Voter guide

Single member districts: Will Austin vote for representation the seventh timearound?

Editor's note: CultureMap Austin is proud to partner with Leadership Austin — the region's premier provider of civic and community leadership development — in this series of editorial columns meant to inform Austinites about the upcoming City of Austin proposition elections to be held November 6.

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Six times Austin has said “no” to single-member districts (SMDs), and six times they’ve come back onto the ballot. Will this November — with two different districting options on the ballot — be Lucky Number Seven for advocates of geographic representation?

Many veterans of local politics are understandably skeptical about the idea that’s been rejected six! times! could ever earn the voters’ approval. And with two plans on the ballot to (potentially) steal votes from one another, and with most Austinites disinclined to vote in any city elections and with so many other items on a very long November 2012 ballot, the skeptics may have the winning hand.

At the same time, Austin’s been voting on SMDs for nearly 40 years now. The last go-round happened a decade ago in 2002. You may have noticed that much has changed in Austin since 2002, let alone since 1973, and finally adopting SMDs would be neither the first nor the last accommodation Austin has made to its new role as a bona fide major American city.

Austin is the only big city in America that elects its city council the way we do. Most big cities, as well as many smaller ones (including several of Austin’s own suburbs) have district systems — either in pure form, with only the mayor being elected citywide, or in hybrids that allow for some members to be elected at large.

This year we get to choose between the two — Prop. 3 is the pure 10-1 plan, Prop. 4 the 8-2-1 hybrid. If they both get 50% of the vote, which is possible since you can vote for both, the one with the most votes wins.

The initial impetus for SMDs came soon after Austin’s current council system emerged in the early 1970s. That system included an unwritten “gentleman’s agreement” reserving council seats for African-American and Latino representatives.

The agreement is purely local custom without any force of law and was (and still is) found wanting by many in Austin’s communities of color, who would like to guarantee they can elect the candidates of their choice without having those choices ratified by white voters.

However, as the African-American community has dispersed throughout the city, the challenge of drawing a “black district” has increased, and leaders in that community — who used to be the strongest advocates for SMDs — are now notably more ambivalent.

Meanwhile, as Austin has grown and the number of city voters has shrunk (fewer votes were cast this past May than in 1971), many local constituencies feel chronically underrepresented on the Austin City Council. This isn’t solely due to the at-large system; low turnout is a chronic problem in big cities across the nation, and Austin’s strict campaign finance system limits the ability of candidates to engage potential voters through media. So the city electorate has steadily become a less and less representative sample of the broader public.

A council elected from districts would almost certainly have more than one Latino (which has never happened), probably an Asian-American (which has only happened once), and a Republican or two (which hasn’t happened in decades). And of course, people from north of RM 2222 or south of the river — none of whom are on the current council. Indeed, it seems likely that, if we move to a SMD system, we will see many candidates who would likely never be elected under the current system, but whose political talents and base of support are sufficient to win a smaller-scale district race.

The perceived mismatch between city and council, and the current dominance of a relative handful of central-city and west-side constituencies, has helped keep the SMD fight alive, buoying the citizen petition drive that landed Prop. 3 on the ballot with more than 33,000 signatures.

That’s enough people — if they all voted, which is a big “if” — to pass Prop. 3 in a typical city election. But for the first time, SMD plans are sharing the ballot with a high-turnout presidential race, where many tens of thousands of voters will have never voted in an Austin city council election and may have no idea how the system works now. It’s hard to say how this long-running saga will play in front of this vast new audience.

Also new, compared to past go-rounds, is the attitude of Austin’s political elite; although there are sincere and sometimes sharp differences between supporters of the two plans on offer, there’s so far been little overt public advocacy for the status quo. Instead, the hybrid Prop. 4 has become the preferred choice of many who are concerned that a pure-SMD system would devolve into “ward politics.”

Opponents of either SMD system may feel that there’s no need to actively work against either Prop. 3 or 4, because history and inertia are on their side. But we may wake up on Nov. 7 with a whole new model of Austin city government — or starting the countdown toward bringing SMDs back for Round 8.

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Mike Clark-Madison is a faculty member for Leadership Austin programs and will be a panelist at the October 10 ENGAGE Breakfast Town Hall event with KXAN News. Register for the event and learn more about these and other issues on the ballot November 6. The opinions of Leadership Austin alumni and faculty members are their own, and do not represent an official position of the organization.

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Red Light

San Antonio leads Texas on ending horse-drawn carriage rides by 2030

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Horses will no longer pull carriages on the streets of downtown San Antonio.

San Antonio has pulled off something that the rest of Texas has yet to do, but it didn't come without some contentious conversations. City Council has unanimously voted (with one abstention) to phase out the use of horse-drawn carriages over the next five years. That means by January 1, 2030, there will be none on the streets at all; instead, there will be electric carriages.

These plans have been in the making since 2022 — if not always at the same level of intensity — when District 2 Councilmember Jalen McKee-Rodriguez and District 3 Councilmember Phyllis Viagran wrote up some concerns about the horses' wellbeing. A special session at the end of October 2024 hinted to San Antonians that the end for this practice was neigh — sorry, nigh — and the final vote was made on December 12. In addition to accepting the plan, it extended its timeframe by two years.

The initial proposal included worries about the horses' exposure to traffic and pollution, as well how their presence might exacerbate those issues for the environment at large by slowing traffic. It also raised concerns about the effects of standing or walking on hard surfaces for too long, or spending time in extreme weather.

At the December 12 meeting, San Antonians gave impassioned speeches about animal welfare — both to call attention to the need for better conditions and to defend the reputations and jobs of current horse drivers — but it wasn't the first time the council heard from the public about the issue.

In a prior city survey, 50,476 respondents weighed in. Of those respondents, 51.98 percent said they liked the idea to "Transition horse-drawn carriages to electric carriages and pedicabs and ban horse drawn carriages completely." There were alternative solutions listed, but respondents were less drawn to them.

A cultural divide emerged in the data and continued in the December meeting: some people avoided the carriages because they worried about the treatment of the horses, while others enjoyed them because of their historical echoes and living legacy. Many speakers in favor of the plan used this to form their argument, raising questions about history versus progress.

More tangible objections to the plan hinged on the businesses — specifically five companies — and jobs that would be lost, which was the main factor behind extending the adjustment period.

Discussions about the particulars of the electric vehicles are still to come, as confirmed in the discussion near the end of the meeting. Councilmember Jalen McKee-Rodriguez addressed concerns about what would happen to the horses, mentioning the Brady Hunter Foundation as a future partner in finding them rescue homes.

Some council members also brought up rhetorical questions about animal exploitation by groups like Sea World, the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo, military and police forces, and even various groups in the Fiesta parade, although these did not come with a formal motion to pick the issues up.

This decision could have a ripple effect on other Texas cities. Dallas has recently considered a similar ban, but it appears to have stalled; Austin's attempts at a ban have been unsuccessful, but according to the Austin-American Statesman, only one operator is permitted to bring horses downtown. She declines to do so because the long hours are unfair to her and the horses. Houston does have horse-drawn carriages, and there seems to be little conversation about banning them.

Cities like Chicago and Salt Lake City have led the charge in the United States with some of the most prominent successful bans. Other cities around the world with bans include Brussels and Guadalajara, which both switched to electric models. Bans that have been around for years, like Guadalajara's and Prague's, still aren't out of the woods — people are still pushing back on the decision, so it sounds like San Antonio still has much work cut out for it.

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