Mayor Watson's Comprehensive Efficiency Audit proposal is a good start. But it needs fiscal guardrails and in-house capacity investment. Here are seven fixes Council should adopt.
austinmetric.com/fixing-the-c...
Based on past history, around 40-60% of the votes cast for these weird off year elections are cast on Election Day. So we will not know a winner of any election until E-Day votes are counted which don't start getting reported out until 9-10PM
% E-day:
Nov. '23: 51%
Nov. '21: 45%
Nov. '19: 60%
Day 10, only 2 more days left!
modalshift.co/nov-25-election
The Austin Metric newsletter is live!
You’ll get two 500-word notes covering wonky Austin policy topics in your inbox each month.
The Metric is free and always will be. Please subscribe!
buttondown.com/austinmetric
Why is Austin facing a TRE? Public safety - especially police - grows general fund share. Sales tax has slowed & property is capped. For now, housing trust fund functionally zeroed out, social services cut, no reserves added, Austin Energy raided more. New APD contract creates further imbalance.
What remains is the issue of ensuring that public safety doesn’t keep growing & eat into these planned future allocations. Proposal’s line item spending isn’t guaranteed after the 1st year. It’s why the ballot language needs to be more prescriptive than a blank check. Sample ballot language: 2/2
NEW: a 5.75 cent TRE proposal from Laine-Siegel-Ellis-Qadri. Pretty notable that Laine & Ellis back it, as this signals it could get up to 9 votes (Watson wants 3.5 cents & Duchen at no TRE). It’s a bit under 3 cents on housing+homeless 👍🏽.
Seems likely to be near consensus on the dais 1/2
At today’s Council budget work session:
-6 votes for >5 cents (2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9).
-Mayor & Ellis more skeptical, likely prefer <5.
-Duchen seems like a firm no.
-Interesting that CM Laine straight up said she’s leaning 5 cents.
Is near-unanimity valuable for campaign optics & fundraising?
Here’s the Metric’s (lol) take:
1. Generally, Manager should pay for their lunch out of pocket.
2. Budgeting for staff events or Council office food expensing is fine. Just nothing extravagant.
3. 1st class flights on public dime is typically a 🚩
4. Maybe City Hall needs a public, cheap cafeteria
A peculiarity of the City TRE discussion is that the different funding scenarios are just that…spreadsheets. They are not ironclad promises unless the ballot language promises specific cent amounts to priorities. Need that or public safety will be allowed to eat into the scenario line items.
In new City budget, from ‘23 to ‘26, APD will get ~$100m more. APD’s share of the general fund grows from 35% to 38%. This shift contributes to the zeroing out of the affordable housing trust fund. There will also be less policing/capita because the new police contract explodes cost/policing hour.
RCV + publicly-financed campaigns + our muni general elections on November federal general election dates would create THE model local electoral system. That should be the goal. We’ll need a Dem Lege to enable this (& another local vote on a public finance system).
Like NYC, Austin adopted ranked-choice voting (RCV) via ballot measure in ‘21. Alas, the Texas Lege banned it. NYC also has publicly-financed municipal campaigns. We had a chance to pass “Democracy Dollars” voucher system. But the measure unfortunately failed 57%-43% in ‘21.
As I’ve previously noted, the D8
Council race has gotten a lot of early buzz, but this County race seems to have several candidates with more meaningful substantive differences.
Here’s the Metric’s rec for your weekend read: a very interesting profile of 44-year old NYPD Commissioner Tisch.
A lot of implications for Austin about City org chart, actual civic leadership, and getting policing right.
nymag.com/intelligence...
The Austin City Council District 8 race seems to have more media buzz but, in terms of policy stakes, the Travis County Precinct 2 contest is more meaningful. Real policy differences in that one. The County has grown its policy footprint as the new attention economy has made it under-covered…
Given this new memo detailing more extensive transmission leaks in the AW system than previously understood, we should revisit if our AW capex budget is optimally sized to address this AND figure out how to contain the explosion in cost/mile of leak repair.
services.austintexas.gov/edims/docume...