https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QelYBvCvfqY

To help the working poor get out of poverty, we have to help train people for better jobs. That’s why I hope this year our Council will adopt the Master Community Workforce Plan. I’m proud to have joined with Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt to ask our workforce development community to bring us this first ever regional workforce development plan.

Working together, our Chambers of Commerce, businesses, workforce agencies, local colleges and our community college have presented us with a plan to lift 10,000 economically disadvantaged local residents into middle-skill jobs by 2021.

We have as many good jobs here as we have good people. But they don’t match up. We need to help people who live here now to get the training to fill those jobs. And we’re going to get this done.

This year your Council will reform how Austin does economic incentives. This is part of creating a more affordable future for Austin. We’re going to focus this tool to more specifically achieve the benefits our community most values and needs.

We thank CM Casar for his leadership in passing the recent ordinance on earned sick leave, because even if it was primarily about keeping our community safe and healthy, it is an important piece of helping to make sure that people that work in Austin can afford to live here.

Now, I join many, if not nearly all, of my colleagues, and I think maybe taking action in just a week or two, to ensure that the city adopts for itself the same regulations that were in the ordinance on sick leave that we just passed for the community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXKVuPtGlu4

We also have to work on affordability. While our work on affordability is nowhere near finished, and will continue as long as our economy continues to grow, we’ve taken real steps to help ensure that people who work in our city can afford to live here, too.
The first thing we think of when we think about affordability is housing prices, and that’s where we’re making important progress.

For the majority of us that don’t own homes, rents are finally leveling off. Supply has increased and is now finding greater balance with demand. Rents were flat last year, and anticipated to be flat this year, too. While not the only factor, housing supply’s impact on housing cost is real.
The Council is also increasing the supply of subsidized affordable housing. Since this City Council took office in 2015, we have increased spending from the Affordable Housing Trust Fund by 530%.

From the time we took office until now, this City has incentivized or co-invested in the construction of more than 2,000 completed income-restricted affordable units – and more than 6,300 are in progress. Important leadership has come from Council Members Casar and Renteria and others of our colleagues on the Council.

For homeowners, we are making progress on permitting reform to make it cheaper and easier to add on a bathroom to your house. The expedited permitting program this Council approved last year is producing big results this year, with a tenfold increase in expedited permits. Nearly all the projects completed through Expedited Permitting got their permits within one day after a review meeting.
We’re refunding those inexplicable jumps in water bills, and with Council Member Troxclair’s leadership are making sure that does not happen again. For seniors and the disabled, we increased your property tax break for the third year in a row. And we lowered Austin Energy electric rates. But we’re not done yet.

We need to give seniors and the disabled another property tax break for a fourth straight year, and this year we should cut water bills for everybody.

The affordability crisis is hitting our musicians and artists particularly hard. This is not new, but what is new is how the Council is moving forward to help, working with artists and the Music and Arts Commissions to implement the Music and Creative Ecosystem Omnibus Resolutions. We’re moving forward with professional development and on revenue opportunities with a busking pilot, a Facebook Live series, and a Live Music Venue Best Practice Guide.

Last week, we passed CM Kitchen’s ordinance focusing on preserving and creating spaces for our creative communities. The new Chapter 380 incentive program now being developed city-wide will propose a focus on encouraging new creative spaces.
I want to call out the leadership of Gary Keller who is helping to take care of musicians and music venues…
…Gary is but one example of how our city benefits from the extraordinary yet quiet work of many of our citizens.
There is one music/creative arts initiative that deserves special mention. We’re seeing promising results with the successful trial of later, live music hours on Red River! After twenty years of… let’s be honest… of warfare, music venues and nearby residents are working together to ensure both the vitality of the live music scene and the peacefulness of our neighborhoods. That’s not an isolated example…

Within the next two months, artists, venues and residential property owners will bring to Council an “Agent of Change” proposal with consensus rules governing new sound in old neighborhoods and new neighbors near established venues.
This is an example, perhaps one of the best examples, of how Austin needs to move past the old paradigms of “who’s fighting who” in our city, and into a future where we value collaboration, listening to and respecting each other. We need to find the truths in each other’s realities. That is the only way we preserve the best of our city.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pq7AWl4LlA

Let me start with one of the top challenges facing Austin, traffic.

Thanks to this Council, our staff, and the 2016 Mobility Bond that you passed, we’re doing more actual work than ever before.

We made our four (4) top-crash intersections safer, reducing crashes by as much as 67%, and started work on the next two. Even though there’s much more to do, city-wide traffic deaths are at a three-year low.
By the end of 2020, we’re scheduled to build 30 new miles of sidewalks to make your neighborhoods safer and for your children to more safely get to their schools.

The city is joining with the State on Loop 360, 2222 & 620, Parmer Lane and, with Council Member Flannigan’s leadership, Anderson Mill. We’re putting in more than $110 million from the bond, and TxDOT is more than matching us with an additional almost $230 million. Within a few years you’ll be able to drive down Loop 360 and never hit a single stoplight.
We’re executing the 2016 Mobility Bond on our most trafficked corridors (North and South Lamar, Burnet, MLK, William Cannon, Slaughter, Airport, Guadalupe and Riverside.)

