Mixed reviews for council’s committee system

Seven months in, some say new process slows business, eats up time.

As the Austin City Council debated how much public testimony to allow on a measure to ban using bullhooks on elephants, Council Member Sabino “Pio” Renteria posed a radical question.

The measure had already gone through one of 10 council committees that hear public comments and make recommendations to the full body, meaning the number of speakers would be limited unless a group of council members decided otherwise.

“Should we just do away with the committees, and just have it all out here and let everyone speak all they want to?” Renteria asked at the August meeting.

Seven months after the newly elected council launched its committee system, designed to give residents earlier input on issues while reining in latenight City Council meetings, council members and City Hall observers agree the system needs rethinking.

Some say the committees, assigned to focus on certain topics such as housing or transportation, suck up too much of council members’ time, meaning they have less availability to meet with citizens or truly study issues. Some say the committee system has multiplied the number of meetings, slowing down city business and making it more difficult for the average citizen to be heard. Some say they are hard pressed to think of instances in which a committee’s work moved the council much closer to resolution.

One thing is clear: The new council is meeting way more often.

The council and its committees, most of which only include four members, met for about 664 hours from January through the end of September, though nearly 81 of those hours were spent in orientations and policy workshops at the beginning of the year. The past council and its committees, which were fewer in number and had a narrower scope, met for about 337 hours over the same time frame.

The regular Thursday council meetings have been a little shorter over that period, though. The new council has averaged a meeting time of nine hours and four minutes, while the past council’s average was 10 hours and 42 minutes.

The use of committees is common among large cities, said a 2014 Austin city auditor report, which studied a group of comparable cities that had from five to nine council committees. Some of those committees took public comment while others didn’t. Among those cities, the average regular council meeting time was three hours and 24 minutes.

Mayor Steve Adler proposed “reinventing” the committee system while on the campaign trail last year, in part to dispel tendencies toward ward politics. He said the current committee system “is better than what we had before, but I think we can make it much better.”

Speaking up

David King, who is retired and actively involved in the Austin Neighborhoods Council and his Zilker neighborhood, attends almost every council meeting and estimates he’s been to 40 to 50 percent of the committee meetings.

One downside to the committees, King said, is that their meetings are scheduled to start during the day (when those who work might find it hard to attend), and some are right before another panel is supposed to convene in the same room. Public testimony at the committee level has been limited because of that time constraint, and once the issue gets to the full council, the number of speakers is again limited, he said.

When the past council met, speakers were guaranteed to get three minutes at some point during the meeting, though that might mean waiting several hours, King said.

“It’s really hard to draw the line and compare the two,” King said. “Are more people able to have their time or are fewer people able to have their time? I don’t know that for sure.”

Stuart Hersh, a retired city employee who estimates he has attended at least a dozen committee meetings, thinks public commentary is better off under the committee system. At their regular meetings, both the old and new councils have limited the speakers on zoning and other development-related items to a certain number on each side, meaning those like himself who don’t fall into either camp don’t get a chance to testify, Hersh said.

“The committee system has created an opportunity for everyone, even if they weren’t selected by an interest group, to give their feedback on major policy issues,” Hersh said.

Roy Waley, vice chairman of the Austin Regional Group of the Sierra Club and a frequent face at city meetings, said the committee system doesn’t allow for more citizen involvement but does allow for more lobbyist involvement. He recalled asking a lobbyist what he thought about the committees.

“He said, ‘Billable hours, baby.’ And laughed,” Waley said.

Any payoff ?

The committees have sent about 50 items to the full council, ranging from a recommendation on a public art project to suggested changes to the city’s rules for ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft.

Council Member Don Zimmerman said the committees were meant to “mediate some kind of agreement” on contentious issues among a smaller group of council members.

