This is Democracy – Episode 288: City Leadership

[00:00:00] Intro: This is democracy, a podcast about the people of the United States, a podcast about citizenship, about engaging with politics and the world around you, a podcast about educating yourself on today’s important issues and how to have a voice in what happens next.

[00:00:25] Jeremi: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy.

Today we are going to discuss municipal government. How are cities governed? What role does city governance play, not just in the management of cities, but in our larger democracy? And how can we all as citizens who care about democracy be better informed about city government and use our better information and understanding about city government to do a better job in improving and growing our democracy?

There’s a tendency we all have to focus on the national issues and sometimes forget the local issues that might affect us. Most of all, we are very fortunate today to be joined by someone who knows as much about municipal government as anybody else. this is a council person, Alison Alter. She is a city council person in Austin, Texas.

She has been on the city council for eight years. She is just finishing her second term and she’s term limited. So she’s just cycling off after eight very successful years. Helping to manage and lead one of the fastest growing and most dynamic cities, not just in the United States, but in the world. So we’re very fortunate to have Alison Alter with us today.

Alison, thanks for joining us.

[00:01:43] Alison Alter: My pleasure. Happy to join you.

[00:01:45] Jeremi: Before we turn to our, discussion, with Alison, we have, of course, Zachary’s scene setting poem. And this poem is special. Why is it special, Zachary?

[00:01:56] Zachary: Because council person Alison Alter is special. Your wife and my mother.

[00:02:01] Jeremi: Oh, so you mean the boss.

[00:02:02] Zachary: So this poem was called "For Mom".

On a dark night in December. I remember standing next to you as you talk to the TV man and wondering what the years would be like, what it would be like so many years later to look back at that moment together. I remember now seeing you down at city hall asking questions and saying things no one wanted to hear.

And I remember standing with you at vigils, and marches, and parties, and parades. And I remember learning about government, when the government was you. I remember nights when the roads were snowed in, when the synagogue was on fire, when the streets were silenced by disease, and we couldn’t drink the water.

And I remember how you reacted, with measure, and attention, and kindness. But most of all I remember, all the times you would, on airplanes or on car rides, in cafes or on long summer evenings, pull out those blue binders and read memo after memo that no one else read. And I still think of this often, when I am at a different city hall, in midnight hearings, or when I am reading late at night, or standing at the polls.

I think of this again, eight Decembers later, and I know now how much it mattered. The government was you.

[00:03:25] Jeremi: What is your poem about, Zachary?

[00:03:27] Zachary: I think the poem is about how, Mom provided all of us and our city with a model of city leadership looks like, but also about what grit and determination and hard work and intelligent policymaking can look like and how important it was for me to see that growing up, but also how important it was for our city that she was doing that work.

[00:03:51] Jeremi: Yes. Yeah. we need good models of political leadership and we don’t have enough. and, Alison certainly provided a very inspiring model for so many people. Alison, you had a PhD before you started on the Austin city council. You had worked extensively, as a scholar, as a philanthropist, as a local leader in other dimensions.

what, after eight years in this role, what did you learn that you wished you had known eight years earlier? What are the things that even the most educated of us don’t know about municipal government that we should know?

[00:04:26] Alison Alter: First, let me say thank you to Zachary for that beautiful poem, and it’s so lovely to hear it from your perspective, all of these years of service,and to see the pieces of it that resonated with you, as you grew up.

I want to start with something really basic to answer your question, Jeremy. I think that people. underestimate the impact of cities or local government on their quality of life and what happens to them day to day. When I have Girl Scout troops come and visit City Hall and I love to do that, to talk with them about city government and what it means, I like to walk them through an exercise because in Austin, we own our own electric utility, we run the water company, we run the airport, we do a lot.

So when you wake up in the morning, you’re waking up to an alarm that is somehow powered. by the city. You are washing your hands in your sink, brushing your teeth with water that’s coming from the city. You’re flushing your toilet. You are living in a house that is safe because of codes that the city has set up for your wellbeing.

