Former City Council Member Bill Spelman and Julio Gonzalez Altamirano of AURA and Open Austin were the final names added to the list of appointees to the city manager search task force on Thursday. They were picks of Council members Ann Kitchen and Greg Casar, respectively. They join Mayor Steve Adler’s appointee, former Assistant City Manager Laura Huffman, who is currently the executive director of the Nature Conservancy for Texas; Council Member Jimmy Flannigan’s appointee, businessman Channy Soeur; and Council Member Ellen Troxclair’s appointee, Adm. Bobby Inman. Council Member Delia Garza appointed Susan Hambright, and Council Member Ora Houston appointed Claudia Conner of BiGAustin. Council Member Pio Renteria appointed Perla Cavazos, director of government affairs at Central Health, and Mayor Pro Tem Kathie Tovo appointed activist and former Planning Commissioner Saundra Kirk. Council Member Alison Alter appointed Jan Lehman, who has her own leadership search firm. Council Member Leslie Pool chose attorney Walter Muse.

City Council Member Pio Renteria hosts a town hall with CodeNEXT project staff this weekend in South Austin. On Saturday, April 22, residents can ask questions about the CodeNEXT maps released earlier this week. In a press release announcing the event, Renteria echoed Mayor Steve Adler’s call for patience from the public. “This is a very preliminary step to the much needed and long overdue rewrite of Austin’s land-use code,” Renteria said. The town hall will include a presentation on CodeNEXT, printouts of the draft maps and laptops so residents can familiarize themselves with the online mapping tool. Representatives from the project team will also be on hand to offer feedback. The event begins at 10 a.m. at St. Elmo Elementary School, 600 West St. Elmo Rd. For more background on the project, visit the Austin Monitor‘s CodeNEXT Timeline.

The Parks and Recreation Department is still looking for aquatics staff for the coming swim season. To fill vacant positions, the department is hosting yet another hiring day – the 11th such day of this season. Stop by the Givens Recreation Center, 3811 East 12th St., on Saturday, April 22, from noon to 4 p.m. Parks needs lifeguards, swim instructors, swim coaches and pool attendants. Attendants monitor people coming and going from pools without cashiers, enforce safety rules and do some mild custodial work. Attendants earn a starting pay of $12 per hour. Other jobs start at $13.50 per hour. Learn more on the city’s website.

City Council Member Ellen Troxclair pulled an item for discussion at Thursday’s Council meeting that surprised Mayor Steve Adler. The item was an ordinance “encouraging support of the Lemonade Day Austin 2017,” which will be May 6, and waiving the usual fees and food permit. Troxclair told her colleagues she wanted to make clear that there should not have to be a Council resolution for a 10-year-old to set up a lemonade stand, noting that a food permit is normally $400. Adler said he was relieved, because when he saw that the item was pulled he was concerned that someone would be trying to “make lemons out of lemonade.” That got a laugh from the dais, and the Lemonade Day resolution was approved unanimously.

At the joint work session of the land use commissions on April 18, agent Victoria Haase with Thrower Design spoke for developers everywhere when she raised concerns that the T6 transect, the highest-density category in CodeNEXT, did not appear in the current iteration of the map. “We were led to believe that T6 is what we would see in the downtown area and the urban core area, and we don’t see it at all,” she said. Later in the meeting, consultant John Miki of Opticos Design explained that the CodeNEXT team had decided T6 was not appropriate for downtown because the zoning there was already highly negotiated. However, for other areas that had not been subject to as much planning as downtown, like the South Central Waterfront or even the Domain, there was an “opportunity” to map T6. “Over time, developers might want to change from what they have today in terms of zoning, and we provide options and tools for doing that,” he said. “While today’s map doesn’t have T6, we expect that as we move forward it will be used.”

East Austin’s Kealing Middle School has a long history, and this weekend will bring together its alumni for an event to celebrate that history. The school opened in 1930, closed four decades later due to desegregation and, finally, reopened in the mid-1980s with the addition of a magnet program. It’s a legacy that affects the school to this day. This celebration marks the 30th anniversary since the school school reopened. Former students and their families – the Hornet community – are invited a lunch with games, tours and music on campus. The reopening starts at 10 a.m. at Kealing Middle School.

