Watson touts progress while pushing for affordability, eyeing city’s long-term needs

Two years into his return stint as Austin’s mayor, Kirk Watson thinks the positive moves on housing and affordability made by the 11 members of City Council will be for naught if he can’t keep moving them forward. While he’s happy with the passage of the HOME and HOME2 initiatives to promote denser infill development, in order to make them truly effective, the next steps require making it easier for owners and builders to construct new homes on smaller, subdivided lots.

“We’ve made these big, important changes, and so now we have to make sure we implement them well,” he said. He listed annual – at the least – reviews to gauge the effectiveness in adding new homes as one step he considers crucial.

“We’ve also made enormous changes in the Development Services Department so that the city of Austin doesn’t get in its own way and add to the cost and the burden of trying to build more supply and address the affordability curve and building affordable units.”

Also playing into the drive for the city to add more affordable housing, Watson and other city leaders want to see some progress on using city-owned properties to provide housing. That includes the 107-acre Tokyo Electron campus that was purchased in March for $87 million (partially funded with anti-displacement funds from Project Connect) with the expectation of building 1,100 units on the site.

Tied to the housing question is the issue of overall affordability for middle-income workers, including creating more jobs that will allow those workers to remain Austin residents. With the area expected to need 10,000 skilled trades workers every year for most of the next decade to handle construction projects such as Interstate 35 and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Watson sees his recently announced Infrastructure Academy partnership with Austin Community College as a key piece in the city’s economic development plans.

“We’re making sure that affordability is also addressed by making sure people in Austin can get into jobs that will help them afford to live here,” he said of the $5 million effort unveiled in the spring.

“We have about $25 billion worth of infrastructure projects … and that is an economic development sector in its own right. We know we don’t have enough people to work in that sector, and those are primarily prevailing wage jobs.”

Watson sees affordability as another key consideration of the contract with the Austin Police Association that is slated for a vote by City Council next Thursday. He said the initial 8 percent pay increase is needed to make up for the stopgap approvals and pay adjustments that haven’t provided the stability needed by the police department as a whole.

Even with the five-year contract forecast to contribute to an expected budget deficit in the final year – “it can be easily budgetable, although it is a big number” – Watson said it’s time for the city to move forward and settle the police question.

“It’s time to turn the corner on this contract, on the relationship with the APA. And we need to be able to attract and retain more police officers,” he said. “We have to be able to create affordability for our police officers so they can live in the town that we’re asking them to serve.”

That projected deficit of $6 million is one reason Watson thinks the time will soon come for City Council and staff to make decisions about when to go to voters for a tax rate election to allow the city to raise its property tax rate by more than 3.5 percent in a given year. On top of public safety, he pointed to affordable housing, homelessness resources, and parks and recreation expenses as areas of need that are growing beyond the capacity of the city’s current revenue.

“We’re going to have to examine as a city how we budget over the long haul.”

Discussing homelessness, Watson said the city had seemingly been locked into an approach that saw the one-time infusion of federal American Rescue Plan money as the primary answer to preventing and reversing homelessness. With that money set to run out by the next budget cycle, he said there has to be more attention paid to all of the stages that lead to homelessness, so prevention and rapid rehousing aren’t overlooked while addressing emergency shelter and permanent supportive housing.

“We know that we do need an alternative to the Marshalling Yard (Emergency Shelter), but we got to find that before we say we’re going to just go backward on the continuum,” he said.

When asked about the contentiousness in city policy, Watson turns to the scrutiny he’s faced for most of the past year-plus over how he and former interim City Manager Jesus Garza conducted city business, with some critics arguing they were suppressing public input or debate among Council. Watson says those kinds of tactics are used by opponents who want to halt city business of any kind.

“I think most people feel like City Hall was moving too slowly and inefficiently. I think there’s a general consensus now that that’s changed, and we’re actually moving and getting things done,” he said. “People who want to stop things will spend time scrutinizing them. I mean, that’s their goal, to stop things that are coming down, that are happening. They’re looking for a way to put a stick in the spoke of the wheels on the bicycle.”

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