This is an excerpt from the Austin Politics Newsletter. To get daily breaking news and analysis on city politics, click here to subscribe. 

 

I’d like to circle back to something an Austin Energy spokesperson told me last week:

Preliminary analysis indicates that Austin Energy was a net generator during the event. Based upon what we currently know, we do not anticipate any negative impacts regarding Austin Energy’s ability to continue to operate and to meet outstanding financial obligations.

It’s worth pondering that for a moment. Although I do think AE needs to answer some tough questions about how it managed the outages, it’s good to know that at the very least, after the hell that half of Austin endured two weeks ago, people can rest assured they won’t get hit with a financially devastating utility bill.

Elsewhere in Texas, many of those who were lucky enough to have maintained power during the storm are now confronting four or five-figure bills. In fact, even some who lost power got hit hard. The Texas Tribune explains:

As the bad weather bore down, it froze natural gas production and wind turbines, choking off the supply of electricity as demand skyrocketed. In response, the Public Utility Commission, appointed by Abbott, let the wholesale market price of electricity rise to $9 per kilo-watt hour, a 7,400% increase over the average 12 cents per kilo-watt hour.

…Karen Knox, a special education teacher in Bedford…lost power during the crisis but still owes some $7,000 to Griddy, an electricity provider located in Houston.

At first, it may seem like the surge in prices only hurt those poor souls on “variable” electricity plans. Indeed, there is no shortage of smug market fundamentalists who would shrug at these people’s misery, insisting they are not in fact victims but rational market actors who made a risky bet.

But actually, many Texans on fixed rate plans may see their bills go up in the coming years. From the Tribune:

Kaiba White, an energy policy specialist with consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said the costs would be passed on to customers one way or another.

“If they [the electric provider] don’t have a mechanism that allows them to do that in the immediate — like on the next bill or the next several bills — it’ll end up getting rolled into the overall cost of service,” she said. “It’s just a matter of whether it’s going to get passed on in an immediate way, in a shocking way … or spread out over time.”

Now, at least one expert I talked to disputed this, saying that the competition in the retail electricity market is fierce enough that companies may just eat the huge costs they incurred during the storm and not pass them onto their customers. But some of them won’t be able to afford to do that. For instance, Brazos Electric Power Cooperative, the state’s oldest and largest power co-op, just declared bankruptcy and it sounds like it’s not going to be the only one. From Reuters:

The state’s grid operator, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), on Friday said $2.1 billion in initial bills went unpaid, underscoring the financial stress on utilities and power marketers. More providers likely will reject the bills in coming days, executives said.

“The municipal power sector is in a real crisis,” said Maulin Patani, a founder of Volt Electricity Provider LP, an independent power marketer that is not a member of the Brazos coop. ERCOT should suspend the service charges to halt further defaults, he said in an interview on Sunday.

In other words, it’s likely we’re going to need a state bailout to keep many of these utilities afloat. Hooray for the free market.

Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of Austin and its customers don’t have this problem. Why? Because, according to what Austin Energy has said, the city-owned utility likely made money during the storm. You see, AE is both a generator and a distributor. It owns power plants that generate power that it, like every other Texas generator, is obligated to sell into the broader ERCOT market. But it simultaneously buys electricity from the ERCOT market to power Austin homes and businesses.

Thus, when prices are high, AE is paying up the wazoo for electricity like all other utilities, but it is also flush with cash from the money it’s making selling the energy it’s generating from its power plants and wind farms. Are you following me?

Now, if AE’s generators had all gone offline during the crisis, the situation would be very different. Austinites wouldn’t have been hit with high utility bills right away, but AE may have faced a serious financial difficulties that could have forced City Council to hike rates, perhaps substantially.

Here’s what Robert Cullick, who was AE’s comms director from 2014-19, says:

We need more information from the City. The news that Austin was a “net generator” during the freeze could be very, very important. On the face of it, It means that when power jackknifed from $40 to $9,000 per unit, Austin Energy may have been selling as well as buying. That would have protected consumers against the price gouging that was occurring in the market. That would be great. But we have to find out which plants were producing power. If the units that were producing were coal, gas or nuclear-powered, the freeze raises political questions — these are the very units that environmental lobbyists are pushing the Council to close prematurely because they prefer renewable sources. We deserve the whole story.

Well, to be fair, renewable sources aren’t merely a preference. They’re a moral imperative and, most of the time, they’re cheap, which is why utilities have invested so heavily in wind power in recent years. However, it is true that we likely do not have the storage technology yet to rely entirely on renewables. We still need to have sources that can be dispatched at any time, whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

So if it was the coal-powered Fayette Power Plant or the one remaining unit of the gas-powered Decker Power Plant that kept AE (and its customers) from losing its shirt during the storm, that certainly makes it harder to vociferously campaign for their closure, as environmental groups have done in recent years.

