Watch this space
At a candidates page at the City of Austin site are links to information furnished in response to PIRs (public information requests, formerly known as open records requests) from two of the council candidates. A personal favorite is the spreadsheet containing the names and titles of City employees earning over $85,000 annually. Did you know there are 410 of them? Sorting it in ascending order of salaries leads to particularly interesting results, as does sorting by departments. This and other good questions were propounded by Place 1 candidate Steve Adams. Incumbent Dunkerley sought information to assist in answering the ANC questions and added a couple of additional queries, including what would be the justification for the police helicopter (at the very bottom of the page).
Cool post. It’s actually a few less than 410 though. The header row is row 1 and there are at least two duplicates that I saw.
It’s easy to see that “Official/Adm” covers a lot of sins, including people who write press releases for a living. It must be a budget heading. This is just salaries, also, it appears, and not additional perquisites (as in the case of T. Futrell, for instance). In a town that’s crawling with lawyers (and they probably outnumber the proverbial Ph.D. in waiting on tables), these people are getting paid a lot to hang around council meetings, refer public information requests to the state attorney general. draft contracts that turn out to be unenforceable, and hire outside counsel when there’s any substantial work to be done.