To evaluate this we have to revisit the failed 2000 rail referendum. Its specter haunts transit politics discussions and is the key piece of publicly-available evidence in rail political feasibility debates.

In that election, there were 124,479 votes cast for rail and 126,434 against.  The narrow 1,955 loss margin means that if just 979 ‘no’ votes changed to ‘yes’ then the proposition would have passed.

In 2000 George W. Bush won Travis County with 46.40% of the vote against Gore’s 41.42%. In 2012, Barack Obama won with 60.14%.  However, let’s assume (as many smart Austin politicos seem to do) that local rail politics are roughly the same as 13 years ago because of something inherent (enigmatic?) about transit politics in Austin.

The three basic strategies for changing the failed 2000 referendum outcome are: (1) persuade ‘against’ votes so that they vote ‘yes’ or skip the item, (2) boost turnout amongst supportive constituencies, and (3) a combination of the first two.  So how can we ‘build a winning map’ and what does it tell us about a given rail route’s political feasibility?

Here’s the Austin geographic vote distribution from the 2000 rail referendum courtesy of the City Demographer Ryan Robinson (cherry red precincts voted ‘for’ between 30% and 40%):

The Robinson visualization focuses on vote proportions; but to get a better sense of where the damage was done, let’s examine vote count margin. Proportions obscure that some districts have more registered voters, as well as differing rates of turnout for those voters.

The top ten ‘against’ precincts and their count are visualized below:

What both the original Robinson visualization and my vote count version highlight is that the 2000 referendum was lost – geographically, at least – in South Austin.  It’s certainly possible that the election was actually lost by some demographic segment that is over-represented in South Austin.  Independent men and Democratic-leaning women that don’t use transit have been mentioned to me. Perhaps these groups disproportionately resided in South Austin then.

But there’s no public polls that I could find that would allow for verification of a demographic segment explanation for 2000.  More importantly, in contemporary rail politics, the political feasibility argument is often geographic. “You can’t get the neighborhoods you need” behind proposal X or Y is a familiar admonishment.  So any route proposal seeking to persuade ‘against’ voters needs to deal with the South Austin issue.

As the Robinson map shows, support for the 2000 line was concentrated in Central Austin, and quite overwhelmingly so in almost all of the precincts the proposed rail would serve.   However, there were important differences in turnout and level of support that serve as the foundation of a ‘base boost’ strategy.

The top thirty supportive ‘for’ precincts are listed and plotted below.  There are countless opportunities to find the missing votes through modest improvements in turnout or margin across many combinations of precincts. For example, the highest positive vote margin count actually came from a precinct with slightly below average turnout. So there are many ways to build the ‘boost’ map.

Inevitably, any conversation about boosting the base from 2000 turns to the reliability of student turnout; ‘students don’t vote’ is argued by some.  But the focus on turnout rates confuses what we are really looking for, which is count of the contribution to the victory margin.

Which would you rather have of two equally-sized precincts: a precinct that has 70% turnout and a 51/49 split for your side or a district that has 45% turnout and 70/30 split for your side?  The answer is the latter because of the margin.  Student turnout (or any group for that matter) is less important if there is a route that engenders a lopsided margin.

The source data and my calculations for the above visualizations can be found here.

When testing the political feasibility of a rail alignment, the 2000 election seems to suggest two major obstacles: South Austin skepticism and expanding the Central base.  Certainly there are other obstacles like anti-rail skeptics (i.e. Skaggs) and ideological conservatives.  But those are individuals that will be opposed to rail regardless of the route. Hence it makes sense to focus on demographics and neighborhoods that can be persuaded or mobilized.

There are two major corridors presently getting a lot of attention amongst Austin transit advocates:  something similar to the 2000 line focused on substituting the “1” bus line on Guadalupe-Lamar (GL) and the evolving Red Line Circulator/Mueller route. In addition, South Congress and Riverside have been floated; and obviously, it makes sense to at least explain why existing MetroRapid bus candidates corridors from the most recent CapMetro bus service plan are not the optimal initial sequence for rail. A map of them follows with the MetroRapid candidates in blue:

Among the two routes that have gotten the most attention so far, it’s possible that the circulator could maintain and potentially expand Central enthusiasm, though one wonders about the precincts that would have been directly served by the original 2000 line.  But it doesn’t seem to have an answer to the South Austin issue.  On the other hand, it might be able to improve performance in the Northwest corner of the Austin map if advocates tell some kind of Mopac congestion story related to the Red Line.

