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The Austin Independent School District plans to close another campus, Paredes Middle School, as the district faces the possibility of further state intervention.
The Austin City Council has been voting in secret on certain matters related to Austin Energy, and it’s been happening longer than you might think. The revelation is tied back to this summer’s purchase of a billion dollar natural gas power plant.
Have you ever wondered what happens to our pets when they die? Not in like some, metaphysical, trippy way — but like, literally? The story of a Pflugerville pet cemetery.
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The full transcript of this episode of Austin Signal is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
Jerry Quijano [00:00:08] The Austin Independent School District plans to close another school. The move comes as the district faces the possibility of further state intervention. We’ll tell you which school and have reaction. And Austin City Council has been voting in secret on certain matters related to Austin energy, and it’s been happening longer than you might think. The revelation is tied back to this summer’s purchase of a billion dollar natural gas power plant. We’ve got more about that reporting. It’s coming up on today’s show.
KUT Announcer: Laurie Gallardo [00:00:35] The Austin Signal is a production of KUT News, hosted by Jerry Kehanel.
Jerry Quijano [00:00:40] Plus, have you ever wondered what happens to our pets when they die? Not in like some metaphysical trippy way, but like literally, what happens? The story of an Austin pet cemetery. Those stories and a whole lot more. That is coming up next. It’s right here on Austin Signal. Thank you. Howdy out there, this is Austin Signal. I’m your host, Jerry Keconnell. It’s Thursday, July 23rd. Thank you for tuning in. We are still under a heat advisory until 8 p.m. This evening here in the Austin area, so stay cool, take some breaks in the shade, stay hydrated, and go to kut.org for resources here in Austin area where you can take some respite. Austin ISD is planning to close another school as it faces a potential state takeover. On Wednesday, the district said in a statement to parents that it would be moving to close Barredes Middle School in South Austin, citing academic progress. Education Austin, the labor union for AISD teachers and staff, said it was told that the school district expected Barrede’s to receive its fourth consecutive failing state accountability rating. The board of trustees will hold special sessions for community input. If the proposal is approved, Barreira students would be moved to Bailey. Or Mendez Middle Schools. We have more at KUT.org. The Austin City Council has been voting in secret for years on certain matters related to Austin Energy. That might surprise you, but it would be really hard to know it was happening because the City Council does not even acknowledge when they do it. That revelation came to light this summer after reporting by KUT News on a rather unusual sequence of events, and it all tied back to the purchase of a billion-dollar natural gas power plant. KUT’s Moe’s Boo Show and Nathan Bernier started looking into it. And filed this report on what they found.
Mose Buchele [00:02:44] Take a listen to this tape of Austin Mayor Kirk Watson.
Nathan Bernier [00:02:48] The city council will now go into a closed session pursuant to section five five one zero seven one of the government code This is at the city council meeting where they vote
Mose Buchele [00:02:56] on that power plant he just heard about.
Nathan Bernier [00:02:57] Which is to consider competitive matters related to Austin energy generation, operation, and resources.
Mose Buchele [00:03:02] If you’re a normal person, you probably have no idea what he’s talking about, except maybe it has something to do with Austin Energy.
Nathan Bernier [00:03:09] 355, we’re going into the closed executive session.
Mose Buchele [00:03:14] An executive session is when they go in private to talk about sensitive city matters. And if you follow Castle, you know they do this kind of thing all the time. But this plan was really controversial. For one, Austin’s promised to get off fossil fuels. And even apart from those environmental goals, there were a lot of people who said, we just don’t need these generators. So this is a big decision. And usually, when these types of things happen at City Hall, council members come out and vote publicly in front of everyone. And that’s why what you’re about to hear is something kind of historic. Yeah, check this out.
Nathan Bernier [00:03:52] It’s 5 19 p.m. We’re out of closed session the resolution considered by the council passed
Mose Buchele [00:04:01] What Mayor Watson just said was that the City Council voted on this billion dollar decision behind closed doors. None of the council members will say how they voted. They made this huge decision in private and people did not take it well.
Citizen 1 [00:04:19] I was genuinely blown away.
Citizen 2 [00:04:22] I have never seen this city government do anything this secretive. It’s simply outrageous. But what it is, it’s an agreement, it is a conspiracy of silence.
