Austin Chronicle: What do you think are your chief accomplishments? And what are your goals for a new term?
Lee Leffingwell: Well, I think first and foremost has to be – we all have to be proud of the way our economy has performed here in a very difficult period for really the whole world. It’s amazing still to me that the city of Austin has stood out so well in all the basic statistics – unemployment, job creation. We continue to grow at about the same pace, and that makes creating jobs even more important. And I think we’ve done everything carefully and with an eye to the future in doing that, because we don’t want to just willy-nilly create jobs. We want to try to target jobs that are good jobs and of course we have that not only responsibility but a mandate, really, that anytime we enter into any kind of agreement with any business that it has to be – absolutely has to be – cash-positive. And every economic agreement we’ve done has made money for our taxpayers, including the Apple proposal – which is not formalized because the county [Travis County] hasn’t done anything and obviously Apple has not accepted it – and I don’t know what their reaction would be to whatever negotiations the county goes through. I don’t know what their final action is. But assuming that it does, with our proposal we’d make $14.6 million net over the life of the contract. And then that’s for 10 years – actually, dating from now, it’s 14, because their building won’t be built for four years and obviously there are no incentives involved in the construction process. It’ll only be after – and that’s another facet of our program is that everything has to be performance-based. In other words, every year it has to be evaluated to make sure they’re meeting the goals that were set in the terms.
AC: Let’s get back to your goals.
LL: Well, obviously that [job creation], and a big part of what I’ve concentrated on is transportation – how we solve our transportation problems. And I think what’s different now from the way it’s been in the past is that we’ve begun to look at transportation in a multimodal way. In other words, it’s not just roads anymore, whereas in past, for example, our bond packages have been 90 percent roads; this last one in 2010 was about 56 or 57 percent roads, and the rest of it is other forms of transportation, such as sidewalks, trails, bike facilities. And that’s the way I would like to see it continue, is that we continue to focus in a multimodal way. And, as a part of that transportation solution – and there are different solutions depending on what part of town it is, the infrastructure that’s there or not there – a part of it has to be improved mass transit.
I’m chair of the Transit Working Group, a CAMPO [Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization] committee that has stakeholders from across the spectrum, and we’ve talked about mass transit in terms of: Even though people have been focused on urban rail, that’s only a part of it. It’s also commuter rail we’re talking about; it’s even inner-city rail, like Lone Star [proposed Austin-San Antonio passenger rail]. And it’s how can we make bus rapid transit and express buses more effective, if that’s the appropriate solution for the specific corridor, and managed lanes. We’re talking about managed lanes. And actually a proposal is already under way to have a managed lane on MoPac – from 183 to the river now, but the plan is to extend that on south out toward Oak Hill. And, you know, all the details of that we can get into if you want an explanation of exactly what that means, but basically it increases the capacity on MoPac without increasing the size of the right-of-way. Another aspect of it is that we’ll require the construction of aesthetically pleasing sound walls, which were part of the original plan back in the Seventies but somehow never got built.
AC: How much does the city control and how much the state on that specific issue?
LL: Well, obviously we have a part in it, but we’re not the big funder, and we’re not the biggest part of it. It’s CTRMA [Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority] of course has a lot to say about it, and so does TxDOT [Texas Department of Transportation]. And ultimately CAMPO, because anything that TxDOT does has to be a part of the CAMPO plan.
AC: Any other things you’ve got your eye on going forward?
LL: Basically, I’ve taken the view that we have to think long-range; we have to plan long-range. That’s why – I know it’s controversial – but that’s why I supported Water Plant 4 [Water Treatment Plant No. 4], and we can get into that in more detail if you want to …. And that’s why we’re also taking another look at electric service – the way Austin Energy provides – and making that transition in a reasonable way to more renewable energy, with the absolute caveat that it has to be affordable. We’re not just going to go willy-nilly and say – now a lot of folks, particularly at the state level, think our program of 35 percent – our goal of 35 percent by 2020 – is too ambitious and that may be the case, but we’re going to have to wait and see about that. And that has to be balanced with our affordability criteria, which means that we have to remain in the bottom 50 percent of the rate structure [in the state], as we are now, no matter what we do. And we’ve also got additional limitation of limiting the increases in rates to 2 percent a year after this first adjustment.
