Okay, let’s get this straight: Neighborhoods want city staff to be more responsive. They want faster service when, say, their streetlights go out, or when their vacant lots get overgrown. They want more direct control over land use. And they want to bring decision-making power down to the front-line staff they see every day, instead of having to raise heck with city department heads and City Council offices.
So how has City Manager Jesus Garza responded to this not-so-recent news? By forming a top-level committee, of course. Or, as it was presented to City Council in a briefing last week, a “neighborhood corporate team” to oversee the city’s “new neighborhood focus.” Go, team!
Captained by Garza and comprising his assistant city managers, department heads, and other topsiders, this squad will meet monthly to strategize, prioritize, coordinate, and do all the other inactive verbs that such groups do. This corporate team will oversee four distinct areas of “neighborhood focus”:
This stuff was all adopted with the current city budget. Until now, it was not clear how these four components would, or even if they should, relate to one another (or to the rest of the council’s Social Equity Initiative). They do all use the term “neighborhood,” but they don’t seem to be using it in the same way. “Neighborhood planning,” by definition, views Neighborhood X as being unique, different enough from Neighborhood Y to justify having different land-use rules. But “neighborhood code enforcement” does the opposite — it’s designed to help neighborhoods X and Y live under the same rules and get the same service. Often, it seems the word “neighborhood” is simply the trendy replacement for city managers’ obsessive focus on “the customer.”
And the use of the word “corporate” to describe what was, in its council-spawned form, a response to the Central Austin political zeitgeist, will undeniably suggest to many readers the exact state of Garza’s not-getting-it. Though the council seemed equally unimpressed with the C-word, the nomenclature is a side issue. What’s more pertinent is why the city — and in this case, that means Garza more than the council — is so damn zealous about turning what should be common sense and standard practice into initiatives with new staff and procedures.
You may be wondering: Why does it take a special effort to enforce existing city codes? Shouldn’t it be the job of all city staffers to respond to the citizens who are their salary-paying customers? Why do we need a separate corporate team, or a separate city department like ONS, to get people to do their jobs? Why can’t they just talk to each other?
And what, exactly, will these new ONS field staff (known internally as “single points of contact” or SPOCs) do? And how much power will they have to do it? Will they have any more stroke than your average squeaky-wheel neighborhood association president? Will departments find them a useful place to pass the buck — telling citizens that any complaints about city services need to be directed at these handfuls of SPOCs? All these questions got asked by council members, not one of which let the staff presentation pass without some cavil.
The most cavil-filled of them all, Willie Lewis, homed in on an objection already raised by several neighborhood leaders: For all the top-level talk about new and different ways of doing business, when you get down to the guy in the field who takes care of rats or issues building permits, the old ways still apply — saying no is easier, kicking citizen concerns upstairs is safer. Creating new staff positions and functions will not change the organizational culture, no matter how empowered those SPOCs are — and, as Bill Spelman aptly pointed out, they won’t have a lot of political clout.
In response, Garza delivered a lot of tough talk about the new SPOCs being “activists” and “shaking up the bureaucracy” and, yes, “thinking outside the box.” Readers may draw their own conclusions about the long-term job satisfaction of anybody hired specifically to beat his or her head against an organizational brick wall.
But there’s so much support for something, anything, that will make city government more friendly and useful to average folks — no matter how convoluted and, yes, corporate the approach might be — that overall, the council and the neighborhood lobby have held their tongues and reserved judgment. Plus, it’s still early; most of these new initiatives, including the official opening of the ONS, aren’t slated to go live until early in 2000.
This article appears in November 12 • 1999.