Karen Huber County Commissioner: Garry Brown

Garry Brown
Chief of Staff

A native Texan, Garry and his family moved around quite a bit to places like Denver, New Orleans, Lafayette and McAllen, Texas. He feels fortunate to have grown up around such diverse populations, in that it has contributed greatly to who he is as a person today.

He graduated from McAllen High School in the Rio Grande Valley, attended the University of Texas at Austin and received a B.A. in English from the University of Texas-San Antonio. Although he spent most of his adult life in Austin, he has moved away from here three times, each briefly; but Austin and Travis County always have called him back, and it is his home.

Politics has been a love of Garry's since he was a child, but he never got involved with it until his first time away from Austin when he worked on his first political campaign serving as the volunteer coordinator for the Bill Clinton primary campaign in Denver in 1992. Later that year, he worked on both a U.S. Senate and a state house district write-in campaign.

After moving back to Austin, Garry was on the staff of Congressman Lloyd Doggett’s first campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994. He served as a Congressional Aide in Representative Doggett's District Office here in Austin from 1999 to 2001. In 2002, He then moved from Austin a second time and was hired as the first field organizer in Des Moines, Iowa for the Iowa Democratic Party’s statewide coordinated campaign.

The following year he began his first tour of duty with the Travis County Democratic Party. Later, he went to Washington D.C. to work for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest GLBT rights organization in the country, as a regional field organizer for 13 western states plus Texas and Arkansas.

He returned to Austin and to the Travis County Democratic Party after 13 months at HRC. As the Assistant Director, he included among his accomplishments recruiting dozens of precinct chairs and training them-- increasing TCDP sustaining members by over 35%. Together with three other staff members, he put together 2008’s largest county convention in Texas and in TCDP history.

Before entering the world of politics, Garry was a preschool teacher for 14 years, an experience he regards as invaluable and an excellent preparation tool for everything that life has thrown at him.

In his current position, he began as Commissioner Huber’s Intragovernmental Relations Director from her first day in office, and recently, has moved into the role of Chief of Staff.