Council Candidate Interview: Laura Pressley, Place 2
Austin City Council candidate Laura Pressley. Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/KUT NewsAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Early voting for city elections begins a week from Monday. There are 14 candidates running for four positions on the Austin City Council. Over the next week or so, we’ll hear from each of them.
For Place 2, Laura Pressley is running to unseat incumbent Mike Martinez. KUT’s Matt Largey talks to Pressley about a few topics she thinks are priorities for the city, including the millions of dollars in subsidies given to corporations, the impact this has on Austin’s affordability, and the rate increase proposed by Austin Energy.
All the big businesses in Austin cut costs constantly. It’s easy to cut 5 to 10 percent of your budget year on year and become more efficient. Austin Energy could do a 5 percent cut — they’re a $1 billion entity [so] that would be $50 million. That’s half of the rate increase they’re asking for. Why don’t they do some work in their own backyard before they come to us and ask us to continue to pay and subsidize them for not doing their own job? The council has really got the leadership problem here, where they’re not setting the expectations for Austin Energy.
Podcast: Download (5.3MB)
