Garza explains motivations behind proposed changes to Equity, Civil Rights offices

At Wednesday’s budget work session, interim City Manager Jesús Garza offered some of his rationale behind the proposed reorganization of four city offices, a change that has drawn criticism from community groups involved in equality and racial justice.

During the session, City Council Member Vanessa Fuentes asked Garza to explain his reasoning behind the changes, which could see the Equity and Civil Rights offices combined with the Small and Minority Business Resources Department under the new office of Civic and Business Equity. Another planned reorganization would have the Sustainability and Resilience offices become part of the Planning Department.

Garza, who has been the city’s top administrator since the firing of Spencer Cronk in February, said he expects that combining the four offices as pieces of new or existing organizations will improve their prominence and bureaucratic heft in city government and allow them to accomplish their goals more easily.

“When you have offices that are relatively small, it’s hard for those offices to get air time,” he said. “They don’t have the gravity to be able to push an agenda that needs to get done within an organization. The bringing together of the Equity Office, the Civil Rights Office and (the Small and Minority Business Resources Department) is to bring some kind of mass to that effort, all in the same vein of trying to open doors where doors have been closed in the past.”

Wednesday’s work session was something of an opening of Council’s work to tailor and finalize the proposed $5.5 billion budget, with members raising initial concerns or highlighting specific positive moves rather than doing much brokering or deal-making for specific expenditures.

Garza also said he hopes reorganizing the specified offices will let staff and administrators take a stronger lead in setting their agendas and processes, rather than making community input sessions the early determinants of what work and goals the city needs to prioritize.

“We did community engagement as a kind of a white board, then we developed a program from that. That’s not a process that I’m familiar with, and I don’t think it gets as much benefit, because what you end up doing is boiling the ocean and nothing gets done. So how can we redirect what needs to get done, and let’s get after it. And there are many things that have languished, because we simply haven’t had the right focus, and I’m hoping to get that done over the course of this next fiscal year.”

In response, Fuentes said she wants the work around equity and serving poor and marginalized communities to remain one of the city’s primary goals.

“Equity is a value near and dear to my heart and to what I do as a policymaker and one that I know that the 10-1 era of this Council, of this city’s chapter, has brought to the forefront,” she said. “We’ve seen a more equitable Austin as a result of the change in representation. And so I want to make sure that as we move forward as a city that we continue to prioritize equity and inclusion and ensuring that we’re having inclusive conversations.”

In response to the proposed changes, a collective of community groups held a press conference Tuesday to highlight what they said was a lack of transparency or community involvement behind the moves. Those stakeholders said that the targeted offices have initiated many successful programs, such as the Project Connect equity tool, the Equity Action Team, the city’s Climate Equity Plan and the newer resilience hubs that partially were a response to recent weather disasters.

Janis Bookout, co-founder of the Community Resilience Trust, told the Austin Monitor that Garza’s approach could negate hundreds of hours of community engagement related to programs and initiatives handled by the four offices.

“Boiling the ocean is a term in management that means to attempt something that is way too ambitious or too broad of a scope,” she said. “For complex issues, broad spectrum stakeholder engagement is necessary to address complex issues, which all of these offices, it’s their task to address. In addition to that, there are existing documents created by thousands of people in a public engagement process whose time was used.”

Luis Ordaz Gutiérrez, executive and artistic director for Proyecto Teatro, said Garza likely hasn’t had enough time to evaluate the work done by the four offices that will in some cases need decades to achieve their goals.

“What stuck out to me was him … using six months as the parameter of time to assess the efficacy of these offices. If you look at the systemic racism within our city departments, from arts and culture to development to zoning, all across the board, if you look at Austin’s history in the last 50 years, you think that six months is going to be enough for the Office of Equity to start these conversations?” he said. “It is impossible to think that racial, social, economic equity can be pumped out in numbers in six months. This is just the beginning of decades of work of repair for our most marginalized and vulnerable communities.”

Garza also took a moment to defend his personal perspective on the matter.

“I’ve heard some comments about me, specifically,” he said. “I was born in ’52, in Brownsville, Texas. And in Texas, Hispanics didn’t exactly get a fair shake. I’m familiar with that. I’ve experienced it myself, my family members experienced it.

“I intend to focus these three departments in the direction that needs to get done. When people have questions about my moral compass or my own ethics, I ask that they just make an appointment and let’s enter into that conversation.”

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