadily dropped – so now they’re uneasy about letting their colleagues supervise AE without supervision. Officially, the AE issue was “postponed indefinitely” – meaning it’s dead until the next rate crisis.
At any rate, the May 23 agenda was long enough to split off a brace of items with barely a ripple. Returning for consideration next week will be the vexed interlocal agreement with Travis County (three items) concerning Emergency Medical Services; this is nominally a money matter, but it has gotten crossways with staffing issues and other administrative questions. Also in the postponed argumentative pile is the revision of the “ridesharing” ordinance; staff have been trying to come up with a way of handling the unofficial, online “sharing” trade – in which riders “donate” for the privilege of accepting a “rideshare” – without effectively sanctioning an unregulated taxi service. Currently, it’s an unacknowledged, pseudo-libertarian black market, and it’s not clear if it can be brought under the transportation umbrella without jeopardizing established cab companies and their drivers.
A surprising, late-hour controversy had to do with new building regs meant to guarantee “visitability” or adaptability for disabled and elderly residents or visitors. Although the regs seemed largely commonsensical – and were stoutly defended by speakers from the Mayor’s Committee for People With Disabilities as both necessary and fully vetted by stakeholders – they passed on first reading only, when some members questioned the details and wanted more accurate cost estimates. So we’ll hear much of that again.
As we will about the University Neighborhood Overlay, affordability matrices, and perhaps about trying to figure out a way to share underutilized city park parking spaces with neighboring businesses (aka the Casa de Luz Proviso). There are also scheduled morning briefings on the Waller Creek development, and the latest on Rainey Street transportation issues. (Council did manage to approve a plan allowing certain historic Rainey Street buildings to be relocated for preservation.) The scheduled music honorees are GOBI – “Indie-Dance-Rap” – and you can be sure by Friday we’ll have plenty of proclamations.
This article appears in May 31 • 2013.
