Austin at Large: Everything’s a Priority Now

Council lines up its asks as a boom-time budget season nears its liturgical climax


This pocket park on Tillery Street was acquired with parkland dedication fees paid by residential developers. Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison wants to freeze these fees for a year to help reduce the cost of building new housing. At the same time, the city is preparing to levy park fees for the first time on commercial development, reasoning that people who come into town to work and play also use the city's parks. (Image via city of Austin Parks and Recreation Department)

It took a little longer than usual for the haggling phase of the fiscal year 2023 budget season to begin in earnest, but begun it has. City Council will convene on Wednes­day, Aug. 17 for the budget adoption ritual, with additional meetings the next two days if needed, which I'm guessing, as I write this, they won't be. Much of this routine is scripted and kinda liturgical, as befits a milestone of the calendar of Austin's civic religion, but the Council message board is full of ideas that will have to be hashed out in real time, as Mayor Steve Adler presides over his last one of these ceremonies.

It took a minute for Council offices to reorient themselves when City Manager Spencer Cronk, who for several years had been warning Council that lean budget times were in the offing thanks to state-mandated caps on property tax revenue, instead rolled out a proposed budget July 15 filled with surplus as Austin rebounds from the COVID-19 recession with a vengeance. Pay raises (the largest in more than 15 years) for everyone! An $18-per-hour minimum city wage! (Lest you think that isn't a big deal, nearly 5,000 of the city's 12,000 employees make less than that now.) A $1,500 across­-the­-board retention bonus! Even the looming fiscal hit of the yet-to-be-determined new public safety contracts did not give Cronk and his budget team pause before they decided to start spending Austin's latest boom dividends.

Now, Cronk's perspective as the city's CEO surely informs his desire to invest in the city's workforce, which ultimately makes his job easier, and I have no qualms about putting some money behind the general good vibes Austin has when it comes to government work. But enterprisewide compensation increases are, by definition, an imperfect response to actual organizational priorities – both Council's and Cronk's, the latter fleshed out in his Strategic Direction 2023 five-year plan, of which we are now entering Year 5.

What Does Council Want?

A quick overview of some of the budget priorities individual CMs have shared on the message board:

Ann Kitchen wants to add a budget rider (note: Until Adler became mayor, budget riders were not a thing at City Hall) directing Cronk to continue the city's HEAL Initiative to close homeless encampments and move at least 200 people into bridge shelters, using remaining American Rescue Plan Act funds. She also wants to add five planners to begin work on district-level small area planning, which Council initiated via a resolution in June. Kitchen has support from Adler, Kathie Tovo, Vanessa Fuentes, and Chito Vela for the HEAL rider, and from Fuentes, Leslie Pool, and Mac­ken­zie Kelly for the planning staffers.

Fuentes' own priorities – which she shared on the message board back on July 27 – include funding for a trauma recovery center, more investment in stopping monkeypox, defending reproductive health services, and ensuring the fire/EMS station in Goodnight Ranch, one of several huge master planned developments in her district, opens on schedule.

Vela's priorities as the newest CM include a $22-per-hour base wage for EMS – "The people we depend on in our worst days are living on the edge of poverty to help us. We must act now to help them." He wants to bump Cronk's proposed $18-per-hour minimum to $20; hire a permanent lifeguard corps to avoid the shortages we've seen this summer that have kept pools closed during the hottest summer on record; conduct environmental testing in La Grange to gauge impacts of continued operation of the coal-fired Fayette Power Plant; and nearly double Cronk's proposed rental assistance line item, to $12 million.

The two CMs running for reelection – Paige Ellis and Natasha Harper-Madison – have some interesting targeted asks. Ellis calls out gun violence prevention, which has mostly been championed by Mayor Pro Tem Alison Alter, and also "safe and welcoming streets," which is her own known-for (Vision Zero, Healthy Streets, lowering neighborhood speed limits). Harper-Madi­son has taken aim at Cronk's proposed doubling of the parkland dedication fees paid by new residential development, which already more than doubled in the current budget over fiscal 2021. (Because the price of land keeps going up.) "We must be mindful of ensuring that our pursuit of this important goal" – providing adequate public open space – "compliments and supports our housing priorities." She wants to freeze the fees at this year's levels and lock in the fee amount at the time builders submit their site plans, to "provide more predictability for home builders who are faced with the possibility of financially disruptive annual fee hikes during the multi-year process of navigating our existing development processes." The city is also preparing to assess parkland fees on commercial (nonresidential) properties, which should presumably pick up some of this slack.

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