I Wrote Three Minutes of Public Comment and Delivered Them to My Kitchen

The egg timer is shaped like a tomato and it ticks like a bomb in a cartoon. I bought it for four dollars at the H-E-B on Oltorf, near the cereal, specifically to rehearse public comment. Three minutes. That's what you get at the podium if you sign up in time and the agenda doesn't slide to 11:40 p.m. while you sit there eating a granola bar out of your shirt pocket.

I did not sign up in time. So I'm delivering it here, to you, and to a kitchen table that has heard worse.

Two items crossed my desk this week. Tomato's wound. Here we go.

0:00 to 0:45, Item One: The Word "Tentative"

On Thursday, the bus workers' union and its contractor reached a tentative contract agreement. It includes raises and more time off, and it still has to be ratified. That means the strike everybody has been bracing for is off the table for now, and the folks who drive the routes may finally get paid a little more and rest a little longer.

Good. Genuinely. I want to say that plainly before I start being a jerk about it.

But I'd like the record to reflect that "tentative" is the most Austin word in the English language. It's how we describe our relationships, our patio plans, our rent and our weather. We have a tentative grip on a city that has spent fifteen years tentatively agreeing to become somewhere else.

And notice the shape of the thing. The people who drive the buses don't bargain directly with the transit agency whose logo is on the side of the bus. They bargain with a contractor. So the bus belongs to the public, the route belongs to the public, the shelter that may or may not exist belongs to the public, and the paycheck goes through a middleman. It's like ordering migas at a diner and having the eggs subcontracted to a firm in another state.

I'm not saying that's illegal. I'm saying it's a lot of org chart for a Number 7.

0:45 to 1:15, A Brief Moment of Sincerity, Which I Will Deny Later

The drivers are the only people in this city who see all of it every day: Rundberg at dawn, Riverside at shift change, Congress when the dinner crowd stumbles out holding leftovers and mezcal regret. They see who's going to work before the coffee shops open, and they get those people there.

If a raise and a few more days off is what it takes to keep them behind the wheel, that's the cheapest civic infrastructure we'll buy all year.

Ratify it. Then run more buses.

1:15 to 2:20, Item Two: Two Hundred Ninety-Five Million Dollars

Also this week, a $295 million parks and library bond is headed to the November ballot.

I did the arithmetic on the back of a Fiesta receipt. Spread across a city of roughly a million people, it comes to around three hundred bucks a head, if you squint and ignore how bonds actually work, which I'm told is how most bonds get passed.

Three hundred dollars. In my own personal price index, adjusted for grievance:

You have to admit the library is the only institution in town that hasn't tried to sell me a membership tier. Nobody at the branch has ever asked me to "unlock premium shelving." Nobody has upsold me a cookbook with a QR code. You walk in, it's cold, a stranger's kid is losing a fight with a picture book, and the whole place smells like toner and old carpet and the possibility that you might learn something by accident.

That's a public good. It's one of the few left that you don't have to stand in line, swipe a card, or follow on Instagram to enjoy.

2:20 to 2:50, The Part Where I Read the Fine Print

Here's my problem with bonds. It isn't the money. It's the gap between the dollar figure and the day the ribbon gets cut.

A bond is a promise wrapped in a proposition wrapped in ballot language written by a committee that has never in its life said a sentence out loud. By the time it reaches the voting booth, "fix the pool" has become something like "improvements, renovations, and related facilities, including but not limited to." You read it twice, then look up at the volunteer at the rec center gym, and she gives you the face that says just vote, honey, there's a line.

Then the money gets approved, and the waiting starts. Design phase. Community input phase. A second community input phase for the people who missed the first one because it was at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday across town. A rendering shows up with suspiciously lush grass, a family of four who all seem to own linen, and a dog that has never once rolled in anything.

I'll vote for it. I'll probably vote for it every time. But I'd like a pool that opens before my knees go, and a library branch that's open on Sunday when working people actually have time to read.

That's not cynicism. That's a punch list.

2:50 to 3:00, Closing Remarks

So here's my whole testimony in ten seconds.

Pay the drivers and run the buses. Fund the parks and the libraries, then actually build the things and keep them open. Stop making me read a contractor's contractor's press release to find out whether the 20 is coming.

Ding.

That's the tomato. I'd like the record to show I yielded my remaining zero seconds to the library, which has never once asked me for a tip.