Brandi Clark Burton, founder and chief inspiration officer of Austin EcoNetwork, unveiled today a comprehensive, online look at Austin’s myriad candidates for City Council and Mayor.

The easy-to-use Austin EcoNetwork Election Navigator includes positions of and videos on Austin’s 78 candidates, as well as, quite valuably, their answers to questionnaires on a series of environmental issues. (My colleagues who cover City Hall have done a bang-up job writing profiles of all the candidates, easily readable and searchable at statesman.com/councilbios.)

Undergirding the effort, Burton said, is a concern that Austin maintains its environmental identity at a moment of political upheaval, as the City Council shifts from seven at-large officers to a 10-1 set-up, with 10 council members elected from geographic districts and an at-large mayor.

"We’re interested in making sure the people being elected have a good sense of the big picture and sustainability," she said. "We want to help pick people to to run the nation’s 11th largest city, with a billion-dollar budget."

Otherwise, she said, "the environment could lose out."

To me, that’s especially interesting: The shift in political representation could upend the Austin’s policy norms in ways hard to foresee. And that uncertainty concerns the city’s power bases, including, collectively, environmentalists.

The EcoNetwork began a decade or so ago as a listserv. Today, beyond the website, Burton sends out a weekly newsletter to 7,500 subscribers.

The Election Navigator has an enormous amount of information, including position papers by candidates.

Candidates write "college-credit worthy essays that eventually end up in a filing cabinet and no one gets to see them. We want to inform voters, so that they don’t have to just rely on endorsements."

Austin EcoNetwork staffer Amy Stansbury wrote synopsis pieces about the candidates. ("She deserves a local Pulitzer for this," Burton said.) Videos of the candidates are meant to show whether the candidates are articulate, well-versed, and passionate about issues.

Making public the answers to questionnaires — from Clean Water Action, Sierra Club, Clean Energy for Austin, and Austin Environmental Democrats — "gives us the potential to use it as an accountability tool," she said.

Burton says she has spent at least $20,000 on the project, with the chief expenses being web programming, video production, graphic design and other staff time. She has launched an indiegogo campaign to recoup some of the costs.

The Statesman, meanwhile, has its own elections webpage, one that looks at state and local candidates.