Based on past history, around 40-60% of the votes cast for these weird off year elections are cast on Election Day. So we will not know a winner of any election until E-Day votes are counted which don't start getting reported out until 9-10PM

% E-day:
Nov. '23: 51%
Nov. '21: 45%
Nov. '19: 60%

Day 10, only 2 more days left!

modalshift.co/nov-25-election

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Why is Austin facing a TRE? Public safety - especially police - grows general fund share. Sales tax has slowed & property is capped. For now, housing trust fund functionally zeroed out, social services cut, no reserves added, Austin Energy raided more. New APD contract creates further imbalance.

NEW: a 5.75 cent TRE proposal from Laine-Siegel-Ellis-Qadri. Pretty notable that Laine & Ellis back it, as this signals it could get up to 9 votes (Watson wants 3.5 cents & Duchen at no TRE). It’s a bit under 3 cents on housing+homeless 👍🏽.

Seems likely to be near consensus on the dais 1/2

At today’s Council budget work session:

-6 votes for >5 cents (2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9).
-Mayor & Ellis more skeptical, likely prefer <5.
-Duchen seems like a firm no.
-Interesting that CM Laine straight up said she’s leaning 5 cents.

Is near-unanimity valuable for campaign optics & fundraising?

A peculiarity of the City TRE discussion is that the different funding scenarios are just that…spreadsheets. They are not ironclad promises unless the ballot language promises specific cent amounts to priorities. Need that or public safety will be allowed to eat into the scenario line items.

In new City budget, from ‘23 to ‘26, APD will get ~$100m more. APD’s share of the general fund grows from 35% to 38%. This shift contributes to the zeroing out of the affordable housing trust fund. There will also be less policing/capita because the new police contract explodes cost/policing hour.

Like NYC, Austin adopted ranked-choice voting (RCV) via ballot measure in ‘21. Alas, the Texas Lege banned it. NYC also has publicly-financed municipal campaigns. We had a chance to pass “Democracy Dollars” voucher system. But the measure unfortunately failed 57%-43% in ‘21.

As I’ve previously noted, the D8
Council race has gotten a lot of early buzz, but this County race seems to have several candidates with more meaningful substantive differences.

Here’s the Metric’s rec for your weekend read: a very interesting profile of 44-year old NYPD Commissioner Tisch.

A lot of implications for Austin about City org chart, actual civic leadership, and getting policing right.

nymag.com/intelligence...

The Austin City Council District 8 race seems to have more media buzz but, in terms of policy stakes, the Travis County Precinct 2 contest is more meaningful. Real policy differences in that one. The County has grown its policy footprint as the new attention economy has made it under-covered…

Given this new memo detailing more extensive transmission leaks in the AW system than previously understood, we should revisit if our AW capex budget is optimally sized to address this AND figure out how to contain the explosion in cost/mile of leak repair.

services.austintexas.gov/edims/docume...