Paul Saldaña

What we talked about

Staffing the only Latino on a seven-member council

Paul Saldaña went to work at Austin City Hall in 1991, first under City Manager Camille Barnett and then for Assistant City Manager Oscar Rodriguez, who oversaw development. Around 1992 he started working for Council Member Gus Garcia. He was about twenty-five and, by his own account, did not know what he was getting into.

The structural fact that shapes everything else in this conversation is that the Austin City Council then had seven members, all elected at large, and Garcia was the only Latino on it. Saldaña describes what that did to a young staffer: real opportunity, real exposure, and real pressure, because a whole community looked to that one office to carry its concerns.

Garcia himself he describes as tough love, someone who reminded him of his father and grandfather, who set the bar extremely high and rarely said thank you or good job. Still the hardest person he has ever worked for. He also says, with some self-awareness, that he now runs his own firm the same way, and that his team would confirm it.

The seats nobody wrote down

The history he tells here is the reason to watch this episode, and it is the part most people who moved to Austin recently have never heard.

Before the modern council, Austin was governed by five aldermen, elected at large, who chose the mayor from among themselves. By his account, a Black businessman named Arthur DeWitty ran and finished a very close sixth, which was too close for comfort for the establishment. The response was to expand the body from five seats to seven, with an understanding that one of the new seats would go to the Mexican-American community and one to the Black community.

Nothing about that arrangement was written into law. It was simply how things were done, and it held for decades: Place 5 was the Mexican-American seat, Place 6 the African-American seat. And because the elections were citywide rather than by district, Saldaña’s point is that the affluent white electorate frequently decided who the Black and Latino representatives would be. His verdict on the whole arrangement is four words long and does not need help from anyone: it was not representative government whatsoever.

By his figures, the Latino share of the population at that time was around forty percent, with a single council member. The Black population was roughly fifteen to seventeen percent then and is below seven percent now.

The development zone, and the mitigation that never came

In the early 1990s the city was in the middle of a fight between the development community and the environmental movement, with Save Our Springs on one side and Freeport-McMoRan and Jim Bob Moffett on the other. Saldaña staffed the Barton Creek task force alongside Laura Huffman, who later became an assistant city manager. Both had been recruited by Toby Futrell, a future city manager.

That work led into the smart growth matrix, which he credits to Kirk Watson, elected mayor in 1997 and mayor again today, working with Futrell. The logic was sound on its face: protect the drinking water supply and the environmentally sensitive land, and steer growth somewhere else. Somewhere else, in practice, meant everything east of Interstate 35, which became the Desired Development Zone.

His account of what happened next is the most important thing he says. The conversations about displacement and gentrification did happen. No mitigation plan was ever attached. And his explanation for why is not a mystery to him: with one Latino and one Black member on a seven-person council, anything perceived as a Black or brown issue became that member’s job to carry, and it never rose to the top as a priority for anyone else.

Everything Austin now argues about under the headings of affordability, gentrification, and displacement runs back through that decision.

Seven tries to get geographic representation

Single-member districts failed at the ballot box six times. Saldaña’s read on why is uncomfortable and probably correct: for those six attempts the campaign was argued on ethnic and racial representation, and a city that considers itself liberal and progressive was not willing to have that conversation.

What changed on the seventh attempt was the frame. A coalition called Austinites for Geographic Representation organized a citizen referendum and argued the case as geography rather than race. He notes that the council of the day also placed competing measures on the same ballot, which he reads as an attempt to confuse voters and preserve a system where at-large seats would still outnumber and outvote district representatives. The coalition’s measure passed anyway.

He supported it, and he is clear-eyed about the results. There are now three Latinos on the council and one Black member, Natasha Harper-Madison, whose district is itself majority Latino and is no longer the district it was drawn to be.

Fifteen years at City Hall, then his own firm

Garcia moved from Place 5 to Place 2 in 1997, the first time a minority council member had run outside the designated seat. He won. The Place 5 seat was then lost to Bill Spelman in a race with five Latino candidates in it. When Watson left to run for attorney general against Greg Abbott, Garcia ran in 2001 to finish the unexpired term and won, becoming the first and still the only Hispanic mayor in the city’s history. Saldaña ran that campaign and served as his chief of staff.

He offers one number that says more about public service than any speech: he left City Hall as chief of staff making forty-seven thousand dollars a year, in a job that pays roughly a hundred forty-five thousand today. By his own math, given the hours, he was earning about two dollars an hour.

The firm came out of that experience. He joined Jake Salinas and Don Martin, became vice president at Martin Salinas Public Affairs, then started Adelante Solutions as majority owner and eventually bought out his partners. The business went through a stretch as Brisa Communications before becoming Saldaña Public Relations, and he has run it as a sole proprietor, an LLC, and a subchapter S corporation along the way.

Why the housing work is the work he wants

The clip that opens the episode is not about politics at all. He is describing what he likes about working with affordable housing developers, and specifically that the good ones do not stop at the units. They add wrap-around services.

His example is concrete. Many of the households are single-parent, and a parent working until six leaves a couple of unsupervised hours after school lets out at three or four. So the developer runs after-school programming: feed the kids, tutoring, learning support. That is the difference between housing and a place to live, and it is the kind of project he says is great to work on.

Coming from someone who grew up on Riverview Street in East Austin, whose family has been in this city for close to a hundred forty years, and who watched the zone get drawn around his own neighborhood without a plan to protect the people in it, the interest in wrap-around services is not a preference. It is the whole argument.