Staff Is Hereby Directed to Look Down

My neighbor Darlene leaned over the chain-link Saturday morning, holding a hose that was mostly producing steam, and asked me the question I have been answering wrong for thirty years.

"Did they do anything Friday?"

They always do something Friday. The trouble is that the something arrives as a PDF. It has an item number and a "WHEREAS" stacked on top of another "WHEREAS," and it ends in a "BE IT RESOLVED" that reads like a man clearing his throat at a funeral. Darlene does not have time for that. She has a job, a dog with opinions, and a water bill she reads the way other people read horror novels.

So here's the deal. I'm starting a column.

The Agenda Item is where I read the City Council, the Commissioners Court, and the CapMetro board so you don't have to. I'll tell you what happened in plain English, then I'll tell you what I think about it, and I'll try to keep those two things in separate rooms. Satire goes in the den. Facts stay in the kitchen where the light is good.

We're opening in budget season. That's the stretch of late summer when the city tries to fit every dream it has into one spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet loses.

What actually happened

On July 31, the Austin City Council passed a resolution asking city staff to study geothermal power as part of the city's energy plans. Community Impact reported it here, and you should read their version because they are reporters and I am a man with a porch.

That's the item. Council asked staff to look into it. Nobody voted to drill. No rig is parking on your street. Nobody signed a contract with a company whose logo is a stylized flame inside a stylized leaf. The city asked the people who work for it to go find out whether this makes sense.

Darlene took that in and said, "So they voted to think about it."

Yes. Welcome to the column.

A short field guide to resolution verbs

Most of reading City Hall is learning which verbs have teeth. Here's the starter kit, ranked roughly from "gum" to "molars."

• Explore. The softest verb in government. It's a first date at a coffee shop. Nobody's met the parents and nobody's split a lease. Explore is how a city says we're curious without saying we're paying.
• Study. Explore with a deadline and possibly a consultant. A study is when somebody somewhere opens a document titled Draft_v3_FINAL_revised.
• Direct the City Manager. Now we're talking. The council can't do much itself. It points, and the City Manager's office is the thing it points at. When you see "direct," somebody's inbox just got heavier.
• Return to Council with. This is the boomerang. Whatever got studied comes back as a memo, a briefing, or a presentation with one slide labeled "Next Steps." Watch for the boomerang. It sometimes takes the scenic route.
• Appropriate. The verb with molars. Money moves. Everything above it is a conversation. This one is a check.

Friday's item lives up in the gum-and-coffee-shop zone. I'm not knocking it. Every expensive thing the city has ever built started as a curious little resolution that somebody thought was harmless.

The obvious joke, which I'm legally obligated to make

The council of a city where the sidewalk can cook an egg by 2 p.m. in August voted to look into getting energy from heat in the ground.

Friends, the ground is not the problem. The ground is volunteering. My driveway gives off more thermal energy than the space heater in my mother's sewing room did in 1987, and that thing once melted a Tupperware lid from three feet away. If Austin wants heat from below, it can follow anyone barefoot across the H-E-B lot on Riverside and take notes on the yelling.

That's the joke. Here's the honest part, which is less funny and more interesting. "Geothermal" covers more than one thing. There are big power plants that tap deep heat, and there are systems that use the steady temperature a few hundred feet down to heat and cool buildings more efficiently. I don't know which flavor, or which mix, the city will end up looking at. Officially nobody does yet. Finding out is the whole point of a study, and I'm not going to pretend I've read a report that hasn't been written.

Why the Grouch is, against his nature, kind of into this

Here's what got me. For about fifteen years, every civic conversation in this town has been about up. Up is where the towers go. Up is where the cranes swing. "Activating the skyline" is a phrase I've heard said out loud, by an adult, at a ribbon cutting, while I held a free cookie I didn't want.

This resolution is about down.

Old Austin was always a down town, and I don't mean downtown. I mean the good stuff was underneath. Barton Springs is the Edwards Aquifer coming up to say hello. The best music in this city came out of basements, or out of rooms that felt like basements even on the ground floor. Half the tacos I love came out of kitchens you had to duck to get into. We were a city that drank from below and danced below and argued about the water table at barbecues. That was before most of the barbecues started taking reservations.

So when the council tells staff to go look at the dirt instead of the skyline, I feel a little flicker. It isn't hope. I'm too old and too hot for hope in August. Call it professional interest.

What to watch, because exploring is free until it isn't

Budget season is when good ideas find out what they cost. A resolution like this doesn't spend much on its own, but studies take staff time, and staff time comes out of a budget. That budget is being argued over right now by people who all have their own favorite resolution.

Here's my scorecard for the item. I'll keep a card like this for every item this column follows.

The thing to watch isn't whether Austin starts drilling next spring. It won't, and nobody said it would. The thing to watch is whether the study comes back at all. Then watch whether it comes back with something a person could hold, and whether anyone at the dais remembers asking. I've seen a lot of curious resolutions wander off into the cedar like a cat that heard a can opener two neighborhoods over.

Darlene's verdict

I gave her the short version over the fence: they asked the city's people to find out whether heat from the earth could help power the city, and nothing has been decided.

She turned the hose on her tomatoes, which have been dead since the Fourth, and looked at the steam coming off the dirt.

"Tell them to start in my yard," she said.

Motion seconded.