Hearing tonight about surprise Guerrero deal
The Parks and Recreation Board is meeting tonight (Monday, April 17) at 6:30 p.m. to discuss the City's surprise idea to move place a Green Water Treatment Facility on top of one of a handful of East Austin parks. The move was a surprise to the whole community, as Council has been secretly negotiating the deal in closed session.This has been another case of "done deal first, public disclosure second." The public is just now finding out about a major project mere weeks before Council votes on the issue. Perhaps if Council had opened up discussions with the community earlier in the process, there wouldn't be such an outcry going on right now. If the Open Government Online amendment (Prop 1) had been in place, the people of Austin might have been a part of the process.
Today's Statesman has an editorial asking "Is a park the right place for water plant?"
Come out and express your views at the meeting tonight:
6:30 PM
One Texas Center
3rd Floor Conference Room
505 Barton Springs Road
Agenda available here.
posted by opengovaustin @ Monday, April 17, 2006
4 Comments:
How many people would read the city's web site but would not read the daily paper? The reason I ask is that this issue of moving Green East was in the Statesman last August (with Bill Bunch praising the idea) and anyone looking at a map could determine what empty sites might be available. Since everything else after that decision to go East was a protected real estate decision I don't see the relevance to Prop 1.
Here's the article anonymous is talking about. We can see other reasons the city wants to pursue the East Austin location: "That would put the new plant in the proximity of the Texas 130 corridor, where planners expect a flurry of growth to take place when the toll road opens in 2007, he said."
Density and sprawl, in one blow, while removing parklands. How beautiful.
Wow, a secret deal that has multiple public hearings and derails at the very first one. Some secret. I guess y'all will have to find a new "secret deal" to prop up this dying campaign.
A secret deal derailed PRECISELY because the public rebelled at having no input earlier in the process. This is what we always do: Council comes up with a proposal in secret, makes it public at the last minute, then citizens have to try to shoot down a bad deal. The public in this case is demanding exactly the opennenss that's in the proposed amendment. If they'd been involved up front, this fiasco wouldn't have been necessary.
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