Austin Monitor

The Capital Metro Board on Wednesday gave final approval to increase bus fares from 50 cents to 75 cents, a hike that had been in the works for several months. The local government committee had previously approved the same proposal.   The purpose of that committee of local elected officials, Acting Board Chair Margaret Gomez […]

A majority of the City Council made a public display of support for City Manager Marc Ott on Monday, after a news report about a letter signed by a number of Hispanic business leaders complaining about their treatment by Ott and questioning his commitment to diversity in hiring and city contracting. Several Council Members said […]

Council Members Lee Leffingwell and Mike Martinez joined colleague Brewster McCracken on Friday in calling for an immediate clean up of the city’s campaign finance laws.   In Fact Daily reported on Friday that McCracken wanted to add provisions to city ordinances to make limits on campaign contributions and expenditures enforceable.   City Attorney David […]

The Oak Hill Neighborhood Plan – which is turning out to be the mother of all neighborhood plans – will stretch across three Council meetings. The 11,000-acre planning area is both massive and complicated, overlaid with environmental features and recharge zone complexities. It was labeled at last week’s Council meeting, rather kindly, “as the most […]

The Planning Commission has endorsed a zoning change for property on Wilson St. in the Dawson Neighborhood that would allow the owners to redevelop the existing mixture of single-family and multi-family housing with a larger, denser multi-family style complex under the city’s SMART Housing guidelines.   Currently, the property in question has several different zoning […]

Austin’s City Attorney believes that the city charter’s limits on campaign contributions and expenditures are currently unenforceable.   In addition, City Attorney David Smith has issued a written opinion stating that there are currently no restrictions on a City Council candidate’s use of funds raised for a previous, non-Council race. If that were true, it […]

Council Members will vote today on language for two items amending the City Charter, questions that will appear on the November ballot. Although there has been little discussion of a Council-sponsored proposal to give the Council authority to hire and fire the City Auditor, there has been a great deal of discussion of the Stop […]

The Austin City Council will take up the Oak Hill Neighborhood Plan and the future land use map that goes with it today. However, a coalition of neighborhood residents and environmental activists is asking the Council to make changes to that FLUM or postpone a vote while those changes are worked out.   “The future […]

Most of those who panhandle in Austin are not criminals, and are not making large sums of money on the city’s street corners, according to a University of Texas study that will be presented to Austin City Council this week.   Researchers at the Center for Social Work Research have completed a preliminary draft of […]

Both the Austin economy and real estate market will remain in a holding pattern until spring of 2009 because of several national and local economic factors. That was the message to members of the Real Estate Council of Austin on Monday from Mark Dotzour, chief economist of the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University. […]

The Austin City Council this week will hold a public hearing and take a vote on new regulations for development over old landfills. The goal of the update to the city code is to align city regulations with state regulations.   “We’re very comfortable with that state process,” according to Chuck Lesniak with the Watershed […]

City Chief Information Officer Pete Collins resigned from his post Wednesday, accepting nearly $66,000 from the city as the result of an agreement signed by City Manager Marc Ott. As part of that agreement, Collins promised not to make any statements “either publicly or to other employees of the City of Austin, regarding the circumstances […]