Vote. This Saturday, go to your polling place and vote. This election has generated little excitement, and early voting turnout has been abysmal. There’s no reason to expect more on election day.
Some of the problem is a lack of issues — the candidates mostly agree with each other. But surely some of the complacency must come from the hopelessness of it all. Election after election, Austinites have turned out to vote for the most sensible, locally concerned, environmentally aware candidates. Despite this commitment of time, money, and most importantly, votes, Austin has grown out of control. The question isn’t if the city will change. The city has changed. It seems impossible to believe that in just two decades, the war for the environment has been so completely lost, and the battle for Austin’s soul gone so badly. But when you drive out of town in any direction, it is hard to feel otherwise. Development surrounds Austin, and the increased traffic threatens to overwhelm it. Driving around town, any time of the day, the University in or out of session, there is constant traffic — not just car traffic — that is steadily getting worse: more people, more congestion, more crowding, more housing, more businesses, and more development. So why vote? We voted, we worked, we organized, and look what happened. We lost.
Forget about what we lost. Think about what we have won. One of the factors that saved Austin from the Eighties slump was its national reputation as an unusually environmentally concerned city. This has always been an asset, and not a liability. Austin has changed, but those intangibles that make up Austin seem to be remarkably in place. Less rustic and more urban, Austin is still a great city, but a city facing a deluge of problems.
There is no day on which the war is won or lost; every battle is ongoing. There are no endings to any of the stories — politics is an ongoing process. Over the years, the votes have paid off. A lot of politicians, a lot of councilmembers, a lot of political activists, have done a lot of good work and accomplished many goals. But we are not talking about issues that will go away. Austin is a contentious, growing city that will still be arguing about the environment 50 years from now when the Austin-San Antonio Corridor is a suburban strip. The issues facing the council are complex, the battle less sexy now that there is so much gray and so little black and white, but they will forever affect this city.
We must vote because our voting has made a difference, even if the changes have not gone far enough. We have a vision of this town and in order to achieve it, vote. And if your vision differs from ours, there is an equal reason to vote.
If we don’t vote, the politicians will believe we don’t care. Then the army of Austin pressure groups will carry even more weight with them than they now do, and who knows what will happen.
It is a difficult time. Austin is going to keep on changing; no one is going to like it. The next council must offer a vision to guide the city’s continued growth — even when that growth slows down, perhaps significantly. The council will have to decide how the city will function, how it will deal with city services and transportation, with safety and social welfare. Too often the council has seemed caught in the most parochial kind of tug-of-war, focusing on the minutiae of politically charged details.
Kirk Watson is running for mayor. I recused myself from the mayoral endorsement vote for a variety of reasons, but I can’t resist commenting on the race. What Watson promises is to bring both sides together, to reach compromise, to move forward. If Watson is a good mayor he will serve as a mediator and a visionary. If he is truly a good mayor, by the end of his term, everyone should be angry at him. A good mediation (and mediators will hate this definition) leaves both sides a little disgruntled. The idea behind mediation is not that one side convinces the other side that it is right, but that both sides work together to achieve an agreement with which they both can live. Usually this means both sides give up something on issues about which they have strong feelings. In Austin, compromise is viewed as capitulation. The more the next council actually does move the agenda forward and the more it provides vision, the more it will antagonize different groups. So what?
So far, Watson is appealing to a wide variety of groups based on the generally positive reactions of most people who have had anything to do with him. Still, he is a relative unknown in Austin politics. We’ve elected unknowns before — attractive, and with no record — and we have been disappointed before. Expressing intelligent positions and understanding the issues has little to do with navigating the reality of Austin politics. There are no right and wrong answers. There are large groups of reasonable people on every side of every issue in Austin, and moving forward is like getting sucked into the swamp of the well-intended and the civic-minded. If Watson is elected, it will be interesting to see how he manuevers through the swamp.
The decision as to our future is up to you. Please don’t let other people make it for you. Vote.
This article appears in May 2 • 1997 and May 2 • 1997 (Cover).