Thanks to my long-suffering and loving wife and children I was able to attend yesterday’s Austin City Council Audit and Finance Committee hearing.\u00a0 The centerpiece of the meeting was the presentation of the city auditor’s most recent audit of the historic preservation department.<\/p>\n
Jo Clifton of the Austin Monitor also attended the meeting and filed this report<\/a>.\u00a0 The official website of the Austin City Auditor can be found here.<\/a><\/p>\n Ms. Clifton could and perhaps should have interviewed me, particularly since I not only have appeared before the Historic Landmark Commission on many occasions over the years, particularly concerning Rosewood Courts and the Montopolis Negro School\u2014two rather controversial cases\u2014but also because I am one of the city’s leading historic preservation professionals, with decades of experience.\u00a0 But I digress; my main desire in this blog post is to talk about how to improve the city’s management of historic properties, not necessarily to critique the Austin Monitor’s biased reporting.\u00a0 That said, I do feel compelled to say one thing about the story.\u00a0 In a paragraph nearly half-way through her story Clifton observes:<\/p>\n In addition, the audit said that some members of the Historic Landmark Commission lack the training they need to make well-informed decisions. As a result of the November election, the commission has two new members who replaced members considered opposed to historic preservation in general, and the city\u2019s programs in particular. So, it is not clear whether the problem was really about lack of education in those two instances.<\/p>\n Clifton is incorrect; it is clear.\u00a0 Neither Arif Panju nor David Whitworth met (or meet) the Secretary of the Interior’s qualifications guidelines in the field of historic preservation.\u00a0 Mr. Panju is a “constitutional lawyer,” a term probably made most popular by former President Barack Obama, but hardly a profession, and certainly not one meeting the practical field experience requirements expected of most historic preservation professionals.\u00a0 As for Mr. Whitworth, as Sheri Gallo’s appointee it was always clear what interest he truly represented:\u00a0 minimally regulated real estate development.\u00a0 He does not meet the guidelines either, neither in terms of education nor experience.<\/p>\n As the audit notes, Austin’s professional guidelines for service on the Historic Landmark Commission are not mandatory, but advisory only.\u00a0 This is an exception to standard practice in other cities, one that should be remedied.<\/p>\n Clifton’s report also addresses the audit finding that the department is understaffed, both in real and absolute terms in comparison to peer cities.\u00a0 That too needs fixing, but even a fully staffed department won’t fix what’s fundamentally wrong, in my opinion.\u00a0 In the end the problems are political, not administrative. The landmarking criteria themselves should not need much revision, if any.\u00a0 Historic preservation judgments are ultimately subjective, but this is not to say that these are endlessly contingent; it takes skills and the ability to evaluate empirical evidence to document and reach conclusions about historic properties.\u00a0 In Austin’s case, judgments about community value are ultimately political judgments.\u00a0 City councillors are elected to make such decisions.<\/p>\n In order for members of the city council to reach proper conclusions they should be furnished with sound information reflecting the best professional competencies of city officials.\u00a0 Unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats in the leadership of the Planning and Zoning department should not be in a bureaucratic position to thwart or frustrate what should be fact and standards based historic preservation discussions and debates.
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\nWe can haggle about the details, but any true fix of Austin’s historic preservation department must do the following:<\/p>\n\n