Shall the City Charter be amended to prohibit the City from entering into future agreements to provide financial incentives in connection with the development or redevelopment of property that includes one or more retail uses, and to stop the City from providing financial incentives under certain existing agreements in connection with the development or redevelopment of property that includes one or more retail uses?

My understanding of what all of this means is that if Proposition 2 were to pass, the City of Austin would be prohibited from providing subsidies (in the Domain’s case, they get a check from the City that is a percentage of the taxes that they collect - sales, property, etc) in connection with retail. Proposition 2 would break the existing subsidy agreements at the Domain and Mueller, as well as stopping any future retail development subsidies.

Austinites will be familiar with the two groups on either side of the Proposition, after seeing their signs all over town: Stop Domain Subsidies is on the For side, and Keep Austin’s Word is the Against side. A little about each side:

Stop Domain Subsidies

These guys are the ones that got this onto the ballot in the first place (they’re for it), they had people going around getting petitions signed earlier in the year. I’ve talked to the two people that are leading/coordinating SDS, Brian Rodgers, a “longtime commercial real estate investor” and Linda Curtis, “a longtime independent political activist” (and the voice behind @stopdomain on Twitter). They’ve gotten many local businesses onboard (as best as I can tell, the vast majority are retail) and they have been pushing that connection all over town (I watched a documentary at the Alamo Drafthouse before they screened the last Presidential debate).

Keep Austin’s Word

These guys are against Proposition 2, their banners have only popped up in the month or so, mostly around the Domain itself, and in a few places scattered around town (except for that big one on the building under construction near Camp Mabry on Mopac). Most of their support seems to be coming from the people in government and local media - including almost all of the current City Council, but they have a list on their website of what appears to be mostly non-retail businesses in support.

Thoughts and Repercussions

Personally, I think I am in between a rock and a hard place - I am all about supporting local businesses (notably, I am writing this in an independent coffeehouse almost within sight of the Domain), I don’t like big retail developments, and I don’t like the idea of having my tax dollar subsidizing large non-local businesses. That would put me clearly in the FOR column, however, I think that subsidies of that nature can be useful - the (mostly successful) Mueller development benefits from the types of incentives (among other incentives) being prohibited by Proposition 2. SDS argues that Mueller would still be okay because it would exempted as a Tax Incremented Financing (TIF) project under Proposition 2.

Another thing to consider is that the City of Austin has already passed a resolution to prohibit any Domain-style incentives in the future (leaving present agreements intact). One of the implications of Proposition 2 passing is that when the City does not make its contractually obligated payments, our bond rating could be hurt (the consequences of not “Keeping Austin’s Word”), which basically means that the City would not be as attractive as an issuer of bonds because of the (then) greater chance of defaulting on bonds (see Wikipedia’s article on municipal bonds).

That, I think, brings the possible outcomes for this situation down to this:

Proposition 2 Passes

Stop Domain Subsidies gets what they want - the Domain no longer receives subsidies from the City and local retail businesses won’t be forced to compete against businesses subsidized by their own tax dollars. Ultimately, the City is hurt by a lowered bond rating and possible lawsuits from the Domain because it is prohibited (by Proposition 2) from making the contractually agreed-to payments, but they have more money in the bank because the tax dollars for the incentives stay with the City. They also lose the bargaining chip and tool that retail subsidies offers.

Proposition 2 Fails

Keep Austin’s Word gets what they want - the Domain and Mueller will continue to get their incentives, and no further Domain-style subsidies will be passed (because of the 2007 City resolution). Austin maintains its bond rating, but will continue to lose the money from the incentives to the Domain.

My take

I am inclined to say that it would be better to take the hit now, and vote against Proposition 2. I think it is easier to stay the course that we are currently on, and continue with the subsidies that we agreed to as long as the Domain continues to hold up their end of the bargain (which they have, according to the City), rather than risk the wide-ranging and possibly unknown consequences of the Charter Amendment. We know now that another Domain-type agreement won’t happen under the City’s resolution (which calls for more time and transparency for independent review in any future economic developments). As much as I dislike siding with the Domain on this one, I think it is in the better interests of the City in the long-term to stay the course (and I will of course, continue to avoid the Domain for shopping).