It’s proposed that all the corridors get major work. We’re talking 50 new turn lanes at 30 intersections, 120 smart signals that time themselves automatically, and 30 miles of repaved streets…

…We’re talking about safety improvements that include upgrades at 13 of our next-most crash prone intersections and 40 new mid-block pedestrian crosswalk signals. And we’re talking about 75 miles of connected sidewalks and paths and 40 miles of bike lanes along the corridors and 100 miles of bicycle route connections.

You know what this means?

The engineers tell us that all this work will reduce traffic delays by 25% and collisions by 15%. This is the work you are expecting us to do, and these are the results you are expecting us to get.

Even with executing the bond on time and on budget, our work is just beginning. We must continue planning for the future.
This Spring, our city staff will propose our city’s first, comprehensive, locally focused Strategic Mobility Plan. This is the plan that will set out a long-term mobility vision and one that coordinates our city’s long-term planning with that of Capital Metro, the Regional Mobility Authority, and the Metropolitan Planning Organization (or CAMPO).

We will see three data-driven mobility scenarios that show a new way of thinking about mobility: one focused on travel time, reliability, and access to opportunity; another on affordability; and another on forecasted growth. With a rigorous, public engagement process beginning this year, Austin will adopt a north star for future mobility investments.

Capital Metro will bring forward this year a mass transit vision for the entire region. The losing urban rail proposition of 2014 focused on one segment of what needed to be an entire system. This year, we’ll see, with different modes, what an entire system might look like.

There might be nothing more important to the future of this city than these new visions for a better transportation future for our city and our region. We look to CM Kitchen and our Council Mobility committee to begin the process to secure that future. We count on the leadership of CMs Garza, Renteria and Kitchen, who sit on the CapMetro board, and on CMs Alter, Flannigan and Kitchen, who serve with me on CAMPO, where I was just elected Vice Chair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXPp0yu5mdM

So let’s begin… Now, more than ever, I value opportunities for us to take stock of a year’s progress and to measure ourselves against the needs of the future.

In these turbulent times, we must deliberately and seriously speak and act in a way true to who we are. Our city continues to face formidable challenges. We cannot pretend we don’t see them. We need to act and to plan for what the future will bring.

The question you should be asking is whether your Council has the will to seize the moment and to act on the scale of our challenges. The answer to that question, when you look back a year and look ahead a year, is “yes.”

Ten years from now… twenty years from now… a new generation of Austinites will ask us what we did, at this time of great risk, to preserve and protect the magic of Austin. This is our moment.

We must act with our eyes focused clearly on the future.

Last year, when we gathered together for this purpose, I said that if the world completely lost its mind, we’d still be Austin, Texas.

…I did not mean that as a challenge, but the world certainly held up its end of the bargain.

It seems our country is losing its way in the world. Here in Austin, though, we know who we are. And if we remain true to ourselves, we will always find the solid ground on which to build our future.

Tonight, we know the state of our city is stronger than ever. And this past year, we repeatedly re-affirmed who we are… In fact, we shouted to the whole world, that we are Austin, Texas…

The Austin metropolitan area added 30,000 jobs last year.

We’ve got the lowest unemployment rate in two decades. In fact, we have the second-lowest unemployment rate in the whole country.

We’re still the safest big city in Texas.

We lead the state in startups, venture capital, and patents.

We’re the best place to start a small business in the country.

And the best place to live in America.

But in Austin, we should never measure our progress by how well we are doing compared to other cities.

We can only say the state of our city is strong if we are affirmatively building a future in which we preserve the spirit and soul of Austin.

In this last year, your City Council and City Staff laid an important foundation for that future in many ways, chief among them on traffic, affordability, racial and economic inequality, homelessness, and climate change.
This coming year we are poised to build further on that foundation in even bigger and more transformative ways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjpDpGDLdAE&t=6s

Mayor Pro Tem and my colleagues on the Council, Manager Cronk, distinguished guests, and fellow Austinites:

Before I begin, I want to thank Consul General Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez of Mexico for introducing me this evening.

People don’t realize that how closely we are working together these days. It hasn’t always been so. Used to be we saw each other only at happy occasions, like at Casa Mexico during SXSW.

Times have changed, and so has our relationship. I want to tell you something that not many people know. When the immigration raids began earlier last year and Austin was made a particular target, we had no reliable access to information except what we got from my friend, the Consul General. At that moment, we found ourselves in common cause in service of this city — and all of its people.

That bond was strengthened when Hurricane Harvey looked like it was headed right at us. His government immediately offered shelter to any Texan who might need it.

You and your wife were in our local shelters tending to all our guests. Again and again, my friend, you demonstrate that you care about people – all people – yours, mine, and ours.

Consul General Gonzalez Gutierrez, you are my partner in some of the biggest challenges facing our two countries. Tonight, I pledge to you not only continued brotherhood and friendship, but continued vigilance in our efforts on immigration.

We want our neighbors in Austin to be safe regardless of who they are or where they came from. We know preserving trust makes us the safest big city in the state. We will not use fear to divide our community. Consul General, you can count on Austin, Texas.