Lone Star Democracy Builders Association

... enough to run an automated phone survey. For his first term I just got glossy fliers. Now McCaul (CD-10) cares enough for me to hear his (recorded) voice.

The first question was whether I was a registered voter. He then went on to ask me questions about immigration, offshore drilling, the second amendment, flat taxes, and Iraq. I'm guessing the second amendment one was in there for identifying liberals vs. conservatives.

Sounds like he's concerned about securing our borders, more offshore drilling, changing the tax rate to favor the rich even more, and staying in Iraq until their government can take over -- regardless of the cost. I'd rather hear about border safety, more energy efficiency, undoing the changes to the tax code that support the rich over the middle class, working to bring our troops home from Iraq so we can be prepared for the next emergency, supporting our veterans, and figuring out where all the money spent on Iraq went. Oh yeah, and health care, de-politicizing our Justice department, re-securing our freedoms at home, re-gaining international respect, ensuring that we're ready for the next hurricane season, and encouraging voting instead of passing stupid, sneaky poll taxes.

But at least I've had another chance to give him a little feedback, albeit within the parameters he set. And he asked if he could follow up with me on the issues. Of course, he has yet to respond to any of the e-mails I've sent to him. [KBH may be a Republican party rubber-stamp, but at least I get some responses from her office. Up until now I've only gotten generic fliers from McCaul. And not even that from Cornyn.]

If I was really a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that the recent announcements of opposition candidates might have had something to do with the timing of the poll. By my count, we're up to three Democratic challengers. But the timing's just too close. I doubt anyone could have turned a phone poll around that quickly.

Posted by GlennM at 8:43 PM in Austin & Who Are The Republicans? | Permalink

Here's what I posted to my neighborhood newsgroup about the MOPAC Managed Lanes Open-House last week. While I learned a few things, the meeting was much less fulfilling than the subsequent Popeye's run to pick up Mardi-Gras dinner.

Continue reading "MOPAC Managed Lanes Open House" »

Posted by GlennM at 3:31 PM in Austin | Permalink

Last night I did an 8pm-12am voter registration shift at the Fiesta Mart on 38-1/2 and I-35. Considering that it was a rainy day in a non-presidential-election year, the turnout was good. While the noon-time and 4pm-8pm shifts seemed to be the busy ones, we got a good stream ourselves and beat our registration target. We registered our last voter at 11:52pm.

The other volunteer for the shift was Terry from DFT. I'm sorry I left the last meetup before the "Iraq for Sale" movie (it was my night to cook). Apparently the turnout was great and the movie got a lot of folks stirred up. Glen Maxey was there to move the anger into action at the end. After the continuous stream of bad news (Iraq, Katrina non-response, condoning torture, removing habeas corpus, NoKo nukes) I've been feeling burned out instead of motivated politically. I could have used the shot in the arm from the movie.

But I'm really glad I did the voter registration. The "midnight deadline" signs worked to pull folks in. It was great when people in a rush stopped what they were doing to register when they realized that last night was the deadline (or at least caught us on the way out). A few folks came up with voter registration forms already filled out, but which they hadn't mailed yet, and we were able to give them registration receipts. But the highlight for me was when folks actually identified themselves as available to work as election workers, just to see what being a poll worker would be like. One lady would have to reschedule her current two jobs just to do it. While democracy may be hurting, it's not dead yet.

Posted by GlennM at 8:31 AM in Action & Austin & Elections and Voting | Permalink | Comments (1)

This evening, I went with my secret decoder ring to a MOPAC-Neighborhood Associations Coalition (MONAC) meeting about the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO) Transit Oriented Development (TOD) plans.

What I learned:
- I don't have to lose sleep over a rail station being added at 35th and MOPAC anytime soon. Plans for an additional passenger rail line down MOPAC are contingent on getting the right-of-way from Union Pacific (UP), who's currently pissed at TX-DOT over a proposed N/S rail line parallel to the existing UP line (Trans-Texas Corridor?). Even if they do kiss and make up, current estimates are way out in the 2010-2012 range.
- TX-DOT may finally put up sample MOPAC noise-abatement walls in November. And they may even install the noise abatement walls (originally promised in the early 70's when MOPAC was built) before adding more managed lanes and/or passenger rail lines to MOPAC. Maybe.
- Send Jennifer Kim your feedback if you'd like the city to help develop financing plans for folks wanting to install energy-efficient windows and/or attic insulation, which might help with noise problems. The city currently provides rebates on the windows but has no plan to help make the installation affordable. If you do get new windows for noise reasons, make sure to get them installed properly and if you're in a historic home make sure they don't decrease the value of your home and/or screw up future historic designations.

