Questions of the day: When will power be restored? Will Cronk keep his job?

Two questions hung over City Council’s abbreviated work session Tuesday, one arising frequently and one never mentioned. First of all, Council members wanted to know how many Austin Energy customers were still without power and when their power would be restored. The unspoken question was whether City Manager Spencer Cronk would retain his job after what many people see as a less than stellar performance in managing the ice storm’s consequences.

Austin Energy General Manager Jackie Sargent said she expects the vast majority of customers to have their electricity restored by Sunday. AE interim Chief Operating Officer Stuart Reilly said at the peak of the outage, 173,000 customers were without power. On Tuesday morning, that number had fallen to 9,200 and by Tuesday afternoon’s press conference, the number was fewer than 5,700.

Sargent said line workers are accustomed to working in inclement weather and would continue to work as long as they can do so safely.

Reilly and Sargent were careful not to promise that every customer’s power would be restored by Sunday. However, Reilly said more than 1,000 people were working on the problem, including crews from as far away as Louisiana. He explained that it would not be possible to tell individual customers how soon their power would be restored.

In response to a question about whether a failure to trim trees caused the outages, Reilly said, “If I had to give you my best approximation at this point, I still think it would have made only a marginal difference because of what we’re seeing. You can’t trim away from the lines sufficiently to account for a 40-foot pecan tree” damaging a line. “You would end up not having any trees anywhere close to any lines.”

Ken Snipes, director of Austin Resource Recovery, said his crews and three contract crews are working in a grid pattern throughout the city to collect storm debris and tree limbs. That task may keep crews busy through April, he said, but residents do not have to worry about getting all those tree limbs into the street immediately. Employees from Public Works and the Parks and Recreation Department are also working to clear downed trees and other debris from the right of way, according to James Snow, interim director of Public Works.

Mayor Kirk Watson, who has tested positive for Covid and attended Tuesday’s meeting electronically, has already apologized to the public for the city’s communication failures related to the storm and electric outages. Watson, along with Council members Chito Vela, Vanessa Fuentes and Alison Alter, has added an emergency item to Thursday’s executive session agenda to evaluate Cronk’s performance.

Bill Aleshire, an attorney versed in laws governing public information, said Tuesday via Twitter, “After seeing agenda wording, I don’t think you’ll see any Council action on Cronk this week, probably all secret talk. Risks TOMA (Texas Open Meetings Act) violation to vote on Cronk.”

Aleshire told the Austin Monitor that Council can take a poll in executive session to see where everyone stands on the question of Cronk’s employment with the city. If they wish to take action, he said they need to post the item 72 hours in advance of the meeting.

Alter criticized Cronk and declined to vote for his raise in December. On Tuesday she said while it can be true “that we experienced an unprecedented climate emergency event” that “left a lot of devastation in its wake, it can also be true that we failed in our emergency response and that we didn’t learn the lessons of a series of crises that we had, or certain parts of our organization did not learn those lessons and that we failed to prepare well. Both of those can be true.”

Alter thanked Austin Resource Recovery, Public Works and the EMS dispatch center in particular, saying various departments did “a lot of really good stuff. But at the same time, we failed in our emergency management preparation. We failed during the crisis.”

Among other things, she said the city “failed with respect to communications,” adding that there were “generators that didn’t go online or were never put in place.”

Alter said that 19 vacancies in EMS Council had authorized to fill in October could not be filled because Human Resources did not authorize those positions. “This is Groundhog Day … every single thing that we’ve seen, we’ve seen before.” It’s not just Austin Energy, she said. She urged everyone to look at Austin Water’s after-action report. Although the city was prepared 99 percent of the time, it was not prepared during a critical 1 percent of the time. The report showed “that fault clearly lies with management.”

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