Advocates of GL might argue that running a better campaign that touts future expansion into the southern neighborhoods might be enough to get the line approved the second time around. They would point out that if the affordable housing bonds can be tried again after a narrow loss, it doesn’t make sense to abandon a route that came so close the first time even though it faced a uniquely hostile electorate.

Others might indicate that an initial sequence of GL in the South or some other route based on existing bus service that targets South Austin might be a ridership and political winner.

Presently, there is no body of publicly-available political polls that provide a sense of how voters would react to the ‘best message’ for each route.  And as already detailed, it’s not obvious that Mueller will achieve significant political lift relative to the GL route in the needed precincts.  A South Austin focused route might solve one problem but create lower support intensity in Central Austin.  The problem is compounded by the lack of detailed corridor/route comparison data.

At this time  no route seems like the clear, slam dunk political winner based on available polling or electoral analysis.  And if that remains the case, then other criteria such such a ridership, cost effectiveness, economic impact and so on become the meaningful differentiators.

In general, Austinites should be cautious when someone argues for or against a rail route on political feasibility grounds but is unwilling to provide data to back up their assertions.  The experiences and theories of professional political and public affairs consultants should definitely be taken seriously, but need to be verified with independent, open data. Otherwise, we are handing over veto power of Austin’s transit future to rather opaquely-derived intuitions based on polls or electoral data analysis that are not submitted to public review.

CATS focuses on evaluating the stops on a route (‘alignment’ in transit jargon) and the vehicle type (‘mode’) for thirteen connections in a pre-determined area that includes the University of Texas, the Mueller redevelopment area, the Central Business District, the Capitol Complex, East Riverside, and Bergstrom airport. The thirteen connections are visualized in the image below; darker color indicates the CATS recommended route.

CATS does not explain why this is the optimal initial sequence for urban rail (the vehicle technology it finds most attractive).  It certainly demonstrates positive benefits, but there are no comparisons with alternative routes outside of the thirteen connections.

The study provides two ridership estimates with the highest being 27,600.  I could not find source code implementing the algorithm or the weights of factors described in the report narrative or the data file used.  CATS does reference past studies and their associated public feedback process and calls the 2006 “Future Connections” study the ‘source study’ for its rail alternatives evaluation.

So, perhaps the “Future Connections” study  (FCS) explains why the CATS recommended alignment is optimal? No, it does not.  Instead – just like its child – FCS focuses on a constrained area and is fairly direct about its view of Central Austin transit as intended to ‘support the planned Capital MetroRail system and serve major destinations in Central Austin not directly connected to the rail system.’  Right below that statement in FCS is a map of the study’s focus area and a few pages later there is a list of twelve familiar-looking connections the study evaluates.

FCS goes and scores the narrow set of connections according to multi-criteria rubric (ridership, land use, cost, etc.) to craft the best route for MetroRail-supporting circulator. You can notice bands of green delineating suggested routes for rapid buses – large, technology enhanced buses that can communicate with signals. Finally, it is important to note that FCS scores a streetcar vehicle technology ahead of buses. It did not evaluate urban rail.

At this point, we are still wondering why a circulator supporting suburban commuters is the optimal first sequence for urban rail in the Austin we anticipate for 2021.  We know that streetcars and urban rail are better than bus and that a circulator supporting the Red line has some ridership benefits, but we don’t know why it is the best choice. Better is not the same as optimal.  And why are high ridership routes being served by the rapid bus technology? To figure this out, we have to consult the 2004 plan that spawned FCS: the “All Systems Go! Long Range Transit Plan” (ASG).

