Firing of city manager highlights Austin battle over ice storm, police oversight

The city council in Austin, Texas, has voted to fire its beleaguered manager Spencer Cronk — part of a larger fight over the city’s future.

Cronk is at the center of two separate but intersecting battles about the role of city government, each of which points to broader tensions in Texas cities: police oversight and the state of the energy grid.

In a packed, contentious meeting evenly divided between progressives, with groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, and police supporters waving “Back the Blue” signs — each of whom cheered when representatives of their views spoke — council representatives voted 10-1 to fire Cronk.

“The council is removing Spencer Cronk from the position of city manager, effective February 16, 2023,” Mayor Kirk Watson revealed in another meeting, adding that Cronk would receive a year of severance pay — valued at $388,190 — in addition to six months of COBRA insurance coverage.

The city managers’ office — the primary overseer of Austin Energy, the main city electric utility — has been a prime focus of public ire following the protracted power outages caused by last week’s ice storm.

Cronk also infuriated council members and Austin progressives by his decision — while thousands were still without power — to sign an unapproved side deal with the city police union.

Before the meeting, Council Member Vanessa Fuentes criticized Cronk for his office’s long backlog in trimming city trees — one that she charged had prioritized the happiness of rich neighborhoods over the common good.

Following deadly outages after a February 2021 winter storm, the city council doubled its spending on vegetation management to levels the utility declared “sufficient,” Fuentes told The Hill.

That increase in funding built on a more stringent municipal tree trimming policy for Austin Energy in 2019 — ending a more lax system which had led to a substantial backlog in overgrown trees looming over powerlines.

Even once the reforms were passed, city contractors sent to do tree trimming “would encounter homeowners who wouldn’t allow them to do it [or] allow them on the property, and who would create a kind of a hostile environment,” Fuentes said.

Austin Energy members had testified that in situations like this, unofficial policy was to let those homeowners be — along with the spreading canopies of their untrimmed trees, Fuentes said.

That failure to prune led to the blackouts that extended into last week — as branches from untrimmed trees fell across power lines already sagging from heightened demand.

Fuentes connected these questions regarding tree trimming before the ice storm to a broader pattern in which a few wealthy southern and western city neighborhoods exerted outsized influence on city zoning, homelessness and development goals.

“We need to have, again, a community-wide conversation and talk about the impact that that has on our power infrastructure when we have, you know, certain homeowners dictating what can and cannot happen,” she added. 

She linked the tree policy to a dynamic in which West Austin gets heirloom oaks — while the largely Black and Brown population in east Austin gets landfills and tank farms. These sort of inequities led to a 2015 revolution in city government that swept council members like Fuentes to power.

In that campaign, the former at-large system of city councilors — which was dominated by a few wealthy western and southern neighborhoods, with two token seats held for Black and Latino members  — was replaced with a neighborhood-based system in which residents are represented by councilors living in their districts.

This made Austin one of the last major cities to transfer to local rule — something that Fuentes said still shows.

“It’s the reason why we have landfills on the east side of the city. The reason why we have vast industrial zoning on the east side of our city,” she said. 

“We have these huge fuel tanks, within 800 feet of homes,” Fuentes continued, adding that “we knew that if this was happening in a neighborhood in West Austin, that it would be a nonstarter.”

But Cronk was also in trouble for apparently doing an end-run around the city regarding police reform.

The night before a critical council vote last week to extend the city’s police union contract by one year — which would have allowed voters to decide on a May ballot proposition that proposed more citizen oversight for Austin’s police force — Cronk announced that he had already signed a preliminary deal with the union, The Texas Tribune reported.

That oversight measure is highly contentious, because after it passed, there was a competing measure featuring similar language and an identical title. The second measure also proposed to create an “Austin Police Oversight Act” — and it too made it onto the ballot, the local Community Impact newspaper reported.

But that second measure was put out by a group called Voters for Oversight and Police Accountability, which was almost entirely funded by the Austin Police Association, according to campaign finance disclosures.

Among other changes, the pro-police measure would allow officers indicted for felonies to continue serving and removes department language about police brutality.

At the council meeting where Cronk was fired, several pro-oversight residents described being tricked into signing the police petition. 

The city manager also raised eyebrows last year when he spoke out against the district attorney’s indictment of 19 police officers accused of shooting dozens of protesters in the head with lead-filled beanbag rounds full of lead — causing lasting harm to many, The Austin Chronicle reported.

The city has paid out $10 million to resolve civil claims by just two of those harmed, according to the Chronicle.

If the officers were indicted, Cronk warned last year, it would “heighten the anxiety of our officers and will impact the staffing shortages we are experiencing.”

“We do not believe that criminal indictments of the officers working under very difficult circumstances is the correct outcome,” he added at the time.