Watson Wire: A Good Year

As 2023 concluded, I enjoyed reading the newsletters from my colleagues on the City Council who showed pride in their individual accomplishments as well as the successes of the Council as a whole. I’m pleased to be working with this group and thankful for the team approach we’ve seen this year at Austin City Hall.

I ran for mayor to shake up City Hall. I compared the place to a car with the front wheels badly out of alignment – it was still moving forward but pulled horribly to one side and bounced, vibrated, rattled, and rolled like it was coming apart. In my view, our local government needed some alignment and stabilization.

We did a lot of that in 2023. The culture at City Hall has changed. We’re making local government work better, less chaotic, and with a focus on results.

Of course, for some things, we spent time over the past year laying the foundation to get them fixed?and will keep working on them.

Stability through Leadership

The year started with a few big things that proved the need for a different approach and a shakeup.

We faced a winter storm that revealed how badly our emergency management was out of alignment. Quickly and decisively, we replaced the City Manager and brought in?Jesús Garza as the interim City Manager. And he, in turn, brought in a team dedicated to professionalism, common sense, and success. They’ve accepted the challenges and made changes needed to get us through a demanding year. I truly thank Jesús and his team, including all the public employees that work every day to make Austin special.

Now, we have new leaders at the Homeland Security & Emergency Management Department as well as Austin Energy. We’ve made numerous and significant changes in operations in those services this year.

We also have new leadership at the Development Services Department, which pretty much everyone said was fundamentally broken. As promised in the campaign, we brought in a third party (McKinsey Consulting) to do a performance review. That review is complete and being implemented,?resulting in significant positive outcomes already.?Overall, site plan turnaround times are better today than they have been in the last six years. A lot of folks who complained loudly about that broken city function have slowly begun to change their tune.

We utilized an effective, open process that allowed us to usher through a complicated city budget that strengthened our reserves, invested in our people, and reflected the Council Members’ priorities for our community.

?The so-called Zilker Park Vision Plan was badly dividing Austin and was set up to damage that jewel. We stopped that.

Here are a few other areas where we’ve made real progress:

Public Safety

We started the year with real problems in our 911 emergency response. We’ve greatly improved 911 staffing so that, in the last half of November, operators answered 93% of calls within 15 seconds. That’s a big change just since July, when 69% were answered in 15 seconds. Since January of 2023, we’ve hired 85 new employees and the training team has conducted more than 25,000 hours of new employee training.

Both the EMS and Firefighters unions have new contracts that were completed this year. EMS vacancies have been significantly reduced in 2023 as a result of new recruiting efforts and the labor contract approval. In March, the Council passed an ordinance to assure our police officers’ salaries and benefits even in the absence of a long-term contract. I’ve committed to passing an updated version of the ordinance early in ’24.

We tried to increase needed patrols by partnering with the Texas Dept. of Public Safety. While aspects of the partnership were helpful, it didn’t work the way I had hoped it would and we ended it. But I’ll always have a bias for action,?and if something doesn’t work exactly as I hoped, I’ll learn from it and move on. In my view, that’s leading. In something as complicated as city government, we have to live and learn and keep trying so we can actually begin to move forward with a smoother ride.

Housing, Homelessness & Affordability

For almost a decade, City Hall was stuck when it came to reform that can provide more needed housing for Austin. That changed in 2023. We’re tackling the issues that have made it hard to create housing in Austin and focused on necessary land-use changes to encourage more housing, particularly along our transit corridors. And we did it by being open and giving notice to people about what was going on.

I understand that efforts like the HOME initiative have detractors. I get it. That’s one of the reasons I offered an amendment (adopted unanimously) to collect data on how it really works. We need practical information and not just theory to judge outcomes and calibrate when needed.

The City’s program for addressing those living homeless was badly out of sorts. This year, we created a stand-alone Homeless Strategy Office to better manage these complicated services. We’ve also opened successful new shelters, including the Marshalling Yard, which has 300 new beds and wasn’t being used at all when we started the year. Just last month, the city’s new Eighth Street Shelter?started welcoming unhoused women and transgender neighbors, replacing the Salvation Army facility that the non-profit surprisingly shuttered. This will give us another 150 needed shelter beds.

Dealing with the State

I promised we’d have a better relationship with state government. We had a successful legislative session, including protecting Austin’s autonomy over its electric utility and the desire of Austin voters for light rail, even though some knives were out for us. Additionally, the better relationship paid dividends for Austin beyond just avoiding bad things. For example, I was able to obtain $65 million of state funds to assist us in addressing homelessness.?I joined Dr. Dawn Buckingham, the Commissioner of the General Land Office, in working on the old, dilapidated Hobby Building in downtown to turn that block into workforce housing.

Looking to 2024,?we’ll be focused on continuing our important progress on the fundamental issues that affect your daily life in Austin, including naming Austin’s next permanent City Manager. I’m anticipating big ideas for programs addressing mobility & infrastructure workforce, childcare, water and climate, policing, homeless services, housing, and more. It will be an exciting year, made possible by the good, stabilizing work in 2023.