ASG was the first major public input process and study undertaken by CapMetro after the failed 2000 urban light rail referendum.  The 2000 referendum proposal submitted to the Federal Transportation Authority featured a 20-mile light rail transit system with 26 stations running north-south from McNeil Road to Ben White Boulevard, and east-west from the central business district to 5th and Pleasant Valley. It estimated a ridership of approximately 37,400 weekday boarding by 2025.  I was not able to gain access to a document detailing the methodology for those projections or the source file for their calculation.  The proposal’s route can be found in the image below.

ASG replaced the failed referendum route with rapid bus.  The remaining ASG documents do not provide a data-driven reason for this substitution.  Instead, the document justifies its direction by noting the thousands of individuals that provided public input.

Obviously, the outcome of the referendum weighted on the minds of the facilitators and participants of ASG, which was used to advocate for the successful Red Line referendum. Thirteen years later, it appears our transit policy is still being driven by the child and grandchild of ASG.

When I walked into a Project Connect open house I was expecting fresh data-driven comparisons that yielded optimal recommendations.  Instead, I was just offered recommendations based on CATS and its ancestors. And no data or model, just visuals.  An example chart from the open house follows.

I didn’t feel empowered to make a decision on whether these recommendation were best.  One could complain if there was an instinctive feeling that something was absolutely terrible and awful.   But without comparison data, how would an empiricist like myself even know that?

It turns out that the influential members of Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization’s Transit Working Group (TWG) also were curious about the suburban commuter circulator route recommended by Project Connect. Nowadays, the alignment is typically referenced by the much warmer feeling-inducing moniker of ‘the Mueller route’.

In addressing their concerns of why a high ridership corridor like Guadalupe/Lamar was not selected, the City of Austin’s Transportation Director made two arguments: (1) that the Hyde Park to UT route was not highly-scored within the CATS study and that (2) there was already a federally-funded rapid bus in the corridor.  The relevant part starts at 7:59 in this video.

The Hyde Park to UT argument is tangential.  The Director was referencing a potential connection in the CATS circulator as it was scored by the subjective formula of the study – it has little to do with overall ridership of Guadalupe/Lamar.  And the implicit argument that there is not enough value is directly contradicted by his second point, which is that the route is so valuable that it is where rapid bus is being deployed to first (!).

While his argument might be compelling if Austin was deploying urban rail in the same corridor a year or two after the 2014 start of rapid bus, the Director pointed out at the May 11^th 2012 TWG meeting that a ribbon-cutting for rail is at best six years away if we get funding from FTA immediately and the project progresses quickly.  By then, the rapid buses would have logged countless miles; and in any event, they could be re-purposed to a different corridor.  Finally, the local cost of the rapid buses is $9 million.  Is it worth it to pick a potentially sub-optimal urban rail route costing hundreds of millions of dollars because of such a relatively small investment?

Just to reiterate the obvious: there was no defense of the Project Connect recommendation on the basis of recent ridership comparisons, just assertions about ‘optics’ that FTA might not ‘like’. Other Mueller route supporters will similarly offer justifications based on ‘development impact’ or likelihood of Tax Increment Financing – but they are not backed by detailed or comparative data.  It’s definitely possible that Mueller is the optimal first sequence, but the comparative evidence is not in the public domain.

One piece of data we know with certainty is who funds transit in our region.  While CapMetro has a regional focus, it is funded by the sales taxes and bus fares paid in Austin.  Sales taxes in the CapMetro’s service area are its primary source of revenue according to CapMetro’s 2013 budget.

And of that revenue, almost all of it is generated by sales taxes emanating from Austin.  Certainly, some residents of Leander buy their lunch in Austin and so on.  But there’s no way to argue that population centers outside of the Austin city limits are meaningful financial contributors.  Austinites pick up the tab for the externalities of suburbanites choosing to live far, far away from their places of employment to get additional residential square footage. The data below is from the CapMetro Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for FY 2011.

