AUSTIN — Zach Theater was a full residence on Feb. 16 for Austin Mayor Steve Adler’s State of the City address.
University of Texas President Greg Fenves started the event, telling the audience the story of Austin’s unsuccessful attempt to build a dam in 1890. Adler used that theme to take a opportunity throughout the night to reinforce the idea that fantastic cities do big things.
“Cities from all over our country and the rest of the globe send entire delegations here to troop through our offices in hopes of finding the magic formula written on a white board somewhere. These leaders from others cities ask me just what makes Austin so special.
“I tell them about the Austin Dam, and how when the dam burst we were set on a path that turned us into a boomtown of the Short article Age,” Adler said to the audience. “The lesson, I tell these visitors from others cities is clear. They need to leave Austin, return to their hometowns, and destroy all their dams and bridges, too.”
The mayor touted Austin’s success, then said he and the council have actually a choice — either ride the river of Austin’s triumph or make big changes to keep the energy going.
“I believe our goal is to do big things, to do that which would certainly not occur if we did not do them,” Adler said.
“just what good does it do to produce all these jobs if you can’t get to the one you have actually because you’re stuck in traffic,” he added. “How does Austin’s prosperity benefit us all if our real estate prices are attractive to out-of-town investors however increasingly unaffordable to the individuals that already live here?”
In order to tackle just what Adler listed as Austin’s “long-term challenges,” the mayor said he will certainly focus on six areas this year.
“These will certainly be considerable focuses of my time this year: Affordability, mobility, the spirit of East Austin, job training, permitting and Austin Energy,” he said.
On affordability, Adler said the city will certainly conduct its very first “Affordability Audit” to see just what the government is doing, what’s working and what’s not. He plans to increase the property tax exemption, giving homeowners a full 20 percent exemption by 2018 and produce a strike fund by the end of this year to preserve affordable housing.
“Austin should build a firebreak that will certainly stop the gentrification or forced displacement of our neighbors,” he said.
“If we do not aggressively preserve our existing affordable housing stock while building brand-new affordable housing, then we are effectively saying goodbye to a population the size of Amarillo,” Adler added.
Adler refers to 2016 at the “year of mobility” and said Austin is in a position to put all the studies and reports it’s conducted into action.
“If time is money, then we’re spending an awful lot of money stuck in traffic every year,” he told the audience.
Adler said individuals need more options, from more sidewalks and transit to urban rail. He likewise wants to see Interstate 35 lowered through downtown to ease congestion and construction on major corridors such as Lamar Boulevard.
Adler said city leaders need to modification the means they job to improve East Austin. He plans to do that along with the “Spirit of East Austin Initiative.”
“Past mayors and councils have actually tried top-down efforts. We want this to be a ground-up, community-driven initiative in which we at city hall are not the generators of modification however the accelerators, removing barriers to triumph and connecting the projects individuals want along with the individuals that can make them happen. The projects being discussed include affordable housing, anti-displacement policies and targeted workforce training. There are mobility projects driven by local needs, infrastructure projects lead by area residents and businesses, and site-based education and STEM training tied to living-wage paying jobs,” Adler said.
Also, the mayor announced the city is creating an Office of Equity.
“For too long, this city has actually not served everyone that lives here or taken into account the long-term effects of just what we do. Having an Office of Equity will certainly insight us modification this by making equity a part of everything we are doing,” Adler said.
To improve job training, Adler announced the city and Travis County are teaming up for the very first time to produce a master plan on educating Austin’s workforce.
“This will certainly be the first-ever coordinated strategic plan between the city and the county on workforce development … along with this master plan, we will certainly insight build the bridge over this raging river to cross the economic opportunity divide. Our goal is not modest. We intend to produce the best, most-effective workforce development and job-training ecosystem in the country. By training thousands more of our neighbors to fill the good jobs being developed in our city that we read about every day, we will certainly move the needle on income inequality,” Adler said.
Adler likewise said the city will certainly fix the broken permitting process to make it easier to build.
“Small business owners are telling me they will certainly not try again to expand their operations in our city, despite the fact that their customers would certainly like them to, because of the burdensome process and expense,” he said.
Adler said city staff are putting performance metrics in place to track the progress of a two-year long program to improve the process. He likewise said there will certainly be opportunities for stakeholder input throughout that time frame.
Lastly, Adler wants to revamp Austin Energy’s business model to make it more sustainable.
“If we do not reform our utility’s business model, we face the threat of the legislature taking control of our utility away from us … One problem we have actually is along with the murky transfers of funds from the utility to the city’s general fund. No one appears to understand, trust, or particularly like this model. So let’s modification it. I propose learning from San Antonio and moving to a model where the City of Austin, as the owner and shareholder of Austin Energy, gets paid a dividend in a transparent and reliable manner,” he said.
Adler likewise praised the council members, calling each one by name and listing their strengths, however he criticized the time council has actually spent on troubles that he thinks could have actually been dealt along with quickly, such as Transportation Network Companies — ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft. He added that council should much better manage its time.
The mayor didn’t shy away from some troubles that have actually been considered controversial in recent weeks. He explained the Pilot Knob deal and mentioned the death of an unarmed teenager that was shot and killed by an Austin Police Department officer.
Here are the mayor’s full prepared remarks. Please note that he did deviate from the prepared speech slightly during the live address:
Thank you, President Fenves. I am grateful for your leadership at the University of Texas and for our growing working partnership and even friendship.
And along with the conversations that need to be happening between UT and the City on troubles like the development of the Innovation Zone around our brand-new medical school, a replacement arena for the Drum, the future of the MUNY golf course site, as well as expanding opportunities for closer connection between Austin and the incredible intellectual resources of your faculty, there’s a lot for you and me — and the community — to be talking about.
And by the way, I’m grateful to you for skipping the West Virginia game tonight. You get quite good seats, so I know just what kind of sacrifice this is.