AC: Do you think you can stay in that bottom 50 percent?
LL: I think we have to. You know, you basically have got three parts of the equation: You’ve got the 2020 part, you’ve got the 35 percent part, and the affordability part. So if you can’t do all three of those, something has to give.
AC: Any major regrets, or anything in particular you would have done differently?
LL: Well, I think that since we’re talking about Austin Energy, certainly, the biomass plant is a decision I would love to have the opportunity to revisit.
AC: Your chief opponent [Brigid Shea] has obviously made a case that that was a really bad mistake, that it was too fast and too much. Do you think it’s really hurting matters now that you are looking at the AE rates?
LL: No, that’s just a small part of it. And the rationale for it at the time was that the state of Texas reviews that as a renewable form of energy generation. And, you know, statewide goals of 20 percent, that biomass plant would be counted in that part. And the other part of the rationale was: Currently, given the fact that we don’t have the capacity to store a lot of energy, you’ve got to have a certain base of what they call dispatchable energy, which right now means you have to burn something or split some atoms, one of those two things. Those are the two options.
AC: And what makes you think you might have done something different?
LL: Well, first of all, I think we’ve done so well in the last year. Wind prices, especially, have come way down, and I think potentially we could meet our renewables goal with wind energy and without relying on – that’d be a part of our renewable goal – but also natural gas prices, which are relatively clean. We could have done … we could possibly make up that [dispatchable] gap there a lot easier with natural gas.
AC: In this campaign, what do you think the primary issues are?
LL: Well obviously my opponent has made a big issue out of affordability, and you know, I’ve had a few comments in the past, if I could elaborate just a little bit. Affordability is important, and there are several components to it. First of all is taxes. Property taxes – Austin property tax rates – are the lowest of any of the five major cities in Texas by a long shot right now. We’re about 48.11 cents per $100 on our city property tax rate; the next closest is San Antonio, and I think they’re about 55, something like that. Some of the cities, like Fort Worth is up in the 80s. And so, you know, I’ll grant you we’re the lowest of the rates; we’re not the lowest of the total tax bill because we have higher appraised values of property, but we are in the middle. If you take from top to bottom, the highest property tax bill for the median priced home is a little over $1,000, and I’d have to check the figures, but I think the top city might be Dallas. And ours is about $877; San Antonio is about $750; we’re about in the middle of that spectrum. So our property taxes are reasonable, and I tell people all the time, if I’ve got a choice between high rates and low values or lower rates and high values, I’ll take the lower rates and high values any day of the week.
Utilities? As I said in my [State of the City] speech today, the last time we had a rate case – 1994, 17 years ago – the price of gasoline was $1.11. So things have gone up since then. And as I said before, we are in the bottom 50 percent of the rate structure, public and private around the state utilities.
The other component is of course water, and there’s been a lot of talk about water. The statement has been made that we have the highest water rates in the state; well, that’s a complex equation. It depends on how much water you use, for one thing, but I will say if you’re a low-income and low-volume user, your water rates are lower now than they were four years ago. So that’s very important. Now if you get up into the average consumption, which is 7,700 gallons per month per customer, then we’re a little higher than most, but we’re not the highest yet. For 7,700 gallons, I think our rates are about $33 a month, and I think the highest is about $38. And other states are lower, and the main reason for that is we have a tiered rate structure, which is geared toward water conservation. We have five tiers, and so as you get into these higher-consumption tiers, you pay more and more for water, and that’s intentional, and that’s to encourage water conservation. So if you’re using 30,000 gallons a month, yeah, your water rates are going to be pretty high. But if you’re down, again if you’re in the bottom bracket and you qualify for the customer assistance program, your water rates are going to be very, very low.
Affordability – of course housing always comes up, and I think that we have a record that I’m proud of. For the first time in our history as a city. In 2006, we allocated money for affordable housing via GO [General Obligation] bonds – $55 million. And that will be our – I believe, depending on the will of the council of course, and the will of the voters – we need to do that every bond package as we go along. That’s one thing, one way we’ve supported affordable housing. By the way, we spent almost all that $55 million since 2006, so it’s an important project that made affordable housing available to a lot of lower-income folks. The other part is we’ve adopted a policy of anytime the city sells land – as we have done, for example, at the Green Water Treatment Plant site, which is going to be privately developed, the land, so that part of the covenant that goes with that sale is that – 40% of the incremental increase in taxes that results from that development on the formerly city-owned land is dedicated to affordable housing. So that’s an income stream going forward into the future that will begin to build when projects like Green and Seaholm are built out.