You get on a road and you bike to school or bike to work because you are on a piece of infrastructure that the city has built. You go to a park, you go to a library, you get. rescued if you have cardiac failure by the city. There’s just so many things that happen on a day to day basis that are impacted by the city.

And you alluded to this in the beginning, but I think that in academia, at least when I was in academia decades ago, we have a fascination with the national and the international, and we often forget the role that cities can play. we Talk about states being laboratories of democracy, but really cities are the places where that is happening the most when we think about climate change and the changes that are really being made that are moving the needle.

We see that at the city level and public safety, many of the things that are changing are happening because we have communities around the country who are trying to do things a different way and are not happy with the status quo.

[00:06:42] Zachary: Give us a sense, maybe, for those of our listeners who aren’t very familiar with city government, who’ve maybe never been to a city council meeting.

What does city politics look like when you’re sitting, on the dais at City Hall? What are the kind of issues, that you’re dealing with? And what does the policymaking process look like when politics are so local?

[00:07:02] Alison Alter: I had the opportunity to serve as a council member for what is now the 11th largest city in the country with a 5.

9 billion budget. so at any given council meeting, we can be talking about, what chemical needs to go into the water. treatment plant to make your water safe, to how we’re going to zone, a big plot of land in your backyard, to, also thinking about what grant we’re going to receive from the federal government, or just how we’re going to set up, a child care center at a local judicial facility.

One of the things that I love about local government and being on the city council is that you are close to the people. I was one of 11 making the legislative decisions as opposed to being one of 435 in Congress. So the actions that you take really matter. but In Austin, we’d agree on 99 percent of our votes, and we’d maybe have a hundred different votes that we’d have to take in any given meeting.

In Austin, we have a really engaged community, and so we hear a lot from the public about what they care about on specific issues, and then also, More broadly, we deliberate among ourselves and that deliberation varies from item to item.

[00:08:21] Jeremi: What are the ways in which citizens influence the decision making?

You’ve emphasized in each of your answers, Allison, How democratic this process is, even though there’s a small number of you in this case, 11, some cities have larger, councils or equivalent, institutions, but one way or another cities are representative governments, just as our national government is a representative government and the people in office have a great deal of influence.

In a democracy, you’re very, gratefully and often influenced in detail and in broader issues by ordinary people. How does that work? How do people influence your decisions? Can you give us some examples where ordinary people change the outcome?

[00:09:05] Alison Alter: Absolutely. So as a council member, you can’t go to the grocery store without somebody stopping you and telling you about some decision that you made that was good or some decision that you made that was bad, but they also bring things to your attention.

And one of the things that I learned over time was really to pay attention. When somebody had something novel, they were really showing you an opportunity or they were showing you, the potential. An issue that you needed to pay attention to. for me, I would look to some of the work that I did in public safety with respect to our 911 response system.

And we were hearing actually from employees in the call center that there were challenges and that the response times were not what they needed to be. And, we put a lot of emphasis and invested over several years to get the staffing up and fix that problem. But it was an alert that I originally received.

from folks who are working in that call center. I also recall a time when a constituent called, texted me and said, you have to listen to this podcast. It was a podcast, I think, from ProPublica about how sexual assault was being addressed in our community. And that has led me on to a five year journey where we are going to go from being called out in the national news for how we address sexual assault to being the leaders in the country.

But without that original impetus from that person and from the survivors, to time and time again, came to council, came to my office and spoke about what their experiences were. I wouldn’t have been pushing on the council end for that journey. That is, I think, really an important aspect of responsiveness.

[00:10:43] Jeremi: what about cases where, public pressure Can be difficult and distorting. I know there were cases where people even came and protested at your home and situations where people came to council meetings and said things that perhaps were offensive. how do you handle that? How do you think about that?

[00:11:03] Alison Alter: I think we’re seeing all across the country that local officials are not as safe in their activities as we might have once thought that they were and that people are being more violent, more threatening, et cetera. As part of the National League of Cities, there are definitely conversations about safety for council members, et cetera.

in my own experiences, we had protesters outside of our home protesting a vote where I didn’t even vote. for the thing that they were upset about. but I guess the facts didn’t really matter. And, those experiences can shake you to the core. They are, not what you think about when you get into public office.

