Forty minutes after the polls closed in Austin on Tuesday night, Mayor Steve Adler was at his victory party, declaring that his re-election margin — which eventually settled at 60 percent, despite six challengers — represents a sweeping mandate for him to tackle his favored projects.

“I do see the margin in the mayor’s race as an affirmation of what we’ve been doing in this city,” he said. “The community has endorsed the position that we’ve taken leading other cities around the state and around the country. The conversations that we have had in respect to the convention center and using that as a tool to generate the revenue stream to actually do something about homelessness.”

The mayor referenced the Austin Convention Center again an hour later as he took the stage before supporters. His comments might point to the next heated battle in city government circles: Adler’s “downtown puzzle” proposal that’s been relatively dormant for nearly a year and a half.

Adler announced the puzzle during a July 2017 news conference at City Hall. It was a complicated proposal that hinged on expanding the convention center to draw more visitors to town. In return, hoteliers would support a tourism taxing district. Revenue from the public improvement district could then help fund homeless initiatives and other downtown projects, Adler said.

Council members, who were on summer vacation when Adler launched the proposal, returned with questions, some tepid support and some skepticism. In the end, they asked staff members to study its various components separately. A University of Texas study regarding the convention center component of the mayor's plan is ongoing.

Time to expand?

In an interview Friday, Adler identified an expansion of the convention center and creation of the associated downtown tourism district as two items foremost on his agenda, along with working on high-capacity transit and restarting a process to rewrite the city's land development code.

“It’s time because the UT study (is almost finished) and because it was an issue in the election,” Adler said. “My opponent (Laura Morrison) ran in opposition to (expanding the convention center), and I think that’s something voters took into account.”

Council Member Kathie Tovo disagreed with the mayor's conclusion. Tovo won re-election with 53 percent of the vote against well-funded urbanist candidate Danielle Skidmore and two other opponents. She won despite being the only one in the District 9 race who wouldn’t promise to support a convention center expansion.

“It seems to me that in all the elections, mayoral or otherwise, there was very little conversation about the convention center so I don’t see the results from Tuesday as being reflective of (support for) a convention center expansion,” Tovo said.

A political action committee partially funded by the Austin Hotel & Lodging Association paid for attack ads against Tovo during the recent campaign. Tovo said she suspected her lack of commitment to a convention center expansion factored into the opposition.

Representatives of the association did not return phone calls or emails Friday. The city of Austin and the Austin Convention Center both belong to the association and pay a combined $1,000 in annual membership dues.

Digging into the land-use debate again



Tuesday’s election results — including approval of a $925 million bond package — and Adler’s emboldened declaration that “there is no doubt tonight” that voters support moving forward on big projects facing the city have led to speculation about what comes next. The biggest item on the table is a new attempt to address the city’s land-use rules after the failure of CodeNext, which sought to fully revise those rules for the first time in more than 30 years.

Urbanists were quick to declare victory Tuesday, noting Adler’s wide margin over Morrison, a former Austin Neighborhoods Council president; the defeat of Proposition J, which would have subjected future land-use changes to public votes and a waiting period; and the inclusion of pro-density candidates in runoffs for council seats in Districts 1 and 8.

“Laura Morrison got less voter share than Ted Cruz in Austin,” said Kevin McLaughlin, a board member for the urbanist group AURA. “Combined with the defeat of Prop J, that means Austinites aren’t afraid of change. … I expect the new City Council to aggressively pursue zoning regulation reform, like CodeNext, but not CodeNext.”

Others pointed to Tovo’s 21-point victory over Skidmore and the relatively narrow defeat of Proposition J to argue that the city remains deeply divided about land-use issues. Tovo said the success of any new land-use changes will depend on whether Austinites trust the process creating them.

“Nothing about Tuesday should be interpreted as support for increasing density in the central city, which is one of the comments I saw on social media,” Tovo said. “That just flies in the face of everything I heard from constituents.”

Rethinking a tax swap?

Another proposal that could have new life on the dais is the idea of a tax swap with the Austin school district.

Adler first proposed a tax swap when he ran four years ago and made a short-lived push for one in 2017. In theory, city residents could see a lower tax bill — and the Austin school district could welcome more funding — if the district reduced its tax rate and the city correspondingly increased its rate, because the school district would have to remit less money back to the state for less property-wealthy districts.

The problem with the idea is that various school districts overlap Austin's city limits, so city residents outside of the Austin school district would see only a tax increase. So would seniors, whose property taxes are frozen for the Austin school district, but not for the city.

Still, Adler and Tovo think some form of a tax swap could be accomplished. Tovo said one of her top priorities is to revisit the idea, perhaps with a less formal structure that would see the city taking over some school functions in exchange for the district lowering its taxes.

Council Member Jimmy Flannigan, whose council district includes a majority of city residents who live outside of the Austin school district's boundaries, flatly rejected the suggestion that a tax swap could ever become a reality.

“It’s not coming back,” he said. “The tax swap idea didn’t work, not because of politics, but because the idea didn’t work.”