And one more thing I would say about affordable housing is that we have on a consistent basis, within the law, whenever we can do it, we’ve included affordable housing in new projects.
AC: Shea has made the general charge that she doesn’t believe you’ve been aggressive enough on certain policies – environmental protection, on working to defend the public schools in the budget crisis, and then more generally on protecting Austin’s quality of life. Do you have any response?
LL: Well obviously, I don’t think it’s founded. I think environmentally we’ve been fairly aggressive. I’m proud of what we called at the time our redevelopment ordinance for the Barton Springs Zone, and if I can say just a little bit about that to explain it. You know in the past the SOS [Save Our Springs] Ordinance, back in 1992 or 1993, they realized at that time that really most of the property in the Barton Springs Zone over which the city has direct jurisdiction is already built out. And they discussed – and this is just anecdotally; I know this from talking to people – that they discussed: “What do we do about the property that’s already there? That’s already polluting?” And it would cost too much money to make the city responsibility a part of the SOS Ordinance, so it was kind of not addressed in the SOS Ordinance; it was only a go-forward ordinance. And so what the redevelopment ordinance said: You can redevelop existing property, maintain your existing impervious cover, but if you do, you have to provide on-site water quality controls, and, in most cases, you have to put money into a fund to buy open space within the Barton Springs Zone – not necessarily in the city, but outside the city’s jurisdiction, which I think is very important. So it was a big extension, I think, of the value of the SOS Ordinance. And one more quick thing is that we did an analysis of what’s happening in the city’s jurisdiction with the Barton Springs Zone, and we found only 16 percent was actually subject to SOS. Sixteen percent. Because over 50 [percent] was already developed, 3 or 4 percent was covered by agreements that were made, development agreements such as Stratus and the Bradley agreements and so forth, and 31 percent was already permanently preserved open space within the city’s jurisdiction. So actually SOS – the effect of SOS – would only be on 16 percent of the properties, and this was to extend the intent [of the ordinance], which was to prevent pollution from runoff of existing properties.
So that’s a big one. A little one, kind of the landmark thing, was the ban on coal-tar pavement seals. Which, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, and you’re aware of the long history of that and how there’s a big investigation – where’s all that coming from? – we banned that in the city of Austin. And that now is being studied by the EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency], whose process is even more bureaucratic than the city’s, to see if they might want to do that, if the EPA might want to implement something like that nationwide.
AC: Do you know if it’s been done elsewhere yet?
LL: It’s been done. I don’t have the cities, but it’s been done in a few places.
AC: But Austin was the first, right?
LL: Yeah, we’re the first.
AC: What about schools?
LL: Over a year ago, when this stuff [about cutting the state budget for schools] first started to surface, I sponsored a resolution that was passed directing the city to try and find ways we could help. And we did find a few ways. We have partnered on policing, issues that APD [the Austin Police Department] could take up for them, and everyone reduced their expenses on that. And we also have a program for shared facilities. We can’t give anything to another jurisdiction, but what we can do is partner and things that don’t have a financial impact on us or the things that we derive some benefit too. So, for example, on the shared facilities item, they get to use Palmer Auditorium and venues like that for events that they’re having or seminars or whatever, and we get to use some of their vacant storage space, the city does. That kind of thing, we’re doing.
In addition to that, I’ve heard this talk about “I’d get together with the mayors.” Well we have a major cities mayors’ group that meets about on a quarterly basis, and we’ve discussed this, and our next meeting is scheduled for June and I know that’ll be a big topic of discussion is how we approach our representatives at the state level and tell them how important it is collectively to restore funding to our schools. So those are the things that we’ve already done, and we’ll continue to look for more opportunities to partner, not only with AISD, but the other six independent school districts that are within the boundaries of the city of Austin; we can’t forget that too. There’s, you know, we’ve got a lot of students, a lot of Austin residents who go to Round Rock Independent School District, Manor, Del Valle, West Lake Hills, Rollingwood, places like that, so … I don’t think Rollingwood has a school district, but there are, altogether, six others besides AISD.