Mose Buchele [00:04:37] So what is going on here? How is a secret vote even legal? For answers, we headed to Cisco’s Restaurant on East 6th Street for lunch with David Escamilla. Former Travis County attorney from 2003 to 2020. So he knows all about state transparency laws. Part of his job was to train elected officials on them and to prosecute them if they broke it. There’s always some new way that… People are trying to figure out to avoid transparency. The law that’s supposed to ensure that the public’s business is done in full public view is called the Texas Open Meetings Act. It was passed in the 1960s, but through the years, lawmakers have… Chipped away at those transparency requirements. There’s an exception that lets them talk about real estate deals in those secret executive sessions. There’s exceptions for talking about lawsuits and legal strategies, sensitive security issues, private personnel matters. But all of these exceptions have one thing in common. You cannot take any action in executive session. You have to come back out of executive session, and if you’re going to take any actions, that’s where you take a vote. In full public view, as you would expect. Except for this one way elected leaders can hide their votes. This one weird trick. This is the only one I know that allows a governmental body under the Open Meetings Act to vote in executive session. It’s a carve-out. It was created by state lawmakers in 1999 as part of the deregulation of the Texas electricity market. Part of that deregulated meant that traditional city-run electric utilities, like Austin Energy, were suddenly competing against giant corporations. Right, and these companies, they don’t have the same obligations to share their business with the public. You know, sharing your plans is sometimes a bad idea. How much you’re paying. What you’re buying, the competition could take any kind of information like that and use it to their advantage and to your disadvantage. So when the state deregulated, Texas cities that had their own power utilities, like Austin Energy, asked for this special exception to the Texas Open Meetings Act. That exception allows elected officials who manage those utilities to vote in secret. Which seems to mean they can keep how they voted. From the public. One of the people who was in favor of it back in 1999 was someone we heard from earlier in this story.
Nathan Bernier [00:07:13] My name’s Kirk Watson and I’m the mayor of the city of Austin, Texas.
Mose Buchele [00:07:16] Yeah, he was mayor back then, and he’s mayor today. So I talked to Watson about the power plant vote before it happened, and even then, even then people were complaining about all the secrecy around this deal. The city would not share who the seller was. They wouldn’t say how much it would cost, even though experts say it’s probably over a billion dollars. But in our conversation, Watson said all that secrecy was necessary for the good of the city.
Nathan Bernier [00:07:44] We’re an electric company that operates in a very competitive market. And if we’re not careful, we will do damage to our customers. It’s like playing poker and I have to show you all of my cards while playing the game.
Mose Buchele [00:08:01] I pushed back a little. I said hiding all these facts sure is frustrating for journalists.
Nathan Bernier [00:08:06] And if that journalist is buying power from Austin Energy, I’m doing that journalist a favor.
Mose Buchele [00:08:12] Kind of sounds like he wants to thank you for me most. Yeah, I did and this was before The vote is before basically anyone thought that the vote itself would be kept from the public Now, Mo, you’ve been covering Austin Energy for a long time. Have there not been a bunch of big controversial votes like this done before in public? Absolutely. From the year 2000 to now, I can think of at least five big votes about Austin Energy that council approved in public. They might have talked about them in private, but they voted in public, that’s one reason people freaked out when this secret vote happened last May. It seemed like it was the first time there had ever been a vote like this. So we wanted to find out if that was true. When we asked the city if this had happened before, they said, there’s basically nothing to see here. They said that these secret votes on Austin Energy Matters are routine. And that was surprising. We were like. Really? And they were like, yeah, Austin Energy sent us a list of 16 city council meetings. But when we took a closer look, none of those 16 meetings showed any vote taking place behind closed doors. And so then they were, like, actually, you’re going to have to go through all the meeting minutes manually. Then you’ll definitely find evidence. But the thing is, that’s over a thousand city council meeting, going back to 1999 when this law took effect. That’s a lot of PDF files. It is a lot PDF files! But we did it. And again, we found no record of any such vote. So we brought all of this to Austin Energy, told them what we found, and they completely changed their explanation. The new response included this sentence. The fact that minutes do not reflect that a vote was taken does not mean that a boat was not taken. That is a very confusing sentence, like a triple negative in there. So just to break it down, they’re saying, even if there’s no record of a vote, council could have voted and there would just be no record it. Yeah, so it’s pretty much impossible to know how many secret votes have happened in the history of city council.