And yet they also, Make it clear that what you’re doing matters and that the steps that you take, everyone cares about, even if they don’t know about on a day to day basis.

[00:11:52] Zachary: speaking of city politics on a day to day basis, what does crisis response look like on city council when you have say a package series of package bombings in the city or a global pandemic.

how does the city respond to those crises? What role does the city play in those sort of immediate response situations? and how did you as a council person prevent that from dominating your work?

[00:12:15] Alison Alter: This is an area that I think I didn’t really know that I would be focused on as a council member, which is just emergency response.

And as you put it, emergency communications. While I was on council, we had a package bomber. We had multiple water boil. Requirements. We had a blackout with Storm Yuri for a week with an ice storm and no power, to much of our community. We had Storm Mara with a breakdown of limbs all over our community with trees everywhere that also, had power implications, et cetera.

we also had COVID. and protests following George Floyd in each of those cases. I think we got a little bit better in how we learn to respond. when I first came on council, I don’t think we had good systems and I had to really learn. How do you communicate clearly? and over time, I think this is something that I, was able to do really well with respect to my constituents.

You have to build up confidence and trust so that they know that what you’re saying to them is true to the best of your knowledge, and that you are trying to think about, if I was in their situation, what is the information that I need, that I might not have, that I as a council member have? What is it, the information that I need to know, and how do we package it in a way that they can hear it.

during one of the power outages, people couldn’t actually download images and other things. And so you had to recognize, oh, I need to strip down my communications and not put all the bells and whistles so that people who are trying to look at their cell phone in the dark with a little bit of power they have can get the information they need so that their family can make.

the best decisions for them. I think the flip side of what you’re talking about with the emergency response and communication though, Zachary, is also important, which is the preparedness and how we communicate to people beforehand. and this is something I think it’s That is something that I as a council member, for instance, with respect to wildfire have placed a lot of emphasis on.

The city can only control so much and a lot of the success of the city depends on individuals and how individuals, take actions in their own lives to make decisions for their own benefit. Families. and so we have done a lot of effort, put a lot of effort into how we communicate what the wildfire risk is, for instance, on the steps the families can take to harden their homes and to be prepared in the event that they were asked to evacuate for those parts of the city who are at high risk of wildfire.

[00:14:46] Jeremi: And just so people understand, Allison, Who does the work for the city when you have these kinds of issues when you have a pandemic which you had to Live through not just as a citizen, but as a city leader or when you had a terrorist incidentwho are you contacting at the city? How should Those of us who generally don’t know who the city workers are, the people who do this, how do we understand the structure of city government insofar as it relates to addressing these kinds of concerns?

[00:15:19] Alison Alter: With the city has, the case of Austin, we have a city manager, we have a city manager form of government. So our mayor is a weak mayor, in terms of powers that He has and the city managers. The one is really doing the day to day implementation. in cases of emergencies, the mayor has a little bit more power,to address things.

But ultimately, it’s our city staff who are out there in the field. If it’s an energy issue in our case, since we own our own utility, they’re making decisions about how to deploy personnel, how to bring people in to help us. we have an emergency management team, group that is supposed to be working with all of the different units.

in a well functioning system, you have continuing continuation of operations plans that are implemented and, adapted for the particular situation that you are using. When we had the power outages and we couldn’t,people couldn’t get to work because they were iced in. Maybe they didn’t have power to access the internet.

It was whoever was on deck who could help. One of the things that, we’ve done over time in Austin is really try to regroup and rethink about how we, do that communication. And we’ve gotten much better. There are also language issues, which you may not know about. be familiar with since you speak English.

but we have many different languages that people in our community speak and we have to figure out which messages have to be translated and how to get the information out quickly to people. but there’s also all of our public safety personnel are very involved in most of these responses, as well as our public health facilities.