The clarity of who pays for transit juxtaposed with the incomplete set of data about the optimal initial urban rail sequence should catalyze action by Council to seek out richer data on alternative rail routes that addresses the weaknesses in how the narrowly-tailored CATS is being used as the justification for Mueller as the initial urban rail sequence.  CATS is about the best allocation given the connections available to a central circulator – it is not justification for Mueller as the first urban rail project. In the spirit of keeping things weird, the Council could call the new analysis the Deciding Optimal aligGment Study.   I certainly hope the data is both loud and has some bite.

It’s not just some egghead blogger pointing this out.  Two externally-powered reviews of our urban rail organizing also concluded that a more transparent process with better data is needed. The hot-of-the-presses Urban Land Institute Rose Fellowship report indicated that we should urge the public input process to: “Show your work. Reinforce unprecedented openness and transparency.” Additionally, this January’s APTA peer review observed that: “The Project Connect and Urban Rail project plans are lacking complete information regarding projected ridership. Ridership projections are particularly important for the further development of Urban Rail.”

If you are interested in helping bring about a transparent and data-driven decision on the urban rail route, then you might want to check out Austinites for Urban Rail Action (AURA), a new group formed by a small band of committed Austin citizens.

The article features a devastating collection of data-driven comparisons of Austin census tracts with other major Texas cities to persuasively evidence the hypothesis.  Well, actually, the piece does no such thing.  Instead, it is a collection of anecdotal observations by the author.  Me pointing out that the supermarket I frequent on the west side has a non-zero Latino and Asian presence or that there were plenty of white people living on East Riverside with me back-in-the-day carries as much empirical heft as this piece.  Which is to say none at all.

There is no evidence presented whatsoever to support the conjecture that Austin is the state’s most segregated city.  Perhaps it is! It would be valuable if somebody given column inches in Texas Monthly would look at the data to figure it out.

The weirdest part is the tangential detour into geographic districts.  I was a proponent of a switch to SMDs, but I have no idea how we get from SMDs to desegregation.  The author eventually admits as much:

But whether single-member districts are fully the answer remains to be seen. African Americans face a special challenge: they have been moving out of Austin entirely, making it harder to carve out an electoral district that will guarantee their representation. A different problem affects Asian Americans, who now make up 6 percent of residents. Not suffering the same segregationist legacies as blacks and Latinos, they are more spread out across the city, making it difficult to guarantee direct representation. As for Latinos, when the plan goes into effect in 2014, they will probably net one or two more seats.

So Latino representation might go up 4% or 14%, but clearly not be a voting majority. African-American representation might cease. And Asian-American representation will be unlikely.  So given this data, geographic diversity leading to desegregation happens how exactly?

It is uncertain what kind of segregation the author is actually focused on reducing.  I assume a combination of residential housing and workplace segregation.  There are all kinds of progressive policies – funding geographically-dispersed affordable housing, supporting living wages, investing in K-12 and community colleges, funding anti-discrimination law enforcement and so on – that can actually do something about segregation.  Cheering on young women wearing quinceañera gowns into the Oasis (which I am all for!) is not a meaningful or scalable solution to housing or workplace segregation.

Even if Austin is not the most segregated city in Texas, plenty of Austinites of all shapes and colors are quite concerned about residential segregation and the educational attainment of the emerging Austin Latino majority. We talk and even blog about it and our need to do more! It would be valuable if folks given space in Texas Monthly would advance actual policies to deal with these issues.

Many of us that supported the hybrid alternative were also concerned about the details of the IRC implementation.  The IRC was sold as an inclusive body free of sinister political operators seeking to undermine the ‘public interest’ (which is obviously in the eye of the beholder).  In refuting Steve Bickerstaff’s optimistic, abstract advocacy for IRCs, I argued that:

I think the [Bickerstaff article] would benefit from making a distinction from true or ‘thick’ participatory randomness and the types of so-called randomness instituted by institutional designs like Prop 3. Because there are multiple procedures that require both an individual to apply and survive screening, not to mention an incredibly harsh disqualification based on past voting, Prop 3 is not ‘thick’ randomness at all. It is randomness within a highly constrained pool.

Once data became available about the full extent of the exclusion from the Proposition 3 IRC implementation, the pro-hybrid coalition explicitly pointed out that only around 20,000 Austinites would be able to serve and that such a pool could not reflect Austin’s demographic diversity.

