In the May election, the candidacy of new urbanist developer Will Wynn drove a wedge in the environmental contingent, with SOS leaders disagreeing publicly over whether to support him, and, by the same token, Mayor Kirk Watson's era of big deals. That split, along with the considerable personal contributions Wynn made to his own campaign, sunk neighborhood leader Clare Barry. Meanwhile, incumbent Willie Lewis, who never shed much light on policy discourse but who adhered to the green vote, got trampled by Danny Thomas, a political unknown whose primary capital consisted of full-page endorsements from Thomas Henderson and, perhaps just as importantly, his independence from the progressive machine. It's easy to see how a skeptic could conclude that Austin's activist agenda has been co-opted by the Chamber of Commerce. But it's also possible for an optimist to conclude that sustainable growth has triumphed in the marketplace of ideas.
Voter turnout seems to say it's time to put the city on cruise control.
Prosperity becomes the beanstalk that leads to apathy and conservatism. The newcomers arrive, they uproot poorer residents, they forward e-mail copies of the daily newspaper's bromides on the foppish behavior of city board members and commissioners. They begin to snicker. We go right back to where we started at the beginning of this decade. The gravity of the equity issue, that hollow third leg of Mayor Watson's Austin economy, is expanding even faster than the city limits.