City Hall Hustle: Come On Down!

What's the best way to describe this week's adoption of the city budget? Horse-trading? Sausage-making?

The winning entry, at least in the Hustle's mind, was that of Showcase Showdown, the climactic finale of The Price Is Right, during which contestants bid on a suite of mind-boggling prizes – theirs for the taking, as long as they don't guess even a dollar over the package's price. (Plans among the City Hall press corps are proceeding apace to find one of Bob Barker's skinny microphones for Mayor Lee Leffingwell.)

Despite the constraints they were working under – this was the fifth budget or so in a row preceded by warnings of a "funding gap" between revenues and expenses – council did have some maneuvering room thanks to some $1.6 million in additional transfer funds from Austin Ener­gy, which is enjoying the high demand of our superheated summer (at least someone is). Vote after vote, budget officers tabulated the steadily diminishing surplus. And the priorities each council member displayed in making a bid for spending spoke volumes about his or her perceived policy priorities – if not their own upcoming election chances.

Let's start with the master of ceremonies, Leffingwell himself. Tellingly, he apologized for sounding like "a broken record" only three votes into the 29 budget amendments council would consider. He noted that he'd be voting against yet another spending proposal (this one for three positions with Parks and Recreation; ultimately, one new hire will be made to assist with PARD's "sweat equity" community matching program). "There's a method to my madness," he said. "I'm not gonna support a tax rate beyond what's proposed." Or as Mike Mar­tinez said during the protracted debate over the item, "This meeting may seem like it's going on real long, but it's gonna be over real quick" if council kept approving amendments at its initial clip. The first two amendments kept the Dottie Jordan and Austin recreation centers open and under city control; Leffingwell, natch, opposed the latter, citing the progress of the center's potential public/private partnership; he also pushed through $82,000 in funding for the private West Austin Youth Association.

Several proposals fell by the wayside along symbolic 6-1 votes or withered for lack of a motion, Kathie Tovo's lonely stance to fund supervised summer play at 27 sites instead of 10 failed, and a motion to maintain current operating hours at Faulk Cen­tral Library (as opposed to opening later and closing earlier) couldn't get a sponsor. But it was the 3-4 votes that flared most controversially.

Case in point: Bill Spelman's suite of public-safety-related items (10 through 16), which challenged the orthodoxy of Austin's "two police officers per 1,000 residents" standard. Laying out his rationale in a 15-minute presentation, he essentially argued the city was receiving a poor return on investment for increased police spending. Although crime and public safety spending have a more direct financial impact on the city than traffic gridlock, Spelman pointed out, the latter's been discussed to death while the only solution offered to the former has been "more cops" – perhaps not the most effective allocation of resources. Spelman proposed that only 31 new patrol cops should be added (instead of a staff-recommended 47), with savings used either on crime-related programs (such as drug treatment) or to hire techs, statisticians, and support personnel to make existing officers more effective – spending, as he put it, "not just symbolically, but effectively" on crime.

Bristling at the length of Spelman's presentation, Leffingwell (who hadn't been especially sunny from the start) unleashed a torrent of criticism in response, invoking the specter of Central Texas' wildfires and even 9/11 to justify maintaining the 2-officers-per-1,000-residents ratio. Positioning himself as the working stiff to Spelman's elitist prof, he drew on his own experience as a pilot to attack "folks sitting in the chair, behind the desk, and doing the analyzing" vs. "those of us who were actually out there doing."

Spelman responded by citing his decades of working with and training police departments, noting his proposals were "not based on theory, not some academic chewing on a pipe and looking out the window." However, he acknowledged, "It is evident I am not going to get what I want, and what I think the city of Austin needs," proposing instead as a reasonable start even a conversation reconsidering the standard.

The rest of council agreed, albeit tentatively. They punted Spelman's proposals to reallocate public safety resources from new beat cops to other uses, but separately approved money for a patrol effectiveness study, and by amendments' end, dedicated what remained of the $1.6 million pot ($321,000) to increased funding for city and county substance abuse treatment. It was a preventative measure Spelman had advocated – but it came with the Martinez-sponsored corollary of $60,000 of that going to hire another employee for the fledgling Music Department.

In this game, you gotta take your wins where you can.

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