President Fenves recounted the story of the Austin Dam. I love that story, because as the Mayor of Austin I’m often asked just what the secret sauce is that makes us a magical city and a focus for innovation and creativity. Most every others city wishes it could replicate our success. When I attended the climate modification talks in Paris, the 100 Resilient Cities meeting in London, the Almedalen Political Rhetoric Festival in Norway, and the traffic control focus in Dublin, Ireland, and individuals found out that I was the Mayor they’d get a big smile on their face and tell me how much they love Austin.
Cities from all over our country and the rest of the globe send entire delegations here to troop through our offices in hopes of finding the magic formula written on a white board somewhere. These leaders from others cities ask me just what makes Austin so special. I tell them about Barton Springs and how our commitment to our environment became perhaps our crucial asset. I tell them about Willie Nelson and our live music, how by embracing diverse cultures we established an inclusive community where creativity thrives, about a community where it is okay to fail so long as you learn and grow. And I tell them about Michael Dell reinventing the assembly line in his dorm room and how coming up along with radical brand-new ideas here doesn’t make you an outcast — it can make you rich and famous.
And then I tell them about the Austin Dam, and how when the dam burst we were set on a path that turned us into a boomtown of the Short article Age. The lesson, I tell these visitors from others cities is clear. They need to leave Austin, return to their hometowns, and destroy all their dams and bridges, too.
But some cities merely aren’t willing to do the Big Things.
You know, back when the Austin Dam burst, only 22,000 individuals lived here. The flood that took down that dam may have actually receded, however the individuals kept coming. By the end of the 20th Century more than 656,000 lived here, and still they came. So fantastic is the flow of individuals into Austin that we are, according to one headline, “the Boomingest Big City of All.” Last summer, the population of our five-county metro area went over 2 million. And lest anyone thinks that not building infrastructure is still a viable option to keep individuals from moving here, the Urban Institute predicts that by 2030 — when today’s pre-schooler is a freshman at UT — Austin’s metro population may well top 3 million.
It’s easy to look downstream and see the outlines of a future that we could not have actually contemplated even a few years ago. Forbes Magazine merely put Austin in very first place on its list of “Cities of the Future” because of just what it called “the nation’s superlative economy” and the fact that so several individuals merely want to live here. Forbes cited a fact that they found eye-popping however to us only confirms just what we see around us: Our population grew 13.2 percent between 2010 and 2014, more than any others city they studied.
People keep moving here because, according to Paper City Magazine, “Austin’s merely as cool as it thinks it is.”
And it’ll stay that means — for a while anyway — even by doing merely little stuff. Our community, cultural, environmental, business, and elected leaders have actually laid such a strong foundation that it is entirely possible that even if we spent some considerable part of the next couple years having picnics in the sunshine on the riverbank, the state of our city will certainly remain the envy of the world.
The quite triumph that comes along with such an economy is likewise exacerbating challenges because all too several in our community are struggling and not sharing in this good fortune, but, by several traditional measures of success, Austin is strong.
We are working. Austin is the 6th-ideal city to look for a job. In fact, our unemployment rate in December was 3.1 percent. The last time it was that low, Bill Clinton was still President
We are prosperous. For the second year in a row, the Urban Land Institute survey named Austin the second-ideal real estate market in the country.
We are safe. When contrasting our crime rate to others big cities in Texas, there was such a stark difference that Texas Monthly called us “basically a fairy tale land populated by elves and hobbits.”
We are innovative. We have actually 7 percent of the state’s population however 30 percent of the brand-new patents. Austin ranks 8th in the country in venture capital investments. A year ago Forbes put us on a list of five cities poised to be the next Silicon Valley Tech Hub. Whether it’s Google’s driver-much less cars, the Pecan Street Project implementing energy-use technology out at Mueller, or our community’s seemingly limitless innovations in the field of breakfast tacos, Austin has actually become a city where good ideas become real.
We are green. The American Council for an Efficient Economy ranked Austin as the 9th-most energy efficient city in the country. About 10 percent of all wind power in Texas is generated for Austin Energy. And because of decisions this Council made, our utility will certainly soon become one of the biggest users of solar energy in Texas and in the world.
We’re likewise a quite good-looking bunch. According to no much less than CNN, Austin is estate to America’s 7th-most attractive residents, a ranking that, given this audience as a representative sample, is far too low. I mean, look at how fantastic you look! Of course, we would certainly have actually ranked higher, however CNN marked us down – I kid you not — because so several individuals here dress like hipsters. Now, I personally don’t look fantastic in skinny jeans, and I believe maybe we didn’t rank higher because your Mayor was getting a little too plump.
So, Diane has actually me on a diet now.
But here’s the thing that I want to make quite clear tonight: The City would certainly probably get along quite well, at least for some period of time, without a City Council, or a Mayor for that matter. This river has actually been flowing for a long time before we showed up, and it’s going to keep flowing whether we show up to job tomorrow or not.
People will certainly keep moving here for fantastic jobs, abundant sunshine and, lest I need to mention it again, because of how incredibly good-looking you all are.
This is the good fortune and daunting challenge of being Mayor of Austin: Barring an infestation of killer bees, a zombie apocalypse or, God forbid, a recession that hits Austin hard, this year when I wake up each morning, Austin will certainly be America’s favorite boomtown whether I go into job or not.
But I do not believe that I was elected to be a caretaker mayor. And I don’t intend to spend my time skipping stones across the river’s surface, having fun however not much effect on the river’s course. Our long-term challenges are too fantastic and they require long-term strategic thinking and action.
Do not mistake me for saying that timing the traffic lights, building sidewalks, and setting the tax rate are not necessary. They are good and proper functions of a local government. I’m merely saying that these points would certainly probably happen no matter that joined my job.
