The event to support the former two-term council member in her mayoral bid attracted an audience between 80 and 100 people to Threadgill’s World Headquarters that included many familiar faces from the Austin Neighborhoods Council. After taking several jabs at her opponent, incumbent Mayor Steve Adler, Morrison told the crowd that her campaign would aim to create to a “viable future for all of us,” and would thus focus on three things.
1. “A real increase in affordable housing”
Morrison lamented that house prices have skyrocketed in recent years and that the city would need to work smarter in order to fix it. Although housing affordability has been a focus of CodeNEXT—the city’ 5-year, $8.5 million project to rewrite the land development code—Morrison said CodeNEXT was not the answer.
“CodeNEXT makes it worse,” Morrison told the crowd to a loud applause. Morrison said the city needs to work on a “bottom-up, not top-down” approach to housing, but did not go further into detail.
2. “Real mass transit”
Morrison was part of the Austin City Council when council voted unanimously in 2014 to put the billion-dollar proposal for urban light rail and mobility improvements on the ballot. Voters shot the proposal down 57 percent to 43 percent and light rail has since taken more of a back seat in mobility discussions.
Morrison brought light rail back to the table on Monday, saying the 2014 proposal failed in part because it did not reflect the needs of then-current residents, something she said she could fix as mayor.
“I’m pragmatic, I collaborate, I always work with the community and I don’t think we’ve taken that kind of approach before and I believe we can get it done together,” Morrison said.
3. “Much more bang for our buck with our resources in this town”
Morrison said the city could do a better job maximizing the potential of its resources.
Morrison vaguely alluded to a program she was working on as a board member of the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, or ECHO, that she said would save the city “$50 million [per] year simply by housing and providing services to the 250 neediest people in this town that are experiencing homelessness.”
“That’s a smart use of money to invest in a program like that,” Morrison said. “We can do much more of that.”
Election day is Tuesday, Nov. 6.