Disclaimer: Everything here is my understanding of the issues, they are very complex and I could be missing something along the way - if you disagree or think I missed some important information, please leave a comment and let me know. As always, do your homework before you vote and make up your own mind.

P.S. Major kudos and thank you to Stop Domain Subsidies for being responsive and active in their promotion efforts - I tweeted with @stopdomain about Proposition 2 and Linda got me in touch with Brian Rodgers on the phone to answer my questions and discuss it with me.

Related Posts

• February 28, 2008 — I Voted - Did you?
• October 15, 2008 — Is your food and drink fair?
• August 13, 2008 — My City: Austin on Brazen Careerist

I was waiting for the bus the other day on the Drag and saw a group of protesters outside of Chipotle. They claim that Chipotle does not fairly pay the farmworkers in Florida, I looked into it some more, and I’m not sure what to think about that issue, but it did get me thinking about other places that I get food and drink here in Austin - are there similar stories out there? (If you’re curious about the Chipotle protesters - here is the Daily Texan story)

Sodade Coffeehouse, Caffe Medici, and Thunderbird Coffee all get their coffee from Cuvee Coffee, a Texas and Oklahoma roaster that doesn’t subscribe to Fair Trade certifications (as far as I can tell) but instead focuses on “sustainable” and “direct relationship” coffee through their efforts to work directly with farmers to improve the quality and sustainability of their crops.

Thunderbird just started serving Cuvee Coffee

Another vendor of coffee that a number of places here in town use is Texas Coffee Traders, you can get their coffee at many of the little cafes on UT’s campus (including Ohm’s in the electrical engineering building) and you’ll be able to get their coffee at Launchpad Coworking when they open up soon. Texas Coffee Traders is “committed to Fair Trade on both sides of the border.”

Many of the mini-cafes on campus at UT serve Coffee Traders coffee

These are only a few examples of places around Austin that are dedicated to stopping poverty through fair trade (even though they may not have the formal certification), but the next time you are out and about - take a look at where your food is coming from, that good deal may only be a good deal for you - not for the people that picked or planted it.

P.S. As a side note, keep in mind that just because a product isn’t certified as fair, does not mean that it was not fairly priced, it may just mean that the buyers may not want to pay the extra fees to receive certification, instead choosing to go it on their own.

Related Posts

• May 7, 2008 — Sodade Coffeehouse Yelp Review
• April 25, 2008 — Friday Link Post: Hardy Heron Edition
• March 30, 2008 — Cafe Caffeine in Austin, TX

So far, most of my time has been spent trying to get some sort of development environment up and running, which has been a big pain for a number of reasons. Initially, I was working in Ubuntu, but there were all sorts of problems with getting RadRails (an Eclipse-based development environment) up and running (and talking to MySQL), so I’ve switched over to Vista (which can run on my laptop, since I bumped up the RAM from 512 MB to 1.5 GB). I’ve gotten a lot farther with Windows, here is the setup as it stands:

• Eclipse with the Aptana Studio & RadRails plugins installed
• InstantRails (a drop-in system that runs Apache, Ruby, and MySQL)

Something that would have saved me a lot of trouble when I was getting started would have been knowing that the leap from RoR 1.2 to 2.0 would break most of the Ruby on Rails tutorials online. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why some of the most referenced tutorials out there wouldn’t work on my setup; seems like most of those material (at least for beginners) was written about two years ago. (For the curious: Scaffolding as done in Rails 1.2 is very different from 2.0, I’m not entirely clear on why, so I won’t guess)

Once I was able to clear that up, I worked through one tutorial and I’m feeling pretty good about this stuff. Went over to the bookstore and picked up Simply Rails 2 by Patrick Lenz, which is apparently one of the few books out there that covers Rails 2.

Hopefully, I’ll have some time to work through this stuff over the next few weeks and maybe I’ll write the next hot Web 2.0 app. Easy, right?

Most Commented Posts

• March 24, 2008 — How Do You Facebook?
• March 25, 2008 — Why Are Students Not On Twitter?
• April 16, 2008 — What Should College Really Be?

Photo courtesy of Flickr user sheesho

Related Posts

• October 24, 2008 — Figuring out Austin’s Proposition 2
• October 15, 2008 — Is your food and drink fair?
• July 2, 2008 — The Case for Social Tech on Campus

UTweet is a newly-formed student organization setting out to connect the entire University of Texas community in meaningful ways through the application of new technology and communication and educate them about passionate individuals and their projects.