AC: And quality of life?
LL: The quality of life? Yeah, I’ve talked about that, you know, trying to protect the integrity of our neighborhoods, I think my record is good on that, but first and foremost, that said, a good quality of life begins with a job. So creating jobs is a part of the quality of life.
AC: There’s this thread in Austin political debates, the old “Austin was good until you showed up” – that there’s this old Austin that was the real Austin, and it’s been swallowed by some new Dark Side. You’ve lived here a long time; you obviously grew up here ….
LL: I was born here. I’ve spent most of my life here. And I’ve seen the population of the city go from 100,000 to the way it is now – a little over 824,000 is the latest number that I heard – and obviously there are going to be changes that come with that. You know we had this mayors’ conference, big city mayors’ conference, last year, that was broadcast on KLRU, and we had Bill White from Houston – these are all former mayors – Kirk Watson from Austin, Henry Cisneros from San Antonio, and [Laura Miller] from Dallas.
So they all came to Austin and they talked about Austin making this transition to a big city and how do we deal with the problems that go along with that, and I still remember something that Henry Cisneros said at that meeting. He said: “Austin, you’re a big city now. You’ve got to get over it.” So it’s just a part of growing up that things – but at the same time we can try to maintain our traditions. In the grand scheme, it’s not a huge thing, but the Trail of Lights – we had to cut back on that because it was costing so much out of the Parks budget, and we elected to spend that money on parks maintenance. We do really well as far as parks space right now – we’re in the top echelon of our peer cities around the country – but we do poorly in maintaining those parks, so we had to devote more money to parks maintenance, and the decision was: Do we do parks maintenance, or do we do Trail of Lights? So this year – as you know, last year we tried to get a private entity to take over the funding of it – this year I think we’ve got a good program in place that’ll be a public/private partnership, where basically we furnish the land and some services, right-of-way fees would be waived and that kind of thing, no actual money out of pocket, but the funds would be furnished through the private sector, raised by – [RunTex’s] Paul Carrozza’s heading it up, and I think he’s gonna – if anyone can do it, I think he can. The latest conversations that I’ve had with him is he’s well on track to meet that goal of raising $500,000 within 90 days.
AC: The incentives question has been hot right now, mainly because of the Apple debate. Shea’s emphasized the Downtown convention hotel and the whole idea of corporate incentives – “For what we waived on the fees of the convention hotel, we could have paid for the Trail of Lights,” for example.
LL: We didn’t have that money then; we wouldn’t have had it at that point. That’s one thing. But on the hotel, I mean, that’s in a lot of ways the most aggravating one of all, because we didn’t actually spend any money on that. We waived some fees, which is not a historic event; we routinely waive fees like that. Most of that $4 million, the majority of that $4 million for example, was for letting them use the sidewalk on Congress Avenue during construction. That’s the kind of thing it is. Those kind of fee waivers where no money changes hands, that was a consideration for example that was given in the past, even as far back as the Nokonah – they got those fee waivers when they built the Nokonah. I don’t recall that kind of controversy then.
AC: The argument has been that the city is repeatedly getting snookered by these people, that they say they won’t come unless they get the deal, and that it’s not true.
LL: And I’ve heard that too. She says they were coming anyway. Well, I can tell you, I was a lot closer to it than probably anybody else on the council at least, and I didn’t know they were coming anyway. I didn’t know that J.W. Marriott [i.e., White Lodging] – you know they’ve had those plans for many years now. And so this is a way to get it moving, because every year that we lose without that increased tax base is money that’s gone forever. And that increased tax base is huge, because – property taxes, sales taxes from a thousand-room hotel, and motel taxes, which go to pay for arts among other things, and repay our debt on the old convention hotel, which we did pay a lot for – they’re going to more than have overcome those fee waivers year after year after year. And as I said, if we’re delayed three or four years, that’s that many, $4 million worth plus that’s gone forever that we’ll never recoup, so it’s to our advantage to get it going. There’s one more thing about the J.W. Marriott, that as a condition for those fee waivers (and to my knowledge this has never been done before), we got them to commit to – it’s actually a requirement if they’re eligible for the fee waivers – that they pay prevailing wage on the construction jobs at the hotel. And that’s a huge deal. Prevailing wage, you know what that is? And that’s 500 jobs for the period of construction, and then, not covered by that of course, but after the hotel is in operation, it’s another 700 jobs for people who need those jobs – lower-income folks, in many cases. So the jobs part of it is a big part.
