Council members call for more rent in Austin soccer deal, attorney claims Houston hiding behind technicalities, Austin Council delays CodeNext vote

Four Austin City Council members on Tuesday called for more than twice as much rent, a $13 million train station and a broad array of other concessions from a Major League Soccer franchise attempting to relocate to Austin.

Houston city officials last month said they would not pursue financial claims against firefighter families to recover money the city paid out for medical care following the deadly Southwest Inn fire in 2013. But the attorney for those families has said, in essence, that the city is hiding behind legal technicalities in making that denial.

CodeNext’s next version is probably not going to come before sometime early next year, City Manager Spencer Cronk told the Austin City Council Thursday afternoon. The council unanimously voted to bury a process to create a new land development code that has so far cost more than $8 million and six years of effort and produced 4,500 pages in three drafts of work that the council and citizen groups have found unsatisfactory.

Also this week:

Austin’s ambitious land development code rewrite seems headed for the trash can

Attorney: City’s ballot language on independent Austin audit ‘political,’ ‘prejudiced’

Austin council’s ‘poison pills’ threaten Mayor Adler’s soccer deal

Have a tip? Contact Editor Trent Seibert at [email protected] or at 832-258-6119.