The race to replace Leslie Pool is on. Pool, who has represented the North Central Austin District 7 since it was created, will leave City Council after 10 years of service.
Most of the candidates running to replace Pool agree on the major issues facing D7, and to some degree, agree on the solutions to each issue. They generally support the recent ideas Council has embraced as a way of addressing the city’s housing shortage and to help ease cost increases. Most also agree that the city must do more to address climate change, both by building out Project Connect and reducing Austin Energy’s dependency on carbon-based energy generation.
Candidates mostly believe that the Austin Police Department is not responding to 911 calls quickly enough but that hiring more officers and paying them more money may not be the best solution to that problem.
Beyond the similarities on policy, though, each Council hopeful brings different personal and professional experiences to the table. Meet the candidates:
Edwin Bautista
Bautista, the youngest candidate and one of the earliest to enter, is still running but has struggled to gain traction. His fundraising has been poor compared to what his opponents have raised and, per his website, he has not garnered any significant endorsements. For more on his campaign, see our Jan. 5 story on Council elections.
Gary Bledsoe
Bledsoe, a late entrant into the race, represents the interests of the neighborhood groups disgruntled by Leslie Pool’s pivot on housing. Bledsoe says he supports Austin building more housing, but that Council’s ambitious Home Options for Mobility and Equity (HOME) reforms were an example of the city not doing enough to engage all stakeholders involved in the process. The process turned ugly for constituents who considered themselves on the losing side of that policy debate, Bledsoe said.
“There was woefully inadequate discussion of major issues,” Bledsoe said, “which is a growing problem of transparency that may handcuff Council in the future and which represents a growing disrespect of citizens mindful of the past.” Like others who opposed HOME, Bledsoe wants the city to prioritize building more deeply affordable housing.
Throughout his career as a civil rights lawyer, Bledsoe has fought and won cases over police transparency. He drew particular attention to the “systemic, cultural racism” at the Austin Police Department that must be weeded out “from the top to the bottom” of the chain of command. He referenced the Tatum report, a third-party investigation conducted in 2019 that highlighted these issues, and said he would work to address them. Rather than just focus on paying police officers better wages, Bledsoe said, the city needs to recruit people who are best suited “to be good police officers for all people.”
“We want our officers to be safe,” Bledsoe said. “But we want them to respect people, too.”
Pierre Nguyễn
Nguyễn is a Coast Guard reservist and emergency medical technician focused on how city services operate at a systems level – and how that might come into play in the aftermath of disaster. His work at the Coast Guard and as an EMT, Nguyễn says, has given him more field experience – dealing with systems and responding to disaster – than any of the other candidates running for the D7 seat.
Nguyễn fears that he may have to deploy his experience responding to disasters in flood-prone parts of Austin following implementation of HOME, which he characterized as Council “doing too much, too fast.” As a result, Nguyễn said, the city will have to play catch-up in terms of disaster preparedness. “We really have to build up our infrastructure to make sure that it’s really protecting the people that [HOME] is meant to serve,” he said.
The race to replace Leslie Pool is on.
As a Public Safety Commission member, Nguyễn has an intimate understanding of the issues the city’s public safety departments are facing. Nguyễn agrees that APD is facing a patrol officer shortage but is not sure that increasing wages year-over-year is the best solution for addressing that problem. After all, he points out, police departments around the nation are also facing similar shortages. “There is a narrative that police are our enemies and that narrative has to change,” Nguyễn said. “There is going to be some amount of human error,” he said. “We want to minimize that in ways that prevent loss of life or other long-term harms.”
Adam Powell
A common theme among the D7 candidates we interviewed is a desire to make Austin Energy greener and more reliable. Powell, a youthful, charismatic policy wonk who is the most “urbanist” candidate in the race, has published a whole white paper on steps he would take to improve the public utility.
Ideas include burying utility lines underground (a costly endeavor that city staff is investigating in select parts of town following a 2023 Council resolution), a more proactive approach to trimming trees near power lines, and increasing residential and commercial customer energy efficiency incentives. Like fellow candidates Mike Siegel and Todd Shaw (see more on them below), Powell also wants to get Austin out of its ownership stake in the Fayette coal plant and help offset the energy reliability loss by boosting the city’s battery storage capacity.
Powell is supportive of the recent housing reform Council has passed that allows property owners to build smaller homes on less land. Now, he says, the next frontier in housing is increasing the opportunities for businesses to operate in residential neighborhoods: corner stores, coffee shops, and small restaurants – those kinds of uses. “To make more walkable communities,” Powell said, “we need to make sure that there’s commercial woven in with residential.”
Todd Shaw
Shaw, an environmental engineer who worked for three decades at Austin Energy, wants voters to see him as a “unity candidate.” Across six years on the Planning Commission beginning in 2018 (the final half of which he spent chairing the commission), he did just that. He joined the commission at a particularly toxic time – during the knock-down-drag-out fights over CodeNEXT, Council’s failed effort to implement a citywide rewrite of Austin’s Land Development Code, which governs what kind of buildings can be built throughout the city.
“I have a reputation among the people I work with for bringing people together to solve tough, divisive issues,” Shaw said. “I would be able to do that on a range of issues the city is currently facing, too.”
By the end of Shaw’s PC tenure, he was helping to usher consensus on recommendations to HOME reforms. Unlike most other D7 candidates, though, Shaw wants to take another crack at a comprehensive code rewrite. On PC, he got an up-close look at the inequity caused by reviewing zoning cases individually (typically, Shaw said, people opposing zoning changes in the wealthier parts of the city had a better chance of stopping proposed change).
Mike Siegel
Siegel, currently the most well-funded candidate, hopes his experience as a community organizer and, formerly, as an attorney inside the city’s Law Department will make him an attractive candidate to D7 voters. Each job offers a key ingredient that would make him a successful Council member, Siegel says.
His work as an organizer with groups like Ground Game Texas and Equity Action, the former congressional candidate says, proves he can build coalitions that can achieve change (effective decriminalization of marijuana with the former and robust civilian oversight of police with the latter). As a city attorney, he helped write progressive City Council policy designed to withstand preemption by the Texas Legislature and legal challenges – two outcomes that now seem certain any time that Council passes big, ambitious reform.
That experience will be vital for realizing Siegel’s top priority: bold action on climate. The city needs to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on various climate projects: first and foremost, transitioning away from the coal-fired Fayette Power Project, but also a more robust battery storage program, Siegel says. Labor organizations need to be at the table helping to develop those projects and guide their implementation. “Workers are going to be directly affected … their jobs are at stake,” Siegel said. “Also, politically, labor can help us defend bold climate action.”
This article appears in September 13 • 2024.