As Austin Recovers From Winter Storm Mara, City Manager's Job Is (Again) on the Line

Photo by John Anderson

Spencer Cronk's future as Austin's city manager is once again up for debate, amid widespread outrage after stumbles in the city's response to what has now been named Winter Storm Mara – what the chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas called "an ice hurricane" that made a direct hit on Austin last week.

Mayor Kirk Watson, working from home after testing positive for COVID-19, announced on Monday, Feb. 6, in a tweet that City Council would meet in executive session at today's meeting (Feb. 9) to "evaluate the employment" of Cronk. Executive sessions, held behind closed doors in a special room at City Hall, are allowed by Texas law to discuss legal, real estate, and personnel matters; Council and staff may speak more candidly and openly without fear of violating the law or sharing information publicly that could harm the city.

Based on the outcome of that discussion, Council could post a different agenda item, for a separate meeting, that would call for a vote on whether to fire Cronk. The item would need six votes to pass, although if it's clear those votes are there – as of this writing, it looks pretty close – it's possible Cronk would step down on his own.

"I accept responsibility as the mayor on behalf of this city for what's going on," Watson told the Chronicle Monday afternoon. "But part of that responsibility is to do right by those that have been damaged during this, by assessing who the city manager is and how the city manager does the job."

It will take weeks or months to clean up the wreckage of Winter Storm Mara, Council learned at its Feb. 7 work session. (For that meeting, as well as today's, Mayor Pro Tem Paige Ellis has the gavel.) It may take just as long to really figure out if and what Austin Energy could have done to better prepare for yet another extreme weather event. But it's clear that the utility and the city's communications team dropped the ball on two key principles of crisis management: Respond to what your customers are telling you, and don't make promises you can't keep. This left customers unprepared for lengthy outages and unaware of the scale of the damage.

Watson did not want to say whether the Council discussion Thursday would result in Cronk's termination. It's the first step in a process the mayor hopes will provide accountability to the people of Austin frustrated by the city's disaster response. Watson wants to ensure that process is fair but was also clear that he didn't arrive overnight at the decision to take a drastic step.

"I've been upset from the very beginning" of the storm, Watson told us, "[and] I have grown more upset as time has gone by." But he felt it was important to let Cronk and his team work through the immediate crisis of restoring power to more than 150,000 households before focusing too much on the question of accountability. "I think yesterday is when we hit that moment," Watson continued, "and I did not want to waste another minute." The mayor hastened to note when the Chronicle talked to him on Monday that he knew many customers were still powerless; some won't get their power back until Sunday, Feb. 12, according to AE's latest estimate.

"Heartfelt Apologies"

In a statement, Cronk offered a characteristically restrained response. "We remain in recovery mode, and my focus is on attending to the needs of our residents, businesses, and City employees who are working around the clock to provide assistance," the statement begins. "I respect and honor the Mayor and Council's role to ask questions, gather information and consider decisions in the best interest of the City."

At a storm response press conference Monday afternoon, Cronk answered forthrightly, "I serve as the city manager at the will of the mayor and Council and will have that conversation with them Thurs­day." He was more contrite at Tues­day's work session, where he read from a prepared statement, "Moving forward, we are committed to improving our response and supporting you in the face of these challenges. I offer my heartfelt apologies for any shortcomings in our response."

City Manager Spencer Cronk at a Winter Storm Mara press conference Feb. 3 (Photo by John Anderson)

The greatest shortcomings, most Council members agree, came in the city's crisis communications, which are fragmented between multiple departments – Austin Energy's own comms and tech teams, the city Communications and Public Infor­ma­tion Office, and its Homeland Security and Emergency Management Office. On the morning of Wednesday, Feb. 1, as Austin woke up covered in ice, AE issued a statement that some customers might be without power for 12 to 24 hours.