Oh wait, the meeting was supposed to be about TOD plans. What I learned about them:
- The new stations and the red line should arrive in 2008.
- CAMPO owns the rail lines and schedules the freight on the lines. So the passenger trains will be on time. As opposed to Amtrak on the Union Pacific rails. Or any bus in town.
- There will be plenty of public input during the process. Neighborhood planning should happen for the first 1/2 of the stations soon, taking six months. The neighborhood planning for the other 1/2 of the stations will happen in the following six months.
- They are bending over backwards to not affect any existing single-family (SF) zoning. New zoning will affect current industrial/commercial zoning. There's still an open question on where to move the current industrial/commercial zoning, but this isn't a big issue, especially as the TOD areas only cover 0.02 percent of Austin's area.
- CAMPO owns the land needed for all of the stations. Developers will be responsible for developing the land around the stations, based on the zoning and design guidelines that will be tailored for each station.
- They're aware that the current planned lines don't reach existing population centers. But developing new TOD areas around existing track seemed possible while acquiring land for dedicated tracks to population centers hadn't been viable.
- The TOD developments will be bicycle-friendly as well as car- and bus-friendly.
- CAMPO is starting to include pockets of dense development in their traffic growth projections.

The devil always seems to be in the details. While a bit off-topic, the previous plan for the 35th and MOPAC station didn't include parking while the current proposal includes 90 spaces (huh? for who? in place of what?). It seems like it'll be up to the neighborhoods to keep a close eye on the plans for each station.

Which leads me to the following take-aways:
- After the defeat of the previous (2000) light rail plan, it seems like Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) is the new order of the day. When they were thinking of widening MOPAC, I really wasn't happy about having my tax dollars being spent on tearing down houses so someone outside of Austin can have an easier commute from their reduced-tax suburb. But I'd be ok with spending my taxes on relocating a few people so that new rail could be more successful out of the gate. Ok, I know I'm in the minority from the 2000 light rail election. But I don't think most people have been educated properly about the issues. And it seems like the pendulum may have swung too far in the NIMBY direction. While I've now got a little more sympathy for the current CAMPO plan, non-political friends of mine have the same reaction: the current rail plans will help them as much as the existing bus service -- nada.
- It seems like we have a more fundamental issue in that current zoning and development plans aren't being honored. Why spend time developing neighborhood plans if developers can ignore zoning and design rules and even stop-build orders without punishment? This seems to be the first development issue that needs to be addressed by the city council.

Links:
MONAC: http://www.main.org/hpwbana/MoNAC.htm
CAMPO: http://www.campotexas.org/

Posted by GlennM at 9:43 PM in Austin | Permalink | Comments (3)

Below is my letter to the Save Our Springs (SOS) Alliance, whose mission is to protect the Edwards Aquifer that feeds Barton Springs in Austin (a local, natural pool). They sent out a DVD this spring, I'm assuming to get folks riled up about Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, a large local employer) moving into the area and to teach folks more about the aquifer. As a supporter that's not frothing at the mouth over AMD, the whole thing left me as cold as a polar bear plunge.

Continue reading "SOS Preaching to the Choir" »

Posted by GlennM at 8:49 AM in Austin & How To Communicate | Permalink

SXSW has just put online one of their 2006 Interactive sessions called "The League of Technical Voters", featuring local State Representative Mark Strama on the panel. This session focuses on a new non-profit group that motivates and assists techies to work in politics. That sounds like this group on its better days.

You can download the session in MP3 format and listen at your leisure. More information on the SXSW podcasts is at http://2006.sxsw.com/coverage/podcasts/.

Posted by Ben at 1:33 PM in Austin & How To Communicate & Inspiration & Our Infrastructure | Permalink

(This is not the opinion of the whole LSDBA group, just me, Ben)

On Wednesday, my girlfriend and I went downtown to Mother Egan's for the monthly Democracy for Texas meeting. The main event of the evening was a debate on prop 1 and prop 2. Supporting the initiatives was Kathy Mitchell from the ACLU and S.O.S., while opposing then was a lawyer and Councilman Lee Leffingwell.

The meeting started with all four people being introduced, and then each side made an opening statement on Prop 1. It became clear that there were specific problems in the past with openness in city government that led these groups to join together to write this citizen initiative, with the biggest ones being the land development process (as seen in the dealings with AMD over its new space in the aquifer) and police oversight (with ACLU had a major problem with the sealed negotiations that led to the last police contract).

