Austin midterm election runoff results

With a resounding lack of fanfare but decisive and dutiful casting of ballots, Austin-area voters—the ones who voted, that is—made their choices in runoff elections on Tuesday,

On the ballot were Austin City Council seats for Districts 1, 3, and 8; a pick for AISD’s at-large Place 9 trustee position; and a choice for ACC District 8 trustee vote. The community college district seat drew voters from a district that covers the city of Austin as well as Leander, Manor, Del Valle, Round Rock, Elgin, and Hays County.

Below are the runoff results (in italics) as reported by KUT Tuesday, along with some background Curbed Austin reported during the race.

This article was originally published in November 2018 and has been updated.

While the excitement and frenzy of the country’s midterm elections has let up, if only slightly (perhaps not at all in the case of Beto fever), there are three Austin City Council races, one ACC trustee contest, and an at-large AISD trustee battle in which the dust hasn’t settled.

Election Day for the races is Tuesday, Dec. 11—that’s your last chance to vote in these races.

Austin City Council seats for Districts 1, 3, and 8 are up for a runoff vote, and only voters registered in those districts may vote for their preferred candidate. The AISD runoff is for the at-large Place 9 trustee position, and the ACC District trustee vote will cover District 8, which covers the city of Austin as well as Leander, Manor, Del Valle, Round Rock, Elgin, and Hays County.

While the local items on Austin’s midterm ballots were hardly the nail-biters that many state and national races became, the results sent some clear messages about local leadership, growth, and change. The outcome of the three remaining races will be critical in clarifying which directions Austin wants to move in as it continues to grow.

Below is information on the candidates in the three races; you can find information on polling locations and hours on the Travis County and Hays County election websites.

Austin City Council

District 1

Runoff result: Natasha Harper-Madison is the winner, with 71 percent of the vote; opponent Mariana Salazar got 28 percent.

Community organizer Mariana Salazar eked out a small victory in the midterms, with 26 percent of the vote, and East Austin entrepreneur Natasha Harper-Madison garnered 25 percent—quite different numbers, obviously, than those from the runoff.

The candidates ran for the seat being vacated by Ora Houston, the longtime East Austin advocate and first District 1 representative to serve when the council moved to a single-member-district model. District 1 is historically a black neighborhood and has faced issues of displacement and unaffordability for years. Both candidates addressed affordability seriously but from different points of view. Harper-Madison, an East Austin native and president of the East 12th Street Merchants Association, campaigned on mending some of the ways the area and its population have been left out of the city’s process and prosperity. Salazar, who moved to Austin from Venezuela as a teenager, emphasized the importance of immigration issues in the conversation about affordability and access to housing and services.

District 3

Runoff result: Sabino “Pio” Renteria received 64 percent of the vote, while Susana Almanza won 36 percent.

Incumbent Renteria and Almanza are no strangers to competition with each other; Longtime activist and PODER director Almanza ran against Renteria for the seat in 2014, the first local election after Austin adopted a single-member districts.

In the 2018 midterm general election, Renteria got 47 percent of the vote—less than the 50 percent required to avoid a runoff—while Almanza received 21 percent.

Renteria has been active in addressing affordable housing and development issues in his district and has worked to get several projects off the ground without exactly being a bulwark against displacement—part of what made him the urbanists’s candidate of choice. Almanza, has for decades been rigorous and consistent in her focus on neighborhood and district advocacy, with an emphasis on environmental activism and addressing gentrification from a preservation angle.

District 8

Result: Paige Ellis garnered 56 percent of the vote, while Frank Ward came in with 44 percent.

The outcome of the District 8 vote was relatively close, at least compared to that of the other two council runoffs. In the general midterms, Ellis received 30 percent of the votes in her bid to replace current council member Ellen Troxclair, who chose not to run again. Candidate Frank Ward got close to 25 percent of the votes in that round.

Environmental marketing expert Ellis has previously volunteered for the Texas Book Festival and Keep Austin Beautiful as well as serving as a state convention delegate for the Texas Democratic Party. Ward, who is on the city’s Parks and Recreation Board, would likely have taken Libertarian-leaning positions (meaning anti-tax and anti-regulation) on most issues, as did Troxclair, who endorsed him.

Considering that District 8 encompasses parts of Circle C, Oak Hill, and almost all of the Barton Springs zone that contributes to the Edwards Aquifer, the district’s choice of candidate can be viewed as an interesting mini-referendum on environmental and the impact of development.

AISD at-large position, Place 9

Result: Arati Singh won 60 percent of the vote, defeating Carmen Tilton, who received 40 percent

In the general midterms, Tilton, a senior executive policy adviser for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission with several years’s experience as a legislative policy analyst, received 40 percent of the vote. Runoff opponent Arati Singh received 36 percent and is an educational program designer and evaluator with experience as a bilingual school teacher in the Rio Grande Valley.

• Austin City Council Runoffs: Harper-Madison Wins D1, Renteria Maintains D3 Seat, Ellis Takes D8 [KUT]