AC: Specifically regarding the prevailing wage, Shea’s response was, “Well, they should have gotten that when they gave them the FAR [floor-to-area ratio]; they could’ve gotten that earlier.”
LL: FAR is of course – our standard limitation in the CBD [Central Business District] is 8:1 [a zoning limitation – generally speaking, the higher the allowable ratio, the taller the building]. There’s none of those large buildings in Downtown Austin that don’t have an increase in FAR above that; it’s routinely granted.
AC: I assume you can’t build a convention hotel on 8:1.
LL: Well it’d be a huge, big flat thing [laughs]. And I’ve heard her say also, and this kind of floors me, that the other hotel that’s still in the proposal stage over on Red River and [Cesar] Chavez – they don’t even want these incentives. They don’t want incentives, well, neither did Marriott. Nobody considers those fee waivers to be “incentives”; they’re just considerations, but I know that people with the Manchester Project do expect the same consideration, and I think it’d only be fair that they get the same consideration on fee waivers, but no incentives. …
AC: Is it achievable or realistic to simply say to Apple, or whatever company, that we will offer no incentives for relocation?
LL: Well, I can tell you that what I personally believe, because nobody really knows – their business people are not going to share their proprietary information with anybody, you know, what sites they’re looking at, what sites they’re not looking at. But I can tell you that the negotiations were very tough, and there were sort of last-minute compromises, and I believe that without this proposal, it would be back to the drawing board. And there’s no telling what would happen. We’re going to have to see. Obviously they want to come to Austin, but – all these negotiations were hard-fought, bargained-for, and you know there’s that aspect of it, too – and we said “OK, this is what we’ll agree to.”
And then subsequently to that, somebody read in the Phoenix newspaper that they had ruled out Phoenix. Well, nobody’s saying that but the people in Phoenix. Maybe they are ruled out – I don’t know – but I know there are hundreds of other cities in the country that would love to have the Operations Center for the Americas in their city. So I think it’s a huge plus. And the thing about these, as I said, our taxpayers always make money. It’s like if you come up to me and say, “I’ll give you $2 if I can go through that door if you give me a dollar back.” Well, I’ve still got a dollar in my pocket and let you go through the door, you know? I’m still making money off the deal. And if you say, “No, I’m going somewhere else,” I don’t have that dollar. So all of our deals have to be cash-positive, as I said, and performance-based. We have had economic agreements in the past where people haven’t made those performance criteria, and they don’t get the incentive. They haven’t gotten it.
I heard somebody the other day, and this was strange I thought, that it needs to be evaluated by a third party. Well, it is. Every year those criteria are evaluated not only by the city staff, but also farmed out to an independent party to verify, and that’s been that way for a long time.
AC: After the 2005 Samsung deal, which was very controversial, there was a city process whereby the incentives program was reviewed and much-debated and the city said, “OK, whenever we’re going to give incentives, these standards have to be met.” And Apple met the criteria that we set the standards for.
LL: We got into that argument with the Domain [incentives], and the Domain was passed in 2003, before I was ever on council, and the idea – in fact, there was a proposition [put on the ballot by petition] to just stop doing it [the Domain deal], and I felt like we made an agreement. I never supported [the incentives] – I was one of a handful of people that actually came down to City Council and argued against the Domain [incentives]. Of course council passed it in their wisdom, and I think a deal is a deal.
Just as a side note, during the 2009 campaign, I think the Statesman editorialized that I had been in favor of the Domain agreement, and how did they put it? That I supported going ahead with it, even so. And none of that – I said all along, “Absolutely, I supported going along with it,” but I went on public record as having been opposed to it in the first place – not because it may not be a good project, but because I believed at the time and I still do, and we have since disallowed, economic incentive agreements with retail. Because it’s too hard to tell: Where’s that money actually coming from? Is it coming from other places that would be getting it across the street, or is it new money? So we don’t do those kinds of agreements anymore. But we do when they can be – when the jobs created and the sales tax and property tax generated can be verified, we do those kinds of agreements.
