A bridge-builder and media darling with surprisingly strong support across a
range of normally competing interests. A crusader against city council activism
with deep backing from those interests longing for a return of their Boom No. 1
good times. And an unconventional wild-card candidate carrying the banner for
Austin’s progressives and counterculture activists.
No, it’s not the mayor’s race — it’s the emerging contest for Place 2 on the
City Council. Most of the noise so far here, in the race for Ronney Reynolds’
abandoned council seat, has been about Gus Garcia’s attempt to jump from his
current side of the dais to the other, and in the process destroy the
much-reviled “gentleman’s agreement” that reserves Places 5 and 6 for
candidates of color and, sotto voce, the other five seats for Anglos.
Ultimately, the significance of this is questionable — even to Garcia, who
still supports the idea of a Latino-only Place 5. Other minority candidates
have run for Anglo seats; the most recent was Manuel Zuniga, who came within a
heartbeat of knocking Jeff Hart out of last year’s Place 1 runoff against Daryl
Slusher, and the gentleman’s agreement was at best a footnote in that race.
(Zuniga is running this year for Place 5.) And Anglo candidates have, in every
recent election, run for Places 5 and 6 — perhaps even successfully, depending
on your feelings about Robert Barnstone.
Since plenty of Austinites, looking at Barnstone and/or Eric Mitchell as
examples, think the gentleman’s agreement is a joke anyway, and since Garcia’s
appeal as the most popular incumbent likely clouds the ultimate question of
whether candidates of color can wage and win races for Anglo seats, we can
probably skip ahead to the real interesting part of this race — how it so
neatly mirrors the political terrain of the mayor’s race, thus making Messrs.
Watson, Reynolds and Nofziger not only contenders, but leaders of de
facto slates. Garcia would likely chafe at being tagged as part of Kirk
Watson’s supporting cast, but there’s certainly no doubt that Becky Motal is
mining the same fairly narrow base of support as Ronney Reynolds, nor is there
any dispute that Mike Librik will draw his votes from the same well as Max
Nofziger. That leaves everyone else — those of us who aren’t members of either
the Country Club Party or the Helmet Law Party — to vote for Gus, which makes
his chances very good indeed.
For that matter, better than Watson’s, since none of the mayoral candidates
have the baggage borne by Motal. Even though the LCRA manager hardly
embarrassed herself with her showing against Jackie Goodman last year, she
proved to be an embarrassment to her Chamber and RECA backers when it became
clear she was a bona fide pro-life conservative, and thus unelectable in
Austin. Since the pro-bidness community has already lost the zeal and momentum
it had in 1996, it seems loath to further dilute its chances by backing a lame
horse, and we might expect Garcia — whose last contributors’ roster includes,
along with the A-list of Austin liberals, names like Ron Kessler, Pike Powers,
and even Zuniga, who was Motal’s ally last year — to pick up much of the
Chamber/RECA support that is likewise gravitating toward Watson.
The opposite dynamic could work in favor of Librik, a 27-year-old bicycle shop
owner (Easy Street Recumbents) and featured player in the anti-helmet-law
circus, who in normal circumstances would be a typical Austin fringe candidate,
destined for 2% of the vote. With Nofziger in the mayor’s race, though, both he
and Place 5 candidate Karen Hadden benefit from the coalescing of hard-left
activists (or what passes for hard-left these days) into an actual political
movement, with common rallying points like the helmet law, the camping ban, and
the proposed campaign-finance reform ordinance, with which all three have
pledged to comply. To many cynical Austin political observers, of course, that
and a buck will get ’em a cup of coffee at Ruta Maya. But in these vaguely
defined times, as candidates struggle for the dubious privilege of leading
Austin through the toughest times it’ll ever know, Garcia’s tried-and-true
strategy of playing to a broad crowd may not seem like a desperate enough
measure to the bulk of Austin voters. (But don’t bet on it).
By the way, Place 2 gained another contender this week when Joe Gonzales
announced he would pull out of the already crowded Place 5 field to run, as he
put it, against Gus Garcia. Gonzales, who calls himself a pro-life candidate,
favors the development of emergency housing in East Austin, a community he says
Garcia hasn’t done a good job of serving.
This article appears in February 7 • 1997 and February 7 • 1997 (Cover).