Max Nofziger

City Council 1987--1996 
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​I knew going in that it would be a long, exciting city council meeting.  I had no idea it would go on all night.

​Jim Bob lead off for the developers, talking about his ties to Austin, and his years playing football at UT.  This brought groans, hoots, and hisses from the packed house of hippies and environmentalists, who were not impressed by former football players.  This crowd was more interested in Freeport-McMoran's dismal record of pollution and mistreatment of the natives of Irian-Jaya, site of Freeport's huge goldmine.

Speaker after speaker spoke against the project.  All of my environmental friends were there, and I recall Susan Walker ( Jerry Jeff's wife ) and Ben Crenshaw making impassioned pleas to stop the project.

After 5PM, a new round of folks came in to sign up after they got off work.  The testimony continued for hours.  Every hour or so, Mayor Lee Cook would poll the Council as to whether we should shut off the sign-ups.  I had always considered listening to the public to be an important part of my job, so I always voted for letting the people speak.

When 2 AM came, the council chambers were full and the folks were still signing up to speak.  It was pretty clear by then that this was going to be a pretty special council meeting!

When the bars closed, many of the folks stopped by the council meeting to join the party.  This added a whole new level of emotion to the speeches, although they may have been slightly less coherent.

At 4 AM, I noticed that my colleagues' faces seemed to look very strange, kind of rubbery and elongated, like they were melting.  When they spoke, their voices seemed to be in slow motion.

By 6 AM,  I began to realize that this could not go on forever, but it had gone on all night.

We realized that people would be up and going to work, and that some would stop in and make a speech on their way to work...so we finally decided to end the sign-up.

Then council members spoke, argued, and took the vote:  it was, surprisingly, 7-0 against the project!

Going into the meeting, I thought it would be 4-3 in favor of the project.

The all-night meeting and hundreds of impassioned speeches turned the council around!

It was a real testimony to the Power of the People!!

Of course, that was the only all-nighter in the history of Austin city council meetings.

Developers and Mayors figured out never to let that happen again!

But it happened once, and I was happy to be on the dais for it!  It was great to be a part of Austin History, along with several hundred of my closest friends.

It was especially sweet because we won that battle, and with that momentum, went on to win several more in the years to come!