Gas prices should make us think
& Council members push back on IT overhaul.
It looks like some on City Council are going to try to delay City Manager T.C. Broadnax's controversial plan to centralize the city's IT workforce in one department.
The measure itself, authored by Council Member Mike Siegel, is not yet available, but the description of the item on the agenda describes "a resolution directing the City Manager to postpone any departmental reorganizations or employee transfers associated with the “One ATS” initiative, until such time that Council is presented with sufficient information to justify those aspects of the initiative, and until Council affirmatively approves their implementation."
This week's sponsor:
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As I discussed recently, Broadnax is pushing to consolidate IT workers from all of the city's departments into one agency, saying that it could the city up to $100 million a year, an extremely attractive prospect for a city desperate for money. However, the only evidence for the eye-popping savings figure is a misleading consultant report that compares Austin's IT spending to "peers" that do not own and operate electric and water utilities or airports.
Since writing about this issue earlier this month, I've gotten a lot of feedback from both rank-and-file city employees and department executives who believe the consolidation is poorly-reasoned and very risky.
I'm very curious to see how many other Council members join Siegel in opposing the consolidation and how hard Broadnax fights in response.
The cost of betting it all on the automobile
Every morning since the beginning of the Iran war, the first thing I do when I get online has been to check AAA's national gas price average. It doesn't matter much to me personally, we don't drive that much. It's just an extremely important economic and political data point. There is no commodity price that Americans are more keenly aware of than gasoline.
