As Austin continues to address the fallout from last week's winter weather, City Council members are calling for an emergency review of the employment of City Manager Spencer Cronk.
The move comes less than two months after council signed off on an 11% raise for Cronk in an 8-0-3 vote, generally applauding his performance at the time.
Cronk was selected for the city manager role in late 2017 and began work for Austin in 2018. Council's December vote granted him a $38,188.80 pay bump to a salary of $388,190.40.
Council members will take up their assessment of Cronk's work in a closed session during their regular meeting Feb. 9. The agenda posting states council will only “evaluate” the terms and conditions of his employment.
In announcing council's emergency review, Mayor Kirk Watson cited “unacceptable” management of the local disaster, ensuing power outages and damage across the city, and related public communication.
“To all our Austin citizens who are furious about the ongoing power outage, you're right. There must be accountability,” Watson said in a statement.
In an interview with Community Impact before his inauguration in early January, Watson had declined to rate Cronk's job performance prior to taking office but said he believed the city government system would fail without a successful partnership between elected officials and city management.
As of around noon Feb. 6, approximately 22,000 Austin Energy customers remained without power. Days after providing and then walking back shorter-term estimates for citywide power restoration, the utility said most of those still experiencing an outage can expect service to be restored by Feb. 12.
During a Feb. 6 press conference, Cronk said he remains "laser-focused" on clean-up efforts and deferred further comment on council's review to later this week.
“Certainly I serve at the pleasure of this new mayor and council, and I’ll be having that conversation with them on Thursday. You know, I’m here to really make sure that we are responding directly to this winter weather event and so that’s been my sole focus," Cronk said.
He also noted that Austin has recently endured a string of historic weather events including last week's storm and said the community must collectively do a better job of preparing itself going forward.
District 4 Council Member Chito Vela, a co-sponsor of Watson's emergency agenda item, said the public is “rightfully upset” with the city's response to the local disaster and criticized Austin and Austin Energy's handling of information related to the persistent power outages.
“I've been very disappointed in the city’s response and deeply dissatisfied with our communications with the public,” Vela told Community Impact. “It appears that we had a pretty good idea, I would say well before [Feb. 5] when we finally released that statement, that it was going to be potentially a long time for some people to get back electricity, and we did not communicate that early enough.”
Along with Vela, Council Members Vanessa Fuentes and Alison Alter formally joined the Feb. 6 call to look into Cronk's performance. Vela said he believes most, if not all, council members share frustration over how the last several days played out and said “everything's on the table” with respect to Cronk's job after this week.
Fuentes said the emergency review is needed as discontent over Austin's reaction to the storm and outages has built up.
"The city's inadequate response to this ice storm is beyond frustrating," she said in a statement. "My colleagues and I are taking action and will do whatever it takes to rebuild the trust within our community. This includes assessing the performance of our city manager. It's time to start offering solutions and accountability, not excuses."
Alter—the only council member to vocally criticize Cronk during the December compensation review—said officials should take action to rebuild community trust after what she labeled as another failure by city management in the face of a disaster. Specifically, Alter highlighted issues such as backup generators at critical city facilities she said were not properly readied for emergency use and civic customer relations that did not serve residents in a time of need.
"Our city cannot afford another disaster. We must rebuild the competence of the organization and we must restore the trust of our residents that we have so severely damaged. After repeated disasters and mismanagement our constituents deserve honesty and accountability," Alter said in a statement.
District 9 Council Member Zo Qadri said council owes its constituents a review of Cronk's performance with a goal of greater transparency.
"The frustrations I heard voters express towards city management on the campaign trail last year have evolved into a wholesale loss of trust in the past few days," he said in a statement. "During a crisis like this, our constituents deserve clear and forthright communications as well as decisive and visible leadership. Hundreds of thousands of Austinites received neither as they were left in the cold and dark as their food spoiled in their fridges in the past few days."
