Austin News

This fall Austin residents will be electing officials to represent City Council Districts 2, 4, 6, 7 10, and District 7, where Morgan Witt and incumbent Leslie Pool are running against each other, KUT 90.5 reported. 

Witt is running as a progressive Democrat, promising to make Austin equitable, affordable, sustainable, engaged, mobile and musical, according to Witt's campaign website. Pool is also running as a progressive Democrat and has acted on global warming, women's rights, police reform and quality of life, according to her campaign website. 

During the Austin City Council candidate forum for District 7, both candidates spoke on a number of topics, including why they chose to run for City Council. 

"I'm running for City Council and District 7 because I believe Austin needs a new leader with a proven track record of community advocacy who's tuned in to the community and who brings fresh ideas to the table to tackle our longstanding and often worsening problems," Witt said during the forum. 

She grew up in Austin and said she knows many of the struggles residents face firsthand. 

"There are a lot of people who are affected much worse than I am," she said. "Through my work in education and advocacy and extensive volunteering efforts, I've seen the steep challenges that a lot of people face with really basic things like just making a living in Austin or accessing resources or accessing local leaders. And these experiences have shown me how badly we need leaders who are more in touch with the communities that they serve."

Pool is a current City Council member running for re-election with six years of service.  

"I've fought hard for District 7 and all of Austin," Pool said. "I'm running for re-election because the work is not yet done, especially at this critical moment from the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic devastation to police brutality and deep-rooted racial inequities, to the urgency of the climate crisis, to affordability and rewriting the land development curve."  

Pool has lived in Austin for 40 years and said she has a record on City Council for strong leadership. She added that the three issues she finds most important are economic resiliency, environmental quality and systemic reform.

"The first one is economic resiliency, and that's as we grapple with and emerge from the pandemic," she said "And we've worked really hard on the council to distribute relief throughout the community since March, continuing to provide financial relief programs to those most disproportionately affected by the pandemic and building on all of our COVID-19 work today would be one of the top three."

Pool has also worked on climate resilience and a Green New Deal to make changes in the community to protect the environment.

"My resolution on community resilience and the budget adoption work of proposals like I brought for reimagining the police department in the fiscal 2021 budget and rebuilding policing is the first of which should be a series of deep dive audits to our policies and procedures on racism and discrimination," she said.  

While both are progressive Democrats, Witt's top three concerns were different from Pool's.

"I believe the most urgent issue facing District 7 is what I call livability and there are a lot of factors that play into that," Witt told the forum. "That's affordability and housing. That's access to affordable transportation options, besides just a car that also includes the ability to live in a healthy environment. And some of the most fundamental things that we're talking about right now, like redeveloping the land use code and Project Connect. We have to do all of these things in tandem to really address the livability issue. As I said, incremental change. Changing one without the other is going to yield limited success for us. But the underpinning of livability is equity."

Witt also believes a broader sense of social and police reform is necessary to ensure people have the services they need to live in a community. She also wants to make sure communities have equity in how services and resources are distributed. 

"But also how are we making sure that we have equitable community input in all of our planning and decision making processes," Witt said. "There is a very big lack of representation from communities of color and other marginalized communities in these conversations right now."