This week, The Austin Chronicle debuts the Hustle for Mayor, a series of one-on-one video interviews with the city’s mayoral candidates. Over the last few weeks, Brewster McCracken, Lee Leffingwell, Josiah Ingalls, and David Buttross all sat for wide-ranging discussions with the Chronicle‘s City Hall Hustler, yours truly. The results are in-depth and unhurried conversations spanning the election’s most important issues: local responses to the recession, tough budget decisions, leadership styles, transportation solutions, public safety, and more. Highlights include Leffingwell naming McCracken as a supporter of the expensive, abandoned public safety salary premium (a charge McCracken dismisses as “invented”); Leffingwell responding to progressive criticism; McCracken addressing his silence on rail this election; Ingalls’ passionate defense of the homeless; Buttross’ surprising stance on federal stimulus dollars; and much more.
Two-part interviews with McCracken and Leffingwell are online right now, with interviews with Ingalls, Buttross, and more to be posted online each day, leading up to the start of early voting Monday, April 27. Watch the Hustle for Mayor starting now at austinchronicle.com/hustle.
McCracken Takes First Crack
The first episode to air features Mayor Pro Tem Brewster McCracken. Addressing the thrust of his campaign – that Austin can position itself as a leader once the economic downturn is over by attracting renewable energy manufacturers, digital entertainment providers, and other high tech industries today – McCracken alludes to clean energy as “the mother of all economic opportunities,” resistant to the boom-and-bust cycles currently plaguing the computer-chip industry. Regarding digital entertainment, he notes that “the old line on the movie industry is even during the Great Depression, the movie business was successful.” He also addressed one of the criticisms leveled at him on the campaign trail – that he previously was a champion of the public safety premium, a 2% raise for public safety responders, in addition to the regularly scheduled raises for all city employees, credited for swelling public safety costs to untenable levels. “That’s invented,” says McCracken, noting that while he “voted for the contract that included the 2 percent premium” when a junior member in 2003, the premium had started well before then. Moreover, he says: “I was actually the first council member to say we can’t do the premiums anymore. I said it in 2005.” With respect to current public safety salaries – a favorite topic of McCracken’s, as opponent Lee Leffingwell enjoys the support of all three public safety unions – McCracken calls for renegotiating planned raises if the economy continues to gimp along. “Bill Spelman has joined me in saying this as well. … It’s time to [tell] the public safety unions … ‘We can’t do a pay raise, guys; you need to come to the table and share in the salary sacrifice.'”
The two-part interview with McCracken is up now at austinchronicle.com/hustle, along with an interview from Lee Leffingwell. Interviews with candidates Josiah Ingalls and David Buttross debut online this weekend.
This article appears in April 24 • 2009.