Karen Huber County Commissioner: Precinct Three Report

Karen Huber Profile
Impact News.com Lake Travis/Westlake

By Tiffany Young Friday, 05 March 2010

Karen Huber, Travis County Precinct Three Commissioner

Address: P.O. Box 1748 Austin, TX 78767
Contact: 854-9333 • karen.huber@co.travis.tx.us
Term: 2009-2012
Party affiliation: Democrat

What does Precinct Three cover?

It’s 48 percent of the geographic area in Travis County. This precinct was gerrymandered in the last redistricting to be the Republican precinct, and that’s why it is so huge geographically. It is really unfair to the constituents to have this size of a precinct. I’m hoping for the sake of good representation that it will be made smaller in the next redistricting. But, we do our best.

What are your main priorities in Precinct Three?

I ran for office on the platform of managing growth—making it responsible to the citizens and making it pay for itself instead of our tax dollars paying for the infrastructure that is supporting the growth. That’s still my main concern, and water is one of the big issues we have.

There’s been a silver lining in the economic downturn. It’s given us a little bit of time to do some things because the growth has slowed down momentarily. At the same time, we’ve had some interesting issues come up.

The drought that was ending as the economic downturn started had already raised high levels of concern about water availability. Of course, [the City of Austin’s] Water Treatment Plant Four is in the developing stages. Then there’s the Brushy Creek Regional Water Utility—I believe they’ve started phase one, but phase two is still up in the air. Those are issues that the county doesn’t have much of a role in the decision-making, but the outcomes affect the constituents, so I see it as important.

What do you feel your biggest accomplishment has been so far?

I have always felt the greatest part of a success factor is the relationships you build, and I have spent a lot of time this past year building relationships—both internally and externally to accomplish what we want to get accomplished.

Today I was talking to a judge in Burnet County because we have this TXI problem. TXI has proposed a quarry for the east side. We tried last legislative session to get a bill passed to allow us to create buffers between incompatible land uses, like the sand and gravel quarry proposed on the east side next to two subdivisions. There are [more than] 3,000 people living right there. By law, they can mine within 50 feet. That’s in someone’s backyard, where kids are playing. They have said they wouldn’t do it less than 600 feet—that’s still unacceptable when you’ve got 18 wheelers taking 250 trips a day down the street in front of a house. So, I was talking to Judge Klaeger with Burnet County because they have a lot of quarries. We were talking about the legislative session. The more support you can get for legislation with specific instances to use as examples of problems, the better chance you have. That’s not all it takes, but those relationships [help].

What made you decide to run for commissioner?

I was a sixth-generation Texan, lived out-of-state for 10 years and moved back in ’95. When I moved back, I could not believe what was going on from a growth standpoint. My background is business, real estate and economic development, and one really only had to take a quick look to see that we were kind of on a dead-end street.

If we keep growing like this, we will stop growing. We are running out of water; we are reaching gridlock on our roads. I felt like the quality of life was in jeopardy. I tried to work with my predecessor to understand it and address some of the problems, but our philosophies were very different. We were looking for someone to run against him and couldn’t find anyone with the professional experience, and I started to feel the fingers pointing at me. My husband and I talked about this, and he thought I should run because if I got elected I would be in a better position to get things accomplished than just working as a citizen. I [also] ran for this office because I was worried about quality of life issues in our precinct.

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