City Council

by Ken Martin
© The Austin Bulldog 2011

Late this afternoon the City of Austin’s Public information Office issued a statement by Council Member Laura Morrison along with six e-mails totaling 11 pages.

Morrison is the second council member to break ranks and voluntarily release e-mails requested by The Austin Bulldog under the Texas Public Information Act that were not retained within the city’s communication system.Council Member Bill Spelman yesterday released three e-mails from his University of Texas e-mail account about city business.

She is the first to release e-mails that she created or received from her personal e-mail account.

Morrison’s press release states, “In the interest of transparency, in the few cases when I may have conducted city business with e-mail on my personal account, my policy is to forward the e-mail to my city account. This practice is consistent with the draft policy that was discussed at the March 29 Council Work Session, which I will continue.

The Austin Bulldog today filed a formal complaint with Travis County Attorney David Escamilla against the City of Austin and Austin City Council members pursuant to Section 552.3215 of the Texas Public Information Act (TPIA), Chapter 552 of the Government Code.

This complaint, which is civil in nature, not criminal, requests that Escamilla use his authority to determine if the City of Austin and its officials have violated the TPIA as alleged in the complaint.

If Escamilla finds that violations have occurred, the complaint asks that he seek a court order requiring the city, council members and staff to comply with the Act. He has the authority to bring a lawsuit in the name of the State of Texas for declaratory judgment and injunctive relief that is in addition to any other civil, administrative, or criminal action.

Escamilla declined to comment about the complaint.

Filing the complaint initiated a statutory process, detailed in Section 552.3215(g) of the TPIA, that by law requires Escamilla before the 31st day after the complaint is filed (in this case before April 23) to determine whether the violation alleged in the complaint was committed and whether an action will be brought against the governmental body, and to notify the complainant in writing of his determination.

Complaint separate from lawsuit

As reported March 2, The Austin Bulldog filed a lawsuit against the mayor, each city council member, and the City of Austin over the city’s decision to withhold certain government records—including records involving public business that were created or received on the mayor or council members’ cell phones or personal computers or the city’s Spark chat system.

The lawsuit claims that council members have violated records management laws by not turning these records over to the city so that the city can comply with the Texas Public Information Act.

On March 4, The Austin Bulldog’s attorney, Bill Aleshire of Riggs Aleshire & Ray PC, submitted a settlement offer to the attorney handling the lawsuit for the city, James E. “Jim” Cousar of Thompson & Knight LLP.

“The Austin Bulldog seeks to help the City of Austin become the shining beacon of open government in Texas,” the settlement offer states. “An important first step in that process is for Austin officials to stop communicating about city business in ways that avoid application of the Texas Public Information Act to such correspondence.”

The settlement offer expired at 5pm today. No defendant accepted the proposed terms. Fifteen minutes before the offer expired, Cousar spoke with Aleshire on the telephone.

“He (Cousar) told me that six of the seven members of the council and the City of Austin respectfully decline the offer to settle,” Aleshire said. “I told him we would respectfully proceed with the lawsuit.”

Settlement offer conditions

Professor William “Bill” Spelman of the LBJ School of the University of Texas at Austin, today told The Austin Bulldog that he “occasionally” uses his university e-mail account for sending and receiving messages that involve his duties as an Austin City Council member.

The Austin Bulldog filed an open records request with UT Austin yesterday to obtain copies of Spelman’s e-mails from his university account that involve his work as a city council member.

Those records will not be made available. The university will instead seek an opinion from the Texas Attorney General, said open records coordinator Annela Lopez, who works in the office of Kevin Hegarty, vice president and chief financial officer of UT, who is the university’s custodian of records. Based on previous requests for e-mails created or received by faculty members that do not involve their duties as university employees, it’s unlikely that the attorney general will order Spelman’s e-mails involving city business to be released.

“We need to let this play out through the attorney general,” Lopez said.

The City of Austin previously declined to provide copies of e-mails the mayor and council members sent or received about city business on their personal computers or cell phones. UT’s policy adds to the problem of obtaining records under the Texas Public Information Act that are created or received on other than City of Austin accounts.

What we have here is not a “failure to communicate,” as the Captain tells Luke and other road-gang prisoners in the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke, but a failure by the City of Austin to ensure that communication created or received by city officials—which by definition are “local government records”—are stored and maintained in accordance with the Local Government Records Act so those records will be available upon request under the Texas Public Information Act, Chapter 552 of the Texas Government Code. That's the law that gives everyone—not just journalists—the right to find out about the workings of government.

by Ken Martin
© The Austin Bulldog 2010

Mayor Lee Leffingwell announced in his State of the City speech on February 25 that he wants to see a plan for increasing the size and geographic representation of the city council on the ballot in a November 2012 election.

The mayor’s proposal was only a day old when a group of Austin citizens—including liberals, conservatives and minorities—gathered at Huston-Tillotson University (HTU) to discuss forming a coalition to push its own plan through a petition drive that could get on the ballot this November.

Section 9.004 of the Texas Local Government Code sets the bar: the petition must be “signed by a number of qualified voters of the municipality equal to at least five percent of the number of qualified voters of the municipality or 20,000, whichever number is the smaller.”

A “test” petition drive is scheduled for this Saturday, March 12, from 12-2pm on the south steps of the State Capitol, during an expected big rally to protest the proposed budget cuts in state funding for education.

At the HTU meeting, the group adopted the name Austinites for Geographic Representation, and hopes to recruit volunteers to gather enough signatures to force the City Council to schedule the election.

If the proposition were to get on the ballot and be approved, it would change the electoral system specified in the City Charter. Article II, Section 1 of the Charter states:  The council shall be composed of seven council members who shall ... be elected from the city at large.

The meeting at HTU was organized by Linda Curtis, co-founder of ChangeAustin.org. She has led numerous petition drives to get measures on the ballot.

The program was moderated by Professor Michael Hirsch, PhD, chair of Social and Behavioral Sciences in HTU’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Only about 15 people attended the Saturday meeting, something Curtis said was intentional, so those who attended “could have a conversation.”

Attendees included Peck Young, director of the Center for Public Policy and Political Studies at Austin Community College, and a former political consultant for some four decades; Steve Aleman, president of the Austin Neighborhoods Council, a coalition of neighborhood groups; Steve Speir, a longtime Democratic activist and board member of the Better Austin Today Political Action Committee; Stacy Suits, deputy constable for Travis County Precinct 3; Roger Borgelt, vice president of the Travis County Republican Party; Roscoe Overton, an African American citizen with longtime interest in civil rights; and two candidates for Austin City Council: Chris Nielsen, who is running for Place 3 against incumbent Randi Shade, and Josiah James Ingalls, who’s running for Place 1 against incumbent Chris Riley.