I certainly hope that enough people rush to apply in the remaining two week window to ensure a high quality and diverse pool of commissioners and panelists. Apply (if  you qualify, of course)!

Much more importantly, I hope the IRC’s troubled implementation helps squash any budding enthusiasm for California-style proposition culture in Austin.  The IRC is now a part of the charter and incredibly difficult to amend; and the fact that is was crafted by an unelected and relatively opaque group of well-intentioned individuals obscured the disinfecting sunshine of public skepticism that would have generated a superior proposal.  I hope this example illustrates to Austin voters the costs of ‘direct democracy’ since its benefits can be so seductive.

The Mayor embraced the concept of ‘public value’ by reiterating that wise policy must build on top of the secular trends that bolster Austin’s economic fortunes.  “Attitude not latitude” as he put it.  Further, I was happy that he made a strong, progressive case for the “attitude” being characterized by public investment (a.k.a. taxing ourselves to buy shared public goods).  Finally, I was grateful that he spotlighted important trends – such as Austin’s booming Latino population – with very concrete data to make fuzzily understood concepts reality.  For example, he pointed out that 60% of AISD’s enrollment is Latino.

On the other hand, for a speech focused on the importance of embracing change to preserve what makes Austin special, it was lacking a detailed policy vision to make change appealing to the median voter.  The Mayor mostly focused on defining the value of Austin’s many dollar-importing festivals, Formula 1, and the future medical school.  In other words, it was a defense of a status quo that has detractors but is not actually threatened or likely to be the most important set of policy choices in determining the well-being of Austinites.

There was one important exception: urban rail.

The Mayor was clear in his belief that a multi-modal solution to Austin’s congestion was needed; he vowed to push for a rail referendum before the completion of his current term.  Some of the devilish details – such as the actual route for the rail – were not covered.

Given the prominence of affordability in the local political conversation and inequality in the national one, I was expecting more policies aimed at ameliorating the precarious position of middle-class and working poor Austinites.

There was no discussion of housing supply, which was a bit of a lost opportunity since he was addressing the Real Estate Council of Austin.  While urban rail is a key part of helping Austinites reduce an expensive dependence on cars for mobility, it is only one tool.  Given the RECA setting, I would have expected discussion of the need to create a more sensible land use strategy as well as invest in other mobility alternatives besides rail.

Perhaps the Mayor was prioritizing a few issue areas and a more expansive agenda would not have been prudent given the unsettled nature of electoral coalitions in the current council and the move to single-member districts.  And perhaps that is my biggest observation about the speech: it seems that there’s currently a vacuum of policy ideas matching the City’s aspirations to be a global model of livability.

This past November Austinites replenished our municipal democratic practices by shifting towards geographic districts and moving elections from May to November.  However, much work remains to be done to ensure that city government is truly open to the community’s diverse perspectives. A high priority for reform is the City of Austin’s approach to lobbying and public input.

The city manager, city staffers, and council members are full-timers who work typical day hours (i.e. “9 to 5″). Presently, our policymakers routinely receive public input while the typical employed adult Austinite is working.   One-on-one policy advocacy and lobbying also happens during work hours.

Even when public hearings are scheduled during evenings or weekends, these sessions take place at a specific place during a set time.  If you can’t get a babysitter, or you are out of town for work, or have a conflicting civic commitment, or can’t afford/find the transportation to the location, then you are out of luck.  While a few superstar citizens persevere, these barriers create a ‘meetingopoly’ that favors professionals compensated to navigate pet issues through the process.

In my experiences I’ve found that council members and civil servants are responsive to new voices; many are deeply sincere in seeking out exhaustive public input.  The problem I am identifying is that it is very hard for people to successfully and consistently engage without it being their job.

