Runoff election for Austin City Council District 7 between Mike Siegel & Gary Bledsoe

AUSTIN, Texas - Voters in District 7 will decide who will represent them on the Austin City Council in a runoff election.

There were six candidates for the district on the November ballot. None of the candidates received more than 50% of the vote.

The top two contenders, Mike Siegel and Gary Bledsoe, will now face each other in a runoff election.

In November, Siegel got 39.83% of the vote, and Bledsoe got 19.28% of the vote.

Siegel is a civil rights lawyer and community organizer who has been a city attorney. 

"I'm running for city council to make a difference for this community. We have a lot of big challenges we're facing as a city," he said.

Bledsoe is a civil rights attorney, social justice advocate, and president of the Texas NAACP. 

"I'm running for city council to tackle the important issues of the day so that we have common sense leadership," Bledsoe said.

Early voting runs through Dec. 10. Runoff Election Day is Dec. 14.

What candidates have to say on issues affecting Austinites

Affordability

"We need to build more housing, and we also need to subsidize deeply affordable housing, so we have to do both things at once. I'm encouraged by the actions of the current mayor and city council to make it easier to build, for example, houses on smaller lots or to build 2 or 3 houses on a lot. I've heard a lot from workers who work in our city who can't afford to live here. For example, that the hospitals who need nurses to be on call within 30 minutes of getting a call. There's not nurses who can afford to live within that call radius or teachers can't afford to live in the communities they teach in. To me, we need to build more housing for the folks who power our city, who make Austin the beautiful place that it is," Siegel said.

"When I got in the race, everyone was talking about how the new HOME initiative would take care of our affordability issues. I've changed that debate because it's clear that it will not. It'll take care of those at the higher end, but it won't take care of those who are below the higher end. There are some initiatives that will take care of some of those who are at the lowest end. But for those in the middle, the middle-income workers, the blue-collar workers, the teachers and those individuals, the musicians, the artists that come below that 80th percentile of median family income, who are at the 70th, the 60th the 50th, there's nothing for them. We need to keep Austin special and keep them here. There's no one speaking out for that. You need to have an intentional program and someone who focuses on that," Bledsoe said.

Homelessness

"Every year more people are on the streets because of affordability problems, because of mental health problems. To me, we need a five-year plan to confront homelessness. How do we get people off the streets? I hear from business owners downtown. They feel like people living on the streets is creating disorder that affects their customers and their workers. We have some very good things happening. We've invested in deeply affordable housing, permanent supportive housing. We have this Sunrise Navigation Center in South Austin that helps connect people who are living on the streets to services, whether it's health care, housing support. We need to kind of pay attention to see how we can make these programs more effective, how we can make sure that people spend as little time on the streets as possible, that they're not living under freeways or on our street corners, and they're getting into community based solutions that will really help them live a better life. To get people off the streets, we need every tool in the toolbox. We have several hundred units of permanent supportive housing where you have a case manager to help people with really deep needs. We have a program called Rapid Rehousing where we basically subsidize rent for 12 or 18 months. That's a program that helps people get on their feet. We also have shelters that are kind of the place of last resort. Those are all three strategies we need to continue to implement and support. But also, I think there's a lot of detail work that we can do to make these programs more effective, to make sure that someone is connecting to mental health support, is getting job training and access to jobs they can work in, is getting rent support, also to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place. Can we do tenant assistance? Are there programs where we can make sure we're not having new people get on the streets," Siegel said.