One of the big points of contention was the cost of implementing the amendment. The proponents say it would be in the $3 million range, while the city estimates $36 million. How could their estimates be so far apart? One reason is whether emails would need to be posted for public view. My reading of the amendment language seems to support the city's view that this would be necessary, while the proponents say that the language has escape measures that would allow them to not post them because it's not "practical".

The Q&A was heated, with about half of the people seeming to want to learn more, and half pushing their own agenda. It got a bit uncivil at times, but the DFT organizers finally stepped in as moderators to guide the debate forward. Ultimately, after hearing both sides and reading the Livable City study, I'm going to vote against prop 1; I support its spirit, but it's a badly worded proposal with lots of contradictions and poorly understood effects, and I think it would harm our city government more than the enhanced openness would help us.

On Prop 2, I left with a different opinion. The language of this amendment is much clearer, and it seeks to constrain the city to always favor policies that support protecting the aquifer. There are reasonable arguments that the handcuffs it puts on city government may hurt some of their efforts, but I think the priority it places on protecting the springs and aquifer is very much needed, especially as more development is attempted in that part of the city. Lee Leffingwell did indicate that he has been working on ordinance drafts that would do similar things but with more nuanced language, and I appreciated the attempt by the council to work towards the same goals, but I think having this language as part of our charter would ensure a consistent policy and show that the people of Austin strongly favor protection over new development.

Liveable City has studies of both propositions with a good explanation of what they would do, but no endorsements.

Posted by Ben at 11:14 AM in Austin | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here are my notes from this weekend's McMansion Task Force feedback forum at the Yarborough Library this last Saturday (5/18/2006). It was led by Chris Allen, a local architect, with two other Task Force members in attendance. They're under the gun to come up with permanent recommendations within the *next month*. If you want to learn about the process and/or make suggestions, now's the time.

Continue reading "McMansion Task Force Feedback Forum" »

Posted by GlennM at 7:07 PM in Austin | Permalink

Today's the start of early voting here in Texas. If you're in Travis County, here is a list of early voting sites. This vote isn't for any candidates, it's just about amendments to the Texas constitution. The Austin Chronicle has an editorial online that explains all of them. They endorse voting "no" to all the amendments, a position on which I agree. The most egregious amendment on this year's ballot is number two, the one which would prohibit Texas governments and business from recognizing committed same-sex relationships. This is being fought by the No Nonsense in November campaign, a group that deserves your support. Even if you don't care about the other issues, it's important for you to go and vote against hate

Posted by Ben at 12:58 PM in Austin & Elections and Voting | Permalink

The Texas Democratic Party is organized as a hierarchy of county groups which are composed of individual precincts. One of my bits of homework from our recent DemBuilders face-to-face meeting was to find out in what precinct I live, determine who was the precinct chair, and get in touch with that person to find out what I can do to help.

Here in Travis County, you can find out your precinct by looking up your voter registration records online. When I did that, I found that I'm in precinct 259. The Travis County Democratic Party has a PDF file posted on their site that lets you look up the different chairs. In my case, my chair is Reuben Leslie, Jr.

In my case, I then found something very surprising. I did a Google search and I found that my chair has built a precinct 259 website.. This has information about the precinct and the Texas Democratic party, along with specific calls to participate and act. I love it!

I still need to email Reuben and see how I can help, but I'm really glad that rather than being frustrated that nothing was happening, I was able to find a local resource for democracy right in my backyard.

Posted by Ben at 5:10 PM in Austin & Our Infrastructure | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last Saturday, Glenn and I attended the second general meeting of Austin Moving Forward, a group that's trying to organize Austin's progressive groups into a coalition that can tackles the problems of our city. It's a worthy goal, and the last meeting provided plenty of examples of groups like this making a difference in cities like Los Angeles.

One of the big issues with the last meeting was the lack of diversity in the crowd, and the organizers made an effort to address that with this meeting. The lead speaker was Greg Hamilton, the African-American sheriff of Travis County. He talked about taking on the good ol' boy networks in law enforcement and his experiences with talking to diverse communities. He had a great story about meeting Martin Luther King III and Coretta Scott King on a visit to Atlanta, and he reminded us that we need to hear all the voices, not just those that are the loudest.

After this opening talk, we gathered into groups by table to work on enumerating our core values. The theory is that as an coalition, we need to discover how to state our shared values in a way that will highlight what's in common among the different organizations. That will let us find the connections in the issues that will let us all work together.

The facilitator at the table where Glenn and I sat was former Austin City Council member and LBJ School professor Bill Spelman. There were five other people at the table, including Valinda Bolton, a Democratic candidate for seat 47in the Texas House. Our group quickly filled up a big sheet of paper with ideas about things that were important: government as an empowering resource, civic responsibility, stewardship of shared resources, having fun, caring for all people. We talked more about the core of these different ideas and chiseled it down to a few key statements that we presented as part of the wrap-up. There were about 15 tables, and we all took a slightly different interpretation of the assignment, but by the end of things, there was an encompassing vision of what's important to Austin's progressives appearing, although I don't think we were able to come up with any strong priorities.