TO BE VERY CLEAR, all of the above has very little to do with whether Austinites kept their lights on two week ago. Austin Energy’s ability to produce power does not have any direct effect on whether its own customers have power because it is obligated to sell whatever power it generates into the broader ERCOT grid. So, the overall effect of AE’s success as a generator during the storm was that it helped to stabilize the statewide grid and it prevented financial disaster for the utility and its customers (you and me).

At the very least, one should hope that AE’s apparent ability to perform while so many of its peers failed means that we will no longer have to live under the continual threat of privatization by the legislature. After all, at least we’re paying our bills.

This is an excerpt from the Austin Politics Newsletter. To get daily breaking news and analysis on city politics, click here to subscribe. 

Five members of the ERCOT board who aren’t Texas residents have resigned in response to outrage over last week’s disaster.

I will concede, it is extremely unbecoming of ERCOT to resort to out-of-staters to fill its board. This is a state of 30 million and the historic energy capital of America. Are there really not enough qualified candidates in that pool?

Our state leaders are peddling these resignations as a meaningful response to last week’s crisis. They are hoping that the crisis will be interpreted by voters as simply the result of absentee leaders being asleep at the wheel.

Don’t fall for it.

First, ERCOT does not have meaningful regulatory power. It’s the Public Utility Commission, whose board is appointed by the governor, that calls the shots. Here’s what one longtime energy insider tells me:

“Essentially the PUC gives (ERCOT) the ability to write rules. However if the rules are controversial then they can be appealed by anyone to the PUC. So practically that means they mostly write technical rules or small ball rules. Big policy items are at the PUC.”

ERCOT’s job is to prevent the grid from collapsing. Last week, it did its job. It does not have the ability to force utilities to generate or store power in anticipation of the type of major surge in demand that took place last week. When Texas deregulated its electricity market 20 years ago, it placed its faith in the market addressing that issue. Last week the market failed, and it will fail again unless significant changes to the system are made.

In many other states, utilities are paid to have additional energy capacity that may not be useful 99% of the time. In other words, when customers pay their electrical bills, they are not just paying for the energy they are using, but for the investments the utility has made in preparation for an emergency. In Texas, power generators aren’t required to prepare for major demand surges, but they are incentivized to do so; when demand skyrockets they are able to sell their power for a fortune to power distributors.

Texas’s system is supposed to result in lower prices most of the time. In practice, it may have resulted in lower prices for large commercial customers but it has not resulted in lower utility bills for your average residential customer. From today’s Wall Street Journal:

Texas’s deregulated electricity market, which was supposed to provide reliable power at a lower price, left millions in the dark last week. For two decades, its customers have paid more for electricity than state residents who are served by traditional utilities, a Wall Street Journal analysis has found…

…Those deregulated Texas residential consumers paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities, according to the Journal’s analysis of data from the federal Energy Information Administration.

Robert Cullick, who oversaw communications at Austin Energy from 2014-19 and had a similar role at the Lower Colorado River Authority from 1991-2001, described the state’s system thus:

“Power is generally cheap, except when it’s extraordinarily expensive. Power is generally reliable, except when it’s off for four days.”

The good news for Austinites is that not only are Austin Energy rates codified by city ordinance, but because AE is both a generator and a distributor, it both sold and purchased power at last week’s exorbitant rates, meaning that it did not suffer the crippling financial losses that some purely distributor utilities are now passing onto customers. (In other words, AE generates power, which it sells into the ERCOT grid at whatever the market rate is and then it buys the energy back to distribute to its customers. Yes, it’s confusing)

The bad news is that we will likely face power outages again –– just like we did in 2011 –– unless the state imposes new requirements on utilities that it is willing to enforce. For instance, it could mandate that power generators make certain investments to protect their plants from cold weather. But those requirements need to be accompanied by accountability, either in the way of inspections or major penalties in the event that a generator goes offline.

None of these changes will occur by changing who is on the board of ERCOT.

“This is going to take a thoughtful discussion about how much risk I am willing to take in exchange for the few dollars (a month in savings),” says Cullick. Scapegoating ERCOT or renewable power is a distraction from that necessary discussion, he adds.

So far Abbott is not talking about making the type of switch to that type of “capacity” system.

He is, however, talking about requiring winterization — and even providing state funding for it. Having the state pay, rather than utility customers, is a more progressive cost structure. But is this going to be a long-term commitment from the state or just a one-time injection of assistance whose usefulness will wane over time as facilities age?

Cullick’s concluding remark: “I for one am going to Lowe’s to buy a generator.”

This is an excerpt from the Austin Politics Newsletter. To get daily breaking news and analysis on city politics, click here to subscribe. 

