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January 5, 2009
Will Wynn struck from jury duty
Mayor Will Wynn was considered for, then struck from, jury duty today. For more, go to the Statesman’s courts blog, Austin Legal:
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/courts/index.html
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November 10, 2008
Dog poop draws flags at Auditorium Shores
Sometimes you don’t see it until you step in it. But at Auditorium Shores today, the exact coordinates of each pile of dog waste became abundantly clear.
Austin resident Bill Fraser gathered a group of volunteers to mark the waste and then pick it up, with the blessing of the parks department, as a project called Operation Flag the Turd.
The flags will stay up until Wednesday to show people just how much waste dogs leave behind and to remind owners to pick up after their four-legged friends.
“We can talk about dog waste and water quality, but nobody gets that,” Fraser said. “I had to come up with a visual way to really make a statement to get people involved.”
Fraser, who lives in Southwest Austin, has been going to Auditorium Shores almost daily for the last 25 years. Most recently, he’s been accompanied by Labrador mixes Nick and Bella.
During their morning excursions in the last six months, Fraser noticed that more and more dog waste that wasn’t picked up. He said he was frustrated that city programs and codes to require owners to pick up after their dogs did not seem to be working.
The idea to flag the offending spots was born.
About 700 flags later, the group of nine volunteers, including kids who had the day off of school, had collected between 70 and 80 pounds of dog waste at Auditorium Shores.
Fraser said he wanted to flag the waste to “cut through the red tape” and push the city to provide more “mutt mitts,” trash cans, and signs educating dog owners.
Troy Houtman, operations director for the city’s parks department, said it is particularly hard to keep off-leash dog parks free of waste. Red Bud Isle and Auditorium Shores are particularly tough spots. So are fenced in baseball and softball fields, where many dog owners take their pets to run, but neglect to pick up waste, Houtman said.
The city requires dog owners to pick up waste, even if “mutt mitts” or trash cans aren’t provided.
“We provide them at as many locations as possible, but that’s an extra cost to all the citizens and we have limited resources,” Houtman said. “They really should be prepared as they go out on their walks.”
As for more signs, Houtman said they can be helpful but not if there are so many that people don’t read them or they clutter the parks. The city has had a “Scoop the Poop” program since 2000 and launched another anti-waste project in March when Fido was blamed for extra bacteria in Bull Creek.
Those projects and efforts like Fraser’s can help keep parks cleaner because they let people know just how much of a problem dog waste is, he said.
“It was really interesting to see how much is out there,” Houtman said. “I was a little surprised.”
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October 8, 2008
No moonwalk, but Wynn did thrill
Even without the Michael Jackson moonwalk, Mayor Will Wynn busted some impressive zombie moves in front of City Hall on Wednesday, dancing to the King of Pop’s “Thriller.”
The stunt, complete with backup dancers from the Alamo Drafthouse and Ballet Austin, paid homage to the 1983 album “Thriller” and promoted the “Thrill the World” event to be held later this month.
Wynn, who was a college junior when Thriller was released, said he had been practicing in his office for about 10 minutes before coming down to the City Hall Plaza to perform. His attempts to recruit City Manager Marc Ott and other council members for the zombie performance were unsuccessful, Wynn joked before beginning.
Ott, who was among the dozens gathered on the plaza, said he didn’t have time to rehearse, but was impressed with the mayor’s performance.
“I think he rose to the occasion,” Ott said.
The Thrill the World dance will happen locally at 1 p.m. on Oct. 25 on the lawn of the Long Center, with a reprise during the Day of the Dead Procession down Sixth Street on Nov. 1.
For more information about getting involved in the dance, including chances to learn the zombie moves, see www.thrilltheworldaustin.com
And if the video isn’t enough for you, here are some photos.
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October 6, 2008
Mayor Wynn to moonwalk across City Hall
Mayor as Michael Jackson?
Will Wynn will be channeling the King of Pop (and zombies everywhere) at 2 p.m. Wednesday to bust his best Thriller dance moves outside City Hall.
The stunt, complete with backup dancers from the Alamo Drafthouse, pays homage to the 1983 album “Thriller” and promotes the “Thrill the World” event to be held later this month.
On Oct. 25, people in 80 cities in 12 countries will do their best renditions of the dance moves from Jackson’s 1983 music video. It’s all part of an attempt to break the Guinness Book of World Records mark for largest synchronized “Thriller” dance on earth.
Austin Thriller fans can participate in the local Thriller event at the Long Center at 1 p.m. on Oct. 25. More information, including times of free workshops to learn the Thriller dance is available here.
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September 29, 2008
Congress Ave. may twinkle with new holiday lights
Downtown Austin may be a bit more festive during the holidays this year.
The City Council will vote Thursday to have Austin Energy contribute $145,000 to the Downtown Austin Alliance for new LED lights for the annual holiday display on Congress Avenue.
The new lights, capable of fading, blinking and glowing in many different colors, will replace the white incandescent lights that have been strung across Congress Avenue in recent years. Those lights are eight years old, said Lacy LaBorde, spokeswoman for the Downtown Austin Alliance.
