by Alex de Marban
With the globetrot-
ting mayor reportedly helping Muscovites employ an Austin-like emergencymedical system, Gus Garcia’s deputy leadership took center stage last Thursday,
permitting an altogether unusual set of circumstances at the council chambers.
To wit, the attendant hoi polloi were granted a right to gripe to an unheard-of
degree, a consideration that contrasted starkly with meetings conducted under
Bruce Todd’s Rules of Order, which seem to grant more import to rapidity than
debate.
The pro tem’s lax authority, either the result of na�vet�,
niceness, or just plain political posturing for a 1997 mayoral bid, guaranteed
extra input for even the councilmembers’ most disliked hecklers, like council
regular John Johnson. Of course, judging from the reactions of the sparse
audience, it also meant that the meeting bordered on tedium. Johnson, a former
wheelman for the mob and ex-Todd opponent, used up 20 minutes of the meeting to
complain that police brutality has depleted Sixth Street of nearly all of its
vendors. True, the monologue came because Eric Mitchell wondered what the
fajita vendor had to say, but the mayor surely would have removed Johnson by
police escort as he did three weeks ago when Johnson attempted to grab
additional speaking time.
Garcia’s easy attitude also allowed about a dozen residents of the Rainey
Street Neighborhood to speak against a proposal by Nations Bank to create
additional commercial zoning in their area, despite the fact that consideration
of the proposal was delayed until the next week’s meeting. Since the
postponement came by virtue of a last-minute request from the bank’s lobbyist,
Sarah Crocker, residents who had left jobs early to make the meeting were
uninformed of the time change. Their complaints of inconvenience provoked
Garcia to agree to “go ahead and hear the speakers since they’re here.”
Not surprisingly, the residents of the small multi-racial enclave — north of
Town Lake and west of I-35 — requested that single-family zoning be maintained
for the half-acre under question. Some focused on the sharp increase in
accidents that the area’s trend toward commercialization is causing in the
historic district. Others jumped on the inner-city housing bandwagon, noting
that the empty lots would make a cozy locale for homes transplanted from the
Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
The protests led to an unforgettable twist to the council tradition of heaping
favoritism on developers. A frantic and put-out Crocker, previously assured by
staff that her item wouldn’t be discussed, had to rush down to the council
chambers at the last minute for her “applicant’s rebuttal.” Crocker angrily
pointed out that Nations Bank is not the owner of the land, as some of the
residents had stated, but rather is the fiduciary agent for a little old lady
in a Florida nursing home.
Crocker has an uphill battle for council approval: The residents have a valid
petition
against the proposed change. The council will need at least six
votes to override the petition — thus the applicant’s request for delay until
a full council is present. In this case, the zoning change will require
positive unanimity among all the voting members: Brigid Shea’s residency in the
area requires her abstention.
A symbolic vote on one Garcia resolution got a little extra consideration
with Garcia running the show. The item, to deem I-35 a NAFTA superhighway, was
raised for council consideration not once, but twice. That’s because after the
first unanimous vote, Garcia snapped to and realized he had forgotten to allow
citizens’ communication. As it turned out, only Kirk Becker, a council gadfly,
homeless person, and once the personal recipient of an Eric Mitchell verbal
assault, had signed up to speak. The council opened the public hearing, closed
the public hearing, then re-voted, giving the resolution a double stamp of
unanimous approval before sending it off to Congress and the President.
n
Remember all the to-do coming from the mayor last spring about how
the tax abatement ordinance would provide wheelbarrows of money for high-tech
job training? The idea is that the city will funnel 20% of those taxes
collected from a corporation that gets a partial tax abatement to a Workforce
Development Board (WDB). The board would oversee the training of the
techies-to-be, with the implication that impoverished Eastside residents will
be the greatest beneficiaries. As of last week, the mayor’s pitch got one step
closer to reality when he finalized his 16 appointments to the WDB (Travis
County Judge Bill Aleshire is allowed another 15), but not without a couple of
reprimands for idleness from the city’s audit team.
As far back as September 22, auditors found that “little progress has been
made” in implementing their recommendations to speed the creation of the WDB.
The team advised that “progress may stall” if the appointments weren’t made by
October 4, 1995. The date was selected to allow orientation time for the WDB
appointees before they replaced the area’s current workforce development board
— the Private Industry Council.
Then, at the October 11 meeting of the council’s Audit and Finance
subcommittee, auditors pointed out that the “critical issue” of appointing WDB
board members had still not been settled. Not until an entire week later were
they made.
Todd’s aide, Trey Salinas, said the mayor’s office was “waiting on the judge’s
office because we had to coordinate [the appointments] together” — to prevent
overlap. Aleshire says he thought everything was on schedule. “Nobody contacted
me to say I had a deadline.”
n
This week in council: No council meeting. Next week, Brigid Shea’s
resolution to combine the resources of the State Comptroller’s Office, the LBJ
School of Public Affairs, and the City of Austin to perform an audit of the
city’s Public Works & Transportation Department. The mayor asked for the
delay so he can get in on the discussion. Also, the Rainey Street zoning case
returns for a vote. n
This article appears in October 27 • 1995 and October 27 • 1995 (Cover).