In Fact Daily, Michael May: Former Place 5 City Council member Bill Spelman wants his old job back, and it looks at this point like no one is going to stop him. Spelman doesn't have an opponent so far, and there is freedom that comes with that. In a wide-ranging conversation with In Fact Daily, Spelman was not shy about wading into the tougher issues facing the city, like where to cut the city budget if the economy doesn't improve. "We're doing better than most cities," he says. "But we have to prepare ourselves for hard times. I think the next budget year is going to be worse than this one."
With city leaders already cutting back on everything from hiring new employees to library hours, Spelman says the Council is going to have to make tough choices in the years ahead. "Some budget cuts are easy," he says. "But some are hard. We only have contracts with our public safety employees. It's always easier to cut into libraries or parks, where the employees don't have contracts. But at some point we're going to run out of options. I don't think the public safety contracts should be on the table now, but if the economy gets worse, we're going to have to investigate that."
It's not that Spelman doesn't think public safety is important. This is a man who left the City Council in 2000 to run a national community-policing program. He just thinks that Texas' collective bargaining rules - which only allow the police, fire and EMS unions to negotiate contracts - skew city priorities.
Spelman is what you might call a progressive pragmatist; it is an attitude he also brings to the recent Wildflower PUD controversy. He believes the Council did the right thing by postponing a vote on the project, rather than killing it outright. "The developers can already build retail with single-family housing in back," he said. "I'd like to see something better than that. The developers say they are willing to set a higher standard, and they say they have a plan that will protect the aquifer, but they didn't prove their case. So, right now, I'm not sure which vote would have better protected the environment."
Spelman is in a rare position. He's been on the Council, but he's spent most of the decade teaching public policy at the LBJ School at UT. It's given him a different perspective on what city government should be doing.
"It's hard to see the big picture when you are making decisions everyday," he says. "On Council, you're always stuck in the weeds, having to make a decision about this zoning case or that one. And you can make good decisions about which weeds to cut, but the important stuff happens at a higher level."
For one thing, I think it's a fool's errand for anyone to file against Spelman now who launched over 750 supporters this weekend and has been going all over town with town halls, policy meetings, and neighborhood events not to mention garnering all the endorsements that one could possibly get so far. And the second point is that it's really exciting to be able to have some honest discussion and debate outside of the Mayor's race and to a lesser extend the Place 1 contest which in the big picture helps to drive the discussion this spring.
