Bowen pledges to bring transparency to City Hall, starting with independent audit

Not many people wake up on the day of the filing deadline for mayor and decide to throw their hat in the ring. But that’s what Jeffery Bowen did when he became the fifth candidate in the race to become Austin’s next mayor.

Bowen, who owns a small construction services company, joins Kathie Tovo, Doug Greco and Carmen Llanes Pulido in a formidable contest to unseat incumbent Mayor Kirk Watson, who won the seat in a close runoff election in 2022.

Launching a mayoral bid at the last minute wasn’t exactly a sudden whim. Bowen, who serves as Council Member Mackenzie Kelly’s appointee on the Board of Adjustment, had been growing frustrated with the City Council’s actions for some time. His dissatisfaction took a turn for the worse last year, starting with Council’s passage of the two HOME ordinances. In Bowen’s estimation, both measures passed without the community having a chance to study, digest, talk to Council members and weigh in on the finer details – and perhaps gain some concessions from the mayor and Council.

Two minutes of allotted speaking time before Council does not go a long way toward making residents feel like they have been heard, Bowen said.

“They had already made up their minds that they were voting for (HOME) no matter what anybody said, even when we showed them proof of flooding issues and other unintended consequences. The day that I spoke I just said ‘Well, we’re talking to only two Council members up here who are even listening to us,’” Bowen recalled, referring to Council members Alison Alter and Kelly, the two dissenting votes.

The passage of the HOME initiative was especially galling for Bowen because Watson had lobbied the city’s neighborhood associations to support him in his runoff against former State Rep. Celia Israel. At the time, Israel had locked up the support of voters demanding greater density. With the YIMBYs in Israel’s corner, Bowen and many neighborhood advocates reckoned that Watson would have their backs on some of the more contentious development cases and, as he did in his first term as mayor in the 1990s, work to bring about consensus between the two sides.

Bowen was one of 13 plaintiffs who sued the city in 2019 alleging the city deprived them of their right to protest the proposed CodeNext rewrite of the Land Development Code. Rather than argue the case in court, the city scratched the rewrite process altogether. In retrospect, CodeNext was tame compared to HOME, but the lawsuit did at least prompt the city to properly notice homeowners this time around, Bowen said.

The final straw for Bowen was Council’s approval of the city’s $5.9 billion budget, which took effect Oct. 1. Such a massive budget, he said, will further drive up the cost of living in Austin and make it harder for small-business owners. He was, in fact, perplexed that there was no discourse on the dais about how Council could trim the budget.

“They just wanted to keep adding on, so that just broke my back, so to speak, and I said, ‘OK, I’m just going to do this,’” he said of his decision to run for mayor.

Like other candidates calling for more daylight at City Hall, Bowen said he’ll take the transparency pledge a step further with an outside audit of all city departments, even the offices of the mayor and Council and boards and commissions.

“The whole kit and kaboodle,” Bowen said. “Why not let us see where all that money is going?”

In 2018, Austin voters nixed a citizen-initiated ballot proposition that called for an independent third-party audit of how the city spends taxpayer money. Bowen is convinced the outcome was a result of Council’s rewrite of the ballot language, which he believes was intended to dissuade voters. The ballot measure, Proposition K, stated:

Without using the existing internal City Auditor or existing independent external auditor, shall the City Code be amended to require an efficiency study of the City’s operational and fiscal performance performed by a third-party audit consultant, at an estimated cost of $1 million-$5 million?

Voters turned down the proposition by nearly 60 percent.

“Why couldn’t it have just said, ‘Do you want an audit, yes or no,’ versus saying, ‘It’s going to cost us this money’? There was no interpretation of how much it could possibly save us, but they concentrated on that versus the question of an audit.”

Bowen also wants to fix and fortify the city’s aging infrastructure, which he said the city is failing to address as Austin continues to grow. That’s where an audit could serve as a guide, he said.

The Austin Monitor spoke with Bowen before the city and the Austin Police Association reached a tentative agreement on a contract. He has since said in a candidate forum that the proposed 28 percent pay increase for police over a five-year period seems reasonable. He aims to ensure there is sufficient staffing of all public safety personnel to serve the needs of residents.

On the city’s homelessness issue, Bowen states on his campaign website his desire to work with local organizations, the county and the state “to come up with a clear, viable plan.” He also wants the city to rethink how it conducts sweeps of campsites so that homeless people don’t lose their documents and other important belongings in the process, which can lead to delays getting them the help they need.

Bowen has been in the construction industry for more than 40 years. He was a construction manager in the Air Force and taught leadership and management courses at what was then Austin’s Bergstrom Air Force base, the current home of Austin’s airport. He has lived in Austin since 1989, and he and his wife, Luann, live in the Maple Ridge neighborhood in Southwest Austin.

Active in community affairs for many years, Bowen is currently vice president of the Austin Neighborhoods Council.

City Council races in Austin are nonpartisan, and Bowen doesn’t claim a particular political party affiliation, having voted in both Democratic and Republican primary elections. In the 2022 mayoral race, Bowen voted for Jennifer Virden, who placed third out of the six candidates. This time, Bowen said, Virden is supporting him.

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