AC: Do you have anything more to say about Water Treatment Plant No. 4?
LL: Nothing really new, except that I think one thing that’s been lost in the discussion is that WTP4 is an environmentally sound project; it reduces the city’s carbon footprint by about 13.5 percent, simply because it’s at a higher elevation. The treated water out of there is going to flow almost 7 miles by gravity alone to the Jollyville reservoir. What we’re doing right now to provide water to that part of town – North Austin, Northwest Austin existing developments – is pump that water all the way from downhill, from Davis primarily, which is at Lake Austin on a lower elevation. That costs a lot of money. We were already – if WTP4 were not online by 2014, as it’s expected to be, we would have to install new transmission lines and new pumping facilities to pump that water uphill. So even though there may be some debate about whether the water is needed in 2014, 2016, or maybe 2018, there is no debate about the fact that we would have to install additional infrastructure anyway to serve that part of the city, and that additional infrastructure would be worthless after WTP4 is completed. Because it just wouldn’t be needed. So that would be kind of a redundant waste there. And finally, I don’t yet accept the argument – I mean, I don’t accept the argument that we could put it off indefinitely. I think I wouldn’t … Whatever the final analysis and somebody’s wisdom is the exact date that it’s required, I’d rather be a little early than a little late.
And there’s the risk, that was another big part of the argument, was: We have two old, 50-year – one of them is older than 50 – 50-year-old plants that are basically operating on duct tape and baling wire right now, and if one of them goes down, people are going to be out of water. We need the redundancy of that plant … so that some times of the year we can shut down one of those plants and do major maintenance and have the additional capacity continue water service. And another one of my favorite subjects, if you’ve got time or if you’re interested, is on water supply.
There’s always talk about “Oh, we’re in a terrible drought” and “Have you seen Lake Travis lately?” and all this stuff. I’ve seen Lake Travis a lot of years, and you know twice in my lifetime it’s been lower than it is right now. So that’s the way it was designed. It was designed to go down in times of drought so that it can go up in times of flood and not flood the surrounding countryside. It is a storage lake and a flood-control lake, as is Lake Buchanan.
What happens in the future? Nobody knows what the future holds. But we have – without the occasion of some huge, monstrous drought – what we have in place right now are firm water contracts for 325,000 acre-feet per year, that’s out of the Colorado Basin, with [Lower Colorado River Authority], for which those are firm contracts, for which we’ve already paid $100 million. That was a [Mayor Kirk] Watson-negotiated contract in 1999. Our rights are superior to virtually anybody else in the entire basin. And, the big user of water out of Lake Travis, if we can put it that way, in the past, in the recent past, like, last year, has been agricultural uses. They use about three and a half times what the city of Austin uses. So if the LCRA, and I don’t want to be critical of them because I don’t know everything that they know about it, but just supposing if they had cut off the agricultural interests last year, early in the drought – probably they couldn’t do that because it was already under way – we would see much higher lake levels than they are right now. So going forward, I think we’re well-situated. In addition to that 325,000 acre-feet entitlement that we have right now, that’s about twice, almost twice what we’re using right now.
In essence, we do have priority contracts on the water that’s available, and as you’ve seen, the LCRA has recently cut off the agricultural uses of that next year, so that will help out a lot as far as maintaining the lake levels. The city has also adopted very aggressive water conservation programs and policies, and I was instrumental in doing that, and I consider that an environmental achievement. The 2007 [water conservation] task force dramatically reduced per capita use. There’s a whole range of things that we did, but limiting on a permanent basis irrigation to two days a week, which we think is enough to maintain Austin landscapes and so do the experts, instead of having people overwater, that saving that inefficient use of water, I would say, and the wastewater is, goes a long way toward preserving our supply in the future. I actually got a – I was named conservationist of the year by the American Water Works Association for that program, which is one of the best in the country.
AC: The persistent argument is that it’s not as aggressive as San Antonio.
LL: I don’t believe that. We patterned our program basically after San Antonio. We do a lot of things better than they do. For example, one little example that occurs to me is that they had required four inches of topsoil on turf areas for new construction and landscapes, and they said that really wasn’t working too well, so we went to six inches for residential and eight inches for commercial. We adopted most of their policies. They have a lower per-capita use than we do, but a lot of that is demographics, different demographics. Different types of users. We have a lot of industrial uses that are big water users that we don’t want to lose like the chip manufacturing industry here. And also, just anecdotally, a lot of folks in San Antonio use well water too; that’s not accounted in that use. And as you have reported in your paper, a lot of folks in Austin are starting to do that, right?