We’re still figuring out exactly what we want to do, so we’re treating it as a rolling launch.

In the meantime, I’m having fun with working on building the website itself, it’s a good project for sure. I have been improving my webmaster foo, learning about what the semantic web means in practice.  The easiest way to describe what the semantic web means in terms of what I am doing with UTweet is to say that I am making UTweet’s website as readable as possible for machines and people. That means everyone from people with accessibility restrictions using things like screen readers or visual aids to people visiting the site with their mobile device (like an iPhone or other cell phone web browser).

Another part of what I am learning along the way is how to manage this sort of multi-user workflow, having multiple people blogging on the same blog and operating the same Twitter account. It reminds me of when I used to college radio, where there has to be a certain amount of understanding between all of the operators as to what we want to say and how we want to say. Working on the blog is an interesting challenge too, with the shared writing and editing processes as part of a multi-author blog.

Getting things set up has been a fun and educational project, now we are going to work on taking it to the next stage. (And don’t worry, I won’t forget about you, my loyal reader on this blog.)

Related Posts

• July 2, 2008 — The Case for Social Tech on Campus
• July 16, 2008 — Social Tech on Campus in Practice
• June 6, 2008 — Friday Link Post: It’s Really Friday Edition

My fifth (and hopefully final) year of school is starting in a month, so I am supposed to be thinking about what I want to do when I get out now. I would hardly consider myself a trailblazer, but when it comes to finding work, I’ve never liked the way everyone else I know at school goes about it. The idea of shuffling around at a career fair in a tie and standing in line to hand some recruiter my resume to put on top of a stack of resumes from classmates doesn’t seem very creative or an effective use of my time (or the recruiters, for that matter). That’s no way to distinguish yourself, doing the same thing as everyone else, and isn’t distinguishing yourself what finding a job is supposed to be?

Maybe they already know exactly what they want to do, or they’re happy to work for the same companies that everyone else works for; if that’s what trips their trigger, that’s cool. As my academic career has gone forward, I have found that I have less of an idea of what I want to do for a living, instead of focusing and specializing, I am being introduced to new opportunities every day. Some days, I think it would be neat to be some sort of writer, other days a coder, a web developer, some sort of sysadmin, who knows?

One of the things that reading sites like Brazen Careerist and getting to know all of the people at Conjunctured and Austin Jelly has really made me think about is not what I want to do, but how I want to do it. I envy the independence and freedom that they can work with and the costs that you have to bear as a freelancer don’t seem too bad to me (i.e. irregular/uncertain pay, self-marketing, bookkeeping).

How common is it for college students (engineers in particular?) to move straight from graduation to a career as a freelancer? You see stats all the time about how the graduating class of year X had an average salary of $Y, or you’ll hear about what companies hired a lot of them, but you never hear much about freelancers (or entrepreneurs, unless they’re super-successful).

Related Posts

• May 25, 2008 — Friday Link Post: It’s Friday Somewhere Edition
• March 28, 2008 — Friday Morning Link Post

When I am looking at classes to take, I have a couple of places that I will check to see if I want to take the course:

• PickAProf or RateMyProfessors
• Friends
• Google:
  • The instructor’s name just by itself (i.e. “Albert Einstein“)
  • The instructor’s name within UT’s domain (i.e. “Richard Feynman site:utexas.edu “)
  • The course number or name (i.e. “RHE 312“)

Searching for these websites will often get you to an old course website or syllabus from previous semesters. For one of the classes I was looking at (”Computers and Writing”) I ended up coming across the instructor’s website , and from there, I found his Twitter. I tweeted that I was looking at his blog and considering the class and within a minute, he had responded to me!

Having to do some course schedule rearrangements for this fall, stumbled across a class being taught by @johnmjones http://is.gd/OwC -link

@davidgiesberg Thanks for taking a look at the class. Are you thinking about signing up? -link

I think that this is a really cool example of how social tech can facilitate and enhance the way that we do things in the university environment. Having the ability to instantly connect to people in an informal manner can be great for students and the community at large. In this particular case, having Twitter and John’s blog/course website created a great back channel for instructors and students.

