AUSTIN (KXAN) — Two women are vying to take retiring Travis County Precinct 3 Commissioner Gerald Daugherty’s seat in the upcoming election. The seat serves Western Travis County in the Commissioners Court.
Becky Bray is the Republican candidate, endorsed by Daugherty. She’s a native Austinite and long-time transportation engineer, transportation planner and land planner.
Bray touts her work managing multimillion dollar transportation and infrastructure projects from concept to completion. Specifically in Precinct 3, she’s worked on projects for State Highway 45, the Y at Oak Hill, State Highway 71 and Ranch Road 620.
“In many ways, my entire career has been on the job training preparing me for the work of a county commissioner,” Bray told KXAN. “Whether you’re talking about traffic or land use, infrastructure, flooding and air quality or the impacts of COVID-19, we need more action. We need more people to roll up their sleeves and actually get to work and solve these very real problems that threaten our quality of life.”
Democratic candidate Ann Howard says her career in non-profit work has also prepared her for the job.
Howard served as the first Executive Director of Austin’s Ending Community Homelessness Coalition (ECHO). She previously served on boards for Any Baby Can and One Voice Central Texas. She also worked as a defense attorney, representing teens in Travis County juvenile courts and worked as legal counsel to Joe Biden in the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C.
Both campaigns promise to promote fiscal responsibility in the county’s government, if elected.
“These are things I’ve learned by cutting my teeth in the nonprofit community, you have to be thrifty. You have to collaborate and you have to show results, or you don’t get money again, we don’t get funding,” Howard said. “I will be a very thrifty policy maker. I’m going to look over that budget and make sure we’re squeezing every dollar to deliver for the people.”
“I think one thing that covid has shown us is we need to learn how to do more with less. We cannot continue to rely on the taxpayers to fund everything, to fund all pet projects, or to fund every little thing that the county commissioners want,” Bray said. “We really need to tighten our belt strings and figure out how we can get things done with less money.”
On the topic of COVID-19, Howard says the pandemic has shown a need for tackling community issues upfront.
“We know that the best way to innoculate Travis County from the next crisis is to have our house in order, to make sure people have access to health care, to make sure wages are as fair and high and living as they can be so people can provide for their families, to have a transit system that gets people where they need to go,” Howard said. “And our justice system, if we can make sure it’s as tight and fair and responsible as we can make it, then we’re better prepared holistically as a community to handle the next hit.”
A large part of Bray’s campaign centers around public safety. She feels it will be important for the Travis County Sheriff’s Office to pick up slack where the city of Austin has made police cuts.
“The sheriff’s department has always been an incredible community collaborator out within the county, and I think the they’re going to be called upon more and more, and it’s incumbent upon the county commissioners to really fund those needs for the sheriff’s department,” Bray said.
Both candidates also stress the important of wildfire mitigation in Precinct 3.
Following Daugherty’s conservative leadership, Howard says she feels more progressive leadership is needed in Precinct 3. She says she plans to make it a point to have an open door of communication with constituents.
“There’s a lot of folks living in western Travis County who are feeling left out and not heard, feeling ignored, and it’s because they live in the part of the county that’s not part of a city and so they’re calling their county commissioner and not getting much of a response,” Howard said.
Also promising an open line of communication, Bray says Daugherty’s tenure has provided balance that she wants to uphold, if elected to commissioners court otherwise made up of Democrats.
“I think that if we don’t have varying voices in an elected body, then we either, A, get stagnant and we continue down the same path, or, B, if people come with differing views, we don’t listen and we just don’t want to have that conversation,” Bray said. “It’s important that people can come and feel free to come to the Commissioners Court and express opposing views. That’s the way that we should be operating, and if we do, that then I truly truly believe that we will make a better community, a community where everybody can live work play and just have a great time.”
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