Will Wynn, Mayor, City of Austin

Will Wynn, Mayor, City of Austin

Written by Staff Friday, 11 April 2008

Q. What do you enjoy most about being mayor?

A. Austin is a very, very dynamic place. I do get a chance to meet a bunch of other mayors and I am pretty active with a national organization of mayors. Other cities, most big cities, are not growing for one. As a composite picture, we are very young, we are very educated, we are very safe, and perhaps because of those three things, we are fast growing.

So, it is just a young, educated, clean, safe, tolerant, dynamic town and so it’s frankly far more fun to be mayor of a town like that than some of the other cities I have come to know. This is just an outrageously positive town and perhaps we lose sight of that sometimes. Everybody tends to do that in life, but when you look around at our peer cities and compare us to other American cities this is a fabulous place to live, work and play and raise kids. I enjoy the work. I am very ready to be former mayor, but I really enjoy my work.

 

 

Q. How does the city council and you as mayor represent Southwest Austin, although the council is not elected on a district basis?

 

A. I will say it’s always a challenge, but we are having this debate internally about the concept of perhaps district representation. It’s really complicated to get there from here. It is interesting to point out there are seven of us, six council members and the mayor, on the dais. Out of Austin’s 270 or so square miles and 750,000 people, interestingly enough, two of the council live east of IH 35, one lives in Northwest Austin, one lives in North Central Austin, I live downtown, one lives far South Austin and one lives in Southwest Austin.
So the way it has worked out is remarkably geographically diverse. In theory, we do represent all parts of the city. More people than not like the idea that they get to vote for all seven of us because what that means is over the course of the year, and obviously in the campaign season, you have to run around town and understand what might be some very localized issues. Then, frankly from a raw political standpoint, the voter turnout in city elections is remarkably higher west of MoPac than it is east of MoPac, so the raw political fact of the matter is that I think council members have to pay perhaps disproportionate attention to what is West, Northwest and now Southwest Austin.
There is a significant growth spurt to the east, but as for Southwest, it is a fabulous place to live and raise a family and some jobs are down there. I just know from my weekly schedule and talking to my colleagues frequently, there is remarkable awareness about what is happening down in Southwest Austin. We had a lot of issues regarding the Oak Hill Y and the transportation challenges down there, but we are never very far from discussing the environmental and quality of life issues.

Q. What are some of the biggest challenges facing Southwest Austin?

A. Well, ultimately growth from a raw, general statement is a big challenge for Austin. It’s a two-edged sword. With it comes economic opportunity, growing cultural vitality and all those positive things, but of course it is a big challenge environmentally. It is a big challenge from an air quality standpoint. It is this constant exercise you never finish and then in Southwest Austin, more than virtually anywhere else in town, we have the big challenge of coming to a housing-jobs balance. There are tens of tens of thousands of rooftops down there, but there has not been nearly that level of jobs and so traffic is bad. Traffic is bad because everybody has to drive every day to wherever their job may be. So one of the big, main answers the Envision Central Texas vision had back in 2002 and 2003 was the concept of the jobs-housing balance. As a region, we are not going to work our way out of bad traffic. Traffic is going to get a lot worse until we start to have a reasonable balance of jobs and houses in certain areas. For 50 years the model here and really across this country was low density, single-use development; that is, everyone lived here, they worked down here, shopped right there and went to school over there. We wonder why traffic became so bad seemingly overnight in this country. Traffic is growing a lot faster than the population growth. It’s not population. It is this land-use pattern.
So we finally started to figure this out, and we have started to change land-use patterns. Downtown for instance, we will take it as a microcosm. There are 75,000 daytime workers in downtown and 10 years ago 500 people lived here. Well, guess what? The big challenge is cars going in and out every day. Well, now we have 5,800 living downtown, there are 4,000 units in construction, which will house 7,000 people. You go from 500 to 13,000 people living in the core downtown in six or eight years. Some people are amazed; some people don’t like it for whatever reason. Sort of the opposite is true of Southwest Austin. There are lots of rooftops. Every plot is going to have a house on it. It is just too attractive a place to live.
A big challenge is how do you find the right employment base and the right commercial-retail base that would allow folks living in Southwest Austin to spend more time, more of their day and more of their week within a reasonable proximity to where they live? The big answer to Austin’s growth management is getting a lot more people living a lot closer to where they work, where they shop, where they play, where they go to school, where they worship and reduce the traffic.