Related Posts

• August 8, 2008 — Pet Project: UTweet
• July 2, 2008 — The Case for Social Tech on Campus
• June 6, 2008 — Friday Link Post: It’s Really Friday Edition

Archana and I met this weekend at Austin Java to talk about UTweet and the state of social technologies at the University of Texas. I think that in general, students at UT are fairly clued into technology and social networking - you can’t walk around without seeing people on laptops, using cell phones, or listening to MP3 players. You’ll see people on Myspace or Facebook with totally blinged out profiles (which is cool with me, if that’s what trips your trigger - just don’t slap me with a large trout or whatever). Both of those sites are, in my opinion, fantastic for maintaining person-to-person connections, but are not very good for facilitating dialogues in an easy way or enhancing true communications with one another.

I believe that we (UTweet) can help show the UT community the strength of new and emerging social technologies as tools for helping us do the stuff we do every day more effectively. Social and general web technologies and services can help us connect with each other, as individuals, teammates, peers, organizations, and the community as a whole.

We polled community members and alumni via Twitter on why students should care about social technologies like Twitter, here are some of the responses:

	hayesdavis @davidgiesberg i agree. i get value from twitter in the form of real-world connections. facebook, et al aren’t meeting their potential. 05:23 PM June 29, 2008 from web in reply to davidgiesberg
	conniereece @davidgiesberg Students should care because these are now business tools and they need to learn how businesses use them. (my short answer 03:38 PM June 29, 2008 from web in reply to davidgiesberg

I think Hayes and Connie hit it on the head - this stuff has moved from being a way to connect to people you already know and maintain those connections to a way for us to conduct business and make more worthwhile connections with people that we might not otherwise have a chance to. Twitter is a fantastic example of a tool with a low barrier to entry for staying connected with people on a day-to-day basis and connect with people in a way that we could not before.

The way I see it, we can help show UT how to use these cool technologies and make the UT community just a little bit tighter and a little bit better connected.

Hook ‘em Horns!

Picture courtesy of flickr user mr3wan.

Related Posts

• August 8, 2008 — Pet Project: UTweet
• March 26, 2008 — My Bio
• February 6, 2008 — Twitter is Everywhere!

It was an ad-hoc style conference (based off of the BarCamp concept) where there were no set-in stone panels speaking at the attendees; instead, there were sessions set up with loose topics and voted on by the attendees with free discussion and debate. It was a very egalitarian setting in which everyone was encouraged to participate and argue debate about a very wide range of topics with the common thread of changing the way things are done in our community.

Here are a couple of the discussions that I participated in along with a few of my thoughts (stay tuned this week as I go into more depth on some of these discussions):

• Co-working in Bryan/College Station, TX
  The guys from The Creative Space were there to discuss their experiences as the first co-working space in Texas - very interesting discussion about the different issues and approaches that a group encounters going from an informal group of independents working together to a group with common business interests and a shared space. Here is an interview with Cody Marx Bailey, one of the founders of The Creative Space.
• The University of Texas ACTLab
  The ACTLab is a group folks at UT doing a whole lot of creative and innovative projects centered around doing, not standard educational regurgitation. Their enthusiasm was infectious and inspiring to everyone there - they are building the sorts of free-thinkers that we can always use more of in the world…
• Austin as an Emerald City
  Everyone has different ideas about why Austin kicks ass, we wanted to find a shared vision for what we can do as Austinites going into the future
• Co-company Case Study
  The guys from Conjunctured had a great discussion about how they are developing the co-company concept - taking a group of independent creative workers and allowing them to maintain a great deal of autonomy while still having the resources of a larger brand to depend on
• The Austin Startup District
  Dane led a discussion about his and John Erik Metcalf’s vision for building a cohesive environment and community for independent entrepreneurs and startups here in Austin. It was a very thought-provoking view of how enterprising millienials in Austin want to change how the startup game is played as we enter and take the the reigns in the community and business worlds

Related Posts

• October 24, 2008 — Figuring out Austin’s Proposition 2
• October 15, 2008 — Is your food and drink fair?
• August 13, 2008 — My City: Austin on Brazen Careerist

Check it out, let me know what you think of it…

Related Posts

• April 1, 2008 — Upgraded to Wordpress 2.5
• February 20, 2008 — david giesberg dot com two point ohhhh
• February 14, 2008 — Changes in Store