“I’m trying to think of an instance where something was hammered out that turned out to be agreeable to the full council, and I cannot think of anything right off the bat. Instead, the opposite has been true,” Zimmerman said, noting that even after three committees took a whack at a proposal for a high-end golf course at Walter E. Long Metropolitan Park, the council still didn’t feel comfortable enough to take a vote and instead shelved the proposal indefinitely.

Two of the most controversial items — changes to the city’s rules for shortterm rentals, and relaxing the regulations for garage apartments and other “accessory dwelling units” — have gone through the Planning and Neighborhoods Committee, which is chaired by Council Member Greg Casar. Those on both sides of these issues agree it was cumbersome to attend so many committee and council meetings on the same subject, but disagree on whether the committee helped or hindered.

Austin Neighborhoods Council President Mary Ingle said that the committee is “not functional,” in part because three of the four members tend to vote pro-development, whereas the remaining member is pro-neighborhood preservation and often forced to compromise. Ingle is also frustrated because what she sees as major changes to the proposed rules for accessory dwelling units happened in a single meeting, she said.

Pete Gilcrease, chairman of the Friends of Hyde Park neighborhood association and a founding member of Friends of Austin Neighborhoods, said he thought the committee system helped speed up the council’s long-overdue consideration of accessory dwelling units.

“If you look at the overall makeup of the City Council, the majority of those council members are going to be concerned about affordability and understand that accessory dwelling units ... are really going to help the everyday Austinite,” Gilcrease said.

There have been instances in which new policies were hashed out in committee and ultimately approved by council, such as the Mobility Committee recommendation to add a fourth taxicab franchise in the form of a driver cooperative, and a proposal from Public Utilities Committee members to place a temporary cap on drainage fees for single-family residences.

Kitchen, who chairs the Mobility Committee (and also took the lead on the drainage fee), said her approach has been to lay out a schedule for dealing with issues over several meetings, moving from a city staff briefing to a full public hearing to deliberation among council members.

“We just try to make sure we give ourselves enough time,” said Kitchen, who formerly served as a Texas House representative.

Also important is what measures committees stop before reaching the full council. A proposal by Renteria to regulate the smoke from barbecue joints and food trucks died at the committee level. So did a proposal from Zimmerman to stop fluoridating the city’s water.

Changes proposed

Renteria has suggested reducing the number of committees to eight, so two would meet every week. He’s worried about the amount of time city staffers spend giving briefings and answering questions at committee meetings.

“I’m really concerned when I’m starting to see city staff over here four days a week, week after week,” Renteria said. “I’m concerned they might not have enough time to do their job.”

The city’s financial staff estimated technical and logistical costs associated with the committees, such as paying building services staff, at $223,089 annually. City staffers are still trying to pull together, at the request of the American-Statesman, an estimate of time spent by city staffers in committee meetings, a city spokesman said.

Council Member Delia Garza said she’d rather hold committee meetings quarterly or bimonthly instead of monthly. Garza said she feels she’s “going from committee meeting to committee meeting,” which works against the whole point of the committee system: enabling council members to dig into specific issues.

Council Member Ellen Troxclair said the council should “really clarify and stick to our policy” on how many speakers will be allowed. The council has inconsistently applied its limit on four speakers per side when an issue has already been heard at the committee level.

Council Member Leslie Pool said she’s concerned that such restraint can create a false impression that the same number of people support either side of an issue. One option on high-interest items, she said, would be for the council to conduct a full public hearing.

“What I don’t like doing is spending an hour debating whether and how we’re going to hear from the community,” Pool said.

A subgroup of council members has been considering how to refine the committee process and will soon report back to the council, Kitchen said.

Ingle and civic activist Brian Rodgers said they wouldn’t mind if the committees just disappeared altogether. Rodgers said he went to at least three committee meetings earlier this year about a proposal to build two luxury golf courses by Lake Walter E. Long, and brought some friends with him so they could donate their speaking time. In each case, he also tailored his presentation to the committee’s scope, he said.

“It was exhausting,” Rodgers said.