COVID was different in that COVID was a very long, deployment. That we had, and so everyone within the organization was involved one way or another, with our COVID response.

[00:17:05] Jeremi: What are you most proud of? what is the one thing you did that you think has had the most effect on people and maybe doesn’t get the attention it deserves?

[00:17:15] Alison Alter: That’s a great question. I’m really proud of the work that I’ve done to improve access to health care using the tools that we have as a city. So we have our own EMS system that’s separate from our fire department and COVID really challenged us to do that. try to figure out how we could deliver the care that was our responsibility in responding to 911.

How would we do that when we didn’t have the ambulances there? So you may recall under COVID, ambulances had to be, sanitized and we also had staffing challenges because, people were calling out sick because they were catching COVID because they were out in the community. One of the things that I’ve had the honor to lead on is how do we rethink how we address low acuity situations where you don’t need to have an ambulance, where you can address the medical needs of somebody with an alternative method that doesn’t require transport to an emergency.

We’ve created programs. We have a collaborative community care line that, that people call, when they call 9 1 1, they get routed to that. And if it’s something that doesn’t require an ambulance, we have other mechanisms that we deliver care through. So if you need oxygen, you need your asthma meds, you need a suture.

and you don’t have to go to the emergency room. We’re able to address that by other means through these processes that we have created. We’re also providing better training, medical, better medical care. We’ve been recognized by the National EMS Physicians Organization as really Providing a new standard of care, a huge portion of our 911 calls don’t require transport to the hospital, but yeah, we have to answer people, and when you have that heart attack and you need to have that ambulance, you want to make sure that we have the resources to do that.

We are a growing city and we can’t do it by simply adding an ambulance on every corner.

[00:19:07] Zachary: It seems to me that what you’re talking about, should interest every listener, particularly any listener who lives in the city of Austin and has benefited from those services. But it seems so many young people in particular, but all kinds of voters, go to the polls and they have no idea what they’re voting for in local elections.

How do you recommend our listeners, if they want to get involved in local politics, in city politics, how should they do So not just so that they’re not voting blind at the polls, but so that they’re actively involved in these processes and getting the services they

[00:19:36] Alison Alter: go ahead. That’s a great question.

Zachary, and going back to where I originally started, you have to start by recognizing that your city actually does some things that you care about. you want to go be able to go out to your park or your local beach, or you want to go to your swimming pool, you want to be able to go to the library, and maybe it’s not everything that you want it.

think about, how could it be better? Write a letter to your council member and say, I want this changed. I think the most important step is to begin to learn who your representative is. Find out how they’re communicating with people, show up at a council meeting, and see what are the issues that are being debated.

if there’s something that you care about in your community, you can get involved. You’ll have great ideas. Some of the best ideas, that I’ve had in trying to advance policy have originated with conversations with my constituents, where they brought a different perspective, or they helped me see something different, or they asked me a question and I had to go, Find an answer.

And it opened up a series of issues where there were opportunities or there were problems that needed to be solved. But it starts with taking that first step. Don’t be scared. as council members, as local elected officials, we’re your neighbors and we want to talk with you. We can do our job better when we can represent you now doing that.

Take some effort on your part, and take some time on your part, but there are a lot of different ways to be involved where you yourself can learn something, or there’s ways just to get informed and feel a little bit more like you know what’s going on, like reading the paper.

[00:21:07] Jeremi: Zachary, is that compelling to you?

we live in a moment now when for so many of my students and other people I talk to, politics looks ugly. Or it’s a very rigid ideological space where people are throwing insults at one another on, on, on Twitter and other social media. what Alison’s describing is a more classic community involvement approach.

It’s a Tocquevillian approach, right? where people get involved, join community associations, go to city council meetings, read local news, listen to one another. is that a compelling alternative to what we’re seeing at the national level for young people like you? I think

[00:21:46] Zachary: it is. I think this is exactly, the most healthy response for a democracy when a larger group of people are happy with the results of an election, or when it feels like national politics are not, helping people in the way that, many would like.

