Austin News

The three District 4 candidates, Greg Casar, Louis Herrin III and Ramessess II Setepenre, were featured in the Austin City Council Candidate Forum on Sept. 23. 

Council member Casar is seeking re-election and is facing Herrin, an environmental engineer with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and Setepenre, a self-described socialist. 

Casar started his career as a community organizer, which led him to running for City Council. He said he seeks re-election because he believes in making changes in District 4, starting with coming together as a community. 

Greg Casar, Louis Herrin III and Ramessess II Setepenre spoke with Nathan Bernier with KUTV during the Austin City Council Candidate Forum on Sept. 23.

"But when we come together, we can make real change and take care of one another," he said during the forum. "Too often I think Austin just relies on unprogressive branding rather than doing the real work to be an inclusive community for everyone. But when the communities push city hall, including working class parts of the city that are usually excluded, like District 4, I've seen real change."

Setepenre, who used to work as an Austin City Hall contractor, said he's running for City Council because of his experience as a contractor. 

During his time at Austin City Hall, he said he had meager wages, no benefits and worked full-time. Setepenre, who is gay, also said he was treated with homophobia and xenophobia while working there. 

"My paycheck was defrauded. Yes, which happens even at city hall," he said during the forum. "On top of that, I was treated with homophobia, xenophobia and bullied by the city of Austin employees. For the past two years, my council member never reached out nor answered any of my emails or social media. My council member, Greg Casar, has never felt [the need to] represent me as a constituent.... I refuse to be anyone's collateral damage. That's why I'm representing myself and challenging his position."

If elected to the council, Setepenre said he will represent LGBTQ and women's rights. In addition, he is pro-Black and pro-Brown, supports indigenous rights, plus drug and sex work decriminalization. He also advocates health care for all, college for all, slavery reparations, living wages, abolishing police unions and qualified immunity. 

When Setepenre said Casar hasn't been representing him during his time in office, Casar responded by saying he has been working on increasing contractors wages to $15 an hour. 

Much like Setepenre, who didn't like the way he was treated at Austin City Hall, Herrin is running for City Council because he doesn't like the way Austin is being treated by the current council.

"I'm running because I am sick and tired of the way the City Council is running the city," Herrin said. "They are not running it efficiently. They are costing us money. They are not really helping out things, especially now when they're talking about defunding the police. The city cannot run or manage a larger project. Austin is not the town that I moved to when I first started coming here in the 1970s. Austin was friendly. Austin is now getting dirty. I'm running because the city needs to change."

He also seeks to push for more police cadet classes to help increase the safety of the community. 

Herrin said he wasn't for defunding the police and Setepenre agreed. But Setepenre does believe the Austin Police Department consumes a much larger portion (40%) of the city's budget than it should. He also said to reduce crime, poverty needs to be abolished. 

"Everyone knows, even on a subconscious level, that's crime and poverty are linked," Setepenre said during the forum. "If you walk through a poverty-stricken part of town, you're going to be more vigilant. If you if you want to reduce crime, you have to abolish poverty and energy use. So we have to provide people with living-wage jobs, affordable health care, affordable housing, affordable education, opportunities to self actualize and again, social capital and provide the necessary resources for people to reduce crime."

Although Casar wasn't specific on his stance for defunding the police, he did say much of the funding should be redirected to departments that are equipped to handle mental health 911 calls. 

Homelessness was also discussed. Last year, the Austin City Council voted to relax rules on camping and resting in public as a way to decriminalize homelessness. 

Casar said in a city like Austin there shouldn't be anyone sleeping in the streets. 

"I believe we can end homelessness in our community and not violate people's basic human and civil rights," he said. "The ban is the criminalization of just being poor and having nowhere to go, it just wasn't right We know that in our hearts. And so the important thing was to change our priorities from thinking that jail is a home and actually investing in the permanent supportive housing and the services that we badly need and that we haven't invested enough in in generations. 

"We know this works, so it's not a new idea to end homelessness. We can actually address this issue without violating anybody's human or civil rights."

Setepenre said he believes he has more of a right to speak on homelessness than Herrin or Casar because he was homeless himself. 

"Homelessness is a complex issue with many different facets from mental health issues to drug usage or lack of family support or social capital to lack of education, living wage jobs or opportunities to climb up the social, socioeconomic ladder," he said. "We need to foster and change our way of policing homelessness.... Yes, having people camp out is not going to solve the problem, but neither is criminalizing homelessness."

He suggested building micro-apartments to give the homeless proper accommodations instead of housing them in jail. Serepenre also said the homeless should be provided an education and social capital to help them come out of poverty.

While neither Casar nor Setepenre favored the camping ban, Herrin said he did support the measure. 

"When the City Council says you can camp anywhere on the city sidewalk in front of businesses, it hurts businesses," he said. "But on homelessness, my deal is for the people who want to [not be] homeless and who actually want to get off to start training programs, to work with groups. There are veteran groups that have set up things like the mobile offices and offered setting up job training set up so they can find houses. You know, there's a lot of things to do ... But I am for [training] people to get out of homelessness and to work that way. "