https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msKY0eXjDis

After years of studies and resolutions, the Council is poised to do something real about displacement in the eastern crescent. The City Auditor gathered all those reports and ideas, and turned them over to a newly created, Council-appointed Anti-Displacement Task Force.

Our city is eager for this task force to do its work so that those ideas, together with new ones now arising from the community, have a place for them all to go together – to be assessed, compared, analyzed and discussed, so that the best of all the ideas can rise to the top and be reported back for Council consideration and implementation.

The Task Force will review and inform their recommendations with a parallel study conducted by UT Austin, initiated by CM Pool, that maps the vulnerability of displacement for all Austinites, and also offers specific tools that correlate to susceptibility of displacement.

We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past any more than we can afford the cost that the status quo is imposing on our community. Our job is to prevent an unacceptable future.

After years of unimplemented ideas, we need to do something to address displacement. We need the Anti-Displacement Task Force and the UT study to reflect the urgent certainty that their ideas will be taken up by the Council following their deliberative process.

This Council has shown a special willingness to try new things and to put new resources behind the mission of housing the homeless.

I thank Mayor Pro Tem Tovo for all the work she has done over many years to address this challenge. We are all excited about the new innovations you have championed like the inter-disciplinary HOST teams that this Council acted to expand this year, and the “Pay For Success” model around which this Council has begun to rally support.

This city had a successful federal pilot program in helping homeless youth. And we’ve got an in-house innovation team working on a $1.5-million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies to develop smarter ways to help our most vulnerable neighbors. Alan Graham and many in our community are launching the expansion of the very successful Community First model.

This Council, city staff, public safety officers, and community stakeholders has acted to address the downtown drug crisis, and with Council Member Troxclair’s leadership is creating a pilot temporary work program for those experiencing homelessness. We are on track to meet our goal of 400 new Permanent Supportive Housing Units by the end of this year.

But for all we’ve done, there is no doubt that we need to do more to help those experiencing homelessness. We need to set a specific goal, and then we need to fund it.

Let’s make the “ECHO Plan goal” the City’s goal. We should commit to housing the homeless. Not more homeless. Not most of the homeless. Our goal should be finding Homes for all the Homeless, as we find them.

We know how to do it. We are among the cities that have achieved effective zero in homeless veterans. Soon, our City staff will be coming to Council, armed with our Audit Reports and the ECHO Plan, so that the Council can focus holistic policy direction.

Bottom line, we all know we’re going to need to find even more money if we’re serious about addressing the homelessness challenge. We are going to have to find all the new revenue streams possible. That’s why the concept of the Downtown Puzzle is so attractive to me.

Your Council has asked the University of Texas to study the possible expansion of the convention center and report back in the Fall. There are questions to be answered. And if, that study comes back with favorable answers, then we should move forward to capture the associated $10 million per year in tourist dollars that may well be available to invest in re-scoping the ARCH downtown and helping Austin to meet its homelessness challenge at scale city-wide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=272NnGAvTbg

One of the most important aspects of this Council’s work on affordability is redirecting resources and effort to where they can do the most good. This focus requires us to address racial and economic inequities. The long economic boom we’re enjoying here is not colorblind. Even after years of robust job growth, unemployment in Black and Hispanic households is way too high.

Did you know that in Austin, life expectancy is ten years greater in the West than in the East. Ten additional years to love your family and be loved. Ten more years to achieve so you can leave something behind.
That inequity is something we inherited, but we don’t have to pass it down to future generations. We need to expand opportunity in Austin to include everyone in every neighborhood.

The Spirit of East Austin framework, initiated three years ago by CMs Houston, Pool, Renteria, Troxclair and me, is about to bring to Council the fruits of the most extensive public engagement process I’ve ever seen. This has been a long time in coming.

Under the umbrella of that framework, we initiated the Mayor’s Institutional Racism Task Force. This task force has provided racial equity training for 210 corporate, non-profit, government, education, and grass roots leaders with another 160 to be trained later this week (70 of which will attend training entirely in Spanish). I hope thousands of Austinites get the opportunity to engage in such training.

It is a testament to her commitment to this work that CM Alter opened up her office budget to help other council staffs attend the training.

That task force’s work is also seeing tangible results. Out of 247 unique recommendations from the institutional racism task force, 60 have already been implemented, and an additional 96 recommended actions are either already underway or are planned.

Our city is finally taking actual steps to implement the Colony Park Master Plan II. It is important that this great master planned community is being planned in partnership with the community and is going to serve the holistic needs of the long-time residents. With CM Houston’s continued leadership, that neighborhood should soon have its pool… and more.

A special thanks to the Colony Park Neighborhood Association for their persistent, passionate, and knowledgeable engagement; you have taught us the true meaning of community engagement.

This Council created our Equity Office and it has already begun realizing the vision. It has just completed an analysis of the racism Task Force recommendations; it has begun making racial equity an integral part of each department’s practices and policies, as well as ensuring that equity is embedded in the priority strategic outcomes the Council is adopting to guide its work. Racial equity will be forever something we include from the get-go and not just as a box that’s checked at the end of a process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLKyyd0elgQ

But any truly honest conversation about affordability must also address the rapid rise of property taxes.

We all know, property taxes are going up. And going up too much, too fast. In fact, for the median priced home in most of Austin, all property taxes combined have gone up $1,408 in just the last five years. That’s a lot.

But did you know that $1,023 of that increase does not come from increases in city taxes, or county taxes, or hospital district taxes, or taxes to fund AISD schools, or all of those taxes added together?

This brings me to something that, for my money, I’ve always thought were missing in our State of the City Addresses: charts!

…Actually, it’s a bar graph. It answers the question: Which governmental entity is the out-of-control taxing entity here in Austin?

The answer: It’s the State. Look at that increase over the last five years. (That’s is the part of the school district tax that the state takes and isn’t used to educate children in Austin.)

$1,023 of the $1,408 property tax increase you are feeling over the last five years comes solely from the increase in the State Property Tax?

Let me show you another bar graph. Here, again, you can see that the total property tax bill has gone up from $4,653 to $6,061 in the last five years.

You can also see that the city property tax has gone up from $1,041 to $1,250 or a total of $209 over the last five years.
The county property tax, the hospital district, all other property taxes, except schools, added together have gone up about $242 over the same period of time.

The property taxes to fund AISD schools in Austin has actually gone down from $2,032 to $1,965 over the last five years.
But, look at the State Property Tax (again, the money the State takes from the AISD property tax and spends somewhere else). Five years ago, it was at $355. This year, it’s at $1,378. That is an increase of 288% over the last five years.
Did you realize that this year, the State of Texas will keep more of your local property taxes than the City of Austin? ($1,378 vs. $1,250)

When people in most of Austin, inside the AISD, say that property taxes are going up too much too fast, we are not talking about the City or the County or the Hospital District or even AISD’s cost to educate Austin children.

When people say that property taxes are going up too much, we’re talking about the State Property Tax.

It is hard to believe that the Governor is even talking about trying to limit city, county and school district tax increases to 2.5% per year (without a vote), when the State Property Tax has increased by 288% in just five years.
It is high time the State legislature finally does something about increases in property taxes. And, if they’re going to really do something, then our State leaders cannot try to divert us away from the real problem. It’s the State Property Tax. To fix its runaway tax, the State must fix and appropriately fund the school finance system. Nothing else will actually give us property tax relief in Austin.

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.