Following the huge power outages from untrimmed trees in the most recent ice storm, Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk has evidently been fired.
Austin City Council members unanimously agreed to part ways with City Manager Spencer Cronk, two city council members told KXAN under the condition they not be named.
The decision was made behind closed doors in executive session Thursday but has not been announced publicly yet. The city manager had no comment, a spokesperson said.
Mayor Kirk Watson ultimately placed an item on Thursday’s agenda to “evaluate” the city manager’s performance, with the backing of a handful of city council members, after overwhelming swaths of Austin Energy customers lost power during last week’s ice storm.
“The members of the City Council had a productive executive session on Thursday night. I’m going to honor that process and won’t comment on the matters that were discussed,” Watson said Friday.
Council members said they were also frustrated with Cronk’s Wednesday night announcement that the Austin Police Association and the city have reached an agreement in principal without looping in city council members.
Clearly Austin Energy’s ice storm prevention and response was woefully inadequate, but Cronk is largely the scapegoat for the Austin City Council’s own “green” priorities over actual tree maintenance. Austin’s radical leftwing government is filled with people who love preserving trees almost as much as they love raking off graft for leftwing causes.
Scapegoat or not, crazy leftwing causes are why I won’t be mourning Cronk’s departure, as he picked the radical leftwing activist participating in the “Reimaging Austin Police” lunacy. There’s no guarantee, but with Watson as mayor and Mackenzie Kelly on the council, maybe there’s a small chance Austin can hire a city manager more interested in actually managing city government in a competent manner that earning social justice warrior brownie points.
Tags: Austin, Austin City Council, Democrats, ice storm, Kirk Watson, Social Justice Warriors, Spencer Cronk, Texas
What’s important is that the power plants uses the right pronouns.
Managing a city of any size is difficult at best. Good managers try to keep the City Council from imposing goofy, stupid, outrageously expensive, and other city-damaging polices on their cities, mostly by helping shoot them down early.
Once such policies are in place though, even good city managers have no recourse but to implement them as well as they can, but at the same time they should be seeking new employment.
I spent about 25 years trying to ‘teach’ prospective city managers how tough the job was, especially when trying to do it ethically. I was aiming at people who would go on to manage cities much smaller than Austin (typically 5,000 to 150,000), but the general principles apply.
My guess is that Cronk has a contract that will pay him well to “go away” and he’ll be hired elsewhere. As I always told my students, “Good city managers can always get a job, bad city managers frequently get jobs, and there are always more openings than there are good city managers.”
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