And, in fact, we have actually already done a lot on Council, and if you want to see a list of our accomplishments, I invite you to visit our brand-new website at mayoradler.com for a list of the 50 items that come very first to my mind.
But by means of example, there’s one thing on this list of accomplishments that I want to bring up, however not in the means you’d probably expect. I’m going to do something I’m probably not supposed to. I’m going to tell you that one of our big achievements from last year – helping to cut city property tax bills, saving the standard homeowner $14 a year – was a fantastic thing to do, however really did not mean as much as some might think.
Sure, it was the very first time in anyone’s memory that an Austin City Council lowered not only city property tax rates however likewise the standard tax bill, which is great. This act began to bend the affordability cost curve. In that respect, it had fantastic meaning. And it’s true that this is the only tool presently available for the City to address the equitable balance between commercial versus residential property taxes.
But is this a reasonable measure of the job we are doing on affordability?
Normally, you can’t get a politician to shut up about cutting taxes, however I haven’t been an elected official for quite long, so imagine along with me for a second: It’s 20 years from now, and we’re at the unveiling of the Steve Adler Plaque to Last-Minute Amendments and Innovative Abstractions. It’s a perfect day, the blue sky open to all the ambition in the world. And along with an approving smile, a prominent citizen is recounting my tenure as Mayor:
“Steve Adler” – she says: “He saved me $14.”
Wow. We have actually to do more than that.
I believe our goal is to do big things, to do that which would certainly not occur if we did not do them. And if you ask Austinites, I believe they’d say the same thing.
What good does it do to produce all these jobs if you can’t get to the one you have actually because you’re stuck in traffic?
How does Austin’s prosperity benefit us all if our real estate prices are attractive to out-of-town investors however increasingly unaffordable to the individuals that already live here?
The ETC Institute merely released a survey about how Austinites perceive the job we’re doing at City Hall. The results ought to not shock you in the slightest.
People like Austin as a place to live, work, and raise their children. No surprise there.
On the others adverse of the ledger, fewer than one in four Austinites thinks we’re doing a good job of planning for growth, and frankly I don’t know why that number is so high.
We have actually an affordability crisis. The Brookings Institute says we have actually the 2nd-fastest growing suburban poverty rate in the country. We live in the most economically segregated metropolitan area in the country. A family making the median income can now no longer qualify for a loan to buy a median-priced estate here.
If you’re merely treading water, you’re going to get washed away. This is the result of years of not preparing for growth, and it’s unacceptable. The price of growth cannot be that the cost of living is growing so much that individuals can’t afford to live in Austin. We’ll never go back to the days when Austin could accurately be described as a retirement community for twenty-somethings. however it ought to not be a radical notion to say that Austinites ought to be able to afford to live in Austin. In fact, this ought to be our policy.
But here is an important question. How do we get there? ought to our ultimate goal and measure for triumph be that we save the standard homeowner $14 a year? Or even $50? It could be a part of making our city more affordable, however does it matter so much that it ought to be the ultimate measure of our success?
What if we slashed spending on fire, police, and social services enough to cut city property taxes in half? Since the City portion of your total tax bill is only 20%, would certainly that make living here affordable?
We talk a lot about affordability, however we don’t know exactly and we surely don’t agree on just what that means. That’s why tonight I announcing this year we will certainly have actually an “Affordability Audit” of city government. Your City Council has actually appropriated the money, and in the next few weeks we will certainly order the City Auditor to undertake such a government system-wide audit. When it comes to affordability, we need to get smarter, more deliberate, and more focused. This will certainly be a first-ever audit of its kind in Austin. We desperately need it, and we’re going to do it. It ought to tell us just what your government is doing that makes this City more affordable? just what are we doing that makes it much less affordable? What’s working and just what is not?
Inextricably linked to affordability is the second-biggest expense for most families, and that’s transportation.
And if time is money, then we’re spending an awful lot of money stuck in traffic every year. The news late last year that I-35 had become the most congested road in Texas surprised no one living here. Traffic congestion on I-35 has actually gotten so bad, individuals in Houston feel sorry for us.
Our mobility complications are bigger than I-35, of course. We all relate to it in our own way, whether it’s having to sit in rush hour traffic every day to get estate from work, to live in a neighborhood without sidewalks, riding a bike in traffic, to stewing in resentment as you sit at an intersection as the light turns green. And then red. And then green. And then, if you’re lucky, you get to the next intersection where you watch the light turn green — however you don’t go.
That ETC survey that told us Austinites believe we’re doing a bad job planning for growth likewise found that fewer one in five of us — 17% — is satisfied along with traffic flow on major streets. Really, individuals in Austin are so fed up along with traffic that almost half of us are dissatisfied along with the enforcement of traffic laws, partly because we now see how “blocking the box” at intersections slows everyone else down, and likewise because Austin had 102 traffic fatalities in 2015, well over the previous record of 81. Our city is so congested and dangerous that we wish the police wrote more tickets. That’s how bad traffic is.
For all the real good news about Austin, we have actually big problems. The river has actually risen means past flood stage.
We have actually the complications of a fantastic town that is suddenly becoming a fantastic city.
So we have actually to learn to do big things. The scale of just what faces us as a city is forcing us to adjust the scale of how we address our problems. For a long time, we have actually acted as if incremental fixes were enough. Growth brought money and jobs and acclaim. It wasn’t too broke, so we never fixed it. Doing merely OK was good enough for government.
But is your city government doing anything on affordability? Every budget year, the scorecard we use is the standard property tax bill and utility bill. That’s easy to understand, however it tells us so little about affordability in Austin. Yes, last year, we cut property taxes by $14 and even lowered the standard residential Austin Energy bill by $3.33 a month. however none of that is as important as the impact on affordability caused by the combined impact of housing, transportation, healthcare, incomes, and even child-care costs.
