Point Austin: Call Us in 2105

Welcome to Point Austin.

As our regular readers know by now, longtime Chronicle staffer and City Editor Mike Clark-Madison has shaken our dust from his boot heels and moved on to broader horizons, taking with him his irreplaceable knowledge of Austin at large. (We are considering instituting our own Bush-style "stop-loss" program and redrafting him into permanent editorial servitude, no body armor provided.) Although we're still regularly picking his brains, Mike's departure has meant a shake-up in our News department. Staff writer (and former politics editor) Amy Smith has graciously – indeed eagerly – agreed to head up our Capitol and legislative coverage, the prime fruits of which you're already enjoying in her reports "On the Lege." And that has freed yours truly to put "Capitol Chronicle" in storage and brazenly follow Mike's footsteps into the intricacies of the city beat. They are big shoes to fill.

The result is "Point Austin," a caption inspired by Antoine Predock's architectural whimsy thrusting northward on the Second Street side of Austin's spanking new City Hall, and ideally suggesting the sort of politician-goosing and policy-bubble-bursting commentary that might eventually earn the nickname "stinger" (alternative names briefly considered included "Pointless in Austin" and, more prosaically, "The Pointy Thing"). I ask only a few weeks' indulgence while I locate the bathrooms and sort out the names – Mark Strama and Todd Baxter's beaming joint appearance at the grand opening last week was momentarily confounding – and invite citizen readers to keep those Austin-centric calls, e-mails, and letters pouring in. We'll continue to chronicle the stories that distinguish Austin as our own "imperfect paradise."

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The Fundamental Things Apply

Whether the paradisal can be maintained for another century or so was the unofficial subject of last week's City Council meeting, which began with prayers and ended with billboards. While the overall mood was celebratory – it's difficult to maintain officiousness on a day that includes command performances from both Ray Benson and Esther's Follies – there was a melancholy undertone to some of the proceedings, mostly having to do with seemingly rational political choices being made now that may well have negative reverberations further on into a very uncertain urban century. The counterpoint was publicly sounded during the early evening time-capsule ceremony, when Council Member Daryl Slusher, depositing Barton Springs-related documents into the capsule, noted that it would certainly be a shame if an endangered regional heritage of pristine waters that had lasted thousands of years were to be undermined or destroyed "beginning on our watch."

Although Slusher's remarks were ceremonial, they grew in significance in light of the most spirited debate that had occurred earlier in the chamber, as Slusher and Mayor Pro Tem Jackie Goodman, with brief help from Danny Thomas, fought a rear-guard and ultimately doomed action to stave off amendments that would weaken the clean water protections in the city's economic development policy. According to city staff, some companies being wooed with economic incentives to locate here are balking at abiding by Austin's clean water ordinances "in perpetuity" – the corporate legal argument being that since they don't know what the ordinances might look like in the future, they don't want to bind future bosses to promises they might not be able (or perhaps not want) to keep. Nobody wants to violate the ordinances now, you see – it's just that, well, speaking only hypothetically here, there might in the future be a piece of prime real estate in the watershed and a deal that is too good to turn down ... It's not personal, you see, it's just business.

Slusher, who had sponsored the original provisions, argued at length that it didn't seem much to ask of a newcomer company that it agree to obey the law – even clean water law – but staff and Betty Dunkerley and Brewster McCracken insisted that the amendments and the disagreement were largely "technical," with McCracken dismissing the entire debate as merely "faculty politics." The official argument is that the kind of companies now being recruited – "call centers" and "data centers" – don't really fit the big-box retail or headquarters model that the ordinance attempts to address, and confining the agreement to the term of the city's financial incentives brings sufficient legal pressure to bear to maintain the law. A Slusher amendment to require twice the term of the incentives failed 4-3, with only Goodman and Danny Thomas joining him, Raul Alvarez crossing over.

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As Time Goes By

Maybe the proponents are right, and the amendments mean only that it will be easier to get corporate lawyers to agree to bind their companies to anti-pollution agreements, and that in any case "perpetuity" means only what a particular city council says it means. But Brad Rockwell of Save Our Springs Alliance, which had spoken out against the changes, said he isn't so sure. "What seems to be going on is that companies like Home Depot [which earned incentives for its new Northeast data center and] wants the city benefits," Rockwell speculated, "but it also wants to reserve its options to build stores in the Barton Creek Watershed." Rockwell considered it "disingenous" to describe the changes (as had staff and especially Dunkerley) as merely "technical," and added, "It's incredibly sad that the only way they think we can attract companies to Austin is to agree to allow them to violate city ordinances."

Slusher ended his argument in much the same vein, suggesting that in its haste to make deals today, the city might be shortchanging its future. "The pollution from anything they might build," Slusher noted, "will be in perpetuity, unless some future corporate leadership should decide to clean it up, because the city of Austin won't have the right to require them to retrofit it." The council shrugged, crossed its fingers, and voted that things will all be the same in 100 years.