Community Profile — Toby Futrell

Community Profile — Toby Futrell

Saturday, 07 April 2007

Toby Futrell, City Manager

I don’t judge success by being in the papers, in fact I do just the opposite,” City Manager Toby Futrell says. “If you’re doing it right, people probably don’t know a lot about what the city manager does.” This is no small task considering the number of hours Toby puts in every week and that she has been at the forefront of some of Austin’s most ambitious projects including the Desired Development Zone. Futrell recently came up for review and received a raise along with highest praises from city council.

Q. What is the role of the city manager?

A. There are two major forms of government in cities, one is strong mayor and the other is council-manager. Most big U.S. cities are run under the strong mayor system. In Texas, 80 percent of all cities are council-manager, which is unusual.
In a council-manager form of government you should think of my job as chief operating officer. It’s not a CEO, and a lot of people try to call it that. I don’t set policy, I implement policy. So my job is to follow operations. We will recommend policy, but we make a recommendation and step back. Elected officials are my board, they are my CEO.

Q. Why do you think the parks bond received more support than any of the other bonds?

A. Northwest Austin has not traditionally been where a lot of services have gone. Disproportionately, our bond dollars have not gone west. That has been a function of several things. West has a higher income per capita, so it hasn’t been an area with pressure for services. So we’re hoping we can create a balance of services. I’m very pleased that you’ll see a large, nice expansion of the library at Spicewood Springs, long overdue, and that the only rec. center built into the package is in the Northwest. We needed to balance out our dollars just a little more than we were doing.

Q. What is the Desired Development Zone and why was it important for you to bring businesses like Dell Inc. and Motorola there?

A. Austin is on a series of watersheds and they form three kinds: urban, suburban and drinking water. The urban forms the oldest part of the city. The suburban watersheds are east, and the drinking watersheds are west. All the drinking water watersheds flow or drain into our drinking water supply, and they are our most sensitive watersheds. So in short what we did was separate the city into two segments and we said the boundaries of the drinking water watersheds are going to be protected. The area outside this protected zone would be our Desired Development Zone. If you wanted things to grow in the Desired Development Zone, which was against the market for growth, you needed your primary employers to locate there and the primary employers at that time were locating in the opposite direction. So we were doing everything we could to entice and lure our primary employers to go there. If you could get your primary employers to go into Desired Development Zones, more people would live there, more building permits would go there, more suppliers. Business would grow up there and you would get more bang for the buck out of that one relocation than almost anything else you could do.

Q. Who are your heroes and role models?

A. I have a lot of role models, depending on what part of my life I’m talking about. Terrell Blogett, who is a professor at UT known in local government circles is just a very logical, professional gentleman. Barbara Jordan is a hero of mine, Anne Richards was an icon.

• Family: Married with no children
• Education: Bachelor’s degree from St. Edward’s University and MBA from Texas State University
• Contact information: 974-2200, toby.futrell@ci.austin.tx.us

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