Meet candidates for Austin City Council District 5

Four candidates are running for Austin City Council District 5. Ryan Alter, David Weinberg, Liz Brink, and Farrah Abraham. Ryan Alter was first elected four years ago. Really, this election is about whether or not we want to keep moving forward, keep making the progress we've been making, or go back to the way things were. I have shown myself to be someone who's a problem solver, who shows up prepared and ready to deliver results that make a real difference for people, and I'm ready to do that for four more years. You need to have people who are actually representing the district well, We do not have that today in District 5. I'm really trying to improve on that in two big ways. Number one, actually listening to people in the district and taking their voices to City Hall on all sorts of issues. The other thing I want to do is just really plain and simple, excellent constituent service for people, helping them out from City Hall. It seems like the City Council really isn't listening to what the residents are saying. and i just got tired of wondering what are they thinking down there and so i just decided to you know be the change that i want to see i'm just a a resident lifelong resident of south austin that just truly wants the best for the city i'm not bound to any developer or activist group or anything like that. I am a 25-year union electrician. Vera Abraham couldn't do an interview because she's recovering from surgery. She gave me written responses. She describes herself as a self-funded, debt-free candidate, single mother, small business owner, national figure, and advocate for survivors of crime. She was a star on 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom. She says her priorities include auditing and saving money. I asked each candidate whether they support Prop I, which would require external audits of city spending. Alter doesn't support it. We are doing our own audit that's going to be much more thorough and comprehensive. And this one that's on the ballot would end up being very surface level. We'd pay a lot of money to get very little value out of it. I certainly am in favor of more auditing. I think I would prefer the proposal that the mayor put forward in terms of his audit program, but I'm not going to be telling anyone in District 5 to vote against Prop I in November. I absolutely support the external audit and getting it on the charter because, I mean, we could do an internal audit, but we would know that as city councils change, they may do away with that. Farrah says she supports Prop I. She thinks social service funding and affordability should be balanced by getting rid of government waste. Another concern in District 5 is safety around the Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center. Sunrise is providing a critical service in the community. The problem is it's the only one in the city. That's problem number one. Problem number two, it's not big enough. When they started, they were serving maybe 20, 30 people a day. Now it's over 300. And because of that, and because it's not big enough, you have this spillover into the neighborhood where there's a school, a park. You cannot concentrate a single homeless service center in one council district it's not going to work i don't care which council district is it's in i don't care who's running it that is too much of a burden on one particular area i think we need to work with the director there to see maybe if we can work with putting up maybe some sort of fencing to kind of help keep people on the property i know it would be great if we could just remove, relocate the Sunrise Navigation Center so it's not right across the street from the school. On Sunrise, Farrah wants to enforce safety standards around facilities, focus on wraparound care and protect crime victims. On transportation, Alter says it's a priority to deliver on bond dollars. We have to balance that with what we can afford and I think really what is most important is the public has asked for a number of years through a number of bonds for us to improve our sidewalks, our roads, you know, all of our transportation infrastructure. Other candidates have concerns about the cost of Project Connect, but want to see other transportation improvements. In District 5, I would like in particular to see some improvements made in terms of north-south bus service. I would like to see some improvements made in terms of how people are getting around by car, particularly in the southern part of the district, Slaughter Lane. Can we maybe shore up CapMetro in some way, maybe get it to where they have more routes that are, you know, through all hours of the night consistently? You know, can we make the buses safer, have better bus stops? I think that there are other things we can look at besides just throwing our money away. On transportation, Farrah says she supports expanding public transit like with the Austin light rail, but the spending must be audited.