Austin @ Large: Austin at Large

It's like a bad futuristic thriller. (Perhaps I repeat myself.) If only our heroes could go back in time! Change that one decision that spelled doom for their society! Can they do it? Should they?

Oh dear me, you say -- I know you always use decorous and proper language -- the Chronicle is going to whine again about the smoking ordinance. Today (Thursday), the City Council -- at its first real meeting featuring Mayor Will Wynn (anti-ban) and Council Member Brewster McCracken (even more anti-ban) -- will consider delaying implementation of Austin's new near-total smoking ban, currently set to go live Sept. 1, until January.

See, the council is just too busy to finish its review -- after passing the damn ordinance -- of the consequences of and alternatives to a ban. The Budget Monster is demanding the council's undivided attention, among other pressing matters -- today's meeting has a 149-item agenda (that's what they get for taking a month off). With the city's new air-quality task force yet to convene, well, the ban will just have to wait. But ban fans -- who, you'll remember, wanted the ordinance to go into effect the day it was passed -- have publicly muttered that a delay is only the first step toward killing it.

Damn straight, although the manner of death -- a council reversal, a court defeat, or a ballot-box bludgeoning -- is still to be determined. That explains my less-than-patient mood. I shouldn't be so critical; I and others who think liberty, democracy, free enterprise, and common sense are progressive values should be grateful that the council is still paying attention. But the fact remains that they still passed the damn ordinance, even though the council -- all of them, on both sides -- has acknowledged, if only by implication, that important aspects of the issue were insufficiently considered and important constituencies insufficiently involved in the making of this sausage.

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Masters of Our Own Domain

So why would it be such a giant step to simply repeal the smoking ordinance? If, when they and the city are ready to make law on this matter, a majority of the council still believes a smoking ban is a good idea, they can adopt it then. With all due respect to the few ban backers who indeed deserve public respect -- like former Mayor Gus Garcia -- at the moment the smoking ban is to local politics what re-redistricting is to state politics. And its proponents have behaved with the same dignity and restraint as Tom DeLay et al., dragging the body politic into the thickets of their personal obsessions and away from far-more-pressing concerns, all to solve a "problem" that, if it need be solved at all, can be solved in a less brutal and undemocratic manner.

Trust me: Gus Garcia is a big boy; he can handle it if council repeals the smoking ban; he can count to four. More worrisome, I suppose, to City Hall is the slipperiness of this certain slope. If we can cut and run on the smoking ban, then what other damage can we undo? How far back can we go? (Some citizens might say "Carole McClellan!" -- but don't be scared. She's gone.) The only limit is the council's fortitude -- which has, admittedly, been a problem area for years. But now would be a good time for some giant steps. Sure, changing Austin's mind may set a "bad precedent," but making bad deals and bad law is an even worse precedent.

For example: How about repealing the Domain deal? When this $37 million bag of sugar was first hauled, at breakneck speed, across the council dais, it already didn't smell so good -- the city was giving away money, under a policy it hadn't yet written, to a glorified mall project (excuse me, "lifestyle center," or was that "urban village"?), which already promised a pretty modest bang for so many bucks. (Yes, we know, it's a "performance-based" deal, but watch future councils blithely sign whatever check is put in front of them. Who is going to monitor the Domain's "performance" 10 or 20 years hence? If Austin had an ordinance prescribing across-the-board rebates, of a standard size, for any project that met certain criteria, I would be less worried. Of course, the city would be quickly bankrupt, but we'd know it was coming.)

That was all true when the council passed the deal in May; if the developer, Endeavor Real Estate Group, hadn't sprouted an unsightly Wal-Mart on its ass, you might never have heard of the Domain. Now the council looks not just credulous but downright stupid, with UT's lease of a big chunk of the Pickle Campus -- right across Braker Lane from the Domain -- to the nation's largest mall developer, Simon Property Group, which plans a suspiciously similar "lifestyle center." Despite the fact that both Simon and Endeavor told the daily that MoPac and Braker Lane are paved with gold, and surely they can fill all this space, Endeavor has already gotten its public subsidy, and Simon would be foolish not to ask for its own shiny new rebate. So either the council pays two firms, neither providing the city with something it really needs, to compete with each other, or it only pays one -- the weaker one. Boy, I'm proud.

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A Hopeless Endeavor

Call me old-fashioned, but I thought incentives were supposed to produce benefits -- however the community chooses to define them -- that wouldn't be gotten had the market taken its course. Seems to me that getting Endeavor to build anything other than a mall at the Domain would better justify an incentive package. (Yes, I know, they said something about office space if they didn't get their rebates, which given the state of the local office market is a laughable threat.) None of the value-added features of the Domain are worth close to $37 million -- a sum which, to use one of several possible examples, could provide decent affordable housing to thousands of people. As for avoiding negative outcomes at the Domain like, uh, a Wal-Mart, the council has this amazing gadget called zoning power that, if you can believe it, state law not only allows but requires to be used in just such circumstances! Regardless of your feelings about tax incentives, growth management, or malls, the Domain deal makes no sense at the most basic level. The council should just kill it.

Or perhaps delay implementation of the Domain package until it has time to really think about the issue and consult with truly representative focus groups and task forces and all the other things it's doing with the smoking ordinance -- which, as shamefully inadequate and imbalanced as debate was, got a fuller public hearing than did the Domain deal. Today, the council is also scheduled to approve a number of revisions to city code that would, in effect, create a set of standard operating procedures for the council itself. These amendments do not, however, strike a current passage of the code -- "Austin's exercise of representative democracy is well-served by the timely and substantial participation of its citizens." You don't say.