Steve Adler Wants to Be Mayor

He views the 10-1 system as a gift and an
opportunity to restart, revitalize city government

by Ken Martin
© The Austin Bulldog 2014
Part 1 of a series
Posted Wednesday, April 23, 2014 2:58pm

It may have been inevitable that Stephen Ira “Steve” Adler, a soft-spoken attorney, would one day want to lead the City of Austin into a new era of governance.

Adler is one of three children born to Lee Elliott Adler and Selma Adler. He was born in Washington. DC, March 23, 1956, and raised in that city and in Maryland, where he went to public schools. He grew up steeped in the culture of national news and political coverage broadcast from Washington by CBS television, where his father worked. As a boy he sometimes found himself in the studio with legendary journalists Eric Sevareid, Roger Mudd, and White House reporter Dan Rather, with an occasional visit from New York-based Walter Cronkite.

As a budding 17-year-old high school senior Adler clerked for Congressman Gilbert Gude, R-Maryland, in the Capitol. It was 1973 and the Watergate hearings were underway that summer. Adler said he sat in on the Senate hearings on the only day, June 27, 1973, when John Lennon and wife Yoko Ono also attended the hearings. At the time Lennon was appealing a federal deportation order that sprang from President Richard Nixon’s disdain for Lennon’s political views and influence.

Forty years later, in an exclusive interview with The Austin Bulldog, Adler said, “That was one of the highlights of my life. I sat behind John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It was pretty cool.” (Unfortunately he didn’t get into the widely circulated photo shown here.)

Adler arrived in Austin in 1978 to attend law school at the University of Texas. He was fresh out of Princeton University with a bachelor of arts degree. “I worked and they gave me a scholarship, which is the only way I could go to the college I went (to).”

Over the ensuing decades Adler has spent a lot of time, energy, and money supporting nonprofit organizations and political causes. (The next story in this series will provide an in-depth examination of these community service endeavors.)

Now he wants to be Austin’s next mayor.

“I think that when you find yourself in a city that you love that has been so good to you, that’s facing the challenges that it’s facing with a new government restart, making it an absolutely crucial moment in time, and you are able to be able to help, I don’t know how you don’t do that. I don’t know how five years from now you look back and say, ‘I was in a position to be able to do something and I didn’t do it.’ That’s why I’m running.”

A new mayor for a new government

Criminal Complaint Hits Commissioner Daugherty

Save Our Springs Alliance files complaint a day
before vote to fund State Highway 45 project

 by Ken Martin
© The Austin Bulldog 2014
Posted Monday, March 17, 2014 8:29pm

The Save Our Springs Alliance filed a criminal complaint with the Travis County Attorney’s Office today, alleging that Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty had violated the Texas Public Information Act by not turning over his correspondence related to the proposed controversial State Highway 45 Southwest. (See: SOS Alliance Criminal Complaint re: Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty)

The complaint came the day before the Travis County Commissioners Court could vote to approve an initial payment of $2.5 million to help pay for design and construction of SH45 SW and to be obligated to pay an additional $12.5 million by October 30.

The SOS Alliance has long opposed the construction of SH45 SW over the sensitive recharge zone of the Barton Springs Edwards Aquifer. Daugherty has spearheaded efforts to get SH45 SW built.

The timing of the vote is important, given the recent Democratic Primary election. Former Travis County Commissioner Sarah Eckhardt is the Democratic nominee for county judge, and former City Council Member Brigid Shea is the party’s nominee for the Precinct 2 county commissioner’s seat that Eckhardt vacated to run for county judge. Both are unlikely to support the new highway.

Celebration of Democracy Honors Achievements

But notes the challenges ahead with a City
Council composed of district representatives

by Ken Martin
© The Austin Bulldog 2014
Posted Thursday, February 6, 2014 5:48pm

An extended standing ovation, completes with whoops and hollers, erupted Wednesday night when the League of Women Voters Austin Area’s Francis McIntyre announced to a crowd of some 125 people at the Green Pastures restaurant, “I present to you the first Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission in the history of Austin.”

Each of the 14 members of the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (ICRC) was honored with an award as McIntyre called them one-by-one to step in front of the crowd. (See list of members below.)

The League’s State of the City 2014 dinner celebrated voter approval of Austin’s new form of city governance that will be launched following the first-ever election this coming November of council members from geographic districts that were drawn by the ICRC.

The Proposition 3 ballot measure to establish 10 council districts drew 146,496 votes in the November 6, 2012, election, besting by more than 24,000 votes the alternative plan put on the ballot by council members opposed to the 10-1 plan.

Featured speaker Steve Bickerstaff—the founder of the Bickerstaff Heath law firm and the attorney who drafted the initial plan that wound up as Proposition 3 on the ballot through the grass-roots petitioning of Austinites for Geographic Representation—called the victory “an extraordinary example of the ability of people to take control of government and an exercise in democracy.”

Bickerstaff praised Linda Curtis, the sparkplug campaign coordinator for Austinites for Geographic Representation; City Auditor Ken Mory, who was instrumental in implementing the application process for volunteers who wanted to serve on the ICRC; the CPAs who (during tax season) winnowed the 450 applications to form a pool of those best qualified to serve on the ICRC; and the ICRC members themselves for accomplishing the difficult task of holding together and drawing the boundaries of the 10 districts from which future council members will be elected.

“A lot of people thought it (the process) would crash and burn but the reality is, you did it,” Bickerstaff said. “The ICRC is extraordinary because the commissioners were willing to spend their own time and skills to make the process work.” He also noted that the ICRC’s mission was completed for less than $150,000.