“I tell thee,” said madame, “that although it is a long time on the road,
it is on the road and coming. I tell thee it never retreats, and never
stops.”
— A Tale of Two Cities
Yup, it is the best of times; it is the worst of times. Austin is wealthier
than ever before, yet the proposed 1996-97 city budget depicts a government
heading for a cathartic transformation, if not a trainwreck. This is a city of
two tales. The Maalox is likely now flowing at the Municipal Building, as at least a
dozen city staff members hit their speed-dials to tell us the city is not in a
budget crisis. Fair enough. This year’s budget combines a windfall of
rapid-growth revenue with a nearly invisible tax increase to achieve some
modest, but important, increases in service. We have seen far worse. Indeed,
this is about as good as it’s bound to get anytime soon, and therein lies the
trouble.
It is a fairly depressing certainty that even if the Austin economy keeps
growing well past the turn of the millenium, it will become next to impossible
for the City of Austin to continue providing the level of service we want at a
price we are willing to pay. Next year’s budget projects the highest tax
collections, both sales and property, in Austin history, yet there is no
surplus, no comfortable command of current service needs, and no investment in
the tools needed to manage the growth of the future.
Instead, the boom dividend is going to fund yesterday’s needs, still unmet.
The new revenue to be generated from the marginal proposed tax increase —
about $10 for the year for the celebrated “average Austin home,” valued at a
bit over $100,000 — will fund debt service for a $40 million bond sale, set
for next month. Those bonds will go toward capital projects — libraries, fire
stations, information systems — that we already need, and have needed for
years, but won’t get until the next century. Before the city found out its
property values had jumped in a year by more than $2 billion, City Manager
Jesus Garza and Finance Director Betty Dunkerley had aimed for a more
red-blooded tax increase to pay for the new facilities going on line next year,
some of which were first approved by voters a decade ago and needed five years
before that. We are, shall we say, a bit behind, and there’s plenty more
backlog — like $33 million in street repair — with no visible means of
support.
So that’s where the money’s going; in order to meet current service
needs, city departments are still having to pinch pennies, shuffle staff and
indulge in creative accounting. In order to provide More Cops on the Street
(such a familiar demand that we can abbreviate it: M-COTS), the Police
Department is having to gut its Community Services division — short-staffing
the neighborhood centers to the point of irrelevance, “suspending” Drug Abuse
Resistance Education (DARE) and the Police Activities League, and so on. This
after Chief Elizabeth Watson put her career on the line to bring community
policing to our fair burg. Those officers will now be M-COTS, bringing the
department’s sworn strength of “uniformed first responders” to the level
previously approved by the City Council, which at least one councilmember and
de facto mayoral candidate has already squawked is no longer sufficient.
(Yet, according to last year’s budget study, which is based on national
studies, there is no known correlation between the number of police officers on
the street and the amount of crimes committed.)
Some of the cuts and restructurings in the new budget fall within the bounds
of Garza’s large-scale initative to reinvent Austin government, dubbed the
Affordability Strategy. This is to be lauded, but it doesn’t mean that the
budget is free of good old-fashioned clear-cutting, even within the departments
that have already been affordabili-cized. (Over the next five years, Garza and
his management team will shake the reinventing-government chicken bones over
every city department.) Check out the first department covered in the new
budget, Development Review and Inspection — one of the seven new
departments to spring from the ashes of the old Planning, Public Works and
Environmental departments. Just four pages into the budget document, we’re
reading about how response time for zoning complaints — already less than
speedy — will drop with the elimination of two inspector positions, and how
the workload per full-time employee has increased 89% since1990-91. By the time
you get to the Health and Human Services budget, we are treated to tart
assessments like “Eliminate two positions, which impedes the progress of the
community planning process.”
Now, chances are most of you will not pack up the U-Haul as a result of these
cuts. But if your government isn’t going to live large, albeit responsibly so,
during the biggest boom in our lifetimes, then when, exactly, will it? Garza is
already projecting, even with the Affordability Strategy, that the city will
face a $26 million General Fund shortfall by the year 2001. So when will
departments get to add the staff they need? When will we wipe out that $33
million street-maintenance backlog? When will we be able to start planning for
the parks and libraries and fire stations we’ll need tomorrow, instead of the
ones we needed in the Carter Administration? And how, exactly, do we plan to
swing the real big stuff — the capital projects that everyone calls
boondoggles until they find one that they like, be it a baseball stadium or a
fiber-optic network or a flood-diversion tunnel for Waller Creek, one of which
may actually be essential to the Austin we envision for tomorrow?
