The victorious City Council members-elect are apparently taking quick advantage of the fact that they are not, in fact, quite yet Council members – and are instead meeting and talking with one another and Mayor-elect Steve Adler in a manner that will be officially forbidden after Dec. 31. According to the Statesman, last week Adler gathered all the newly elected members together at his home, and the Austin Monitor reported that he had “met with each of the 10 district Council members-elect.” They better take good notes, since that’s a luxury they won’t enjoy in 2015; any such gathering (or round-robin conversation) will soon violate the Travis County Attorney’s interpretation of open meetings laws, to which the current Council has been bound since the Great Open Meetings Scandal of 2011 (see “Open Meetings: Case Closed?” Oct. 18, 2012).
Apparently, there hasn’t yet been an outcry from the self-appointed Monitors of All Public Business – shouldn’t they be demanding to know why we weren’t all personally invited to Chez Adler?
When I spoke to the current CMs two weeks ago (“Farewell to the Seven,” Dec. 12), Mayor Pro Tem Sheryl Cole she said she was proud that, while members haven’t always agreed, “there has not been any hint of scandal, or impropriety, or doubt cast on whether we all intended to do what was right for the city.” When I recalled the open meetings controversy (for which all but the not-yet-elected Kathie Tovo faced potential criminal charges), she responded, “I don’t even consider that a scandal. We weren’t trying to do anything improper – that was a [meetings] practice that was going on long before I was on Council …. We addressed it, we implemented work sessions, and we have longer meetings because of it, and that’s probably all a good thing from the public’s standpoint, and I don’t regret that either. I think that was all positive.”
Time to Be Certain
Not everybody would agree with her, and “long meetings” have since become their own campaign scandal, a plague that Adler and others say they intend to cure. He says his first order of business will be to work on the “deliberative” process, using more committees and other methods to spread out the work. As Adler describes the current process, “Right now, people come to testify, they wait eight hours, and then it doesn’t make any difference what they say. The decisions have already been made.”
That was, of course, the explicit charge made against the pre-2011 Council, which the open meetings mandate supposedly fixed. What worries me more is Adler’s naive but all-too-conventional portrayal of Council meetings – where virtually every decision of substance has in fact moved through staff review, Council subcommittees, and myriad boards and commissions, all of these subject to public input – while during preceding work sessions, Council members are still deliberating and debating the details and suggesting amendments. And the Weird Austin reason there are so many “eight-hour waits” is because so many advocates insist upon their own “time-certain” discussions, and neither mayors nor even God can make time-certains simultaneous.
Adler, however, says he knows how to fix all this, and I can only wish him the best. He added that he plans to postpone “major decisions” for 100 days while these procedural improvements are in process, and one can only hope that what’s minor to him is not major to his constituents. (There’s that pesky matter of the Decker Lake golf course proposal, for example, a matter quite major to the residents of District 1, and scheduled to return to the dais somewhere within that sacred 100 days – plus plenty of zoning cases simmering that at least the applicants and neighbors will insist can’t bear any more delay.)
A Historic Opportunity
Nevertheless, it’s both the holidays and the electoral honeymoon, so we wish the mayor-to-be and all those members-elect the best of the season and a very happy New Year. Perhaps they can convene unofficially every day between now and 2015, enough to learn one another’s policy priorities, beverages of choice, and favorite colors – plus hand signals to fend off unauthorized future conversations. On Jan. 6, five of them will be drawing a short straw – and a two-year term – thereby learning that the year-long campaign they have just escaped will be resuming, oh, somewhere just after the 2015 budget season. Suddenly, divisions like east and west, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, will pale against the divide between long- and short-timers.
Inevitably, we’ll also begin to learn if our long-overdue adventure into single-member districts will begin yielding not only policy gains but truly broader citizen and citywide engagement – and not the same old faces and voices pretending to speak for everybody on their block, every resident of their neighborhood, or indeed “the people” at large. It remains a sad reality of Austin’s “participatory” democracy that far too few of our fellow citizens are willing to participate – but many are all too eager to complain that they weren’t personally consulted before a decision was made. Something to consider, when you’re drafting your New Year’s resolutions.
This article appears in December 26 • 2014.