In response to a newsletter from earlier this week, in which I referenced the blasé attitude expressed by some about last week’s disaster, Selena Xie, president of the Austin EMS Association, sent me an email detailing her experience as a medic during the storm.

Here are her words, verbatim:

Early Monday, power shut down for many Austinites. I jumped on an ambulance to start responding to emergency calls at around noon. While our shift started at 10 am, the ambulance had been t-boned by a vehicle that lost control. We had heard of crews holding over for over 4 hours working over 28 hours straight, with no rest.

Our first 911 call was someone who lost power. He was reliant on his oxygen concentrator to live. His oxygen levels started dropping without it. Our ambulance got stuck going up a hill that had snow deceptively covering ice. After two hours, one of ATCEMS’s 4x4s was able to extract us. By the time we reached the patient, his oxygen levels were half of what is normal. As we rode into the hospital, I tried every form of oxygen, trying to get his levels up to a place that would be safe (or safe for intubation if necessary).

Our second patient was a bone cancer patient who couldn’t get his pain meds refilled due to the road conditions and he was in agonizing pain. Our third patient was on hospice and expected to die in a few days at home comfortably surrounded by loved ones. When his oxygen that was making him comfortable went out, he started making awful grunting sounds. It is not acceptable to die like that, in agony. We had no other options at the time than to take the person to the hospital to keep him comfortable, but not before we let his wife cry against his chest for 5 minutes, which was all we felt comfortable sparing at the time.

Then we ran an overdose, a young woman who was brought to her limit living in her freezing vehicle that had run out of gas. Then in the evening, the carbon monoxide calls started coming in. People choosing between freezing and burning furniture to keep their families warm causing carbon monoxide poisoning.

As the next days approached, we would see our infrastructure fall like dominos – a freeze meant no power. No power meant no water, no gas, no power or water meant different type of medical emergencies to follow. Our methadone clinics and dialysis clinics closed which meant people dying or critically ill while needing dialysis. Someone asked me for help to get dialysis and the response from the hospitals was, unless you’re close to dying, you’re not eligible for dialysis.

After my shift, I slept for the whole day. On Wednesday I started thinking about how to make sure EMS crews got food (many were stranded at work or asked to work 24 on 24 off).

While getting food to crews, I got a phone call. The person’s cousin had died and 911 said there were no resources to take the body away. He didn’t know what to do. I told him his options were to wait or put the body in his vehicle and drive it to a funeral home if it was safe. I cried in my car for an hour after that. I told someone to load their loved one’s body in a car and take it to a funeral home. And honestly, that wasn’t the best advice but that was the best I could do and I couldn’t believe those words came out of my mouth in this city, in this country.

It was only Wednesday, and we would continue to see people resort to illicit drugs to stave off withdrawals from methadone clinics closing, people dying from electrolyte imbalances from lack of dialysis, our only Level 2 trauma hospital evacuating patients and closing the doors to EMS, our only Level 1 hospital almost on the same verge. It was and continues to be a humanitarian crisis and it is horrifying that there exists so much privilege that people can be blind to it.

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Well, that was something, wasn’t it? The gorgeous weather this weekend was surreal. Had the frigid chaos of the previous week just been a bad dream? I was certainly tempted to think so as I sipped a margarita in a friend’s yard yesterday afternoon.

Unfortunately, there remains plenty of evidence that it was not merely a dream. Empty grocery shelves. Broken water pipes. Dead bodies.

One reader who emailed me about the issue described the power and water outages as a “minor inconvenience” for most Texans. While he conceded that some had genuinely suffered, he described the outrage expressed by the rest of us as “too much whining.” After all, he pointed out, there are millions if not billions around the world who endure similar deprivation on a daily basis.

One part of that is obviously true. Hopefully experiencing that level of hardship will raise people’s awareness of the suffering that exists around the world, including in our own neighborhoods. And hopefully that awareness will inspire greater compassion. Just think: even when there aren’t extreme weather events, there are still people sleeping outdoors when it’s either far below or far above a reasonable indoor temperature. And there are families sleeping in cars or in homes where the power and water has been cut off because they can’t pay their bills.

As I saw one person aptly comment: After last week, how could it possibly be controversial for the city to provide housing to people who would otherwise be sleeping on the streets?

But back to the “whining”: it was very much justified. And it should continue unabated until the state of Texas does what it needs to do to make sure this never happens again.

What happened last week is not what is supposed to occur in a developed country, let alone the richest country on Earth. Guaranteeing electricity and clean water are two of the most basic expectations people of all political stripes have of their government.

Unless state government makes changes, there is good reason to believe the next crisis will be worse. Officials at ERCOT say that we were within minutes of a complete grid collapse.