On Tuesday, City Council Member Leslie Pool assured her colleagues via the City Council Message Board that a resolution to define the border between Rosedale and Allandale was “a District 7 housekeeping change to sync the neighborhood boundaries with the planning area boundaries.” It all seemed very calm for a day. But Wednesday, a post from Council Member Jimmy Flannigan hinted there might be more to discuss. Flannigan wrote, “I think the planning area boundaries should follow logical planning principles, not just neighborhood association lines. I think it makes much more sense to plan the proposed area with Rosedale and keeping Hancock as the border between areas rather than add that area to Allendale when there is no connectivity between it and the rest of the area. Keeping the planning areas as-is (divided by Hancock) would keep Bull Creek Rd and 45th in the same contiguous planning area, rather than split between two. Is there some pressing need to make this map change now separate from initiating the plan for Rosedale? Couldn’t the map change be made at that time when a more robust conversation about the planning process could be had?” The item will be up for discussion during today’s City Council meeting.

After one day of chill, the urbanist group AURA has released a statement on the new CodeNEXT maps, declaring the current plans to have “near fatal flaws.” The April 19 statement reads, in part, “AURA members, along with many other community advocates and Austin taxpayers, are in disbelief that the City of Austin spent $6 million and over two years only to maintain the status quo. The nominal differences between current and future land maps are a slap in the face to the Austinites who have spent hundreds of volunteer hours in the hopes of improving our city.” The full statement is available online here, but the stated concerns roughly boil down to missed opportunities for more housing and density and a concern that the rewrite enshrines some of the more convoluted aspects of the current code, failing to deliver on the promise to make it clearer and more concise.

City Council Member Leslie Pool has explained one of the more mysterious items on this week’s Council agenda in an April 18 post on the City Council Message Board. Pool has sponsored a resolution clarifying the boundaries between the Allandale and Rosedale neighborhoods. The reason for the resolution is not, she explained, to make sure that this year’s softball leagues are appropriately formed. Instead, Rosedale is next up for a neighborhood plan, and Pool wants to “make sure the boundaries are clear when Rosedale starts its planning process.” She explained, “In this case, the Rosedale Planning Area would encompass Rosedale, Ridgelea, and Oakmont Heights. My resolution would not change that – it would just fix a discrepancy in the boundaries in order to keep Allandale whole, rather than splitting it up among two different planning areas.”

Today, the Barton Springs Edwards Aquifer Conservation District hosts its annual Well Water Checkup event, where well owners can drop off samples for testing and then ask experts about a host of water and environmental issues. It’s an effort on the part of the nice folks at the conservation district to help residents better understand what makes up their groundwater. From 9:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m., staff at the district office will “process the nitrate, pH, and salinity analysis” for the first 75 registered residents. A bacterial analysis will be performed in another location, with the results back in a week. The results for the first three screenings will be available tomorrow. The district encourages residents to ask as many questions as possible of the assembled experts, who will include representatives from Texas State University’s Edwards Aquifer Research & Data Center, Balcones Water Well Service and water-treatment supplier Culligan of Austin. The district supplied this list of resources for those unable to participate in the event but are still interested in well water testing. Here’s a link to a handy video explaining how to prepare a sample.

On Monday evening, the Electric Utility Commission authorized a request to commission artist Beili Liu to develop and install artwork for the Austin Energy District Cooling Plant No. 3 project. This comes after the Arts Commission approved the artist at its May 3 meeting. The project, located on Electric Drive in the Seaholm EcoDistrict, will cost $202,500. According to Jim Collins, director of on-site energy resources at Austin Energy, the project’s funding falls within the Arts in Public Places ordinance, which grants 2 percent of eligible capital budgets for commissioning or purchasing art for a public site. Some commission members, however, questioned whether a cooling facility constitutes a public space and whether it’s appropriate to allocate such funding to it. Collins answered that the artwork would be visible on the north and south sides of the building, allowing for public viewing. The project is expected to be complete by the end of the year.

It was a big day for short-term rentals over at the Texas State Capitol Tuesday. The biggest news on regulations came out of the Texas Senate, which approved Senate Bill 451. That bill, written by Sen. Kelly Hancock (R-North Richland Hills), prevents cities in Texas from banning short-term rentals. It also narrows the scope of allowed city regulations governing short-term rentals to those designed to protect the public’s health and safety. Also yesterday, the Texas House companion bill – House Bill 2551 – was taken up by the Committee on Urban Affairs, where it was still being discussed at the time of publication. Among the speakers on HB 2551 was Austin Mayor Steve Adler, who spoke against it. The Austin City Council passed regulations on short-term rentals in 2015 that would be largely negated by the state action. The Austin regulations are the subject of a lawsuit that Attorney General Ken Paxton joined in 2016.