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feelings is oxymoronic at best. A seashell, in the honey-dripping parlance of
mediator-lawyer Mel Waxler, is a fleeting thought, an idea, an expression of words. And our
city council spent two leisurely days collecting and sharing these seashells
during a retreat in Bastrop last weekend. Waxler facilitated the session and
encouraged councilmembers to verbalize their feelings — or seashells, if you will — as well as to pen
their thoughts in a journal, engage in team-building exercises, and play
psychological volleyball on the huge plot of common ground that they already share. It is
no accident that the retreat came on the heels of two full days of public hearings on the
city budget. Councilmembers said they wanted the public input on the upcoming
budget process fresh in their minds before they disappeared into the wilds of Bastrop. More
cynical observers say that the hearings were designed to make the council appear
responsive to public concerns before the preliminary budget comes out on August 12. One
thing is certain, though. The council’s agenda is going to be all about sharing and
caring — with the public and with each other. The new councilmembers have read more
than their share of pop psychology books; they feel our pain, they feel their own
pain, they feel each other’s pain — and they want to talk about it.
The bottom line, though, is that this is a council not just of
tree-hugging do-gooders, but also of people who enjoy one another’s company. After one of the budget
hearings last Wednesday, June 25, for example, all of the councilmembers and their
aides repaired to the Waterloo Brewing Company for a round of pints. It is, incidentally,
illegal for a quorum of council — four members — to meet without we the people
knowing about it, but if they don’t discuss city business it’s okay. “Who wants
to talk shop after a 10-hour-long meeting?” reasoned Larry Warshaw, Mayor Kirk
Watson’s aide.
One need only reflect back three weeks to imagine a different council
dynamic which would, for instance, have included former Councilmember Eric Mitchell.
Adding a confrontational voice like Mitchell’s to the mix in Bastrop could have
reduced the sensitive council to tears. In fact, the idea for an overnight retreat
came up after the elections, when Watson realized that the newly elected,
like-thinking council just might all get along.
The methods and scope of this retreat were unprecedented, especially in
light of last year’s half-day consensus-building workshop, which by most accounts
was a failure. The retreat’s participants included not only councilmembers, but
also department heads and assistant city managers (with the exception of Joe Lessard). There
were two days of testing, brainstorming, and mediated discussion. It was probably
a useful process, even though the new-agey methods and discussions were heavy-handed
at times. Council and staff have been butting heads long before this new crop of
politicos rolled in, but recently tensions between the two sides have been worse than
ever. After the retreat’s first day of getting-to-know-you exercises, council and
staff met to hash out their differences.
Not one to block his feelings, Councilmember Daryl Slusher lobbed this
seashell: “Very bluntly, I don’t have the faith and trust that the staff will
carry out the policies of the council in the way that we intend.” He then tersely
outlined a history of staff failures, from the bungled South Texas Nuclear Project in
the late Seventies, to the more recent annexation of Davenport Ranch. Slusher’s
tense tone shattered the feel-good spirit, but several councilmembers expressed
their gratitude to him for deftly laying out the underlying issues.
For a council that wants to make dramatic changes in Austin between now
and the 1999 elections, mending fences with the staff is crucial. “If
relationships don’t start off on the right foot, we can get stonewalled very easily without
the bureaucracy to implement our ideas. If we don’t get anything done, it won’t
matter to anyone why we didn’t,” said Councilmember Jackie Goodman, who worries
that staff stalling on her initiatives amounts to “somebody, somewhere trying
to set me up for a political hit.”
Although they did express a desire to iron out differences, staff had very
little bile to sling back at council. Their reticence is not surprising, considering
that council pressure could cost staff members their jobs. “Yes, we cower
when you call from the council offices, because you’re powerful,” admitted City
Manager Jesus Garza, who suggested that the unprecedented consensus on council might
actually make things easier on staff. “When council begins to move in separate
directions, staff gets confused,” he said. Betty Dunkerley, head of the city’s
Financial Department, backed up Garza’s observation. “Many times I see staff going
back and getting the video tapes [of council meetings] to see who said what,”
she observed.
Assistant City Manager Jim Smith spoke plainly about his frustrations.
“I’ve spent 13 years working for the city of Austin and I’m still bewildered by the
lack of communication,” he said. “We get council-speak and they get back
staff-speak.”
Despite the obvious tensions, it is not time to watch for heads to roll at
city hall just yet, according to Slusher. But the council is hoping for tangible
results from the retreat. “We need to immediately have evidence that we’re all
pointing towards the same goals. I’m going to take it on faith that [staff] really
meant what they said,” Slusher said.
On the whole, both the budget hearings and the retreat will likely prove
useful for the new council as it decides how to reshape Austin into its sea-shelled
vision. The two days of budget hearings prior to the retreat, however, seemed more
like a symbolic gesture, with the speakers going away feeling that they had spoken,
the council feeling it had heard, and both sides feeling that they had engaged in
a meaningful dialogue. Whatever.
The hearings were divided into two supposedly related topic groups: Social
Fabric and Public Safety one evening, Urban Fabric, Environment, Infrastructure, and
Transportation the next. On both nights, however, the dialogue was dominated by a few
well-represented interests. Wednesday saw at least a dozen speakers on the public library
system and packs of teenagers praising Councilmember Beverly Griffith’s Social Fabric
initiative which funds playgrounds in low-income areas. Thursday saw a parade of animal
lovers protesting the rumored loss of the city’s animal cruelty investigator
position, and several speakers addressing the difficulties of pedestrian, bicycle, and
handicapped mobility in Austin. Each of these concerns is valid and a critical area of
focus. Still, clearly missing in the process were the voices needed to provide a
clear snapshot of Austin’s budget priorities.
Some who spoke at the meeting felt that the newly revamped attempt to gain
public input before the budget comes out might actually backfire. Observed Mary Kay
Isaacs, who spoke on behalf of the Parks Board: “I don’t think it was
intentional, but I do think that their changing the process has had the effect of politicizing
[the budget process] more because, rather than seeing a preliminary budget where
the priorities of the city manager and council are visible, as has always been the previous
case, now everyone is guessing,” she said. “Now it’s not just the people
left out of the money who feel they have to marshal their forces, it’s everybody.
There is going to be a feeling of helplessness when that budget finally comes out,
with people feeling like it’s done, end of story, you get what you get.”
“The council took those hearings very seriously,” Griffith
responded, asserting that the issues that were voiced represented a broad base of
concerns. “We listened very carefully, and I think you’re going to see the council
responding.” She also noted that other methods of communication — letters, telephone,
fax, and e-mail — are being honored equally with input from the hearings.
Given the arduous budget process ahead, council and staff should enjoy the
afterglow of their weekend love-in while they can. It is easy to talk commonality over
lemonade on a veranda in Bastrop, but not so easy once they climb back onto the dais
to wrangle over money matters in August. Even in the midst of the warm, fuzzy weekend,
however, councilmembers acknowledged that the retreat was no cure-all for the city’s
ills. “It doesn’t solve everything,” said Goodman, “but it helps to
know that your sunrises with golden, gilded clouds are practically the same.”
This article appears in July 4 • 1997 and July 4 • 1997 (Cover).