Just ponder that for a moment. Power would have gone out everywhere, including hospitals, police and fire stations, the warming centers where people were seeking refuge. Experts predict it would take weeks, perhaps months, to get the grid running again. Everything we depend on — food, water, telecommunications, gas — would suddenly disappear or become extremely scarce. During that time, Texas would become a giant refugee camp, likely prompting an unprecedented federal mobilization — FEMA, the National Guard, perhaps other branches of the military — to prevent starvation and chaos.

Apologists for the status quo — Rick Perry comes to mind — dismiss last week’s disaster as a fluke. It was a once-in-a-century storm, for God’s sake. What is a few days without power every 100 years?

There are two big problems with this logic. The first is that due to climate change, extreme weather events are going to become more frequent. The second is that, again, there’s no reason to assume the next time won’t be worse and the consequences of a grid collapse are so great that it warrants sacrifice in the good times — potentially in the form of higher electricity prices — to prevent it from occurring. Whatever good comes from the current system (and it’s not even that good) is a pretty weak justification for the misery inflicted upon millions last week, let alone the prospect of a grid collapse that could easily result in tens of thousands of deaths.

I will end this on a slightly more optimistic note. As shameful and embarrassing as it was that Greg Abbott’s initial response to the crisis was to go on Hannity to bash the Green New Deal — a bill that has zero chance of passing in the foreseeable future – it’s encouraging that he has since pivoted to requiring utilities to winterize. The cheap ideology that state leaders have used to paper over their other derelictions of duty — their refusal to expand Medicaid, for instance — isn’t going to work this time. This time, it wasn’t just poor people getting screwed. Even their campaign donors were freezing.

This is just a small sample of what you get every weekday if you subscribe to the Austin Politics Newsletter. 

This is just a small sample of what you get EVERY weekday if you subscribe to the Austin Politics Newsletter. 

Last week the Austin Transportation Dept announced plans to put in place “interim” transit priority lanes on a two-mile stretch of E. Riverside, between Summit St & Grove Blvd:

These aren’t full-fledged dedicated lanes, but rather painted lanes, similar to what exists currently on sections of Guad & Lavaca downtown, that are supposed to be reserved for buses and bikes. Cars should only enter to make right turns.

From ATD:

East Riverside Drive is a major transit corridor for Capital Metro, and the nine bus routes that will operate in these transit priority lanes carry almost 20% of Capital Metro’s riders. During pre-COVID normal traffic periods, the thousands of Austin residents on board these routes experienced persistent delays during peak hours while traveling to work, school, and other destinations…

…The installation of transit priority lanes on this corridor, we estimate the potential for transit travel time savings of up to 5.5 minutes during peak periods compared to pre-COVID travel times. General purpose traffic may see an increase in travel time during peak periods, but these impacts are anticipated to be minimal.

5.5 mins is huge! This is long overdue and hopefully indicates an appetite at City Hall for similar changes on other major transit corridors. One obvious example is the Drag, which is where the 803 and 801 MetroRapid buses end up getting stuck during rush-hour, resulting in major delays and “bunching,” where buses that are supposed to be 10 minutes apart end up right behind one another.

Unlike the ones on Guad & Lavaca, these lanes won’t be red. That’s because they’re “interim” and the red paint is apparently expensive. At least the good stuff is. When Cap Metro tried to use the cheap stuff it quickly faded to Aggie maroon. Sad. The project will cost an estimated $100k, ATD tells me.

This is only an “interim” project because E. Riverside will eventually be home to the Blue Line, one of Project Connect’s two light rail lines. There may still be a good argument for keeping bus priority lanes, but a big chunk of today’s bus riders will be on the train.

These types of projects are the result of an interlocal agreement between Cap Metro and the city. Cap Metro pays to build it and the city is responsible for maintaining it. The city owns the road, so it’s up to the city whether to allocate a portion of it to transit. Usually these decisions can be made administratively by city staff, but obviously City Council can intervene if it chooses.

If the city is serious about achieving the goals outlined in all of its lofty plans, such as reducing the percentage of commuters in single-occupancy vehicles to 50% by 2039, it needs to get much more aggressive in reallocating right-of-way from cars to other modes: transit, bikes, pedestrians.

Austin voters have made clear, through Prop A & Prop B, that they’re willing to pay for alternatives to cars. Those major investments are necessary, but there are also ways to significantly enhance transit service (thus making it more popular) at a fraction of the cost. All you have to do is take a little bit of space away from cars.

This is just a small sample of what you get EVERY weekday if you subscribe to the Austin Politics Newsletter. 

This is just a small sample of what you get EVERY weekday if you subscribe to the Austin Politics Newsletter. 

On Jan. 14 the Austin Police Dept submitted the “custodial death report” to the Texas Attorney General’s office about the death on Jan. 5 of Alexander Gonzales, who was killed after a bizarre, late-night confrontation with an off-duty officer.