"What we need to do is do something really large in reference to homelessness. I know that in the race, I know my opponent first talked about this being a federal issue, which it's not a federal issue for sure. It's not a federal issue now. I think what we need to do for homelessness is we need to have a kind of one-stop shop, and we need to make sure to try to bring almost everyone in that we can. There are many people who are homeless, they're the low-hanging fruit that maybe just had a recent loss of job or something or not making quite enough to afford the home. We can look at those and go through, and that's 10, 15% of the population that you can easily handle. Then there's another group that's much larger that we need to deal with. But what we need to do is to be able to bring them in and make them whole and try to do all that we can. So many of them are veterans. You know, probably a huge percentage of them are veterans. I think we owe an obligation to them and there are programs and things that they are eligible for, that they are not availing themselves of their opportunities to participate in those programs. I think when you have that, when you bring people in and you take care of their needs, whether it's a mental health need, whether it's a drug addiction or something along those lines, you can really help get those things done. We have some tremendous nonprofits that work on this area, and we need to lift up those nonprofits and work more into having public private partnerships with them to make sure that they're enabled to do more work because they're doing so much as it is now. I think that'll be a great thing, because what we can do is when you bring people in and have that holistic approach and have that one stop shop and you can take people and you can  bring them up to back being ready to go back into society, they can then contribute back and help those programs that still continue to have funding. You can do it in ways that it does not depend exclusively upon the taxpayer, and I think that's a good thing. I think most Austinites would really support that kind of a program," Bledsoe said.

Public safety

"From the thousands of conversations I've had with voters here in District 7, I've heard three main demands from the voters are one, we want the police to come in when we call. That's absolutely important. Even though we've approved this pay raise for the police officers, we need to drill down on the details to figure out why is there this severe response time crisis. The second thing I hear is that people want the police to respect civil rights. Austin voters overwhelmingly supported the Police Oversight Act a year and a half ago. We want to make sure there's not secrecy, that there's transparency and oversight and accountability for the police department. Also public safety is more than just police, it also includes EMS and fire," Siegel said.

Siegel represented Equity Action, a group that brought forth the Police Oversight Act, which voters approved in 2023. They later sued the city for not implementing it. A judge sided with them. When the city and police union were negotiating a contract, one of the sticking points was the "g-file," which are essentially complaints against officers that didn't result in discipline. Equity Action believed the contract would conflict with city law. A judge ruled the contract does comply with the law.

"For the next city council, we have a five-year police contract with very generous compensation for the police officers. Now we can move beyond that struggle with the officers about compensation and really drill down on the details, like how do we get better response time, how do we improve the police academy?" he said.

"Unlike my opponent, I've never been part of a movement to seek to defund the police. My opponent filed a lawsuit to stop the police contract from going through. Even though I've been the victim of racial profiling myself on many occasions, I know that the answer is better policing and that we can do that by better training of police, by making sure that we have proper enforcement, proper response times, and that we try to make sure that we have good and fair police oversight to make sure that we can guide the good police officers to become good police officers.  I hear those issues all throughout the community, whether I'm in Harris Ridge or whether I'm in Allendale. People really want public safety. I think that's something extremely important. We have to make sure that our citizens feel safe and that they are getting responses from police," Bledsoe said. "One of the things can be done to improve response times is making sure that we actually fill the vacant positions."

As for the contract, Bledsoe says, "I think that the idea is you try to make the best contract that you can."

Final pitch to voters

"I'm a civil rights lawyer, former city attorney, former public school teacher. There's two things that I really bring to this race that my opponent doesn't and is one is community organizing. I've been really involved in local issues, whether it was writing policy when I was a city attorney or being part of community coalitions for things like police oversight and school safety during the Covid pandemic. I've shown that I can bring people together," Siegel said "I've been at city hall. I've written policy. I've gone to court. I know how things work there. I think I can be a very effective legislator to make sure that people's needs are being met," Siegel said.

"My final pitch to voters is I think you want to have someone who's there, who's looking out for the public interest, who will make sure that you're respected, who'll reach out to you and have public hearings and try to get your ideas. A leader who will recognize that all the ideas are not necessarily at City Hall. Not every consultant has the best idea. The idea that we know that good common-sense commentary from citizens is extremely valuable and that that should be a main constituent of how we formulate public policy.  I will be that person who will be truthful with you and not tell you talking points from billionaires that something will provide affordable housing when it will not," Bledsoe said. "I'll try to make sure that we don't have more open meetings violations and things of that nature, because those things are very important. Public participation, public notice, public interest. All those things are extremely important and valuable."