The danger of using the wrong metric to measure whether your government is helping along with affordability is not that we’re merely measuring the wrong thing – it’s that measuring the wrong thing means we’re not working on just what will certainly really have actually an impact on affordability. This has actually to change.
So now here we are, and the water is at our door. We are the city of the future, however just what future will certainly it be? If we do not do big points now, we’ll end up along with the housing costs of San Francisco and the traffic congestion of Los Angeles. We’ll be immobilized, crippled by growth, isolated from each other, stuck in our neighborhoods.
It doesn’t have actually to be this way. There is no law of cities that says as Austin grows we will certainly become unaffordable and immobile. Our future is still in our hands. Austin is still at a place where we can do something about it.
But we need to do big things. If Austin is going to become a much better version of itself as opposed to a cautionary tale, we need to learn to scale our thinking. Our complications are from proportion to the old means of doing things. Learning to scale our solutions is as much of a challenge as the intertwined crises of affordability and mobility, however this is where the good news comes in.
Because inherent in our challenges is the promise of transformative change. fantastic cities do big points not because they are great. Cities become fantastic because they do big things.
And in these rapids, the old paradigms of political leadership do not serve us well. In Austin, we are often too quick to go to extremes. We need to learn that not everything is a zero-sum game. By now you know that I do not believe our city or our Council are well served by leadership that stakes out firm positions on ideological grounds and seeks dominance over its opposite ideological pole, resulting in time-consuming and expensive conflict.
I believe that the very best means forward can most often be found by taking the very best of both positions and creating consensus around a brand-new position. This starts by showing respect to both sides and seeing the validity in how they see themselves. Too often this is called compromise, however finding the right answer is not the same as finding a compromise. I don’t believe taking the very best of both worlds is a compromise any more than water is a compromise between two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
We can do big points if we as a City Council take a lesson from the startup culture and adopt an iterative leadership style. That means we try points and we learn. Then we try much better points and we get better. It’s the culture and lesson of our tech startup ecosystem.
I believe that to ideal address the brand-new challenges of mobility and affordability, we need to become comfortable along with trying brand-new points and adjusting when we receive brand-new information. I want us to creatively and innovatively deal along with the complications that fast-growing cities are facing even if others cities have actually never figured out the answers.
This is how we learn and get better. This is how we do big things.
It has actually been suggested that this is not the means government works, that government cannot innovate. This idea that government cannot innovate would certainly have actually come to a fantastic shock to Alan Turing, that invented computers while working for the British military. A couple of decades later, these computers were connected in a government program called ARPANET. We now call it the Internet.
We are only as small as we see ourselves, and the scale of our achievements is limited only by our perspective. To paraphrase a government employee proposing a pretty innovative government program, we choose to do big points at this point in our city’s history not because they are easy however because they are hard.
Inherent in seeking solutions that are big enough for our complications is increased risk. Put one more way, some rockets are going to blow up on the launching pad. We cannot be afraid to fail so long as we learn quickly. In our very first year, while we have actually pursued big things, we have actually surely learned lessons.
When we decided on up the Housing Heroes challenge to discover permanent housing for our homeless veterans, very first accepted by my predecessor Mayor Leffingwell, we didn’t know how we were going to do it. We did know just what had been tried wasn’t working fast enough. So we had to resort to the only thing that would certainly work, and that’s just what hadn’t been done before. And yes, there were false starts, mid-stream adjustments, and missed deadlines, to be sure.
But we learned that by bringing the Austin Apartment Association, the Real Estate Council of Austin, the Austin Board of Realtors to the table along with the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, or ECHO, we could, for the very first time, partner the individuals that had the homes along with the individuals that were trying to discover the homes. Add in the efforts of the Greater Chamber of Commerce and the fortuitous fact that so several individuals were happy to contribute to insight homeless veterans, and we hit upon the innovation – the Risk Fund – that developed a solution big enough to address the problem.
I am proud that we were able to insight these community heroes discover permanent housing for homeless veterans. We erased the backlog of veterans waiting for homes, and now ECHO is able to immediately insight homeless veterans as soon as they encounter them. A solution to scale can bring a problem into focus and then make it small enough to manage, even one that was once believed hopeless.
And as much as the Pilot Knob PUD represents an achievement in creating opportunities for affordable housing, it likewise represents an incredible teaching moment for my administration. No one had figured out how to achieve permanent affordable housing at this scale, and we found a means within existing city policy. The prices were in line along with others land trust deals the city had done. It developed future options for the Council, not obligations.
To be clear about Pilot Knob – every penny the developer was originally going to pay to the City the developer continues to pay to the City. The recent job of Council did not modification by one dime the financial deal for the developer. Rather, we asked the developer to job along with the City to discover a mechanism the City could use to offer permanent affordability, and the developer worked along with us to discover a solution at no benefit to himself.
It’s safe to say we could have actually done a much better job of anticipating the reaction of several in our community. One of the big lessons we have actually drawn from this is that it doesn’t matter how good an idea is if we don’t do a good job of explaining it and creating consensus.
Big changes can cause so much discomfort that maybe they ought to come along with a disclaimer of possible adverse effects. It is not unusual for the city to do SMART Housing projects without ever causing a newspaper to spill ink. I suspect the confusion from our lack of communication compounded the fear caused by the numbers being bandied about. Big modification causes discomfort. Our challenges may inspire us to do big things, however our emotions are regular human size.
If the means we used Pilot Knob to provide the City the choice, however not the obligation, to invest more in permanent affordable housing in any given year was not the very best one to use or if it doesn’t work, then we need to adjust it. however Austin should build a firebreak that will certainly stop the gentrification or forced displacement of our neighbors in a means that will certainly actually achieve opportunities for permanent affordability or we will certainly shed individuals and communities all together. Pilot Knob – by creating permanent affordability – is such a firebreak.
