Meeker Enters District 10 Race

Second try for City Council seat energizes
Zoning and Platting Commission member

by Ken Martin
© The Austin Bulldog 2014
Posted Wednesday July 2, 2014 10:02am

Jason Warren Meeker launched his bid for the District 10 City Council seat Sunday June 22 at the Waterloo Ice House in northwest Austin with some 16 adult well-wishers on hand and a total of 26 who signed in at some point during his two-hour appearance.

Meeker, who heads marketing communication firm Meeker Marcom, roused his backers with a stump speech that quoted Abraham Lincoln quoting the Bible, saying, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

“Here in Austin we’ve been divided politically for far too long and even today the power is too concentrated, it’s too deaf and too blind to the concerns of the people of Austin,” Meeker said. That changed in 2012, he said, when 60 percent of Austin voters approved the election of city council members from 10 geographic districts, a new system that will take effect in January, after the November 4 general election and December 16 runoffs.

“We’re about to witness a new experiment in democracy that will unite our city. Not just 10 different districts, but one city united, represented equally, a house united—and that’s why I’m running.”

Kitchen Launches District 5 Bid

Former state representative packs the
house at the iconic Broken Spoke

by Ken Martin
© The Austin Bulldog 2014
Posted Friday, June 20, 2014 10:59am
Updated Friday, June 20, 2014 12:09pm (to add other District 5 candidates)

The dance floor was far too crowded for boot scooting at the legendary South Austin honky-tonk as City Council Candidate Ann Elizabeth Kitchen stepped to the mic for a speech Tuesday night, June 17.

“In the 20-plus years that I’ve lived in South Austin, I have dedicated my life to taking an active role in improving our community,” Kitchen said. “As a former state legislator and as an advocate I’ve represented much of District 5 in the past. I do know how to effectively work with, listen to, and advocate, fight for the people of South Austin.”

She said she moved to Austin in 1973 to attend the University of Texas. “After graduating I worked with special needs kids and their parents. That was important to me. It taught me a very important lesson. That lesson was that if we’re going to make real progress sometimes we have to roll up our sleeves and change the system.

“That’s one reason I went back to school to study law at UT. I wanted to use my energy to help reform government, to find some real solutions for tough issues and work towards giving people the chance to create a better life for themselves. I’ve been trying to do that for the past 20 years,” Kitchen said.

Steve Adler's Other Environmental Lawsuits

 Three more cases in which the candidate’s legal
work pitted him against environmental regulations

by Ken Martin
© The Austin Bulldog
Part 5 in a series
Posted Tuesday, June 17, 2014 10:45am

Austin mayoral candidate Stephen Ira “Steve” Adler has handled hundreds of lawsuits, he says, and he doesn’t want to be judged by the handful in which he represented developers who, through his legal assistance and occasional legislative maneuvering by others, were able to avoid complying with the City of Austin’s current environmental regulations.

“My concern is that others in the city want to get me defined by three cases out of hundreds of cases and there's a narrative they're trying to create on the street and it's not fair and it's not true,” Adler said in a May 15 interview. (For the record, there are four such cases.)

“I’m talking to as many people in the environmental community as I can,” he said. “I’m asking people to judge me on matters over time and not ... walk away thinking I was challenging SOS Ordinance.”

That’s one way of putting it. Another would be that he and other attorneys he worked with helped property owners avoid complying with the Save Our Springs Ordinance, or other environmental protection ordinances that preceded it, by asserting a right to develop under older, less restrictive ordinances.

Whether an attorney running for office should be judged by the clients he represented is a question for voters to decide.

But an attorney’s clients definitely played a decisive role in a past city council election.

Opponent’s clients helped Slusher get elected

Tovo Launches Reelection Bid

Jam-packed crowd enthusiastic about keeping
Tovo as sole survivor from current city council

by Ken Martin
© The Austin Bulldog 2014
Posted Friday June 6, 2014 11:06am

Rousing cheers greeted incumbent Council Member Kathie Tovo, a District 9 candidate, as she launched her campaign to win a second term Tuesday night at El Mercado Restaurant in South Austin.

Tovo’s chief opponent is Council Member Chris Riley, who was first elected in 2009 to fill the unexpired term of Lee Leffingwell, when Leffingwell vacated that seat to run for mayor. So far the only other candidate to appoint a treasurer for the District 9 contest is Erin K. McGann, who lives on South Third Street. Riley lives downtown on San Antonio Street and Tovo lives north-central on West 32nd Street.

“When I ran for Council in 2011, I promised to be a different kind of council member, and I have worked hard to keep that promise,” Tovo said. “My service on the Council has been about representing people, representing everyday Austinites—not the lobbyists and developers that come before us in a steady stream. And I weigh every Council action, large or small, against the effect that it’s going to have on the people who live and work and raise their families in our neighborhoods.

Monitoring City Staff Conflicts of Interest

Public information requests and ongoing investigation
triggers reforms by Austin’s Ethics Review Commission

Investigative Report by Joseph Caterine and Ken Martin
© The Austin Bulldog 2014
Posted Wednesday June 4, 2014 10:33am

12 non-elected City of Austin officials failed to file Statements of Financial Information that were due in April 2013. That number is disputed by the City. (More about that later.) A public information request for the statements due in April 2014 is awaiting the City’s response.

Of the 147 Statements that were filed by non-elected officials in 2013, only 56 forms were filled out correctly, according to The Austin Bulldog’s analysis.

This is not a story exposing conflicts of interest among City of Austin staff members but about the city’s lack of oversight that would prevent or assist in the discovery of such conflicts.

This investigation exposed problems the city has in identifying which city staff members are required to file and found the city has done nothing to discipline those who file late or not at all.

The stir caused by six public information requests filed for this investigation between January 6 and April 2 caused the city staff and Ethics Review Commission to initiate a number of reforms. These reforms include revising reporting forms to clarify what information is required and agreeing to perform annual audits after the filing deadline.

“It’s always been my position that it seems like a waste to make people file this information if nobody actually looks at it,” Ethics Review Commission member Peter Einhorn said at the April 29 meeting.

And that's one of the key findings of this investigation: City Code requires designated city officials to file these reports but, beyond reminding officials to file, oversight has been nonexistent.