Government
COMPILED BY ELLE BENT, KATY MCAFEE & BEN THOMPSON
Council taps city manager search firm Mosaic Public Partners will lead the national search for Austin’s next city manager, the appointed head of local government. The details After vetting several interested firms, a City Council subcommittee picked Mosaic to handle candidate recruitment and public engagement for a $150,000 contract. A search timeline isn’t finalized but officials previously said they hoped to install a new manager by next fall. “This is a big, big, big decision on behalf of the city, one of the biggest decisions that we will take on as a group and as a council,” Mayor Kirk Watson said. “We want to make sure we take the appropriate amount of time and we don’t limit ourselves.”
Austin funds response initiatives for sex crimes Nearly $1 million has been set aside for audits of the Austin Police Department’s sex crimes inves- tigations, victim counseling services and sexual assault prevention initiative. This represents another step in ongoing reform efforts in response to the city’s history of failures responding to such cases and their survivors. The approach City Council voted Sept. 21 to fund new over- sight of the APD’s work combating sex crimes as well as new local policing programs. The updates follow the city’s $875,000 settle- ment deal last year over a pair of lawsuits filed by survivors against Austin over how their cases were handled. In addition to the compensation, that agreement included many required actions for the city to take on, which are now being addressed. “These items aren’t just contracts and grants.
Local response funding
• $507,510 for a one-year crisis intervention project for counseling and victim services • $106,063 for a policing program to monitor places with a high risk of sexual violence • $237,500 for an audit of APD’s Sex Crimes Unit and its response to recently-proposed changes • $100,000 to review a random sampling of sexual assault cases opened in 2021 and 2022
SOURCE: CITY OF AUSTIN/COMMUNITY IMPACT
They are agreements. They are commitments that stem from hard, collaborative work and involve real lives, real traumas and real persistence on the behalf of advocates and survivors who are holding us accountable to make real systemic change,” Council Member Alison Alter said of the new initiatives in September. The funding follows the creation of a new city and community collaborative formed to advance more than 100 proposals for structural changes across Austin’s sexual assault response system in the years ahead.
Review lays out extreme-weather response flaws A consultant’s recent review of lessons learned from Winter Storm Mara advised Austin and Travis County to fix communication breakdowns with residents, address planning and operational short- falls, and dedicate more resources to resilience efforts and infrastructure. The details The after-action report released Oct. 3 dove into city and county emergency planning around the storm from late January into February, highlight- ing how governments can better ready for extreme weather events. Dozens of improvements were proposed in the review. Austin leaders said multiple departments will create a citywide corrective action plan by the end of the year—especially after similar propos- als weren’t fully addressed in the past.
Revising crisis response
The latest review of local crisis response proposed 78 fixes across six areas of improvement.
Technology, infrastructure: 8
Resource, asset management: 18
Communications: 14 action items
78 total fixes
Operational coordination: 11
Planning, preparedness: 13
Shelter management: 14
SOURCES: CITY OF AUSTIN, TRAVIS COUNTY/COMMUNITY IMPACT
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NORTH CENTRAL AUSTIN EDITION
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