Understandably, much of the scrutiny of this case by the media and activists has focused on the on-duty officer who showed up after the initial confrontation and fired the fatal shots. But I think it’s equally important to scrutinize the story told by the off-duty officer who admits to firing on Gonzales’ car –– apparently wounding Gonzales and his girlfriend –– before calling 911. There are many parts of the story that are hard to believe and there is one potentially significant difference between APD’s initial report and the one that it submitted to the AG yesterday.

Both the initial report and yesterday’s report say the unidentified off-duty officer was “driving in a neighborhood” and “noticed there was a car behind him” after turning onto the 2500 block of Wickersham Ln, where he was driving southbound. It doesn’t say what street he was turning from. That probably means he was turning off E. Oltorf:

Next, it says this:

“This car cut the officer off and once it pulled up along side his vehicle, the officer saw the driver point a gun at him. The officer fired at the suspect, and the vehicle continued to travel a short distance southbound on Wickersham Lane where it finally stopped against the curb. The officer stopped behind the suspect’s vehicle and called 911 to advise of the situation.”

Time out. He “cut the officer off”? Usually that expression refers to someone switching lanes in front of you. Wickersham has no marked lanes. Here’s what the street looks like:

Next, it says this:

“This car cut the officer off and once it pulled up along side his vehicle, the officer saw the driver point a gun at him. The officer fired at the suspect, and the vehicle continued to travel a short distance southbound on Wickersham Lane where it finally stopped against the curb. The officer stopped behind the suspect’s vehicle and called 911 to advise of the situation.”

Time out. He “cut the officer off”? Usually that expression refers to someone switching lanes in front of you. Wickersham has no marked lanes. Here’s what the street looks like:

If Gonzales did try to cut in front of the officer, it would almost certainly mean that he drove into the left side of the street to pass the officer on his left.

That means that if Gonzales, who was driving, was pointing a gun at the officer, he was pointing it over his girlfriend, who was in the passenger seat, and threatening to fire through the passenger window.

In the report submitted to the AG’s office, there is no longer any talk of “cutting off.” This time, it just says this:

“This car pulled up alongside his vehicle, the officer saw the driver point a gun at him.”

It’s important to note that this is taking place at 12:30 a.m. There are street lights on Wickersham; I don’t know how easy it would have been in that environment to discern a driver in another vehicle pointing a gun. It doesn’t state whether Gonzales was pointing through an open window.

Both reports follow with this description of what follows:

“The officer fired at the suspect, and the vehicle continued to travel a short distance southbound on Wickersham Lane where it finally stopped against the curb. The officer stopped behind the suspect’s vehicle and called 911 to advise of the situation.”

Neither report describes how the officer fired. Was he firing into Gonzales’ car when it was next to him? Or was he firing through the back of the car after it had pulled in front of him?

Another unanswered question: how long was Gonzales alongside the officer’s car? And how did the officer so quickly pull out his own gun and fire? Did he pull it out of a holster? The glove box?

Finally we get to the issue of motive. Why prompted Gonzales to point a gun at the off-duty officer with his girlfriend and child in the car? This was initially framed as a road rage incident, but nothing in either report hints at what might have provoked the rage. The only way I can understand the actions attributed to Gonzales is if he was having a severe mental health crisis, such as a schizophrenic episode. That’s certainly possible.

Another possible theory is that Gonzales knew who was driving the car and was intentionally threatening or attempting to kill the off-duty officer. Or that he mistook the off-duty officer for someone else who he wanted to threaten or kill. Both are possible.

If the incident actually took place the way it is presented in the reports, then there is substantial context missing for no good reason.

I am awaiting a response from APD about whether the off-duty officer was tested for drugs or alcohol after the incident. That’s one of many questions APD must answer about this story. Others include:

Did the off-duty officer know Gonzales, either personally or through prior interactions as an officer?

Where was the officer coming from that night? Was he coming from a restaurant or bar where he may have been drinking and if so, do credit card records indicate whether he had recently purchased drinks?

There is reason to believe that answers will emerge to these questions more quickly than in past officer-involved shootings. Travis County’s new district attorney, Jose Garza, has made it a priority to investigate police shootings — including the deaths of Mike Ramos and Javier Rambler — and both Gonzales’ parents and his girlfriend are being represented by experienced local attorneys.

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This is just a small sample of what you get EVERY weekday if you subscribe to the Austin Politics Newsletter. 

On Dec. 29 the city of Austin released two reports prepared by two different consultants that examined the police department’s approach to race and diversity. These reports were prompted by Council actions that preceded the turmoil over police violence this year.

The first report was prepared by Raymond Weyandt, a grad student at the LBJ School of Public Policy and founder of the Peace Mill, a policy consulting group whose website could definitely benefit from a little more information about the group and the people behind it. He was tasked with assessing seven of APD’s 48 divisions on diversity and equity. The second was a report by Joyce James Consulting to “help identify racial inequities within APD and develop immediate and prolonged strategies to eliminate them.”

