By the standards of, say, the Texas Legislature, the City Council’s final wrestling match over the fiscal 2004 city budget, adopted for good and all Tuesday morning, was a most civil affair. But by the painfully friendly standards of Austin City Hall, Monday’s first reading was plenty contentious. Last year, then-Council Member Will Wynn joined his colleagues in unanimous approval of the budget and all its amendments and ancillary votes. This year, now-Mayor Wynn voted against six different amendments offered by his colleagues to City Manager Toby Futrell‘s draft spending plan. He lost each time. (Wynn abstained on another amendment, to cut the council offices’ nonstaff budgets by 10%. Three other amendments proposed by the council — including Wynn’s 10% cut, and elimination of one staff position, from his own budget — passed unanimously, as did a number of house-cleaning amendments proposed by city staff.)
Despite Wynn’s supposed mandate of City Hall moderation, the council’s left wing — Mayor Pro Tem Jackie Goodman and council members Danny Thomas and Raul Alvarez — carried the day on the big changes to Futrell’s budget. They were joined, perhaps surprisingly, by rookie Brewster McCracken, who was elevated to the dais last spring largely by support from the same pro-business constituency that backed Wynn. Those four votes were all it took to kill Futrell and Fire Chief Gary Warren’s controversial “squad/quint” restructuring proposal, to restore half of Futrell’s proposed 10% cut to social-service contracts, and to redirect funds and staff within the Town Lake Animal Center toward rescue operations. (Goodman nearly withdrew this last amendment until she realized she had Thomas’ fourth vote.)
Both the squad/quint and social-service amendments were made fiscally possible by reallocating money set aside by Futrell for a 2% raise for Austin firefighters — a deal brokered last week by McCracken et al. with the Austin Association of Professional Firefighters. The exact nature of this “public-safety premium” has been a point of apparent confusion to the council, which turned into conflict when the AAPFF deal came up for a vote. Council members — particularly Wynn and Slusher — have made no secret of their belief that Austin can’t afford to offer a pay raise to police and fire this year. So, McCracken noted, “The question became what to do with this $1.5 million we all agreed was not going to be spent on a pay raise.”
But Wynn and Slusher, and to a lesser extent Betty Dunkerley, supported leaving Futrell’s public-safety premium untouched in the budget, in case the city needed that money as a bargaining chip in its ongoing contract talks with the AAPFF and Austin Police Association, and banking those funds toward the FY 2005 budget if the raise was not in fact granted. Dunkerley abstained on, and Wynn and Slusher opposed, both votes to spend that money elsewhere — particularly since, despite its “selfless” decision to give up its raise, the AAPFF had not committed to maintain concessions the union had made to management in its (now-expired) last contract, including heightened minority recruitment efforts. “This is what happens when you go outside the process … when council members start negotiating these agreements, instead of the people we hire to do it,” said an irritated Slusher. “You end up with a deal that doesn’t hold on to the gains we made in previous negotiations.”
Despite their squeamishness about the AAPFF deal, Slusher and Dunkerley did break with Wynn and throw their support to other final-round amendments to restore cuts proposed by Futrell. One of these was Alvarez’s proposal to supply future operating funds for the Mexican-American Cultural Center and Terrazas branch library — among 10 projects approved by voters in 1998 which Futrell proposed delaying for two years. (The MACC will be delayed one year; the Terrazas renovation and expansion, which had been slated to begin last spring, is back on its original schedule.) This money will come from Austin Energy’s Holly Mitigation Fund, created to finance community projects in the East Austin environs of the controversial Holly Power Plant. Wynn was unmoved, however — noting that this “bridge funding” does not eliminate the operating burden of these new facilities down the road, he cast the only no vote. The other eight projects remain delayed, though Thomas renewed his call for the private sector to step up to support them — particularly the Turner/Roberts Recreation Center in Colony Park, first promised to the neighbors over 25 years ago.
Also saved from fiscal oblivion, though perhaps temporarily, was the Austin Music Network, for which Goodman convinced her colleagues to support a final $150,000 outlay in “transitional” funds from the reserves of the city Cultural Arts Fund, fed by hotel-bed tax. This proved to be the one issue where McCracken agreed with Wynn and disagreed with Goodman; he announced that “the AMN model is broken” and called for city funds to be used on other entertainment-industry development projects. (Wynn was more circumspect, couching his opposition in technical terms; when the city issued its last request for proposals to operate AMN, it told respondents there would be no city money on the table.)
By Tuesday, the bad vibes had dissipated, and — to the staff-supplied strains of “Don’t Worry Be Happy” — the council quickly passed the budget and all its amendments 7-0, closing with speeches thanking the city workforce for (once again) taking the big hits that made a balanced budget possible. “There’s no science of budgeting,” said Dunkerley, the city’s former finance director. “It’s an art — an art of compromise.” Referring to Futrell’s success at avoiding one-time budget tricks to get Austin through one more year, Dunkerley added, “We did something as a team that no other city in Texas has done. I do think this budget will make the city more sustainable in the future.”
This article appears in September 12 • 2003.