AC: Yeah, that’s a new problem.
LL: Unintended consequences.
AC: Earlier in the week you had said you hadn’t seen Shea’s specific campaign finance reform proposals. Have you had a chance to look at those yet?
LL: I read the general overview, but I haven’t studied them. What I would say is I think the Charter Revision task force took a close look at that and made some recommendations. They don’t go nearly as far [as Shea], and I know that they discussed legal issues, constitutional issues. For example, I think one of her proposals, and I don’t want to get too far into the weeds on this because I could be wrong, but for example, saying that anybody that works for a firm that has a lobbyist in it – is that right? – [the firm] would be limited to $1,750, and I don’t know where that …. Now how do you tell somebody – OK, you work at the Chronicle. Say the Chronicle has a lobbyist, therefore the total aggregate contributions from everybody that works for the Chronicle can only be that?
I think Peck Young had it right in his comment when he said the important thing is the disclosure. Make sure you know where the money is coming from so people will know where that money is coming from and how it’s spent. And then you don’t run into the constitutional questions of “can you …?.” We’ve got several things in the code right now that I think are potentially controversial. For example, the lobbyist can only give $25, OK, fine, but how about the lobbyist’s wife? Our current rules say she can only give $25 too, and I know some wives who say, “What does that have to do with me?”
AC: The charge is always that developer money rules City Hall or the police money rules City Hall – whatever particular ax is being ground at the time – that the council members always look to their contributors when they try to make decisions. What’s your response?
LL: I’ve heard that. This is my fourth campaign. I’ve heard that every campaign, and my answer is always: People who give me money, it’s not for any consideration; it’s because they think I’m a better candidate, that they would rather have me in that office. If they want to give me their money without any conditions or considerations, I’m very happy to accept it. There are people that I wouldn’t accept money from. I’m not going to go into that, but certainly people all over the city of Austin have the right to make a campaign contribution if they want to. And by the way, and you would be a better authority on this than me, but I think we’re one of the most strict political entities around, the city of Austin, campaign-contribution-wise. Federal government: $2,300. County and state: unlimited. If you want to give them a million bucks, you can do it.
AC: Some say restricting the money too much means candidates cannot get the word out – and the result is, nobody votes.
LL: Nobody even knows there’s an election.
AC: I don’t know that there’s a single cause, because it’s been true all over the country, especially in municipal elections, that people aren’t voting. We had a watershed issue in the city when the decision was made whether we should move the elections to November. You were in the minority that said we should. Any comments about that issue generally?
LL: I think there are a lot of factors, several factors that have to do with low turnouts, and I think that [limited campaign dollars] is one of them. I think there’s not enough money in the campaigns – I mean you look at a Dallas mayor’s campaign or a Houston mayor’s campaign, and there’s millions of dollars involved in those campaigns. Now I’m not advocating that, but I’m just saying that is a factor because you really can’t communicate with a lot of people on a limited budget. Another factor – and I’ve already supported this before Senate Bill 100 was passed – that we move our elections permanently to November when people associate November with elections. They know there’s going to be an election, so maybe they’d make a little extra effort to participate. And the numbers don’t lie. Last year we had a 7.4 percent turnout in May. In 2008, I believe we had about a 10 percent turnout in May, and we had about a 60 percent-plus turnout in November. So I definitely think moving it to November on a permanent basis will improve voter turnout. And the final thing is: You know, I’m not a newcomer to this geographic district thing; I’ve supported that in every campaign since 2005. I think having geographic representation on the council will engage more people because they’ll be more familiar with who’s representing them at City Hall.
AC: Do you think small groups, because of the nature of the turnout, very small groups of activists on whatever side, have an outsize influence on local politics?
LL: There’s no question about that. No question. When I took Government 610A and B, they talked a lot about pressure groups, and small groups of people that are very active that exert disproportionate influence with the electorate. So I think pressure groups have more influence on low-turnout elections than they do in a big-turnout election. I absolutely do not buy into the idea, which my opponent affirmed in a forum last week, at the Austin Progressive Coalition forum, the idea that’s been floated that it’s better to have “informed voters.” I think it’s better to have more voters.
