Austin: A City of Suckers?
By Andrew Dobbs
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The three biggest controversies facing the Austin City Council today are really just one problem our leaders have found three different ways to repeat. Code NEXT, the soccer stadium fiasco, and the ongoing fights over the police contract all represent instances where the City has something that another powerful, well-heeled party wants and in each case substantial factions on Council want to give their advantages away for free.
There’s a name for someone who is easy to talk into lop-sided deals that trade something for nothing: a sucker. And right now the primary question before the Austin political class is whether we want to be a sucker city or not.
This is especially urgent as the City Council is slated to consider competing proposals for the McKalla Place property tonight — whether it ought to be given away for free to some hedge fund guys from California so they can steal a soccer team from Ohio or whether we ought to see if maybe somebody would pay us for it instead.
Ah! But they WILL be giving us something in return, we’re told, a soccer team! Lots of people want a soccer team, so we’ll get them one in return for giving away a $30 million piece of property and 20 years of taxes, not to mention all the services we’ll provide for free. But again, if so many people are so eager for a soccer team then why can’t the owners sell tickets and merchandise to fans instead of making everybody — including all the non-soccer fans — pay for it?
The answer is that the soccer team can’t afford to operate unless the City subsidizes their existence. A non-sucker would trade the subsidies for some equity in the team; usually the folks you hit up for money to start your business are called investors and they are given partial ownership in your enterprise. But that’s not on the table — they want something for nothing. They say we’ll keep the stadium, but they get more or less total control on how it’s used and they’ll only allow the City to use it once a year.
Let me tell you something — if I own something I use it whenever I good and goddamned feel like it. Instead we’re being asked to subsidize the existence of a team that we won’t own by building a stadium we will own but aren’t allowed to use. The people supporting that are nothing less than Major League Suckers.
Many of them are also total marks on the matter of Code NEXT. To hear the various parties of city politics tell it Code NEXT is some epic moral battle between the forces of urban progress and pluralism and the wretched curmudgeons of white homeowner reaction, or perhaps between postmodern robber barons and beleaguered families of conscientious citizens. But it is actually a simple prospective transaction: developers and their economic allies want to be allowed to build more stuff — they want greater land-use entitlements — and the City has the power to grant those entitlements or withhold them.
Developers et al. have a bunch of money, the City has something they want, why wouldn’t we just sell it to them?
The supply siders are screaming at the screen right now telling it that this is exactly what Code NEXT does. But the key here is that the City has all the leverage, and you don’t start a negotiation by giving that up. A non-sucker version of Code NEXT starts with cranking down entitlements as much as possible. Then you can get something sweet even for the status quo. Nobody thinks that’s what we’re doing right now, and as a result we’re on the verge of handing the carny $10 bucks for some fucked up softballs.
Finally, with regard to the cops the whole thing blew up this year because the Austin Police Association had a really simple deal with the city: we pay them huge sums of money and in return they promise to kill an unarmed person of color once or twice a year. They got all the money they wanted and they traded this for… literally getting away with murder. They’d been playing the City for decades.
Thanks to the courageous efforts of incredible Austin activists the con job was finally exposed this year and Council momentarily snapped out of their sucker stupor and told APA no dice. Ever since then, however, Council has been looking for reasons to go back to the old scam, trading back major stipends in return for… nothing.
Just like with Code NEXT a substantial chunk of Council wants to surrender major points of leverage before the bargaining even begins. The reason for all of this is really obvious: they are on the other side. They want to give up as much as they can because they are confederates for the hedge fund guys, developers, and cops. They aren’t suckers after all — WE are the suckers if we let them get away with it.
Right now with regard to Austin politics we are being played with a massive short change scam — they are depending on us losing track of who is paying whom for what. In every instance, however, we need to remember that the public interest is not on the side of the billionaires or bullies. If they insist on doing their business here we better make them pay for it, and we need to use those resources or powers to check their destructive effects on our community.
The alternative is throwing your hard earned resources away for nothing, feeding the bad habits of bad people. We can’t afford that in a city where thousands go hungry and homeless and sick. If we do, we aren’t even suckers, we just suck. For those engaged in the political life of this city let’s try and not do either. It’ll make things a lot easier, I promise.