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Jeff Barton
Presented at Painted Horse Pavilion
May 1, 2008
Oars in the Water
Dobre den. Bienvenidos. Welcome.
I want to start with a question -- with a series of questions, for each of you.
Question: How many of you here in this room tonight have known someone personally who's been injured or killed on our roads' On FM 1626 in particular, or on one of the other roads in Hays County that we're talking about as part of the state partnership' Raise your hand if you have. Now take your hand down. (About 2/3 raised their hands.)
Question: Next, how many of you now plan around traffic congestion on a daily basis' Add time to your commute, or worry about missing the kid's band concert, or getting a pregnant wife to the hospital on time -- whatever it is -- how many of you have real stories of time and money, or grief based on either routine congestion or unpredictable traffic delays' Hands up. [again, about 2/3 of hands go up]
Q: Now, if you raised your hand to either of those questions, raise it again. Look at this room. [a few hundred hands are up -- 80 or 90 percent of the room]
Another set of questions.
How many of you swim in Onion, or the Blanco, or the San Marcos, in Cypress, or in Barton Creek -- or in one of other creeks in this area' Or your kids swim there'
And, finally, how many of you -- drink water' I'll bet some of you do it almost every day. Go ahead. Don't be embarrassed. We can't all be like my friend Davood Salek -- who I see in the back there, who drove down from Austin -- we can't all be like Davood and live on Texas wine and Central Market pomegranate juice. If you drink water, maybe even several times a day, go ahead, raise your hands.
If you haven't figured it out yet, this talk is about drinking, and driving.
So we find ourselves here on the bank of Onion Creek, on the edge of FM 1626, in the middle of this precinct, half-way between Buda and Kyle, smack dab in the center of change and contrast and growth -- in the midst of development, for all the bad, and good, the word implies. Right over there is where Bob Lowden who owns this place with his wife, found dinosaur bones. Just down stream from here is a fabled whirl pool, where in times of plenty, when the creek is flowing, water swirls down into the limestone passageways that were eons in the making, spreading out from here to replenish wells across northern Hays County and to feed the springs in Austin that have come to symbolize the capital city. In the 1830s and 1840s, the first travelers to write down their thoughts about this piece of Texas wrote of this creek and the Mountain City community that stretched from Onion back west toward Kyle, a rambling place, the frontier sprawl town of its time.
So much history.
But if you listen, if you listen, from here you can hear the whizzing traffic of our modern age remorselessly moving this place -- and all of us -- to the future. Along this road to the south is rising Seton Hospital's regional medical complex and the vast, new urbanist Plum Creek subdivision, millions of square feet of retail. Just to the north is Whispering Hollow, and beyond a dozen more subdivisions in Hays and Travis. There is Barton Cemetery, an island of quiet, and across the road, not far from here on FM 1626, the newish elementary school, named for community that dried up and disappeared decades ago and is now resurrected as a subdivision, reborn and repopulated with a vengeance, with more people already than the historic namesake -- Elm Grove -- ever knew.
Take this road to the next intersection, turn west, and you are immediately in the Texas Hill Country, moving through historic ranches into the western precincts of Hays County. East is Buda and the prairie, and there one of the largest new developments in all of central Texas -- the Sunfield MUD on the Heep Ranch, all by itself 7,500 lots. South is Kyle, the fastest growing city in Central Texas, and then, beyond that, the county seat and its expanding college. Or, at the intersection up here, go straight, to the north, as thousands of us do each morning, and wind up Brodie or South First or Manchaca Road into the mythical lands of Austin, capital of music and mayhem and Texas.
The embodiment, the physical marks, of progress -- if you want to call it that -- are on this road: survey stakes marking it for expansion. Almost every one of us has mixed feelings about that: about how to come to terms with the inevitable.