That evening, at 7:35pm, AE sent an email to Council – not to the public – that revised the timeline, saying most customers would have power restored within 48 hours, by 6pm on Feb. 3. (Ellis ended up tweeting this information out, which was the first that some of those customers heard of the revised timeline.) When that time rolled around, more than 100,000 customers remained without power. "The city manager is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the city," Watson told us, "which includes the hiring of the department heads within the city's public information office, and all of the public information offices in different departments, and making sure they all function together."

At the Council work session Tuesday, AE provided a high-level briefing on restoration progress, but many questions were still unanswered. As AE explained its triage process – prioritizing critical loads (hospitals, schools, nursing homes, etc.) and then the largest clusters of outages – Council Member Ryan Alter asked why customers can't see where they are in the queue on AE's online outage map. Stuart Riley, AE's interim chief operating officer, stressed that while that's possible in common scenarios that cause power outages, Winter Storm Mara was anything but common.

Within a cluster of 400 outages, Riley told Council, "there could be multiple poles, multiple cross-arms, multiple trees down on wires. … It's like outages within outages within outages. We could start working on that and say, 'You know what, the scale of this challenge is going to take us all day. Let's have one of our crews go over there and get those 200 up in two hours. And let's come back over here and work on this overnight.' You just never know what the circumstances are going to be in this level of damage from this natural disaster."

Literally Groundhog Day

Austin Energy says it believes its response has been as good as it could be under the trying circumstances, with all hands on deck and mutual aid crews from other utilities doing as much as they safely could to repair the power lines. However, at Tuesday's work session CM Alison Alter pointed out that "multiple things can be true at once. It is true that we experienced an unprecedented climate event. It can also be true that we failed in our emergency response and certain parts of our organization did not learn the lessons of our prior crisis."

That would be Winter Storm Uri two years ago, which nearly destroyed the Texas power grid. The city's Uri after-action report highlighted major shortcomings in the city's emergency communications that Mara showed haven't been fixed. Austin Energy took the lead on communication on Feb. 1, responding to media inquiries and being active on social media. But direct communication to customers without power, and thus without TV or internet access, only picked up after community outrage began to snowball the following day, and didn't begin with non-English speakers until this week. At Tuesday's work session, Alison Alter asked why AE did not send texts to customers with information about the storm, but Riley did not have an answer; he said it would be explored in the utility's Mara after-action report.

An Austin Energy crew works to restore power in South Austin on Wednesday, Feb. 1 (Photo by Jana Birchum)

"Everything we have seen this time, we have talked about before," said Alison Alter, who had sardonically observed that last Thursday was literally Groundhog Day. "We have got to talk about how we learn the lessons. But it is not on Austin Energy. This is a whole city that has to respond to an emergency situation." CM Chito Vela said the same thing in a conversation with the Chronicle on Monday: "We have to improve our communications. Our constituents did not know quickly enough how severe the outages would be. I know there's a balance between providing information accurately and quickly, but we need to find that balance before the next extreme weather event hits us."

For Alison Alter, Watson, and others on Council, frustrations with Cronk extend beyond decisions made – or not made – over the past week. Frustrations over how the city activates extreme weather shelters have boiled over in recent months. Last year, former Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros resigned after the utility issued its third boil water notice since 2018 – all three of which occurred under Cronk's leadership.

Cronk and much of Council are also of two minds about how he has managed, or not managed, the Austin Police Department. One year ago, when Travis County District Attorney José Garza announced indictments of 19 officers for alleged assaults committed during the May 2020 protests at APD headquarters on Eighth Street, Cronk issued a statement saying, "We do not believe that criminal indictments of the officers working under very difficult circumstances is the correct outcome." That aligned Cronk with police Chief Joe Chacon, but not with many Austinites and their elected representatives. Cronk's apparent preference for instead paying out multimillion-dollar settlements to Eighth Street survivors and other victims of police violence is costing the city real money.

Watson's agenda item to discuss Cronk's future is co-sponsored by Vela, CM Vanessa Fuentes, and Alison Alter, who has consistently criticized Cronk's leadership. At Council's first meeting after the Eighth Street protests, on June 11, 2020, Alter told Cronk: "Your silence has been deafening to me. A moment like this requires action and not just waiting for others to take the lead."