Truly democratizing public participation in Austin requires adoption of proven reforms including:

- Increasing the importance of digitally-submitted public input

- Shifting from exclusively paying consultants to chat with NGO leaders and civic junkies towards actually engaging the average Austinite through citizen juries and deliberative polling

- Adopting publicly-financed clean elections

As an initial step, I’ve requested that the City of Austin adopt the White House’s approach to digital petitions.  This move will facilitate collective action, encourage the transition towards digital public input, and create easily-accessible, transparent accounts about where policymakers stand. Please join me in supporting this request here.

The piece goes on to offer three directions to make Austin more affordable:

1. An unspecified homestead exemption on property taxes for non-elderly and/or disabled

2. Ending the “100 percent reimbursement to extend large water and wastewater lines to new developments”

3. Reducing the practice of “giving away the store” (that’s as specific as the piece gets) for economic development projects

As I have previously outlined, the median Austinite’s major expenditures are housing (the mortgage or rent, not the property taxes), transportation costs (car and insurance payments) and federal taxes.  And we have to think about more than costs: part of the reason for affordability concerns is the stagnation of wages.

With this context, the three proposals advanced by the piece are not necessarily helpful and might actually be counter-productive depending on the implementation details.

Assuming government stays the same size, a homestead exemption would shift revenue generation towards property taxes from rentals and sales taxes – both of which are likely to be regressive and place modestly higher affordability pressure on non-wealthy renters.  While a capped homestead exemption would be more progressive than a flat rate one, the regressive contour relative to rental housing would remain.

Similarly, while reducing the infrastructure reimbursement might hit developer profits and leave supply untouched, it is also possible that the capital behind new housing development will simply choose not to build the lower price supply.  This might be successful anti-sprawl policy, but reducing housing supply will not help reduce the cost of purchasing a home or renting.  Quite the opposite.

Finally, as I have already discussed, the subsidy/incentive policies of the City are not significant enough to impact Austin’s affordability in any substantial way.  They are just too small as a part of the budget and the jobs landscape. The allocation of subsidies certainly should be made more just and efficient – and I personally lean towards a universally available credit that facilitates the local ‘economic gardening’ approach. But regardless of the changes, this area will not yield meaningful improvements to Austin affordability.

One interesting sub-plot to these three policies is that they would certainly be helpful to the affordability of existing homeowners; assuming they are all pure specimens of homo economicus, this group of Austinites has an interest in having their homes maintain high asset value but low tax and public fee costs for preserving that value.  Hence a policy scheme that constrains new housing supply and shifts the burden of financing municipal government to rentals makes sense for this group. This might be a winning political coalition, but it is doubtful to prove an economically egalitarian approach.

Political viability of hybrid vs. exclusively SMD approach 

The piece leaves out the complete history about the past viability of both 10-0-1 and 8-2-1.  I provided the author with the chart below detailing the election date, council election design, and percent of the vote in support.

It is inaccurate to imply that 8-2-1 is unique in getting ‘its ass kicked’ by the voters.  Both approaches experienced difficulty.  It’s hard to say what might be more viable today based on elections so long ago. Hence, we should pick the best policy since it’s definitely not clear that either approach is the clear political winner – in fact, they have both been losers.   If the hybrid vote attempt had earned a substantially different vote share than the four exclusively SMD votes, then that might be an argument against over-optimizing.  But that is just not the facts.

Empirical support for an Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC)

The piece provides one anecdote from a local attorney/redistricting consultant arguing that political boundary-drawing often is intended to (a) help one group over another and (b) is intended to help incumbents.  Incumbent protection is not really an issue in Austin because of term limits.  The value added by an IRC in this case is marginal – still a reason to vote for the AGR proposal, but hardly a reason to vote against the hybrid proposal.

Moreover, while we all have our favorite ‘bad’ groups and special interests we would like to protect against through a redistricting process, how can we be certain that it won’t be our ‘good’ groups that will be disproportionately hurt? Specifically, no matter the mechanism for redistricting, it will become increasingly difficult to draw an African-American SMD without using the types of creative boundaries that are often decried as ‘gerrymanders’.  I expressed concern to Roberts about the lack of Latino geographic dispersion in Austin and how that creates significant risks to descriptive and substantive representation if we just draw a couple of squares on the East side.