Over the last year I have actually likewise learned that, as a Council, we need to be diligent about guarding our time and purposeful in how we spend it. As clear as our priorities have actually been, it is not always so clear how to prioritize them. Nowhere has actually this been more evident than in our fight over ridesharing companies.
I am proud that a group of community volunteers, city staff, and council members collaborated to produce the very first cross-platform safety badge in the sharing economy, one demonstration project of the concept that we call “Thumb’s Up!”
I am proud that we got Uber and Lyft to show unprecedented flexibility and to agree, for just what I believe is the very first time, to offer their passengers a real and physical choice between fingerprinted drivers and non-fingerprinted drivers.
But I am not proud of the hours and hours of expended time that could have actually been spent looking for innovative solutions to mobility and affordability. And now we are going to spend more time, not to mention a lot of money, having an election that I fear will certainly not ultimately achieve our goal of individuals in Austin being able to have actually a meaningful choice of a fingerprinted TNC driver regardless of the vote’s outcome.
I know that we will certainly always have actually events that happen that require the Council’s immediate attention. The recent death of David Joseph is one such event. Regardless of just what happens next, the loss of a 17-year-old boy is terrible. There ought to be and will certainly be a quick and thorough investigation of this tragedy.
But I, as Mayor, with each other along with my colleagues on the Council, need to learn from just what we’ve experienced. We — the Council — are in this together. And I think, together, we have actually done good work:
Don Zimmerman is a constant voice about the impacts of government spending and joining along with me to discover options for the biomass energy plant.
Ora Houston has actually been a leader on the Spirit of East Austin Initiative and was instrumental in initiating body cameras for public safety officers.
Kathie Tovo, that brings us institutional knowledge, has actually brought us closer to a sobriety focus and helps protect much of just what we treasure about the city we love.
Sherri Gallo has actually shown us all just what it means to reach out to our districts and helped secure the senior homestead exemption.
Ellen Troxclair is a conservative voice on a generally liberal Council who, at her best, is able to discover the common ground to bridge differences.
Delia Garza does fantastic job on affordable housing, health and social services, and renewable energy.
Pio Renteria is my partner on housing initiatives including combating gentrification in Homestead Preservation Districts and in helping to get the affordable housing strike fund off the ground.
Greg Casar has actually worked to reform development rules to promote housing integration, and identified affordable housing funding to fight back versus economic segregation and gentrification.
Leslie Pool, that traveled along with me to Paris to sign the Under MOU 2 climate treaty along with local governments all over the world, led us along with good-government resolutions, including lobby reform and electronic campaign filings.
And Ann Kitchen. Only a few individuals will certainly truly understand this, however there’s no one I enjoy disagreeing along with more. The job Ann is doing on the Mobility Committee will certainly serve this City for generations to come. Ann is an asset to this City, and I am grateful for her partnership.
Speaking of partners, and there’s no good place in a speech to say perhaps the crucial thing, I want to thank Diane Land, my very first lady, my partner in crime, my Valentine. I am so damn proud of you. This is a hard gig for you, whether it’s putting your occupation to the side, finding ways to continue to lead on community goals, or spending a lot much less time along with me. Remember our trip to Dublin where we spent the day at their traffic control center? Do I know how to show a girl a good time or what? A blessing of this job is that more individuals in Austin and around the globe are getting to know the woman I love. I am well aware of the sacrifices you are making for me and for your city, and I am determined to make this time worth your sacrifice.
And to the City Manager, Marc Ott, I apologize for all the eggs the Council and I have actually broken and the hundreds more we will certainly continue to break. We continue to tackle monumental challenges together, whether it’s putting with each other a City budget of which we are all so quite proud or partnering along with me on the Spirit of East Austin Initiative, (which I’ll talk about later). And the measures of this City’s triumph and the supporting foundation that I addressed at the beginning of this speech reflect your job and the job of your team.
Ultimately, we will certainly be evaluated and judged – you, me, and the Council – on how we each do to achieve greater affordability and increased mobility. Those, I think, are the considerable yardsticks for each of us individually and collectively. I believe you and I can do fantastic points together.
I want to thank the 13,000 city employees that get up every day in the selfless pursuit of public service. These folks are among the very best and brightest in our community, and their commitment to the general welfare is a gift to us all.
And finally, I want to thank my appointees to boards and commissions. You are my representatives in the community. Your ability to extend the reach of our office is invaluable to me, and I am grateful for all you do.
And I remain honored to job along with this very first 10-1 Council. along with hiccups here and there, the 10-1 system is working extremely well. We have actually not devolved into ward politics. We support one one more even when we disagree. We’re doing the right thing along with the committee system, and by that I mean we’ve tried it and are adjusting it.
This adjustment to the committee system is an opportunity for us: We need to discover space to be more deliberative along with each other, to believe through troubles as a Council and discover our focus when there’s much less tension to decide. If we can produce this space for ourselves, we can finally lift Austin from the either/or politics of the past and move toward a more iterative leadership model that allows us to try brand-new things, to adjust when we learn brand-new information, and to try discover brand-new ways forward.
It is my chance that in doing so that we can be more deliberative about how we use our time. We spend a lot of time on three-letter emergencies — STRs, TNCs, ADUs — that seem to catch us flat-footed. These are important troubles that could be ideal sorted in a calm fashion at successive job sessions. We can and we must, together, job through these troubles in a means that does not eat up so much of our time.
We can’t pretend that these are aberrations. There will certainly always be troubles demanding time. There will certainly be flash floods and wildfires. There will certainly always be pockets of super-heated interest. however the greater community needs us to spend time on doing big things, and it’s hard to imagine the big ideas that will certainly get us there if we spend so much of our time on the emergency d’jour.
We only have actually so much time before either time or circumstance takes us from our chairs. This is the only time we will certainly have actually to do this job to make Austin more mobile and more affordable. And when we stand for judgment, and our jurors are sitting in traffic and worrying about how they can afford to keep living in Austin, do you really want them to think, “At least they saved me $14?” We need to do more.
