Seven years ago the Austin City Council passed a resolution directing the city manager to utilize hotel occupancy tax dollars to acquire the Montopolis Negro School with the intent of repurposing this “historic asset” into a cultural center and museum. This decision did not spring up out of the political ground from nowhere; it was the Montopolis community that mounted a vigorous anti-gentrification crusade against a rapacious developer and various city officials who were the actual perpetrators of the zoning case. You can read some of the details of our community’s quixotic struggle on this blog; if you are new to this subject my previous posts will inform you of what this fight looked and felt like at the time, in real time.
Unfortunately, the importance of the Montopolis Negro School fight in the simultaneous enactment by the city council to move a percentage of tourism tax dollars into a historic preservation fund has been conveniently forgotten, thanks to pro-development media inertia, but also due to a slick propaganda campaign. The idea of scrappy neighborhood activists from “Poverty Island” taking down an important sector of Austin’s real estate establishment is not the sort of story our city’s ruling class oligarchs want to tell. Or to be retold.
Also minimized or ignored is the fact that our community possesses unique credentials and expertise in both planning and executing how the historic school should be reused and interpreted. In that regard, it has been comical as well as unsurprising to watch city officials prop up outside individuals and groups as “partners,” all in an effort to undermine any role that I or my colleagues in the Montopolis Neighborhood Association and Contact Team might play in exercising interpretive as well as operational control at a redeveloped Montopolis Negro School.
Which is to say that in today’s Austin, the idea of a humble community group receiving a multi-million dollar contract to effectuate grassroots-based historic preservation is unacceptable. City planners and their “community engagement” consultants have to get that money instead. Bounteous consulting contracts are reserved for the in-crowd, for city hall insiders possessing the necessary political understanding for the art and mystery of modern municipal contracting.
How much money are we talking here? FYI, hotel occupancy tax collections have now jumped from $36 million dollars in 2007 to an estimated $169.9 million dollars in the just approved 2024-25 budget. That’s a whole hell of a lot of tourism promotion.
You may be wondering: where have all of those millions in tourism tax dollars gone? Who manages this “historic preservation fund?” Where is the accountability for the money? Who decides how the funding is spent?
The answer is simple: the money is basically divided up into two pots. The first set of funding is set aside for “heritage preservation grants” managed by the city’s Heritage Tourism Division. Organizations such as the Norwood House Conservancy have received millions of dollars from this fund, as have other organizations, most of them NOT in East Austin, and certainly not in Montopolis. Expect the city’s Parks department to sink its clutches even deeper into this growing pot of opaque money, now that the functions of the office were recently transferred away from the city’s Economic Development Department and into the Parks and Recreation Department itself.
The other portion of the money essentially acts as a slush fund for city projects declared to fall under the rubric of tourism promotion by city officials. Probably the most noteworthy of these projects is the renovation of the Barton Springs bath house, whose initial redevelopment estimate was around $12.5 million dollars, but whose price has now gone up past $23 million and climbing. Which department operates Barton Springs? You guessed it, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.
My point? There is no shortage of money, it’s just that the money has been going to the usual suspects. So much for the diversity, equity, inclusion, or the “nothing about us without us” proclamations of our city’s leaders. I guess actual community groups will have to continue to remain satisfied with “Black Lives Matter” being painted on our streets instead. Never underestimate the power of empty symbolism.
Our demand is simple: allocate the $8 million in HOT tax dollars ($5.7 million dollars adjusted for inflation) city officials estimated it would take to convert the Montopolis Negro School into a cultural center and museum. This money includes all planning and renovation costs, as well as initial operating costs. The recipient of the funding should be the Montopolis CDC, the most qualified, skilled, and experienced historic preservation choice…..whose officers also happen to currently live in Montopolis, and have for decades.
As for the $150,000 in Austin Parks Foundation money put on the table for planning services by the city’s parks department, such a lowball offer is both an insult and is utterly contemptuous of the risks, sweat, toil, adversity, and disrespect the Montopolis community has had to navigate, too often as a result of the actions or inactions of city officials.