And we don’t make the decision on whether or not they’re informed. What’s next? Literacy tests? Going back to that? And beyond that, only white male property-owners or whatever? I think just let everybody vote. Encourage more people to vote, and let them decide whether they’re going to be informed about something. That’s up to the people who are candidates to make sure they are informed, that they know as much as we can possibly convey about what the election is about.
One more quick thing before we leave that subject, and I’ve said this several times, but I want to emphasize it. And it shows what has happened in Austin in the last few years with the system that we have now – the total system – that we have no council members that live south of the river, and I live over by Camp Mabry, in the 4500 block. I live further north and further west than anybody else on council. And there’s a lot of Austin north of me and west of me, and there’s a lot of Austin south of me too. And so I think it’s really concentrated in a result of, if you look at the election maps where the high turnout is, those 15 to 30 percent districts are concentrated in the central city. A lot of West Austin or close-in West Austin.
AC: Everybody gives lip service to geographic districts, but it always founders on the details. I gather that the staff said it’s a difficult scheduling matter just to get everything done [for charter revision] in time for November, just because of the Department of Justice reviewing everything concerning election changes. Do you think we’re going to spin our wheels on single-member districts again?
LL: You know, I’m hopeful. I’m not as hopeful as I was a year ago, but I think that a lot of times, change has to be incremental instead of sweeping. So a lot of people are going to be uncomfortable with dramatically increasing the size of the City Council, and I think that’s going to be a factor. I think there are going to be people that would be comfortable with making the change with some geographic representation but not a huge number of districts and maintaining some at-large representation. I think the arguments on the other side, they make good arguments too, that maintaining at-large positions maintains the status quo to an extent.
So we’re on a course right now to go through a longer public process – I think we’re going to have a town hall meeting in May with more people involved. And the task force recommendation is very important, there’s no question about that, but there would be other factors too, and I think it would be unwise and unfair of me to make a judgment on that right now. Not before you’ve heard everybody. But you know, you’ve got this situation where there’s a solid core of people who don’t want to change at all; they want to maintain the at-large system. And then you’ve got another group of people who definitely want a large number of districts and an all-district system – they’re pretty definite about that – and then you’ve got a bunch of people who are kind of, “Well, I don’t know.”
AC: And I think that the no change at all was represented by one person on that task force.
LL: And it was my appointee! Shows you how good at screening I am. [I appointed] the one who voted for 10-1 (who wanted all [geographic] districts), one who wanted a hybrid, and one who didn’t want anything at all.
AC: The other challenger, Clay Dafoe, represents the sort of free-floating libertarianism that hangs out at City Hall an awful lot. What’s your sense of the effect of that relatively small, but very vocal, group on city politics?
LL: I respect everybody’s right to free speech, and I respect their right to come down to City Hall and exercise that. At the same time, we’ve got a lot of people that have legitimate business at City Hall besides them. So what we don’t want to see is the entire meeting clogged up by one or two people; we want more people to have a chance to participate. I was the one, for example, who kind of revised the way we do Citizens Communication, to say, you can sign up for two meetings in a row, but then you’ve gotta skip one – let somebody else have a chance. There was a lot of controversy about that – but then the limitation on how many Items you could speak on, on the consent agenda – which, by the way, we’re not required to take any citizen input on, we do it because that’s the way we do things in Austin – we kind of limited that, said, “OK, pick a few.”
We had an old ordinance that said you can’t participate in removing more than two Items from the consent agenda. So we kind of went with that for a while, with a lot of protests from that group. And actually, Council Member [Laura] Morrison was trying to be responsive to that [protest] and said, “I’d like to make some changes in that ordinance,” so she and some others came up with one. I said that’s fine, I voted for it – now they don’t like that one either.
But what effect do [these small groups] have? Certainly they have some. I think the most troubling thing to me is, they don’t want to play by the rules in campaigning. There were a lot of instances of that in the campaign last year – illegal signs, that kind of thing, not doing the necessary paperwork to participate in elections that all legitimate PACs have to do, and that kind of thing. So, play by the rules, please, that everybody else plays by, and we respect your rights.
This article appears in April 27 • 2012.