There’s too much go through in one day, so today I’m just going to focus on what I view as the most topical part of Weyandt’s report: his assessment of APD’s training and recruitment division, which is responsible for the 8-month cadet academy that every officer goes through before joining the force.

City Council members have been calling for reforms to the academy long before the George Floyd protests, citing claims by some former cadets that the training championed a militaristic, antagonistic approach to policing. After last year’s protests, Council, as part of its “reimagining public safety” thing, cancelled three cadet classes –– one that was scheduled for last November, one this spring and one next summer. The idea was that training shouldn’t resume until it is reformed, but in response to a wave of retirements and resignations, the mayor and Council are under increasing pressure to re-open the academy.

Some of the most notable findings by Weyandt:

Of the 70 employees of APD’s training division, only one is black

From 2015-20, only 48% of black men cadets graduated. They were much more likely to quit or leave due to injury, while 83% of Hispanic men and 82% of white men graduated. I would be wary of the stats on women due to their much smaller sample sizes, but about two-thirds of white women graduated, as did just over half of black women and Hispanic women. An oft-cited fact by those who opposed delaying the cadet classes was that the most recently-cancelled class was the most racially diverse in the city’s history.

“Multiple former cadets” in “separate” interviews said training staff denigrated the homeless and recommended the homeless as easy targets for citations on a “slow day”

”Multiple cadets stated that they and their colleagues had been screamed at or punished for checking on one another or drinking water during intense physical drills, which last for hours in sweltering summer heat”

“Data provided by APD confirms that a troubling number of cadets were treated for heat exhaustion and dehydration during the academy”

“The academy’s training staff employ dangerous training tactics that have been described by cadets with military backgrounds as ‘worse than anything I went through in [US military training].’”

Concerns that the academy promotes a Lethal Weapon mentality to policing go back many years. The Matrix Report, published in 2016, said the department’s marketing focused on “adventure, danger and the stress of a military-style academy” and that “APD staff should reconsider the image they are invoking to the public regarding police officers in Austin.”

That’s certainly the impression you get from this video of the academy done by APD. I’m not sure when it was filmed (it was uploaded by someone not affiliated with APD in 2018), but it seems to have been done in the last few years and features a lot of footage of training leaders cursing out cadets for shortcomings.

In the video, officers justify the abuse, saying that part of being a good cop is being able to cope with stress. This is definitely true, but I think a more appropriate test of dealing with stress is how you respond to abuse from non-officers. I don’t care if you can stand there while your boss heaps insults on you. Does that teach you how to resolve a tense situation as peacefully as possible? Does that teach you how to gain the trust of the people you’re serving?

Interestingly, one of the cadets undergoing training in this video is Jeremy Bohannon, who is now an APD recruiter. For what it’s worth, Bohannon’s Twitter is focused on community-minded policing. One recent tweet stressed a person’s right not to consent to a search and another lauded patrol supervisors “who question and cancel ambiguous 911 calls which lead to unneccesary profiling by proxy.”

This is just a small sample of what you get EVERY weekday if you subscribe to the Austin Politics Newsletter. 

This is just a small sample of what you get EVERY weekday if you subscribe to the Austin Politics Newsletter. 

Two runoff elections in West and Northwest Austin were decided by razor-thin margins last night and ended with the defeat of City Council Member Jimmy Flannigan by Mackenzie Kelly and the reelection of Alison Alter over Jennifer Virden.

Since both Alter and Flannigan fell well short of a majority in the general election, my initial inclination was to believe they were both in trouble heading into the runoff, since the small number of voters who show up in runoffs tend to be older and more conservative. And yet, some Dems were still confident that they’d win both runoffs, perhaps easily. They believed that although these were two of the city’s most conservative districts, both have become clearly Dem-leaning in state/national politics and they believed their advantage might be even greater among the small group of weirdos who turn out for runoffs. By highlighting Kelly and Virden’s ties to Trump and right-wing extremists, they hoped partisan polarization would deliver for both incumbents.

In the end, turnout in the runoffs were much higher than ever before. In Alter’s bougie West Austin District 10, turnout rose from 14,820 in the runoff four years ago to 24,109 last night –– an increase of 63%. As I indicated in yesterday’s analysis of early vote figures, there was a particularly big increase in the number of voters with no history of voting in primaries, which made it hard to project their party/ideology. In the early vote (which was 75% of the total vote) in D10, these no-primary history voters accounted for 15.8% of the electorate, up from 6.5% in 2016. (To be clear, few of these people were first time voters –– they simply didn’t have a history of voting in party primaries, suggesting a lower level of political engagement)

As many suspected, it appears that most of these voters with no primary history were activated by the conservative candidates or causes.