Q. Then, what can the city council do to bring more employment?

A. Again, it’s easy to overstate what authority the city has. Ultimately, we live in a big capitalistic free society, and for the most part companies move where they want to move. The good news is good companies, good clean industry and knowledge-based companies with highly skilled workforces, they tend to follow the talent. They tend to follow where highly motivated, educated, driven, creative people might want to live. I think Southwest Austin is that if nothing else.
Unfortunately, there was a big to-do about it, but when AMD announced and now has virtually finished their campus down there, it stirred up a big controversy. It was done in a very ecologically sensitive way, and it is bringing jobs close to where there are a lot of rooftops. We do our best to limit damage to the Aquifer. Essentially, you do that by limiting the impervious cover over the Aquifer, but the fact of the matter is the rooftops, the tens of thousands of rooftops, are already down there and so now we have to figure out how we get to redevelop some of the older commercial areas down there and recognize they can be redone in a far more environmentally sensitive way than they were done originally.
Then that could hopefully start to compliment all the housing stock down there. Ultimately, you cannot force a company to move there and it is really hard to stop a company from moving there if it is perfectly legal and it is zoned correctly. I am not trying to dodge the buck, but ultimately the city has very little control over what companies move where. We have incentives. We can try to help steer it.

Q. You have been involved in Envision Central Texas. Explain how you have represented the city in ECT?

A. Technically, I am not active in Envision Central Texas right now. I was one of the founding members of it in 2001, so seven years ago. It was very related to what CAMPO (Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization) is supposed to be doing. The MPO stands for Metropolitan Planning Organization. I think sadly for a long time CAMPO was not doing a lot of true planning. So, a handful of us started ECT as a way to have a much more regional, global, holistic view of Central Texas and frankly, it is all about population growth and the people are coming. Austin is an attractive place and attractive places attract people.
We spent two years and $2 million bucks. Ultimately, the citizenry looking at the four different visions of what Central Texas would look like with another million plus people, the vast majority of people coalesced around this composite vision. We really need to figure out how to be compact, how we can drive less and not more and how we have this jobs-to-housing balance.
ECT was an exercise. In a sense, that initial exercise is over. Now the opportunity for the board members of ECT is to continue to raise awareness that individual counties and cities are going to have to start enacting ordinances and regulations that align themselves with the ECT vision.
Hopefully, that will be a concept [we use] as we work through everything from the transportation grid out at Oak Hill Y to recognizing that there needs to be more employment and shops down in Southwest Austin. So for instance, [that is] part of the rationale of why we approved the redevelopment ordinance. The SOS ordinance was the big, controlling regulation for Southwest Austin put in place in ‘92, well after most of Southwest Austin was built, at least all of the older commercial stuff. People could not renovate the old commercial stuff because they would not be complying with SOS. They could not even get building permits, so stuff just sat out there and never had a chance to improve. It even looks like that today. Now just in the last few months, we passed the redevelopment ordinance that will allow some of the older strip centers to get renovated in a significant way. Most of that stuff had zero environmental protection. Now the quid pro quo is we will let you dramatically redevelop your property, make it far more valuable to you and that will hopefully meld into this vision of ECT, which is mixed-used density but as you do that, we want some environmental protection.

Q. What is your favorite book?

A. I have favorite books that I reread sporadically. My favorite book from childhood that I read every now and then, about every 10 years, is Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. I can put myself back in that place when I was a kid, when I first read it. It had this real, positive effect on me. I wanted to be the Green Knight and the chivalry, virtue. So it had an impact on me. It helped me. I reread Lonesome Dove three times since 1986, I guess. I have a couple of autographed copies from Larry McMurtey. It is so funny; I read a lot of nonfiction; a lot of it historic in nature and even the fiction, like Lonesome Dove, is historic.

Family: Two daughters, ages 12 and nine

Education: Bachelor’s in environmental design, Texas A&M University

Contact: 974-2250, will.wynn@ci.austin.tx.us

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