We need to do big points on affordability.
Here is our challenge: We have actually more than 21,000 subsidized housing units locally, and we likewise have actually more than 65,000 unsubsidized units that rent at below market levels. We are losing those units – to redevelopment and demolition – every day. To call these “housing units” ignores that these are homes to about 200,000 of our fellow Austinites. And if we do not aggressively preserve our existing affordable housing stock while building brand-new affordable housing, then we are effectively saying goodbye to a population the size of Amarillo.
These individuals are a part of that we are, and we cannot shed them without losing something we value about this city. And if we do nothing, the river will certainly wash them away downstream. however if we harness growth, we can use it to power the solution.
Here’s just what we’re doing:
Since taking office in January, this brand-new Council has actually approved an estimated 5,342 affordable housing units for construction that are now in the pipeline.
This Council has actually developed likewise the very first Homestead Preservation Districts in the entire state. Now, growth in these rapidly changing areas will certainly fund efforts to mitigate the symptoms of gentrification. In this way, growth will certainly pay to keep Austin affordable for those that already live here.
And as the recent groundbreaking for The Independent – which you probably know as the Jenga Tower – reminded us, giant residential towers are not making Austin more unaffordable. In fact, because of a modification this Council passed, downtown towers will certainly pour tens of millions of dollars into the city’s affordable housing trust fund.
Over the next 10 years, it is projected that this Council will certainly have actually put a combined $68.2 million dollars into the Housing Trust Fund and $5.6 million into the Homestead Preservation District, not including Pilot Knob. Making growth pay for the burdens it creates is possible, it’s happening, and it’s working.
This is all good news.
But this is likewise nothing more than a good start.
The City of Austin has actually the capacity to bend the affordability cost curve, however it doesn’t have actually the capacity to achieve the scale called for to disrupt it. We’re going to need to harness the power of the private market to achieve the scale we need.
Last year I called for a strike fund to do merely that, and tonight I’m pleased to let you know that we are making fantastic and real progress. We have actually assembled private, public and nonprofit sector professionals that are in the final stages of creating a funding mechanism to buy and preserve our affordable housing stock. We studied models from across the country. We studied local demographic and market data. We are now working to “Austinize” this idea.
By the end of 2016, we will certainly officially launch the Austin Affordable Community Trust. This strike fund will certainly leverage private investment dollars, and we intend to likewise include opportunities for Austin residents to participate through crowdfunding and minibonds(I still want to see something like an “Austin Bond”), to secure affordability now and into the future. This will, very simply, provide affordability a profit motive on a scale that no others city has actually imagined.
The good news is that we are tackling this problem at an earlier point in time than others large cities. Today, the median estate price in Austin is about $322,500. Meanwhile, the median estate price in San Francisco is about $1 million. If this works, we will certainly not turn into one more San Francisco. The Austin Affordable Community Trust, as well as everything we’re doing at the city along with the affordable housing trust fund and homestead preservation districts, will certainly insight us become the Austin that we imagine by remaining an Austin that we recognize.
But using growth to fund affordable housing is only part of the solution. Affordability is something we all feel, albeit differently, and one thing that we as a city can do to touch the most individuals to lower your property taxes in a means that makes a real difference to you. We have actually begun to do this by increasing the senior and disabled property tax exemption, saving those taxpayers a total of $1.6 million.
And we created, for the very first time, a meaningful general homestead exemption for city taxpayers of 6 percent, saving Austin homeowners a total of $3.5 million. I want to increase the city homestead exemption this year along with a goal of reaching the 20-percent threshold in 2018.
But the City’s portion of the overall property tax bill is only a small part of your tax bill. If we are going to do big points for you, we need to believe creatively and innovatively. And I’m pleased to tell you tonight that we’ve recently taken steps to do this.
For too long, Austin has actually endured from a broken school finance system. Because of this, AISD last year sent $270 million to others school districts, which works out to about $1,000 for each homeowner in Austin.
So when AISD taxes you a dollar on your tax bill, a big chunk of it leaves and isn’t available to be spent here for services. however if the City taxed you for that same dollar, all your money does stay here. Austin taxpayers could save money or get more for the taxes we pay by having the city and the school district engage in a “tax swap.” just what if the city paid from some small part of the social services now being paid for by the district? If the City were to raise its taxes only to the extent necessary to pay for something that AISD already does however which the City takes over, AISD could lower their taxes by even more and our community would certainly get the same value.
Last week the Council asked the City Manager to explore this option to see if we can get it done. This, alone, could result in a difference on your tax bill that you’d actually notice. (And we’d make it equitable for taxpayers and students in others school districts.)
We need to do big points in Austin’s Eastern Crescent .
I want us to focus on this year on the Spirit of East Austin Initiative, a strategic partnership between communities, my office, the Council, and the City Manager. The Spirit of East Austin seeks to combat the effects of historical and intentional inequitable policies and practices, as well as the results of benign neglect.
Inherent in addressing inequities is the promise of transformative change. We will certainly never reach our full greatness if we don’t face east. merely as the sun rises in the east, so does the future of our city.
In the last half-year, the Mayor’s office and City staff, along along with community leaders, have actually met along with community groups to see just what they want. Past Mayors and Councils have actually tried top-down efforts. We want this to be a ground-up, community-driven initiative in which we at City Hall are not the generators of modification however the accelerators, removing barriers to triumph and connecting the projects individuals want along with the individuals that can make them happen.
The projects being discussed include affordable housing, anti-displacement policies, and targeted workforce training. There are mobility projects driven by local needs, infrastructure projects lead by area residents and businesses, and site-based education and STEM training tied to living-wage paying jobs.
We need to press forward faster, taking our ideal assets and leveraging them to bring unprecedented focus, energy, investment and opportunity to East Austin.