As for D6, the conservatives showed strength in last month’s general election, when Flannigan finished with only 40% of the vote, while Kelly took 33% and Jennifer Mushtaler, who ran as a moderate but embraced Kelly’s positions on the biggest issues (police/homelessness/LDC/Project Connect) got 19% and then endorsed Kelly last week.

In other words, liberals can’t just blame the loss in D6 on a low turnout runoff where nobody under 65 voted. Runoffs are still a terrible way to select public officials, but in this case it looks like the conservative message legitimately carried the day in Northwest Austin.

There are many different variables that affect the outcome of a race. In races these close, it’s almost impossible to know what could have changed it.

When Alter trounced Gallo in the runoff four years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Gallo lost because of highly motivated voters upset over Gallo’s support for two controversial developments (the Grove and Austin Oaks) and because liberals were reeling from the shocking victory of Donald Trump the month before and wanted to take it out on anyone vaguely associated with the GOP.

The most obvious analysis of last night is that a large group of voters –– including a fair number of Biden voters –– were unhappy with the handling of the homeless and policing issues. My sense is that those had a bigger impact than Project Connect taxes or the land development code, but I could be wrong. And did the outcome of the presidential election affect the runoffs? Was it Republicans this time who were out for a consolation prize? Perhaps.

Flannigan: Proud of “hard work.”
Addressing a gathering of supporters on Zoom, Flannigan said he was proud of the work he had done during his four-year term and said he believed the city would be better off because of the moves Council made on police reforms, Project Connect, homelessness and racial equity.

“This is a tough night for all of us, but it doesn’t mean that any of this work ends,” he said. “And of course none of us are going away. We didn’t go away when we lost in 2014, and we’re not going away now.”

“Just because the path to equality isn’t straight doesn’t mean we’re not on the right path,” he later said.

He said he was proud to be the first openly gay man on Council and the first Williamson County resident. He urged his supporters to continue pushing on the issues –– saying that the “hard work” will continue.

He didn’t specifically congratulate Kelly but said, “To the new Council member, I hope she does her best to represent this district with honor.

Neither victor show much love for opponent
Kelly released a statement to the press:

“From standing courageously behind our law enforcement community to demanding safer conditions for our homeless population to fighting for transparency at City Hall, the voice of Northwest Austin has been heard. Considering the stark differences between my campaign’s priorities and the platform of the incumbent, their united voice is resoundingly clear this evening. I am honored to be the next District 6 representative and will work immediately to begin healing the divisions in our community.”

The “healing” comment was Bidenesque, although the rest wasn’t particularly conciliatory. In another message she sent to media, Kelly said:

“Congratulations to Council member Jimmy Flannigan on a hard-fought campaign. I, along with my staff, will look forward to working with Austinites from all backgrounds and political persuasions to build a better future for the greatest city in Texas.”

In District 10 Alter posted a FB message with only a veiled (and unflattering) reference to her opponent:

“Thank you to the voters of District 10 who voted in favor of my integrity, policy experience, and proven leadership, and against the politics of fear. “I look forward to serving another four years representing District 10. Austin’s best days are in front of us!”

I haven’t seen anything from Virden yet.

RIP LDC? A setback for housing
Kelly’s victory over Flannigan is a setback for housing and smart growth. Project Connect is a done deal, thanks in part to Flannigan’s advocacy, but the path to a new-and-improved land development code has grown much narrower with his departure. Even piecemeal efforts to address the city’s housing crisis may be doomed.

Land use was definitely not the focus of Kelly’s campaign, but she has said that she opposes the new LDC. Her statements on housing in general have been vague: she has expressed support for reducing regs on development but says she wants to protect the character of single-family neighborhoods.

But it’s hard to know from Kelly’s statements how she’ll vote on the many zoning cases she’ll see every Council meeting. It’s definitely too early to assume she’ll be a reliable vote with the preservationist bloc. Maybe she’d even be willing to support some relatively big reforms if they weren’t accompanied by the political baggage associate with the LDC rewrite.

At the very least, however, there is NO LONGER A MAJORITY in support of the proposed land development code on Council. With Flannigan and Delia Garza on Council, there was a 7-4 majority in favor of the new LDC and in favor of the city appealing the ruling by a county judge that Council needed to approve the new code by a 9-2 vote. With Kelly replacing Flannigan and Vanessa Fuentes, who said she does not support the LDC in its current form, we now have a 6-5 majority against the LDC.

What about Vanessa Fuentes?
Or do we? A lot of that depends on Vanessa Fuentes, the new CM for Southeast Austin’s District 2. Fuentes is an across-the-board progressive who says she supports increasing housing stock in all parts of the city. Her campaign generally did not talk much about development but when I asked her about housing in October this is what she said:

We need more missing-middle and multi-family housing in all areas of this city. I do not support the current LDC. I wish the equity overlay would have come in at the beginning of the process and not the 11th hour.