Kaiba White [00:10:31] I was genuinely shocked and appalled to find that it was not a new thing that our city council was voting in secret, but in fact, it was worse than we thought, and they’re routinely voting in secrets. I was just blown away by that fact.
Mose Buchele [00:10:47] That’s Kaiba White. She works on climate change with a group called Public Citizen. All of this made her wonder about how this system works.
Kaiba White [00:10:56] The fact that they’re doing that at all really just makes me question the integrity of the Austin government. You know, as somebody who believes in government, I believe in democracy. I think that it can work for people, but it can’t work for people if it’s just being done in secret.
Mose Buchele [00:11:19] And then you have attorneys who specialize in open meetings laws and transparency. And they were kind of shocked by this, too. Joe Larson is one of them. He’s a lawyer in Houston. He’s on the board of the Texas Freedom of Information Foundation. He thinks the city might even be breaking its own rules by doing this.
Citizen 2 [00:11:35] It’s an invisible government. It’s a black box. You don’t know what anybody’s doing. You don’t know who to hold accountable, much less for the public to have any input on an ongoing basis. It completely undermines the idea of the Open Meetings Act.
Mose Buchele [00:11:50] And then there’s Bill Ailshire, he’s an attorney focused on the Open Meetings Act and a former Travis County judge.
Bill Ailshire [00:11:55] You really think information needs to be withheld. You ought to be willing to explain to the public what harm would come to them if it was revealed. Who voted for it and who didn’t?
Mose Buchele [00:12:09] So we asked. Councilmember Ryan Alter said he couldn’t tell us how he voted.
Ryan Alter [00:12:15] That’s right, the idea of executive session is for those discussions to be confidential and once you start chipping away saying, well, this little piece is not confidential, well then maybe that other little piece isn’t confidential. Next thing you know, you’ve opened yourself up to having to disclose everything.
Mose Buchele [00:12:33] And so Kadri’s office said they were told by city attorneys not to say how he voted. Staffer at Mark Duchin’s office said even they, even the staffers, don’t know how their boss voted on this billion-dollar decision. We asked every council member who voted on this deal. None of them would talk. But back at Cisco’s former county attorney David Escamilla says any one of them, any one of these council members can say how they voted at any time. There’s no law against it. Of course, there might be a reason they don’t want to. Something that might hurt them politically in the next election, they would like to avoid having to make that public. And there is an election coming up in November. Four city council members are trying to keep their seats. I’m Mo’s Buchel in Austin. And I’m Nathan Bernier in Austin
Jerry Quijano [00:13:28] Also something to keep on your radar today, the Austin City Council is set to sign off on an agreement that would allow Amazon to move forward with building on a vacant piece of land along the Colorado River. Earlier this week, the city revealed that Amazon is the Fortune 100 company behind the Dog’s Head development project in southeast Austin. KUT City Hall reporter Luz Moreno Lozano is following the story. We’ll have more about that tomorrow on Austin Signal. And we have more show coming up after this break. This is Austin Signal, welcome back. All right, say with me, have you ever wondered what happens to our pets when they die? And I mean this in a literal sense, many are cremated and there are some that are buried in the backyard, but some pets are given a burial in a proper cemetery. We got a question about a pet cemetery for our AT Explained project. KUT’s Stephanie Federico has that story.
Stephanie Federico [00:14:26] A while back I went over to Liz Henry’s house in northwest Austin. We stood in her kitchen looking at photos of her childhood pets. A photo of her when she was three, beaming as she held her dog Jigger. That’s jigger, me holding jigger way down there in the corner. In another photo, Jigar is lapping Kool-Aid from a cup.
Liz Henry [00:14:42] There she is dressed up, she’s got a bonnet on.
Stephanie Federico [00:14:45] As a child, Liz would dress up the chihuahua-terrier mix and push her around in a stroller. Jigger would eventually jump out and run away, but she was pretty cool about it. Liz’s cat, Shanghai, shows up in later years. In one photo, he’s hanging out while stockings are emptied on Christmas morning. In another, he is chilling outside by a sliding glass door. A typical Siamese, Shang had his quirks.
