City Council’s last regular meeting of 2021 was back on Dec. 9, but members finished the year with a couple of small meetings on big issues in the past week – taking care of two key pieces of unfinished business by teeing them up for the full Council to take on in January.
Last Wednesday, Dec. 15, the Council Audit and Finance Committee considered a request from three key city land use commissions – Planning, Zoning and Platting, and the Board of Adjustment – for Council to approve bylaw changes to keep their public meetings at City Hall, thus overruling city staff’s plan to move them to the new Permitting and Development Center behind Highland. After hearing the change in location excoriated by public speakers, along with officers of all three bodies, the committee members – CMs Alison Alter (chair), Leslie Pool, Mackenzie Kelly, and Kathie Tovo, with Mayor Steve Adler absent but sending in questions – discussed the matter for a bit and settled on what seemed like a consensus: They couldn’t support the specific request for bylaw changes (even City Council sometimes meets outside City Hall), and there’s nothing wrong with the PDC as a meeting place. However, it does seem illogical and bad messaging to take the city’s most attended, and often most contentious, meetings out of the seat of government; nor does there seem to be any pressing need for the move (left unsaid: other than to prioritize staff’s convenience over the public’s).
The CMs kicked around ideas about what kind of direction Council could give to staff to ensure these meetings stay at City Hall, but after a staff reminder that they needed to stick to the specific item on the agenda, they voted unanimously to issue no recommendation, but to forward the matter on – not just the bylaw change, but the more general question of board and commission meeting venues – for the full Council to consider at its first meeting of the new year, Jan. 27.
Then on Monday, Dec. 20, the full Council held a special called meeting to consider creating a tax increment reinvestment zone for the South Central Waterfront district, which is essentially the entire commercial area between Auditorium Shores and the mouth of Bouldin Creek – most notably including the old Austin American-Statesman property on South Congress (see “Council Slows Staff’s Roll …,” Dec. 10).
Opponents call it a $278 million tax giveaway: That’s the calculated value of the tax money that will be dedicated to infrastructure and amenities within the district, instead of going into the general city budget, over a 20-30 year period, if the plan is approved as proposed. The crux of their argument is that the development would happen anyway, without any need for this public investment, making this plan a violation of Texas tax code, which reserves this funding mechanism for properties where “development or redevelopment would not occur solely through private investment in the reasonably foreseeable future” without the TIRZ. That’s patently not true in this case, as Bill Bunch stressed in a long letter to Council shortly before the meeting, terming the scheme “another massive corporate welfare handout,” and asking them to reject it outright, or at least postpone it until it can get more scrutiny than is possible at this point.
Proponents say that money will indeed buy public amenities and benefits for this very important public space, that the developers would not put in by themselves. But it’s hard to deny that the rush to approval – including a holiday-week special called meeting – is at least a bad look, and a common tactic for developers’ agents trying to sneak something through with a minimum of public input. Hence Mayor Adler’s early morning plea on the Council message board the morning of the meeting, urging that Council simply set up the structure now, “so we can the start the clock on the real estate” valuation during the current calendar year. Meanwhile, they could keep “all options, including geographic area, open and available to us next year,” in order to have “a dedicated work session on this issue in January or February and then to make any and all changes to the preliminary plan or even to reject the TIRZ altogether.”
Several of the CMs appeared to have significant misgivings about the plan overall, but on that basis, reserving the right to amend or reject the proposal at that future date – and with a Tovo amendment adding affordable housing to the list of desirable public benefits – they voted unanimously (with Pool and Greg Casar absent) to create the TIRZ, and have staff prepare for that in-depth discussion in the new year. See you then.
This article appears in December 24 • 2021.