And, on the environmental front, the new lights will use 80 to 85 percent less energy than the old incandescent ones. That will cut the holiday electric bill by about $5,000 a year
“We need to celebrate the spirit of the holidays but keep in mind our need for energy efficiency,” said Council Member Sheryl Cole, who is sponsoring the item on Thursday’s agenda.
Crews will start stringing the lights after the Chuy’s Children Giving to Children Parade, which features a number of large balloons that float down Congress Avenue on the day after Thanksgiving.
LaBorde said the Downtown Austin Alliance isn’t changing the actual design of the light display much this year, but hopes to add new features in the future. The new lights alone should be impressive, she said.
“These lights are so dynamic, it’ll be a different arrangement each time you see them because of the color,” LaBorde said.
The new lights will make their twinkling debut on Dec. 6 for the Congress Avenue Stroll, Capitol Tree Lighting and Holiday Sing-Along.
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August 12, 2008
Double wedding bells for Martinez and McCracken
Two of Austin’s most eligible and influential bachelors are officially off the market.
Council Members Mike Martinez and Brewster McCracken are both engaged and plan to wed in November.
McCracken, 42, proposed to fiancée Sarah Groos, 29, in front of the McNay Art Museum in her hometown of San Antonio.
Groos is a program manager at the LBJ Foundation. The two dated for a little more than 10 months.
It will be the second marriage for McCracken and the first for Groos. McCracken said he and Groos enjoy many similar interests but admits she isn’t a big fan of politics, which could be a challenge given McCracken’s almost certain run for mayor next year.
Politics is definitely in the blood of Martinez’s fiancée Lara Wendler, 41, who serves as chief of staff Texas Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston. Martinez, 39, said he and Wendler met four years ago and have dated seriously since last spring.
He proposed in the living room of his East Austin home while his 10-year-old son captured the moment on camera. It will be a second marriage for Martinez and Wendler, a native Austinite.
“We feel really, really good about it, and we’re really happy,” Martinez said.
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July 14, 2008
Acevedo: Not interested in Texas DPS job
Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo’s name is already being tossed out as a possible replacement for retiring Texas Department of Public Safety Col. Thomas A. Davis Jr., who announced he was retiring Friday.
Acevedo spent more than two decades with the California Highway Patrol, which, like Texas DPS, is a statewide police agency, before moving to Austin a year ago this week.
So I went straight to the source this morning and asked if he was interested in the DPS gig. Acevedo said he won’t be seeking the position.
“I’m very happy (in my current job),” Acevedo said.
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December 31, 2007
Political fire still burns in Emma Long
The petition effort to qualify a charter amendment for the May ballot could soon be getting a little help from a pioneer of Austin politics.
Emma Long, 95, called the Statesman this afternoon looking for how to contact Brian Rodgers, the campaign founder and subject of a profile that ran Monday.
She wanted to pass the petition around at her regular Friday night poker game that is frequented by a bunch of “good liberals,” she said.
Back in 1948, Long was the first woman elected to the Austin City Council and served on the council for over two decades.
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November 28, 2007
Aggie Wynn to speak at A&M commencement
Mayor Will Wynn will return to his alma mater of Texas A&M University in December to give the commencement address for the mid-year graduation. He will speak at 2 p.m. Dec. 14 at Reed Arena.
Wynn graduated from A&M in 1984 with a degree in environmental design.
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November 2, 2007
Hilgers elaborates on FBI inquiry
Austin’s housing director, Paul Hilgers, sent the mayor and City Council a memo this afternoon shedding more light on a Scuttlebutt item that ran in the Statesman’s Metro & State section today.
The item reported that an FBI agent and an agent from HUD’s Inspector General’s office met with and asked questions of Hilgers on Tuesday. Hilgers declined Tuesday to give specifics about the scope of the questions.
In today’s memo, Hilgers writes: “The (Scuttlebutt item) did not include complete information about the topics discussed or the City’s ongoing responses.”
He tells the council in today’s memo, “With the exception of a personnel matter, all areas of discussion have been fully vetted in the press and at City Council in the last six months. The issues included the Austin Revitalization Authority, Push-Up Foundation, and the Neighborhood Commercial Management Program.
“Staff is cooperating fully with the agents and providing all requested information, including program guidelines, application forms, recent awards including those approved by City Council and other related information. We have received no indication that this informal inquiry will result in a formal investigation or other actions.”
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FBI interviews housing director
The City of Austin’s housing director, Paul Hilgers, has confirmed that he met with and answered questions from an FBI agent for an hour Tuesday afternoon.
Hilgers said he and the agent “talked about several different issues,” but declined to say what they were. He said the agent plans to interview other city housing employees.
Also present at the meeting was Walter Zapata, a special agent for the Inspector General’s division of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Hilgers said. Austin, like almost every other city housing department nationwide, receives grants and loans from HUD. The inspector general’s office is the auditing and investigative branch of that federal agency.