I think the healthiest response is to get involved in your local communities and to help the people right in front of you. Not to get lost in the lofty political rhetoric or the ideological battles, but to really get involved in your local community. I think though we have to be careful not to fall into the cynicism that surrounds Minnesota that we’re got to learn as well, about the fiscal state of America’s cities or very well founded concerns about the future of local government.

We can’t be daunted by, by the big tasks that are at the feet of many municipal governments these days. And I think what Mom’s Experience shows is that really competent, People, can make a big difference, in their, not just in their communities, but nationwide, showing, how these issues can be addressed in new creative ways.

I think there’s a creativity to local politics.

[00:22:51] Jeremi: Yeah. I like that. I like that. A creativity and an openness. Alison, that’s our final question to you. Are you optimistic about this? the challenges of course are quite large, right? When you have hostile state and national forces, when you have newspapers and other local, news sources.

going out of business, when you have powerful entities of different kinds, coming into cities, is this open model of communication and deliberation that you embody so well? are you optimistic that it will survive and thrive in coming years?

[00:23:23] Alison Alter: I think we need it to. I think that when Zachary describes it as the creativity, that creativity comes from the interplay between the local citizenry and the elected leaders and the leadership of the staff for the local government.

And there, is nothing that is inherently partisan about local government and keeping the lights on, making sure the water is clean, taking their trash out, making sure you can take, off at the airport. All of these things are, basic services that we all want to have in our communities. but there are ways to do them better and there are ways to meet needs.

in the community, in different ways. And we frankly can do it better when people are involved. So next time you’re scrolling on your phone and you’re, you’re trying to follow the news, make sure you take a look at that local news or you’re looking for something to do. Go out to that park that has,some event that’s put on by your city, see what your city is doing and find a way to get involved and contribute.

Our cities are better because they’re more than the sum of their parts. And that happens when people like you get involved. I ran for office because I had been involved in parks issues and cared about a park, in my neighborhood for my kids. there are a lot of different ways that people can engage.

And I think that you’ll be surprised if you do a little bit investigation into what it is that your city does, and how they support your daily life and your family, and even your business on a daily basis.

[00:24:57] Jeremi: That makes so much sense. And, you have been rightfully congratulated and feted, Allison.

For many of the achievements, some of which you’ve referred to here from, reforming, many elements of policing through, enhancing health outcomes in the city, addressing sexual assault, improving parks,so many issues. I’m leaving many out. but I think what’s most valuable for our, weekly discussion on this podcast is you’ve shown, how an individual.

Can, step up to the plate, can use her knowledge and background to make a difference. it’s not possible, of course, for each person to immediately get involved in national politics and that might not even be the best route to make a difference. You’ve enhanced our democracy by bringing your intelligence, your openness, your creativity, your thoughtfulness, and your caring and honest approach to serious local issues.

And every one of our listeners can do that in her own or his own way. And so you’re in some ways a model for all of us. And as you say, that’s not a partisan point. That’s actually a point about democracy, about how all of us have to do more than just complain and inform ourselves. We have to get involved one way, one way or another.

So congratulations on your service, Alison.

[00:26:13] Alison Alter: Thank you. I think after that, I’m going to let you have the last word.

[00:26:16] Jeremi: That was

[00:26:16] Alison Alter: great.

[00:26:18] Jeremi: Thank you, Zachary for your inspiring poem for mom today. This was more personal than usual. Your poems are always personal, but this was even more personal, than usual. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners and loyal readers of our Substack for joining us for this discussion of municipal politics. We are recording this episode at the very end of 2024. We wish you all a good new year. If you’re listening to this after the new year, we hope you had a safe and fun new year. And we look forward to many more episodes.

What do you think, Zachary? Is 2025 going to be a good year of episodes for us? What do you think?

[00:26:55] Zachary: I think so.

[00:26:56] Jeremi: We’re looking forward to it. Thank you for joining us for this week of This Is Democracy.

[00:27:09] Intro: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio.

And the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This is Democracy on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

See you next time.