As we Face East, we do not excuse or dismiss the parts of our past that are, at best, ugly and unjust. Rather, we can use this history as fuel for the kind of determination to shape a more equitable and prosperous future in our City’s East Austin. merely because we were not the ones that originally did wrong does not absolve us of responsibility now for doing just what is right.
Affordability is not the only lens through which we need to analyze our actions at City Hall, which is why we are creating an Office of Equity at the City of Austin. Your Council put funding for this in the current budget, and soon the Manager has actually indicated you’ll see a public process to hire the very first Director of Equity at City Hall. For too long, this city has actually not served everyone that lives here or taken into account the long-term effects of just what we do. Having an Office of Equity will certainly insight us modification this by making equity a part of everything we are doing.
We need to believe and act big on mobility.
This need to be the year of mobility; it is time, Austin. We have actually to go to job to insight you get to work.
Your Council has actually now launched a three-month community conversation to set priorities on just what mobility projects we want and need to do next and then to decide how we’re going to pay for them. We have actually to move past planning and talking and do big things.
This means actually taking the corridor plans off the shelf and doing the job on Lamar, Burnet Rd., Airport, MLK and Riverside. It means taking concrete steps to get traffic moving on Loop 360 and RR 620. It means creating more transit lanes so that buses can travel to and from Park N’ Rides located at the perimeter of congestion and travel at no much less than 45 mph, passing cars caught in rush-hour traffic jams. We need to job along with our mobility partners to build out a network of express lanes on 183-North, MoPac North and South, and IH35, connecting Park & Ride facilities to Austin’s employment centers. Even those of us that don’t want to get from our cars want those around us to do so; some folks will certainly get from their cars to get into those faster moving buses.
The Council has actually wisely acted to direct the City Manager to identify mobility projects that we could think of bringing to the voters in a bond election as early as this fall.
Importantly, we need to likewise turn to the highway that has actually divided our community for so long however that now unites us in frustration: I-35. The road we all avoid is the one we need to now face. It’s time, Austin, to finally do something about I-35 and insight fix the most-congested road in Texas.
We are getting into position for a win. This began five years ago in 2011 when the legislature passed Budget Rider 42, appropriating $300 million to look at relieving congestion around Texas. Our quite own mobility champion, Senator Kirk Watson, set up a local community stakeholder group and has actually shepherded the process.
He brought in the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M and, working along with TxDOT and others transportation experts and advocates, developed a focus on the most congested roads in the region, I-35 being the biggest offender. The City of Austin added some money and expertise of our own to insight along with the process of looking at I-35.
And when it was far enough along, that job transitioned into an additional, more specific and facilitated focus on I-35 as it runs through downtown. From the start, it was detailed, smart work, led by experts on how to improve our situation. And to have actually us ready to get to job on projects, as opposed to merely talking about them.
I have actually never seen a TxDOT community and public engagement process that was as robust as the one they have actually taken over the last few years. TxDOT did a fantastic job focusing attention, energy and expertise on I-35 in this region and, in particular, our downtown.
This effort has actually put us in a fantastic position to do big points on I-35. It resulted in a vision for I-35 that runs from SH 45 in the north to SH 45 to the south. And this job ought to include lowering the I-35 mainlanes through downtown to alleviate street level congestion and adding capacity along with managed lanes to insight alleviate I-35 congestion. This would certainly likewise allow us to put a cap on top of I-35 to insight to heal a physical wound that has actually too long cut our city in half.
The process has actually been responsive to community input. My vision for this project includes cooperation along with our regional partners, CAMPO and the CTRMA to draw down money from the state and federal government to transform I-35.
Governor Abbott’s important focus on congestion in our State took form merely days ago in an announcement by TxDOT Commissioner Bruce Bugg and Chairman Tryon Lewis that Austin ought to receive $159M to improve key intersections on I-35 when the final vote is taken this month. This important funding goes into some of those improvement projects identified through the process envisioned by Rider 42, and the deliberate, good job that’s been ongoing since that time. This is cause for fantastic celebration, and our City is thankful for this attention and support.
Austin needs more mobility choices to encourage those that will certainly to get from their cars. We need much better transit, bike and pedestrian options.
And at some point in our future, that includes considerable mass transit options such as urban rail or others innovative mobility options where individuals move above our streets. I cannot imagine the Austin metropolitan area, 25 or 30 years from now along with 4 million people, not having such infrastructure.
Last month, Capital Metro approved a brand-new study of transportation in our urban core dubbed the Central Corridor Comprehensive Transit Analysis. This 30-month analysis is the next step in boosting downtown transit service, and finding solutions for how we can connect more parts of our overall community to each others along with real transit options. To get this done, we have actually to do it right, and right now that means beginning along with seriousness and deliberation and not a panicked haste towards our goals.
We need to do big points to produce a world-class workforce.
We’ve got unfilled jobs. We’ve got individuals looking for work. They don’t suit up. We merely need to get the individuals ready for the available jobs. Until now, that hasn’t been done at a scale necessary to move the needle on our tragic economic segregation. however starting now, it should be.
Here are the facts: Two-thirds of Central Texas high school graduates that go onto higher education don’t finish a degree or certificate. This is partly because the educational pipeline is not innovating along along with growth industries. Employers that want to produce an inclusive workforce are facing tough sledding, forcing them to look outside our community for job-ready applicants.
This is the flip adverse of the affordability challenge. There are two ways to make points more affordable. Yes, you can try to make points cost much less – however you can likewise insight individuals earn more so they have actually more to spend. As much as we need to bend the cost curve on housing prices and property taxes, we need to address the jobs and income adverse of the equation as well.
We need the city, county, Chambers of Commerce, Austin Community College, Workforce Solutions and others key stakeholders to job with each other to produce a world-class workforce system that trains a world-class workforce.