Liz Henry [00:15:09] They loved playing the piano in the middle of the night and wake us all up.
Stephanie Federico [00:15:14] Liz turns the page and there are more photos of Jigger. This time, she’s lying in a three-foot long box with the lid propped open. A spray of white flowers sits on the ground in front. Jigger was buried in 1974 in the Pet Rest Cemetery in Pflugerville. Shang would join her almost 10 years later. Liz’s parents bought side-by-side plots and tombstones made of Texas granite. They weren’t fans of cremation. They wanted to be buried themselves and thought it only proper to bury their pets. Back then, the cemetery was called Pet Rest Memorial Park. Liz visited a few times throughout the years, but it had been decades when she returned in 2021.
Liz Henry [00:15:52] It didn’t look like they were taking new animals or doing anything. It looked like they pretty well shut up their doors and.
Stephanie Federico [00:16:00] Dan Seligman drove by the cemetery from time to time. He noticed the same thing.
Dan Seligman [00:16:06] So we’re just thinking, well, there it is.
Stephanie Federico [00:16:07] Then bulldozers showed up.
Dan Seligman [00:16:09] Now it’s not.
Stephanie Federico [00:16:10] So Dan asked, ET explained, what happened to the animals? He doesn’t think anything nefarious went down. Maybe they were just dug up during the construction process. But he couldn’t find anything online or in the paper about it. He says it would have been great if the animals were removed, but if so, where to? If his pet were buried there, he would want to know what happened to the body.
Dan Seligman [00:16:32] Probably wouldn’t be anything to dig up and take home. I’m sure plenty were buried in cardboard boxes, as were our pets. And kind of a ashes to ashes, dust to dust sort of thing.
Stephanie Federico [00:16:43] Texas law says you can’t build on top of a cemetery for humans. Any sort of construction requires the graves to be relocated, and that requires the next of kin to be notified, or court approval if those folks can’t be found.
Dan Seligman [00:16:54] But maybe because they aren’t people, there’s no rules about it.
Stephanie Federico [00:16:59] He’s right, pets are considered property in Texas. They aren’t afforded the same dignity as humans when they die. So what happened to the bodies? To answer Dan’s question, I reached out to the last owners of the cemetery. I left several messages, but they didn’t respond to my request for an interview. Pet rest had been around since the 60s. There was a two-story house on the property. The owners actually lived there. There was also a crematorium and two smokestacks. Meg Mayo’s dog Taffy was buried. She said it was like walking around someone’s front yard when she visited a few years ago. Well, it’s like the Stephen King book.
Meg mayo [00:17:36] Can’t help but think about their spirits, whatever is there and right there next to you.
Stephanie Federico [00:17:45] Most of the markers were flat on the ground, but there were also headstones and other memorials. The price to bury a pet varied depending on an animal’s size and what it was buried in, if anything. A cardboard box, a styrofoam container, an actual coffin. Liz’s dog may have been buried in the liner of a child’s casket. Nothing in the papers Liz showed me promised the animals would be there forever. The property was sold in 2021. The owners were both about 70 then. A good time to call it quits. I went out to the site just before Christmas. It hugs a busy intersection across the street from a U-Haul rental place. In the distance, you can see the Welcome to Pflugerville Water Tower. There definitely aren’t any smokestacks. I stopped by the construction company next door to the property to see if anyone knew what happened. One guy just smirked and said the animals were all respectfully removed and relocated. Another employee said the company had bought the property about a year ago to expand. He showed me where the cemetery used to be. Now there’s just a square, one-story building on green grass behind a black fence. He estimated there were around a thousand animals buried there. His company has all the tombstones out back. They put out a notice saying families could come by and pick them up, as well as any remains. So Liz went out to collect her pet’s headstones.
Liz Henry [00:19:10] We were glad we found them, and we just put them in our flower bed out back. So there they are. Yeah, and I think my parents would be glad we.
