Travis County Commissioner Brigid Shea urges local climate resilience initiatives to combat coming federal turn

Travis County Commissioner Brigid Shea has been a mainstay of the Austin environmental movement for decades. Though she’s seen many gains in that area since her political career began, the relentless changing climate of our region has kept up the challenges as well. 

“Nothing else will dictate the fate of the region more than the loss of water,” Shea said in an interview with the Austin Monitor. “Nothing destroys the economy, ruins all real estate values, causes the engine of the economy to absolutely grind to a halt than if you run out of water.”

The county doesn’t have direct control over any water use except in its county buildings, but Shea urges, “We can control how we use our water, and we can be thought leaders in the region. We can’t change the fact that it’s getting increasingly hot and there will be more and more evaporation from our large reservoirs, Lake Travis and Lake Buchanan, but we can change how much we waste water, and we can save and stretch our water supply.”

Shea urges Austin to reuse more of its treated wastewater and she touts the county’s purple pipe program as one of the best resilience measures in the region.

“We just won another national award this year for our resilience initiatives, the big one being water conservation” from the National Association of Counties. Shea says once the new civil and family courthouse at 17th and Guadalupe streets is hooked up with purple pipes, the plan is to extend it to the state Capitol complex, “which is the real prize,” Shea said.

“We’ll be permanently eliminating demand for 45 million gallons a year just by swapping out the water supply for our air conditioning systems in our major buildings downtown and our jail. It’s not a complicated engineering task. I’ve spoken with a student government at UT, for instance, and I’ve urged them every year to urge UT to move more quickly towards purple pipe. If they hook that up and for the whole Capitol complex, they can save close to a billion gallons of water a year.”

Another climate initiative that the county will pursue in 2025 is to install solar panels on as many county facilities as possible, with battery backup.

“Because of the Biden administration relief funding to local governments, Austin Energy has $30 some million to support that, so we’re actively pursuing that, and the money will also be available for residential installations,” she said.

Aside from resilience efforts, Shea has her eye on a combined threat to air and water quality, as well as time and convenience, from twin construction projects on two major corridors: “The construction that’s commencing on I-35 in Downtown Austin will also be happening at the same time as North San Antonio undertakes major work on I-35 North. So the two major transportation hubs on each end of the Austin-San Antonio corridor will be under construction at the same time. And I keep thinking, what toddler planned this?” 

A big priority for both Shea and County Judge Andy Brown is urging the Legislature during its next session to pony up the funding needed to build high-speed passenger rail between Austin and San Antonio.

“We have a line,” she said. “Amtrak is very interested in it. It doesn’t make sense to me that there hasn’t been any movement on giving people more options besides being parked on I-35 for hours at a time. So I’m a big supporter of this, and I think it’s something that just makes so much sense, because the lines are already there – the biggest part of this is scheduling and the addition and improvements of the quality of the rail line itself.”

Looking toward another Trump presidency, Shea does worry about what fresh horrors might await: “I’m always surprised at the cruelty that can come out of some of the legislative changes. So I think there’s probably going to be more targeting of women and women’s attempts at reproductive care, and it’s kind of hard to imagine what else they could do.

“I will say, with the retreat under the incoming president from really doing anything meaningful about climate, it does devolve to local governments. And in fact, 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the cities of the world. So the obligation will revert, in a lot of ways in the U.S., to local governments, and I suspect they may try and attack that as well, which is so incredibly harmful.

“I don’t think there’s any community in the country that has escaped the destructive impact of climate change-driven freakish weather. And if they take action to limit the ability of communities to prepare for that and to try and reduce their contributions to climate impacts, I think it’s going to really hurt local residents. It will be difficult if the federal government isn’t a partner, but we’re going to continue that work.”

Part of that work will be the implementation of the county’s affordable child care initiative, which will be funded by a tax rate hike that passed this year. “It’s hard to really grasp the enormous impact that that will have,” Shea said. “I do think this will be transformative for thousands of families and their children – there’s so much data on how investing in high-quality early childhood care improves graduation rates, improves health, improves earnings. All of it. So I think this is just a profoundly important investment, especially in the face of the horrible attacks on public education.”

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