The equity overlay was the policy championed by Garza and Greg Casar aimed at “protecting” certain low-income areas from gentrification/displacement. The idea was to upzone them less than the rest of the city. (I actually think that’s a recipe for more displacement, not less)

Fuentes certainly enjoyed support from both groups. She took part in the ATXcelerator, a program run by former RECA president Ward Tisdale that tries to get growth-friendly people across the political spectrum involved in city politics. Tisdale, who lives a block away from me, had a Fuentes sign in his yard. But her contribution list also showed support from a number of prominent anti-development types.

The first question is whether Fuentes would side with the five other anti-LDC folks in trying to get the city to stop appealing the court ruling, which a fair number of insiders believe has a decent chance of getting overturned. And if the ruling were overturned, and Council only needs six votes to approve a new LDC, what changes could be made to the draft to get Fuentes to support it?

And if a new LDC isn’t in the cards, can Fuentes be counted on to usually vote for more housing on zoning cases? Are there other reforms aimed at boosting housing supply and reducing sprawl that she will support?

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The staff at the Austin American-Statesman and its six community affiliates have announced plans to unionize. The newly-formed Austin NewsGuild says the “vast majority” of newsroom employees have signed union authorization cards that have been sent to the National Labor Relations Board and are asking Gannett, the media conglomerate that owns the paper, to voluntarily recognize the union and to begin bargaining with it over wages, benefits, staffing, working conditions and hiring practices. 

A press release released by the union included statements of support from a variety of reporters young and old, including 47-year sports vet Kirk Bohls, 14-year food writer Addie Broyles, 16-year editorial assistant Veronica Serrano. Over on Twitter just about every Statesman reporter/editor I follow has expressed support.

The Austin NewsGuild is an affiliate of NewsGuild, formerly the Newspaper Guild, a division of the Communication Workers of America that represents thousands of reporters at national and local publications. Unions used to be common in the news industry and many of the most prominent publications — the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal — have remained unionized. However, in the last few years a rising labor consciousness, particularly among young journalists, has led to widespread unionization in media. Recently-unionized outlets include major dailies such as the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune, prestige publications such as the Atlantic and the New Yorker, and digital outlets like Buzzfeed, Salon and Slate. 

Two years ago, when I was writing about the challenges facing the Statesman in the wake of its acquisition by Gatehouse (which has since merged with Gannett), I spoke to numerous current and former Statesman employees about the prospect of unionization and encountered little interest. Some didn’t understand the benefits and some mistakenly believed that unions couldn’t really work in Texas because it is a “right to work” state. 

In fact “right to work,” a cynical misnomer concocted by anti-union Dallas Morning News editorialist William Ruggles in 1941 and embraced by businesses in the years since, only prohibits union contracts that require workers to pay dues. It is a transparent attempt to weaken unions by creating a “freeloader” effect, but unions in RTW states enjoy all of the same federally-protected rights to bargain. Nevada, for instance, is RTW but is nevertheless home to extremely powerful unions that are credited with winning middle-class wages & benefits for unskilled workers in the gaming industry. 

In the last couple years, other papers in historically union-hostile states have organized, including staff at a number of Gannett or Gatehouse-owned papers  who have grown sick of the company’s relentless gutting of newsrooms. Notable examples at Gannett/Gatehouse include the Arizona Republic, the Southwest Florida News, the Palm Beach Post, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and the Delaware News Journal. 

And most notably, in October staff at the Dallas Morning News voted overwhelmingly to unionize. Days later management at the Fort Worth Star Telegram didn’t bother forcing a vote and elected to voluntarily recognize their staff’s union. 

According to sources, the organizing drive at the Statesman kicked off in April. As is usually the case in successful union drives, a relatively small number of employees worked deliberately and quietly to gain support for the concept among others before submitting the union petition to management. Although you only need a majority of workers to vote in support of unionization, the goal is generally to have a much stronger majority. First, because you can expect management to work hard to dissuade workers from voting yes, and second because a union that only has the support of a slim majority is not particularly strong. 

Gannett has tried to fight back against union drives in the past but in many, many cases in the last few years it has failed. I should be wary of confidence projected by the union organizers but support certainly seems to be pretty high among staff. 

I wish the Statesman staff the best in this fight. Like any community institution, the local paper is frequently flawed. But we must work to make it better. Part of making it better is supporting its workers fight to earn a decent living.

You can email letters@statesman.com to tell management in less than 150 words that you support the Statesman workers’ bid to have a seat at the table. You can also follow the union on Twitter and Instagram and make your support known to management there.

SOLIDARITY! 

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