Stephanie Federico [00:19:17] That too. She has no hard feelings. Progress is progress, she says. Back at the construction company, I asked a worker if I could take a look at the tombstones. He suddenly decided I needed to talk to his boss. But it was clear during a phone call later that the boss didn’t want to talk to me. And neither did the boss’s boss. All they would say is that they hired a store to a cemetery. So nobody wanted to tell me what happened to the bodies. The former owners of PetRest didn’t want to speak to me. The construction company bosses wouldn’t tell me. I decided to bring in DeeDeeHawk. I’m a medium and. Animal communicator. Maybe the animals would speak to her. There’s still animals here. I’m picking up that. Someone did come across this property and purposely pulled up all the gravestones and just left the animals here. Anything about what I’d learned so far. On that day, she sensed the outline of what had been the cemetery and a little girl looking for a dog named Charlie, but not much else. No animals spoke to her. Didi believes when animals die they level up and go to another plane. Sometimes they come back to check in on their people, just like if you were to talk to people out loud, you know, past family members out loud. Same thing with pets. If you speak to them out loud they’ll kind of chime in and be like, yes, you ring? And hang out with you. She understands wanting to bury a pet in a cemetery. It’s a way to tell complete strangers this animal existed. This animal meant everything. This animal… Loved. Also for me it’s respect for the animal and for the life so I feel like burying them, returning them back to the earth is where they would want to be. This story got me thinking about my own two cats. They’re getting old and every time one of them throws up, I’m like, is this the end? People with this, what’s called anticipatory grief, often seek the support of Nicole Vickacall. She’s a licensed social worker in Austin who began specializing in pet loss after her cat Cecil died.
Nicole Vickacall [00:21:38] People say like, there’s no road map, like I need a book on how to do grief. A lot of people get kind of blindsided. And so I help people navigate for themselves how to make meaning.
Stephanie Federico [00:21:51] Of the loss. Pets are a chosen family, so losing one can be devastating. You don’t just get another cat. Her goal as counselor is often to help people connect with their pet spiritually. How can they transition their relationship to still carry this pet in their heart? When I told friends about this story, almost everyone wanted to tell me about a pet who had died. Each wanted to share how awesome their dog or cat or chinchilla was. The need to share memories is pretty universal. There’s a line in the movie Pet Sematary that really hit me. Fred Gwynn’s character Judd says that in time, the young girl Ellie will learn what death really is.
Fredd Gwynn [00:22:28] Which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin.
Stephanie Federico [00:22:32] I asked Nicole why anyone would get a pet knowing they’re probably going to die before us. She said our brains may not be able to fully grasp that we’re going to outlive them. But also, pets are the reason a lot of people get up in the morning.
Nicole Vickacall [00:22:45] As lovely as humans and people are, we can hurt each other. We hurt each others physically and emotionally and pets are not like that, you know? We can really truly trust them and I think we can open up and bond and just be ourselves and they can comfort us in a way. They don’t try and give us advice or change the way we feel. They’re just with us.
Stephanie Federico [00:23:09] So we get a pet, and we love that pet, and then the pet dies. But after a period of mourning, many of us do it all over again. And why? Maybe the answer is simple. Pets are just worth it. I’m Stephanie Federico in Austin.
Jerry Quijano [00:23:30] And before we let you go today, here’s a quick headline from the Austin music scene. Empire Control Room is officially shut down. The Red River venue opened in 2013, but recently the owners had come under fire by former employees over late payments and sudden firings. The Austin Chronicle reports that back in April the venue owners were locked out their indoor venue due to non-payment, but continued to hold shows outdoors. An official eviction judgment gave them time to appeal, but no one representing the venue showed up for the appeal and their website is no longer working. We’re gonna have a link to that story from The Chronicle in today’s podcast, Show Notes. That is it for us today here on Austin Signal. Thank you for making us part of your Thursday. We have more about the stories that we shared with you in the podcast Show Notes, and you can always find more from Austin Signal over at KUT.org slash Signal. We told you earlier in the show that KUT City Hall reporter Luz Moreno-Gonzalo is following the dog’s head developments at City Council. In case you missed it, we spoke with Luz yesterday about everything that has led up to this decision and we have a little bit more background. We’ll have the latest from her reporting on tomorrow’s episode. The Austin Signal team is Rayna Sevilla, Alexandra Hart, and Kristen Cabrera. I’m your host Jerry Kikano, we’re gonna be back at the same time tomorrow, we’ll talk to you then. Stay cool out there.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
