Prepare
yourself, here we go again. First, the council ignored citizens who had supported the
S.O.S. ordinance. They did it again when they tried to sneak a $10 million
baseball stadium proposal into existence. Both times they suffered backlash
from the voters.
Now, the stage is set for another of those legendary showdowns that have
marked Austin’s political landscape and shaken many a councilmember to their
knees. Like S.O.S., another citizens’ petition is in question. This time it has
the whimsical title “Austinites for a Little Less Corruption,” (ALLC) and with
it, those ever-vigilant watchdogs at Priorities First! — a group originally
formed to combat the baseball stadium — hope to diminish the influence of
monetary grease on the local political machine.
Last week, the City Clerk’s office rendered the group’s petition for campaign
finance reform invalid. The petition calls for limiting contributions to
candidates to $100, and to PACs to $25 per individual donor. City Clerk
employees toiled ’round the clock over the past month to determine if the
29,231 signatures made the grade. By the time the work whistle blew last
Monday, City Clerk Elden Aldridge had negated more than half — 14,873 — of
the signatures, because, says Aldridge, they were not valid. The long and
short: the petitioners lack 1,606 names. They need 15, 964 signatures — 5% of
Austin’s registered voters — to get the petition on the ballot for a vote this
January.
But Linda Curtis and the rest of the Priorities First! gang have staked out
grocery store entryways and public gathering places every weeknight and weekend
over the past year, and damned if they’ll fade quietly into obscurity. Curtis
claims that Elden has erred, and not accidently either. She’s tossing about
hard-hitting but vague accusations of conspiracy, essentially charging the
long-time clerk with marching to the beat of unnamed councilmembers beholden to
disproportionate benevolence from the well-moneyed.
Just two days ago, Curtis announced that Brent White, the council activist who
initiated the petition, had reviewed about 6% of the so-called ineligible
signatures and found that “well over 100 people had been disqualified for no
good reason. They had listed (their) addresses and names that were on the
(voter registration) rolls. Extrapolated, that’s 1,600 voters.”
Some of the reasons why signatures were stricken from the petition do seem
awfully nit-picky. Take Craig Smith’s, for example. According to Mike Blizzard,
who is a strategist for the ALLC campaign, Smith, who is president of the Save
Barton Creek Association, was dropped off the list when the City Clerk’s office
found that he didn’t sign his name precisely the way it appears on his voter
registration card: Courtney Craig Smith.
Signatory Roxanne Evans, on the other hand, says she can’t imagine why her
signature was determined by the city clerk to be invalid. She hasn’t moved in
years and she doesn’t have an alias, though one could have come in handy when
she served on the Statesman’s editorial board a few years back, she
quips. Evans adds that she hasn’t missed a local election in more than a
decade. “This is disconcerting,” she complains. “To me, being a voter means
more than just being able to vote for mayor. It means having some say in city
affairs. It kinds of makes me uneasy about how the system works if qualified
voters are disqualified.”
Curtis vows to sue. “This is clearly malicious intent, and we’re going to
court.”
Assistant City Clerk Betty Brown explains that incorrect addresses weren’t a
nullifying factor if the voter included a valid voter registration number. The
petitioners did not require voter registration numbers, however, and they
accompanied few signatures. And when only an address was included — one that
differed from what was on the voters’ rolls — without the registration number,
the clerk could not certify whether that was the same Susan Smith who had
signed the petition. As for disqualifying voters because they used their
unofficial name, contrary to ALLC claims, the clerk’s office contends it did no
such thing.
Still, according to Blizzard, the clerk’s office could have done a more
thorough review of the disqualified voters by calling them to verify if they’d
signed the petition. But City Clerk Aldridge responds that even if each
disqualified voter had been called, there would have been no way to verify that
the person on the other end of the line had actually signed the petition.
What about checking the petitioners’ voter registration histories to see if
the addresses they had listed were also listed on past rolls? Assistant City
Clerk Brown confirmed that the office never considered doing that.
What is particularly disturbing to Curtis is the negation of those voters who
filled out everything exactly as listed on the voters’ rolls, she says. In
retaliation, last Thursday, Curtis and the ALLC gang pumped out a smarmy news
release regarding the clerk’s scheduled raise at the council meeting. “And why
shouldn’t [Aldridge get a raise]? After all, it’s not easy to invalidate 12,000
signatures [more than 2,000 are undisputed — their registration had expired]
and give democracy a big kick in the pants all at the same time.”
The council never followed through with Aldridge’s raise, though his
performance was discussed in executive session. At the dais, the council did
receive input from both the public and the clerk, compliments of an item posted
by Daryl Slusher. The council, especially Gus Garcia, emceeing in the mayor’s
absence, spent much of the hearing defending the clerk and his staff. During
the lively back-and-forth, Curtis said she didn’t want to argue with Garcia any
more, and Garcia protested that they were merely having a “discussion, like
around the dinner table.” Garcia seemed far more interested in shutting the
meeting down by the 10pm whistle than in listening to the complaints of
Priorities First! and other speakers. Neither Garcia nor Curtis would concede
an inch, with Curtis finally telling Garcia, “Let’s go to dinner, then.”
But the dinner Curtis serves up may not appeal to the councilmembers’ tastes.
She is planning a lawsuit for the main course. Three recent court rulings,
including one in 1994 in which Curtis was a plaintiff, held that petitions need
not include registration numbers as a standard for validity. The clerk’s office
didn’t require that, but requiring that voters list their addresses on the
rolls even though they no longer live at that particular residence is even more
burdensome on voters, says Jay Jacobson, state executive director of the
American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU may file the case on Curtis’ behalf,
Jacobson says, and the outlook is “hopeful.” He says that “you can make a…
case that the next step [should have been to double-check] those disqualified
voters.”
When Curtis took the council to dinner last year, the main dish was crow. She
led the petition drive that forced the council to undo their decision to spend
$10 million without voter approval, and to instead place the baseball stadium
proposal on the ballot. Of course, voters shamefaced the council by soundly
rejecting it.
The council also suffered the wrath of the public back in 1992 after they
ignored voters’ wishes by delaying the vote on the S.O.S. ordinance by 90 days,
allowing developers to apply under the weaker development ordinance then on the
books. In the next election, voters quickly forced the council majority
responsible for the delay — the infamous RULE council — out of office. Only
Ronny Reynolds remains (Charles Urdy retired).
Will the council go down those troubled roads anew? Who knows, but it
certainly doesn’t look promising. “The whole thing is an insult to voters, once
again,” says Curtis.
n
The council also took testimony from a slew of neighborhood activists opposed
to widening the Lamar Bridge to increase traffic flows. Key to the discussion
was printed and videotaped evidence presented by Beverly Griffith showing that
council had requested that the contractor studying the expansion, HDR
Engineering, Inc., also study alternative routes. A subcontractor for HDR
claims to have done that, though the only studies that ever went public dealt
with widening the bridge. The council cut off the hearing mid-way, to get the
meeting done on time, and will continue it at tonight’s meeting at 6:30pm.
This article appears in November 1 • 1996 and November 1 • 1996 (Cover).