Point Austin: Looking for Bums

We live in the worst city in America.

Default and bankruptcy are just around the corner, there are no jobs available for anyone, and nobody lives here anymore, because it's too crowded. Traffic is unendurable, there is no mass transit and no plans to create any, and everything started to go downhill the week after I arrived. City Hall is addicted to spending, crime is out of control as are property taxes, and if I sold my house today I'd only get three times what I paid for it. The idiots on City Council keep spending money on useless fripperies like libraries and open space, when they could either be writing tax refund checks or else hiring more cops....

Oh ... I guess I was having a nightmare.

More likely, I just left yet another 10-1 Council candidate forum, where the predominant vision of Austin is roughly that of Rome just before the Visigoths arrived. I've attended about 10 forums now, and to hear most of the candidates tell it, Austin is the worst-run city in the U.S., while our public officials misleadingly pretend to walk and chew gum at the same time. As a colleague remarked, "I thought The Wire was set in Bal­ti­more, but I guess it was just a stand-in for Austin."

I'm exaggerating a bit – but more than once at forums I've heard "Look at Detroit!" as a dark omen of Austin's future if the candidates of "fiscal responsibility" and "tax cuts" fail to be raised to the dais in November. Never mind that Detroit's current predicament is a monument to the grandiose failings of capitalism – their City Council members probably wanted to build a boardwalk, too. "Liberal cities will destroy us!" declared one candidate in exasperation – to their credit, most of his fellows giggled at that one.

Never Been Worse

It's not surprising to hear this sort of goofy hysteria from the outright "conservatives" in the field – desperate to have one of their own firing potshots on the dais – but many of the self-defined "progressives" have taken much the same tack, or proposed similar policies. That's less true at the mayoral level – Steve Adler has thrown predictable salvos at his Council incumbent opponents, with Mike Martinez and Sheryl Cole (also understandably) defending their records and (Cole especially) pointing out, almost plaintively, that hey, things aren't so bad around here.

But in the Council races, Districts 1 through 10, there's an awful lot of unreflective moaning and groaning about a city that, overall and on a national scale, is doing quite well. (As District 5's CarolAnneRose Kennedy put it this week, "Some people are really whiney-hiney.") That's not to ignore our real problems, those that reporters indeed spend much of our time reporting: The city's poverty rate is stubbornly high, inequality is rising (in part because of local prosperity), and city officials do spend a great deal of time stumbling to catch up with undeniably breathless growth. At the same time, it's difficult to take seriously outrage about "affordability" emanating from the wealthiest districts of the city, where household wealth and median family income is soaring – all because their rising property values have inevitably raised property taxes.

Maybe, instead of a homestead exemption, we should propose a trade: We'll all transfer a percentage of our rising equity to the common good, and the city will in return build libraries, buy parks, and hire more cops.

Oh, wait, that's what happens now.

A Worthy Succession

It's certainly predictable that the very first single-member-district Council campaign should take as its dominating theme "Throw the bums out!" The next Council will have at least nine of 11 members who will be novices, and the quickest way to establish a campaign distinction is to insist you're gonna be different from the last bunch. But the last bunch – counting, first, only those certain not to reappear – haven't done such a horrible job. Mayor Lee Lef­fing­well and Council Members Laura Mor­ri­son and Bill Spelman have provided long, loyal, and worthy service to Austin, and indeed Leffingwell has devolved into the sort of tax hawk that the new political wave supposedly considers first principle. And I would include as good stewards each of the others now running for some form of succession: Cole, Martinez, Kathie Tovo, and Chris Riley. That they haven't always agreed – or that the rest of us have taken issue with them, now and again – does not call into question their dedication to the city, their diligence and hard work, and their leadership.

The candidates' urge to reflexively bash city officials is understandable, occasionally deserved – but it should not cause campaigners to lose sight of the real benefits of living in one of the most prosperous, friendliest, and yes, best-run cities in the country. Change is a good thing in public life, but so is stability – and reasonable candidates shouldn't let Austin's failings blind them to our blessings.