Tax hikes? Get real. Someday, we may see a tax increase that amounts to more
than the cost of a 12-pack, but it won’t be in the 20th century. If the city
raised taxes as much as it could, on its own, each year — known as the Peveto
rate — we’d add between 10 and 15 cents to the property tax rate by the year
2000, which would, as Garza and Dunkerley point out repeatedly in the budget,
bring us more in line with what citizens pay throughout most of urban Texas. We
might as well hope for a renewal of the Stamp Act. Witness the cries of highway
robbery over Capitol Metro’s quarter-cent hike in the sales tax, which adds a
whopping $44 to the price of a new Toyota Corolla. And witness the flood of
Austin tax refugees migrating to Williamson and Hays Counties.
Austin’s traditional tools for balancing its lower-than-average tax rates are
surely being wrenched from its hands. Our reputation as the bond-debt capital
of America is grossly exaggerated, but public animosity toward “boondoggles”
and contempt of city management competence don’t bode well for the major bond
election the City Council is contemplating for next year. (What of the success
in passing the AISD bonds, you ask? Which embarrasses you more — our decrepit
schools or our decrepit streets? Which do you feel more personal responsibility
to fix? I thought so. Think, instead, of El Paso, where voters in 1994 sent a
$100 million-plus, NAFTA-fueled public-improvement bond package to ignominious
defeat.)
The other two widgets in Austin’s fiscal toolbox — rampant annexation and
the markup of utility rates — are likewise out the door. Many of the plump,
juicy subdivisions in the MUD Belt would rather be annexed by Tulsa than
Austin, and many central-city slow-growthers would rather de-annex
everything north of U.S. 183 anyway. Plus, our suburbs are now competitors
with, rather than camp followers of, the Austin economy. (Property values in
the county beyond the city limits are higher and growing faster than within.)
And come deregulation, the utility transfer will inexorably drop even if the
city flouts its consultants’ advice to cut it in half, since it’s based not on
what the General Fund needs but what the utility has left over.
And these are the best of times. How will we survive them? Since the city is
not allowed to play the lottery, we seem stuck with the usual flavors of tonic
for our budget dyspepsia — excise all waste and lard from city government,
make the “hard choices” needed to set honest and effective budget priorities,
and maybe in the process convince Austinites that their government is not
completely run by idiots. As one councilmember puts it: “A good start would be
to not screw up over and over and over. If we run out and proclaim a baseball
emergency, how do we expect to be trusted?”
Which brings us back to the Affordability Strategy, Garza’s effort to further
all three of these goals. To best understand it, we should forget what it’s
called, since “affordability,” conjure word though it has become, is really up
to us to decide — not the city bureaucracy. How do we objectively
determine what service levels we will accept, and what price we can afford? Who
knows? (Not the city staff, any of several council members, or the Chamber of
Commerce, apparently, because we asked them.) So better to understand the
Affordability Strategy as a reinventing-government initiative, and, truth be
told, a rather late one. Of the four components of the strategy, two —
program-based budgeting and the ongoing department review — have precedent at
the state-government level. In both cases, the state process seems to be more
successful than the city’s, even though the jury is still clearly out on the
latter.
For example, Garza’s department review is analogous to state-level Sunset
Review, except that at no point does the city manager reserve a place in his
process for the customers — not Joe Crank the tax protester, but the people
who use Program X’s services every day. (The state’s Sunset Advisory Commission
does everything but pay your cabfare.) Instead, the management team gets help
from consultants, UT academics, and “local corporate executives recruited by
the City Manager.” Hmm. Not even the relevant boards and commissions get to
kibitz — they are merely “informed” of the results of the review. As was seen
last year with the restructuring of Public Works et al., not even the
Council is guaranteed a vote on the recommendations. Undemocratic? Yes, but
perhaps it shouldn’t be. How do you know what your customers want, and are
willing to pay, unless you ask them?