More than two years later, on Dec. 8, 2022, Alter voted against giving Cronk his first pay raise since his arrival in Austin, citing "deep concerns about our community's trust in [Cronk's] stewardship [and with] the manager's performance for over two years." As we reported last month, while most of Council, including the new members, looked forward to working with Cronk, Alter said her Dec. 8 remarks spoke for themselves.

Watson has had much less time to observe Cronk's performance from the inside. Still, he's been frustrated with how Cronk and his team have handled the current labor talks with the Austin Police Association. "I have been disappointed," Watson, who was mayor when the first "meet and confer" agreement was reached in 1999, told us. "It appears Council is going to be faced with a contract so close to critical deadlines that it will put us in the unfortunate position of having to evaluate an important document and decide on it quickly." (Read more on the police contract here.)

Months of Cleanup Ahead

A basic lack of trust in Cronk's ability to manage a crisis will not be helpful as the city and Travis County begin an arduous cleanup process that may last for months, along with providing assistance to residents who need it. On Tuesday, County Judge Andy Brown extended the county's disaster declaration, issued last Friday, to fund continued recovery costs like debris removal and food distributions; CMs expect to do the same in Thursday's meeting.

The amount of cleanup required will clock in at least at $5.7 billion, the threshold necessary for the city and county to declare a disaster. Along with the state's declaration, Cronk on Friday promised vague "options" for individual financial reimbursement; at Tuesday's work session, Alison Alter urged Cronk to look into designating a cold-weather day to reimburse city and AISD employees who couldn't come into work during the storm.

A downed tree hangs on a powerline (Photo by Jana Birchum)

Travis County has already drafted a disaster summary to the Texas Division of Emergency Management along with local school districts, cities, and emergency service districts, and will continue to update it. The city and county have established Multi-Agency Resource Centers, which will operate at least through Saturday, Feb. 11 (see "What Do I Do Now?" below for locations). Charging stations, debris pickup information, food, laundry, and showers will be available at the MARCs – all services that are being tracked for federal reimbursement as well.

Council's Austin Energy Utility Over­sight Committee next meets on Feb. 21. Its chair, CM Leslie Pool, has indicated that the commitee will expect AE to provide more analysis on what went wrong in terms of preparations and response to Mara. "We need to carefully navigate what the city can control and what it can't control," Pool said at Council's Feb. 7 work session. "We can't control that a storm parked in our area and coated the city in ice," she continued, "but we can and should provide the best emergency response in terms of communication, coordination, and relief resources that we can. We fell short, and it's not the first time."

Beyond the meeting, AE will conduct a review of its preparedness and response measures and produce an after-action report, as it did in 2021 after Uri. Though some have speculated that better vegetation management, which has sometimes been stymied by pushback from homeowners, would have mitigated the worst of the damage – it was promised in the Uri after-action report and last week by Watson – Riley said that "would have made a marginal difference. You can't trim away from the lines sufficient to account for a 40-foot tall pecan tree." The role of tree trimming, like much else, will be further examined in the after-action report.

Many have called for burying power lines as another strategy to avoid this devastation, a project which Riley estimated would cost about $12 billion, or about $1.5 million per mile of line. AE General Manager Jackie Sargent has also noted over the past week that buried lines create their own emergency management problems in a region prone to flooding. However, some CMs are in favor of doing what they see as necessary to avoid future disasters: Vela tweeted Tuesday, "It's a big job, going to cost a lot, take years and be a huge headache, but I think we have to bury the electric lines."

CM Mackenzie Kelly has authored a resolution on the Feb. 9 agenda calling for the Office of the City Auditor to investigate AE's response to Mara, taking stock of the "adequacy" and "execution" of AE's vegetation management plan, coordination between AE and other city departments, and a review of the utility's "operational practices" during the storm. On the Council message board, Pool pushed back on Kelly's call for an audit, saying that staff should first finish its own after-action reporting before Council decides if a formal audit is warranted.