I gotta tell ya!

With Marc Katz

Preserving Austin's cultural icons is an admirable endeavor, generally receiving widespread civic support. More than other cities, Austinites define themselves as a community by their devotion to many of the unique and even idiosyncratic landmarks we encounter every day.

But our urge to preserve can sometimes get us into trouble, and this is what happened in the case of Las Manitas, an exceptional restaurant and deserving as it is of its cultural imprimatur.

It's only natural that we should collectively recoil from losing tangible, concrete representations of our local culture, no matter what they are or what hazard of fortune happens to befall them, because they are parts of our identity as a city and our image of ourselves as a community.

But the city of Austin, in all its wonder, is one thing; while Austin's city government is quite another thing entirely.

Austin's city government is a civic institution; an administrative bureaucracy that is either run well or poorly, depending on your perspective.

In comparison to other cities, I think our city government is good. But its role should not be to preserve Austin businesses, regardless of their cultural significance.

No one argues that Las Manitas is a vital part of downtown Austin. As Mayor Wynn indicated, its benefit to the quality of life of Austin would probably be diminished if the restaurant were to disappear.

But  the city government and its politicians are  the wrong entities to prevent Las Manitas, or any other for-profit business, from going out of business, or falling prey to development, like so many memorable austintatious businesses of the past.

To my knowledge, having operated businesses in other major cities, there is no precedent for what happened between Las Manitas and Austin city government. Extrapolating from media reports, it seems clear that, while the Perez sisters were working to save their business location from being consumed by a new Marriott Hotel, city officials, driven by politically correct sensitive motives, approached them, unsolicited, with a remarkably foolish scheme to save Las Manitas by moving it to a nearby location, which the sisters already owned, aided by a substantial and mostly forgivable city loan.

After due deliberations, the Perez sisters and city officials reached an agreement, the city council approved the loan, and all seemed well. Las Manitas would move, the Marriott would go up, and the sisters would pay back part of the loan, much of which would eventually be forgiven.

However, problems erupted when highly negative public response to the loan cast the city administration in an unfavorable light. Politicians began backtracking (panicking), adding new conditions to the agreement not negotiated with the Perez sisters.

Some of the conditions were utterly ridiculous--one tying the forgivable part of the loan to completion of the Marriott Hotel, over which the sisters had no control, and another requiring the sisters to guarantee employment to a fixed minimum number of employees in order to ensure the loan, regardless of economic downturns or changing conditions that inevitably require real business operators, as opposed to politicians, to adjust employee numbers to the actual marketplace.

These new conditions were so off-the-wall (but not to city bureaucrats and politicians operating under a different mindset) as to render the loan untenable, forcing the sisters to reject it, as any business operator in his or her right mind would have done.

Keeping a restaurant in business in Austin for 25 years, as the Perez sister have done with Las Manitas, is no small feat, and amply demonstrates their business acumen. But in their laudable attempt to ensure the survival of their restaurant, they ran afoul.

Though good intentions abounded throughout the Las Manitas loan fiasco, the incident proves that government intervention in business is a bad idea, often doing considerably more harm than good.

The role of city government is to provide public services and promote public safety, for the good of all and with the consent of all. Even if all parties in the Las Manitas episode had promoted the loan in unerringly good faith, the project still would have failed.

Let city government stick to its vitally important, but well-defined boundaries, and let the question of preserving Austin’s cultural monuments be debated by the citizens of Austin, and answered in the open marketplace.