Here is the very first step: County Judge Sarah Eckhardt and I have actually merely commissioned the region’s workforce development community to come back to us along with a master plan that allow us to plan for the job training in the same means we do for capital infrastructure – strategically, methodically, and along with an intent not to put a report on a shelf however a strategy into action. This will certainly be the first-ever coordinated strategic plan between the City and the County on workforce development. It will certainly need to reach consensus on the specific workforce challenges we’ll go after, and then set specific goals and identify the exact metrics we will certainly target.
With this master plan, we will certainly insight build the bridge over this raging river to cross the economic opportunity divide. Our goal is not modest. We intend to produce the best, most-effective workforce development and job-training ecosystem in the country. By training thousands more of our neighbors to fill the good jobs being developed in our City that we read about every day, we will certainly move the needle on income inequality.
This is one more case in which our challenge itself contains within it the kernel of opportunity to address it. The biggest gaps on job readiness are where our biggest opportunities are found: in tech and healthcare jobs. We need to focus job training efforts and that means not trying to be all points to all people. This may require us to make tough choices and to say no to some good ideas and programs that don’t fit in the master plan. however this is the right thing to do to make progress where we need it most.
We are likewise working toward a brand-new Economic Incentive policy at the city. Our Economic Development Department is focusing on creating opportunities to train local skill for local jobs. In the future, the very best means for an interested company to seek financial insight or even incentives from the City ought to be to produce or grow jobs in town, jobs we want and lack, for individuals that live here and are looking for opportunity.
We need to do big points on permitting.
Fixing our city’s broken permitting process remains a higher priority of my administration. The complexity and delays of the development and permitting process are not merely frustrating, they have actually a real impact on affordability. Small business owners are telling me they will certainly not try again to expand their operations in our city – despite the fact that their customers would certainly like them to, because of the burdensome process and expense.
This past year, the Zucker Report commissioned by the City Manager described in painstaking detail the enormity of the challenge. however if the Zucker Report of the Planning and Development Review Department was a wake-up call, then you’re a real deep sleeper. The complications in permitting have actually been along with us for a while, and there are no excuses not to fix them.
Our office has actually worked along with the Manger and his staff, as well as stakeholders, to articulate this question: If the permitting program were successfully fixed, how would certainly we know? The answers to that question are the performance metrics to which the public will certainly be able to hold the Manager and this Council accountable.
The “Roadmap to Success” plan put forward by the Development Services Department ought to make measurable improvements in permitting, some already taking place, from making it possible for you to make a payment or file an application or submit a strategy online, to such advancements as releasing the cell phone numbers for building inspectors to increase accessibility.
But the key to fixing permitting is the performance metrics.
This is a two-year process. My pledge to you is to continue regularly and periodically convening public and stakeholder meetings along the means to make sure that progress is happening over time and that at the end of two years we have actually indeed reached success. This is a problem that we can fix it, and we will.
We need to do big points on Austin Energy.
If we do not reform our utility’s business model, we face the threat of the legislature taking control of our utility away from us. That’s why we have actually been working along with the City Manager to bring the transparency and sound business practices that Austin Energy should survive and thrive for decades to come.
One problem we have actually is along with the murky transfers of funds from the utility to the city’s general fund. No one appears to understand, trust, or particularly like this model.
So let’s modification it. I propose learning from San Antonio and moving to a model where the City of Austin, as the owner and shareholder of Austin Energy, gets paid a dividend in a transparent and reliable manner. This will certainly put our utility and our City on a more transparent and fiscally sustainable footing.
This coming year will certainly likewise have actually us looking at electric rates, both residential and commercial, to make sure they are reasonable and equitable and we are launching a Cost of Service Study that will certainly be the most transparent and visible of its kind anywhere in Texas.
Finally, both along with our energy and water companies, we need to begin the job of transitioning our current business models to ones that much better take into effect the means brand-new technologies are changing those industries.
These will certainly be considerable focuses of my time this year: affordability, mobility, the Spirit of East Austin, job training, permitting and Austin Energy. We will certainly much better make Austin affordable for the individuals that live in Austin and set into motion real and meaningful solutions. We will certainly realize opportunities by righting past wrongs, and turn congested eye sores and clogged corridors into healthy arteries and ways for you to get to job and to get home.
It is likewise important to mention, though there’s not time today to address, the job we will certainly likewise begin to enable a growing music industry and much better protect artists, to much better establish our resiliency as a city even in the face of acute stressors, to protect our environment (our core value) and to implement our Climate modification Plan, to establish a secure future along with sufficient water, to implement the My Brother’s Keeper program, and to modernize our development code.
Big points take time. Rome was not built in a day, and we will certainly not modification the course of this river in a year. When we come with each other next year to once again assess the state of our city, the measure of our triumph will certainly not be whether we have actually completed our work, however whether we have actually begun down a substantial and meaningful path and if we are still at it. This is not where our focus as a city ought to be for merely a year, however for a decade or more or even a generation.
Human endeavor need not always be folly. for each Austin Dam that collapses along with the very best laid plans of city fathers there is one more that generates power and lifts a region from darkness, much like LBJ did when he got funding for the system of dams along the Colorado River. When done correctly, a dam can modification the future by harnessing a river.
This, in the end, is our choice. We can sit by the river while the water rises, congratulating ourselves on circumstance and basking in the glow of our magical city.
Or we can harness this growth to modification the future course of the river, transforming Austin into a more fully realized version of itself. To do just what Austin needs us to do, we have actually to be much better versions of ourselves, more willing to fail in the pursuit of progress, much less afraid of doing just what has actually never been done before. If we discover the courage to lead our city to where it’s asking us to go, if we can job with each other to do big things, then we will certainly be a fantastic city.
And then we can truly say that the state of our city is strong.
from Golden Land Travel http://ift.tt/1U8BeKB
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