Likewise, Garza has converted the city to a program budget — where, instead
of allocating X-thousand dollars for “supplies,” the Council allots the
specified sum to, say, 911 service. The necessary catalog of programs is larger
than the budget itself. Each program has objectives, and each department has
strategies, just like in state agency budgets. However, outcome measures —
de rigeur at the Capitol — are mostly absent, and linkages between what
programs are doing, how well they’re doing it, and how much money they’re
getting are hard to discern. “It’s very difficult to look at specific items and
say, with any degree of confidence, that Program X is overfunded,” says John
Gilvar, aide to Councilmember Beverly Griffith. “We don’t have the expertise,
nor the time, to say to an assistant city manager that they don’t need that
much money. And they know that’s how the game is played.”
So there’s some consensus that, as councilmember Daryl Slusher puts it, “What
Jesus Garza is doing is legitimate and necessary, but it doesn’t go far
enough.” The Council’s new designated kvetch would like to see, for example, a
full-on Sunset Review with public input, although he cautions that such a
process puts an onus on all parties, including you and me. “In the city
manager’s defense, he has said that the community has to make a lot of
decisions about how their budget is supposed to work,” Slusher says. “We had
one speaker at the public hearing about new fees.” (That would have been former
council candidate and uber-activist Mary Arnold.)
The two new council arrivals — Slusher and Griffith — have been giving staff
the most headaches during work sessions, asking deeper and more complicated
questions than their colleagues. Slusher dwells on the need to find “real
alternative sources of revenue,” whether that be an early jump on new airport
revenue or additional transfers from Capitol Metro, the non-electric utilities,
or the Travis County budget — “People in the city already help pay for
services out in the county; our taxes are paying for their roads and such.
There’s got to be ways that the reverse could be true.”
Griffith, on the other hand, has decided on a more narrow focus. “There’s been
a glacier of paperwork and we’ve been playing catch-up,” Gilvar explains. “So
we decided to draw the line and settle on one big issue, and this is it.”
“It” is Griffith’s crusade to have the Parks and Recreation Department
re-identified as a public-safety program — thus immunizing it from any real
cuts, at least in the current climate — and making PARD the front-line
department in dealing with juvenile crime and at-risk youth. Since juvenile
crime is the only area of misfeasance that truly causes much concern, this puts
Griffith squarely at odds with the M-COTS crowd, notably Ronney Reynolds, who’s
already proclaimed a civic emergency in law enforcement. It also makes Griffith
and Gilvar less than sympathetic to the plight of DARE and other APD
community-service programs, which in theory fill much the same role she
envisions for PARD. “She’s not making a specific proposal to take money from
APD, but wants to look at the trend,” Gilvar says. “You look at programs like
DARE and you don’t get a lot of bang for your buck; that’s confirmed by
teachers and school board members and police departments all over the country.
With parks-based programs, you do. We want to get away from the image of
Beverly as The Parks Lady, (she used to be chair of the Parks Board), but
mayors and councils everywhere see how the parks infrastructure is more
important to prevention.”
And where, exactly, does this money come from, since PARD’s budget has been
shrinking for years and continues to do so? “What it comes down to,” says
Gilvar, “is that the money has to come from somewhere.” Right now, that would
seem to imply horse trading, which doesn’t do anything to address the long-term
fiscal outlook, a point Gilvar concedes. “We’ll see about seven-tenths of a
cent (the proposed tax increase) when push comes to shove,” he says. “We can’t
dramatically increase law-enforcement funding and re-establish PARD’s
ability to deal with at-risk youth and keep Pioneer Farm open. The
Statesman and Ronney Reynolds seem to think you can, without a tax
increase. At some point, something’s gotta give — we can’t be all things to
all people. Do we really need to make it extra-easy to pay your traffic fines
at the Municipal Court? We need to ask ourselves about priorities. Somehow, we
have to make it work.”
To coin a phrase, it would be a far, far better thing to do, than we
have ever done. n
This article appears in August 23 • 1996 and August 23 • 1996 (Cover).