Randomness in the selection of IRC members does not necessarily translate into substantive fairness because there is absolutely no randomness whatsoever in the process of applying to be selected.  It would have been useful for the Roberts to apply equal levels of scrutiny to the theorized benefits of the IRC, especially since the incredibly limited data we have from California indicates that while it is an improvement, it can certainly can be gamed.  Austin lobbyists, civic groups, and entities with a stake in public budgeting will have plenty of seemingly independent friends and relatives that can meet IRC criteria while being loyal to those they have social ties to.

The IRC is well-intentioned and a likely improvement, but there seems to be such modest benefits that it doesn’t justify disqualifying a vote for the hybrid.  Especially since we might need some creative gerrymanders to achieve things Austinites care about, such as providing opportunities for African-American representation.

Fiscal stewardship

The piece’s central fiscal argument is this: “Also keep in mind that no research shows that at-large council members can stop the spending increase.” The emphasis is mine.

If we focus on the word ‘stop’ then the statement is true.  Not even a strong mayor with veto power is likely to stop the effect of increasing seat size.  But that is not our position; we argue that having some at-large seats will help create relatively better fiscal stewardship than an exclusively SMD system.

Given the amount of time I spent discussing fiscal stewardship with the piece’s author, I was surprised by the limited detail provided by the piece on this topic.  It only covers one of the three research essays I’ve highlighted in the white paper and other writings in support of our fiscal stewardship argument.  The Langbein piece, which finds that SMDs lead to higher spending, and the Sass & MacDonald essay that finds a similar, but diminishing effect of higher SMD spending.  In terms of Baqir, I specifically indicated to Roberts that Baqir’s modeling assumed first-past-the-post multi-member systems where the at-large members can win seats powered by a relatively narrow base of 20% of the vote (e.g Boston).

This is precisely why the 8-2-1 proposition features citywide seats. Since we have an instant run-off system, the electoral incentives of the legislators resemble those of the citywide mayors that Baqir and the other authors associate with relative spending restraint.  To be clear, citywide at-large seats are not as effective as a veto-empowered strong mayors and there’s a non-zero chance that they are essentially the same as SMDs.

But the Baqir quote in the Cut’s story should have this context; I know it is too much to ask for the piece to explain the nuances of Baqir’s Table 7.  On the other hand, I don’t think it is accurate to imply to readers that there’s no difference on fiscal stewardship by creating a tangential, artificially high standard that no hybrid proponent ever claimed would be met.

Descriptive representation

I might be misreading the tone, but given the piece’s voting recommendation for a 10-0-1 plan it seems that the author accepts that a 10-0-1 plan with an IRC can somehow simultaneously provide optimal descriptive representation to African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans while also ensuring that district boundaries are neighborhood-focused.  It also appears that the empirical evidence of bias against white women by SMDs is not found to be an important item to be weighed against exclusively supporting 10-0-1.

It was extremely disappointing that Roberts did not aggressively press AGR for release of the census tracts used in their hypothetical calculations, or independently explore whether these many promises can indeed be satisfied at the same time.  As I have argued in the past, the most honest 10-0-1 maps available come from the Austin Neighborhoods Council, and they make it clear that it’s already very tough to draw an African-American opportunity (as opposed to majority) district because the densest African-American concentrations happen in areas that are majority Latino, and hence, are also important to optimizing Latino representation.

This dilemma will only get tougher as the presently foreign-born Latino cohort is replaced by Latinos that are born here or naturalized.  Moreover, the piece seems to accept AGR’s punt on Asian-American representation by re-stating their position that it’s not impossible for an Asian-American to be elected from an SMD, and hence there is no need to engage the requests from the Asian-American community for an at-large safety valve.

Latino substantive representation

The piece does not engage the distinction between Latino substantive and descriptive representation.  The likeliest problem that an emerging Austin Latino majority would face under an all SMD approach is that boundary-drawing risks constraining the substantive influence of Latinos.  Specifically, as I explained to the author and have detailed in other places, under an exclusively at-large or a hybrid system, a Latino majority is automatic in all future citywide districts once the group becomes the majority of the city’s population.  There is no risk of boundary-drawing undercutting the majority.  This point is not engaged by the piece; instead, it solely focuses on descriptive representation.  In the short-term, the Latino population will probably be slightly better served by an exclusively SMD system (though it all depends on the boundaries drawn) in the next election cycle or two. But even that advantage very quickly and aggressively dissipates, even more so if Latinos do not geographically disperse.

