Austin City Council Pandering

TCRP Wants Real Representation in Austin
Posted by Dave Nalle on Oct 1, 2010 in Gallery |
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Austin City Council’s East Side Meeting is Just Cynical Pandering
Real Democracy in Austin Demands Single Member Districts

AUSTIN, TX. On Thursday, when the Austin City Council decided to hold one of their weekly meetings in East Austin, it was a cynical and inadequate response to the years of disenfranchisement which residents of many parts of the city have experienced under a government deliberately operated to represent only the interests of a political elite who live in a select group of downtown neighborhoods.
If they are concerned about giving all of the citizens access to government, then there is a much more effective solution than the occasional visit to historically neglected east Austin. What the people of east Austin need and deserve is more than an opportunity to address the council for three minutes from the floor. The citizens of Austin deserve actual representation on the City Council. What they need is direct representation in single member districts.
Austin has suffered for too long with government by the elite while most of the people are excluded. Our at-large system for electing council members concentrates control of all of the seats in the council in the hands of those who can turn out a core group of voters for their chosen candidates in every election, while the votes of other neighborhoods cancel each other out and never add up to a win. Travis County Republican Party Chairman Rosemary Edwards believes that “block voting produces a council whose members all think the same and vote the same, and who don’t represent the interests of the entire community.”
Pandering from our palatial new city hall is not the solution to this problem. Putting a token ethnic member on the council or holding a meeting in east Austin is not real change. Real change would be the establishment of representative democracy in Austin by letting each part of the city have its own representative and its own voice on the council. LULAC District 12 Director Marcelo Tafoya joins us in "insisting upon single member districts as the only way to create a truly representative city government."
The Travis County Republican Party joins LULAC and other community groups in urging that the City Council follow the recommendations of its own Charter Revision Committee in instituting Single Member Districts and giving the government of the city back to the people. If the city does not take this action we urge the state legislature to pursue the bill submitted last year by Senator Jeff Wentworth to require the city to be represented with single member districts like every other major city in the state.