As part of the synthesis of all of these presentations, several tables strongly felt that we needed to look at racism in Austin. I tend to agree with other elements in the room that the problem isn't strictly racism but is more a symptom of how Austin handles class differences, although many of those differences are due to the legacy of racism and a system that makes it so difficult to get out of poverty.

The Moving Forward group has some good plans for the future. Their immediate action is to take all the values listed at this meeting and try to come up with a set of values that the coalition can publish as a motivational statement. They are also forming a committee to work with that data and develop a list of issues of local importance that will be used to organize the next general meeting. They are also working on improving their web site and using it to point to the many progressive organizations in Austin, providing an organized resource for people to find groups that fit their interests. I know I'm looking forward to helping them out in this process.

Posted by Ben at 10:46 PM in Austin | Permalink | Comments (2)

While the star of tonight's Democracy for Texas meetup was Kirk Watson and the start of his campaign for the Texas senate, my favorite moment of the night was the conclusion of John Courage's remarks to the group. To quote the candidate:

Bush needs a brain, Cheney needs a heart, and Congress needs Courage!

Way to play the Wizard of Oz card! I look forward to seeing that used a few more times before the 2006 elections.

Posted by Ben at 12:22 AM in Austin | Permalink

Glenn and I were at the Austin Moving Forward event earlier today. It looked like there were about 350 attending this session on the St. Edward's campus, including quite a few people from the Austin progressive political scene. I spotted a number of people from last weekend's DemFest among the audience and volunteers.

It was great hearing from Representative Lloyd Doggett, Dr. George Lakoff, State Representative Eddie Rodriguez, former Rep. Ann Kitchens, Rev. Emilee Dawn Whitehurst, and UT's own Bill Spellman. They all had interesting comments.

A highlight for me was Bill Spellman talking about how a lot of progressive ideas are viewed as special interests rather than general concerns because they've being advanced by small groups rather than broad coalitions. Bill also gave a great example of how a community group in Los Angeles was able to build a movement that let to major living wage reforms in the area.

The meeting wasn't all cheery. During the town hall portion, several people commented on the lack of non-whites in the crowd, and one of the organizers later apologized, saying they had made an effort to reach out to the Hispanic and Black communities, but they just hadn't shown up. There also didn't seem to be any consensus on what issues are most important for an Austin progressive agenda.

Rep. Doggett talked about how his job has changed after redistricting, now that he represents both south Austin and McAllen in a 350-mile long district. It sounds like he is handling the challenge well.

I'd not see George Lakoff speak before, but his talk was a real treat. He started with brand new material about the Karl Rove attack on the Democrats from last week. According to George, we fell into Karl's evil trap, taking his bait to reframe the debate to be about Democratic wimpyness rather than the bad decisions of the Republicans. After dissecting what Rove had done, George started into his standard talk, going over what led to the ideas of strict father versus nurturing parents, the constructing the arguments of both sides from these perspectives. However, I really liked the new spin he put on the material, coming from working on defeating Bush's social security proposal: we can organize Democratic/progressive ideas along this basic value statement:

We believe that the commonwealth should be used for the common good so that we all can pursue our individual goals.

This simple idea shows the true difference between us as progressives and the conservatives among us. We believe that government can benefit everyone. We believe that no one succeeds on his or her own and that society can be bettered. I think that's something really powerful, and I hope this framing idea will gain traction.

"kevin" from Latinos for Texas liveblogged the talks -- here are pointers to his entries:

• Moving Forward: A Progressive Agenda for Austin’s Future
• Eddie: I’m a proud, progressive Hispanic
• Rev. Emilee Dawn Whitehurst of AAIM
• Goals for Today
• Bill Spellman - Agendas and Coalitions that have worked for actual change
• Coalition Building and Community Perspectives – bruce banner, marguerite jones, niyanta spellman
• One-on-one discussions and town hall
• TownHall meeting
• Congressman Lloyd Doggett
• GEORGE LAKOFF - at austinmovingforward.org conference

Posted by Ben at 9:13 PM in Austin | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Statesman had a lead story on how we'll be losing two staunch environmentalists on the City Council when Slusher and Goodman's terms are up.

Then they endorsed pro-business Kim for the Place 3 seat.

Continue reading "Statesman on city council races" »

Posted by GlennM at 8:31 AM in Austin | Permalink