City Auditor Steve Morgan said Thursday that the FBI agent who met with Hilgers has asked to meet with an auditor in his office’s public integrity unit to ask questions about the Austin Revitalization Authority, a nonprofit the city contracts with to redevelop East 11th and East 12th streets. A recent financial review of the ARA — conducted by a city auditor who does not work for Morgan — raised questions about the ARA’s finances.
Morgan said his office is doing some preliminary research about the Revitalization Authority before deciding whether to launch a more detailed review of that nonprofit. Residents have criticized the ARA recently for not completing the redevelopment of East 11th and 12th fast enough.
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October 24, 2007
What will emerge in Austin's future?
Council Member Brewster McCracken has serious questions about Austin’s economic future, so he has turned to about 200 people in the high-tech and business communities to provide some answers.
In a letter sent last week, McCracken lays out the increasing competition that Austin faces in attracting jobs in emerging technology sectors and what the City Council is doing to foster these kinds of businesses.
“We don’t have the luxury of resting on our past successes,” he writes.
Then he poses these questions:
What benchmarks should the emerging technologies policy set so that we can measure the effectiveness of our efforts?
Which critical assets should the City of Austin be seeking to acquire in each of these key sectors?
What should the City of Austin be including in each of its sector work plans?
What are we missing?
“Austin needs to be implementing future-oriented policies now and investing now to ensure that Austin accelerates its leadership on the cutting edge of the global economy,” McCracken concludes.
Anyone out there have some answers for McCracken?
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October 16, 2007
New name for City Hall plaza
The plaza outside City Hall could get a new name this week.
The City Council will vote on a resolution Thursday to re-name the plaza the Dan H. Davidson Austin City Hall Plaza in honor of the former Austin city manager, who died in June.
Davidson “had the vision to assemble a former lumber yard site and adjacent city blocks as city-owned land,” where City Hall was eventually built, the resolution says.
Davidson graduated from Texas Tech University in 1959 and began his career in public service in San Antonio, where he worked as a city planner before moving to a management job in St. Petersburg, Fla.
He came to Austin in 1969 and served as city manager from 1972 to 1981.
Colleagues have described Davidson as a consummate gentleman with a remarkable attention to detail — remembering, for example, that he used to write down concerns and questions that surfaced during the day on a note card he kept in his pocket.
Council Members Brewster McCracken and Betty Dunkerley have co-sponsored the resolution.
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October 9, 2007
Heigila .... Heilgila ... oh forget it.
State Sen. Kirk Watson, as facile a public speaker as you’ll ever find, certainly knows his way around the English language. German, not so much.
Watson, presiding over the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization board’s big toll road meeting Monday evening, several times brought Mike Heiligenstein into the conversation. Watson was making various points about the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority, which employs Heiligenstein as its executive director.
Watson came up with some creative pronunciations of Heiligenstein’s name, accenting various syllables. For the record, it should be “HEIL-eh-gen-stein.” Watson, of course, is not the first public official to crash on the shoals of Heiligenstein’s vowel-rich name. Most people play it safe and just call him “Stein.”
At another point, Travis County Commissioner Sarah Eckhardt mangled the name of Gerald Daugherty, her colleague on the commissioner’s court. Her attempt came out something like “Dotery.” Should be “Dough-er-tee”
As long as we’re staying away from substance — the CAMPO meeting, in case you missed it, resulted in the Austin area having five more toll roads — then Bruce Byron deserves some sort of humor prize. Maybe the Best Joke/Wrong Audience Award.
Bryon is executive director of the Capital Area Transportation Council, CATC for short. This is typically pronounced Cat-cee. The group supports road building, and was 100 percent behind the toll plan.
At a public hearing on the toll roads a month ago, supporters of the plan had worn white gimme caps, leading one tollway opponent to refer to them as “fat cats in white hats.”
Byron, speaking in favor of the toll plan at the beginning of the meeting, mused that perhaps his group should be renamed “fat CATC.” This riposte, which was actually pretty clever, produced only a smattering of titters. After all, if you were one of the fat cats in attendance — the white hats were once again much in evidence — then you probably didn’t like the reminder. And if you were a cat-hater — at least 100 of them were on hand — then you probably didn’t see much humor in the situation.
But good one, Bruce. Tough crowd, tough crowd.
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October 5, 2007
Cofer gets hometown praise for bag campaign
Rick Cofer is drawing some attention far from Austin for his work to ban plastic bags here. His hometown paper, Plano Star Courier, profiled the 25-year-old law students work on the Bag the Bags Coalition.
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October 2, 2007
A question of qualifications
It seemed to take many in City Hall by surprise last week when the Statesman reported that Austin’s next city manager would need a master’s degree.
That qualification was included as part of the job description attached to the $25,000 contract for Arcus, the Pennsylvania-based company leading the search for Toby Futrell’s replacement.
But that requirement, which would eliminate Assistant City Manager Rudy Garza from the running, had not been discussed by the City Council. The other two internal candidates, Austin Energy’s Juan Garza and Assistant City Manager Laura Huffman, both have graduate degrees.
Don’t count Rudy out just yet. It appears the council members will have a chance to change the requirement next week when Arcus seeks approval of its profile for the new manager.
A final decision on the new city manager is expected by the end of the year.
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