In 2025, Travis County Commissioner Ann Howard eyes building more supportive housing and strengthening climate resilience

Coming from her background in affordable housing at the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, Travis County Commissioner Ann Howard has always prioritized the same throughout her tenure at the county. 2024 saw two big wins on that front, she says: “There’s some things that we’ve been working on for a long time that I think are going to finally come to fruition.” 

“There’s been sort of two different bodies of work. This last year was the big heavy lift of getting the contracts completed for 11 different (housing) projects using the federal American Recovery Plan Act money,” she said. “It’s been now two and a half years since we passed a resolution at the county to invest $110 million of those funds into housing, and we have gotten nine of the 11 contracts executed. So that was a really heavy lift, just administratively, because we were also coordinating with the city of Austin’s neighborhood housing department to make sure that each project had enough money to know that they could really spend our federal money.”

In September, the county signed two contracts with LifeWorks and Foundation Communities to provide $27 million to add more than 200 affordable supportive housing units for people experiencing homelessness.

“In many ways, I saw this as a continuation of my work at ECHO, because we dreamed up that we could really build the housing we need for these nonprofits to provide services to people experiencing homelessness,” she said. “This money has really been exciting because it will forever build out capacity to really address the needs of people with very little income.

“The other work we do is with our financing tools at the county to help developers who are building multifamily housing – either providing bonding authority or tax abatement if they’re doing affordable housing. (There are) thousands of affordable units that Travis County has helped make happen, and that’s really exciting,” Howard said. “And there is another opportunity where we can talk to the developers about their design – their amenities, their programming for families. What’s the transportation? How close is it to the grocery store?” 

One area in which Howard sees room for improvement in 2025 is that “we have not had any kind of real focus on housing for people with disabilities besides their chronic homelessness. Folks who are neurodiverse, the autistic community. … How could you build out a community to be more accommodating so you could have caregivers or sort of a modern group home?”

Looking toward a new Trump administration and the continuing slings and arrows of the Legislature, Howard says “our best hope is where we can show some data, whether it’s around eviction prevention by having more rental assistance or around additional funding for people experiencing homelessness – I hope that our successes could lead to more federal programs. But if we take what’s reported in the news as the way forward, where the federal government is going to cut a bunch of programs, then that is scary. Because it means our local community is gonna have fewer buckets to draw down from. If there’s people that are relying on federal programs that are going to lose their funding, and our state government could be of a similar mindset, I don’t know.”

In her free time, Howard likes to be outside – so it follows that “probably the funnest part of my job, for me, is the work of conserving our natural resources. I do a lot of that work outside.” For her, “water is probably going to be one of my biggest areas of focus for 2025, and I think part of that is because of what I’ve learned in 2024. Our county is not a provider of water, we’re not a water utility, we don’t build water infrastructure. But we are mindful about water where we’re a consumer.”

This year, the county committed to a purple pipe program that allows new county buildings to reuse water.

“When we approve subdivisions, we have so little authority, but we can ask: Do you have a contract for water?” Howard said. “We used to ask for proof, but the Legislature has really cut back on our role in development.”

Instead, she says, “we’re trying to be a steward of what the county has. Even conserving the rights to water, like in a conservation easement, that’s way cool. So I think for me, personally, I’ve been learning more about the issues around groundwater and surface water and how they dance together, and then trying to be a connector around these issues.”

Part of that is making sure that the $1 billion state water fund for infrastructure improvements passed last session feeds local rural projects – for example, addressing the persistent water quality problems of Austin’s Colony, an unincorporated community in Austin’s extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ). Beyond that, Howard wants the county to be more involved in community planning on water, which is not always the case: “Sort of a glaring example is that there’s an entity called the West Travis County Public Utility Agency, and Travis County is not involved. It has appointees on the board from the city of Bee Cave and from Hays County.”

Beyond water, Howard says the county is spending the last of the 2023 parks bond “equitably over on the east side of Travis County, looking at land that could become parkland that protects water sources and critical environmental features.” In 2024, the county purchased around 1,500 acres of ranchland near Hamilton Pool Preserve, converting private property into protected parkland for the public. Howard says that “has really has inspired me to help other families figure out how to protect their land. We added employee positions to the budget this year in this space so that we’re responsible for managing the land we are stewarding. And I think that ties right into our resilience as a community, and being prepared should flood or fire come.”

This year, the county equipped all Emergency Service Districts (that fight fire outside city limits) with new common radio equipment.

“It was something that’s been pointed out in the past, that we need to improve communications in times of emergency,” Howard said.

“That’s what’s fun about being a county commissioner. You have a lot of roles to play, and those roles change on any given project, depending on, you know, where it is in the timeline,” Howard said. “It can be very satisfying to be this ‘supporting actress,’ you know, because really cool stuff can happen in our community. And if I can convene a meeting or ask the right questions, it could lead to something that’s really an improvement on the quality of life of our residents.”

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