Roberts acknowledges this final point by including the statement: “Single member districts don’t necessarily harm large, dispersed Hispanic populations, though”.  But the piece does not carry the caveat to its logical conclusion. As I pointed out in the white paper and at Burnt Orange Report, the last ten years feature Austin  Latino population share growth without dispersion. This problem is the foundation of our skepticism that an SMD approach is optimal for ensuring fair Latino descriptive and substantive representation in the long-term.  What happens if dispersion does not happen, as it has failed to happen in Austin? The article does not consider this possibility.

Constituent services

The story doesn’t really engage the pro-hybrid evidence on constituent services at all.  To summarize: officials elected from an SMD are likely to prioritize the constituent services of their coalition.  If you are outside of the median voter or the winning coalition, or are pro-actively part of the opposing coalition, then your constituent service request is unlikely to be served.  This is not that difficult to understand – if you are a southwest Austin progressive Democrat represented by Republican on council, you realize that your representative might not prioritize your requests.

Further, the research by Butler and Broockman shared with the author makes two findings that raise the stakes of this dynamic: elected officials treat service requests by constituents differently depending on race and constituents initiate requests at different rates depending on the race of their representative.  These important arguments for citywide representatives were not engaged in the story.

Instead, the brief engagement of this topic trails off by asking a rhetorical question about whether renters and people with disabilities have been particularly well-represented in substantive policy by at-large districts.  As I and others have discussed in other places, it is unlikely that SMDs will lead to the empowerment of a particularly enlightened median voter that is excited to boost affordable rental supply within their neighborhood or eagerly zone mental health support facilities.  Certainly these groups are marginal under at-large, but it’s not clear why Roberts believes they will fare particularly better under the likely NIMBYism empowered by SMD median voters.

 An unjustified voting recommendation

“In this case, any change will be better than keeping things the way they are.”

That’s how the author starts the Cut’s story.  But given this, the piece’s conclusion – voting exclusively for 10-0-1 – was a bit of a surprise.  Roberts’ analysis led the reader to believe that he found the issues complex and the plans to be fairly similar when compared to the status quo.

But then at the end, it seems clear that Roberts’ supports the AGR proposal because of the remarkable value attributed to theorized effects of the IRC.

This implies that the problems Roberts grants arise from an exclusively SMD approach (e.g. the bias against white women, higher spending, Asian-American concerns) are an acceptable tradeoff and/or concludes that the promise of amorphous and unproven benefits of the IRC are enough to justify exclusively voting in support of the AGR 10-0-1 proposal and against the 8-2-1 proposal.

This seems a bit of a stilted recommendation to me and perhaps that is why it was made so coyly.  It was particularly surprising given that the author chastises those of us that are providing multivariate regressions based on thousands of empirical observations as ‘theoretical’ but bases his exclusive support for Proposition 3 on a theory about the IRC’s benefits based on an single anecdote about a vague problem that doesn’t even cover why the IRC would be an effective solution.

In any event, the IRC’s benefits over council-approved redistricting are modest (especially if the Voting Rights Act stays in effect) and unrelated to the substantive issues raised by hybrid proponents and reiterated above.  This further deepens the importance of voting for both – or to borrow from the author’s reasoning, why let the unproven, but supposed perfection of the IRC be the enemy of the good the hybrid provides over the status quo?

Austin voters that want an alternative to the status quo can choose to vote for either plan or for both.  The majority-surpassing proposition that gets the most votes will be implemented.

Some folks are adamant that an exclusively SMD system is the only acceptable alternative to the exclusively at-large status quo. I prefer 8-2-1 overall for several reasons and hope Austinites that favor adding substantial geographic representation but are not absolutely devoted to an exclusively SMD system will consider voting for both.