Two years ago we began this campaign odyssey -- many of you were there -- also on the banks of Onion Creek, also at a pavilion, the Salt Lick Pavilion. Since then, like life, we have inevitably moved downstream -- a lot of water under the bridge. Down past the new quarry, past Ruby Ranch, which is a ranch no more, past the Dahlstrom place, which is a ranch still, past Barber Falls, to these bluffs. Same creek, different place.
I'm glad you are here with me. I thank you. My campaign account, in the red for these two years, thanks you. I am glad that so many of you like great brisket and fine music. Why else would you be here' Join me in applauding Scott Roberts and his family at Salt Lick for providing our sustenance, and thank also the musical instruments and their players tonight: the gregarious, gracious and Grammy-fied Danny Levin, and the too-beautiful, too-talented Hillary Kaufmann Smith ' and the musicians who join them tonight....
I want to thank also the Lowdens, who provided this facility tonight, and our sponsors. And the host committee members who did so much to put this on. This is a volunteer event. Literally, it could not have happened without these people.
It could not have happened without them. It would not have been a success without all of you.
I have been talking about driving down the road -- trying to 'loosen our load' -- and for those of you old enough, or retro enough, to catch the reference, let me say that this thought leads to seven women on my mind -- three that kind of own me, three that want to stone me, and one that's a friend of mine.
I'm going to mention each of them but for god's sake don't clap or anything. These people all have big heads as it is.
The three that want to stone me on a regular basis, or at least would have a right, include -- not limited to, but include --
* Amy Parham. She was my campaign manager in 2006. She chaired this fundraiser. After so much experience, to still be doing these things with me, for me, is a sign she doesn't learn well, but forgive her. And thank her.
* Theresa Schwartz bossed me through the first 15 months as my executive assistant and has just taken retirement. I hope we're going to persuade her to continue on part time on the road bond project. Either way, much of whatever good happened in my office over the last year was due to Theresa's formidable bark and tender heart.
* From a large pool of applicants for Theresa's replacement, Kara Bishop stood out. Working with her for a couple weeks now I warn you that it's possible she might actually make me organized. You'll get to know her. I am not quite sure why she accepted the offer, but I suspect it was she's young and didn't know better.
Three that kind of own me:
* My mom is here. She just celebrated a birthday. Thirty-nine. It's kind of a miracle. Turns out she's some sort of renowned psycho-analyst -- so if you're sitting at her table, my advice is don't share your dreams from last night. Mom, Pop, thanks.
* My daughter Mary Rose Bozena is here, helping at the tables despite, or maybe because, she has TAKS tests tomorrow at Barton Junior High. She's named Mary, Marietta, for my grandmother who raised sheep and goats and dairy cows not far from here when this was a dead-end gravel path without a bridge over the creek. She goes to a school named for her great-grandfather and she lives as the seventh generation on our family place. She told me not to wear boots and jeans tonight but to dress like we're a changing county, a place that welcomes new people and new ideas, like I recognize that the job of county commissioner is changing, has changed. I make it a point to listen to her sometimes.
* The next woman I'll mention is my campaign treasurer. I've admitted this to some of you before -- I sleep with her. It's hard not to. She's cute -- and we've been married longer than I'm going to admit here. She runs her own business, and is on about a million boards, and, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to me, is willing to find time to balance the campaign's finances, even to let me 'supplement' them from our common account from time to time. She is an extra-ordinary advisor. Cyndy Slovak, thank you.
You've been patient with my digression. One more woman. She is not here tonight. I hoped she might be. I want to mention her anyway. Dot Moore has been a school teacher, a book seller, a legislative aide a generation ago, and a constant voice for courage and common sense in Hays and Caldwell counties for my whole life. I believe that everyone who knows her admires her. Some of us love her. Her mind is as sparkling as ever but the flesh is failing her now, and so she is not with us here tonight. But those of us who know her feel her presence, and I ask those of you who do not to remember this Unitarian woman in your prayers.
Without sponsors and hosts and the place and the food, and these women, this road, without them, and each of you, I couldn't be here, we couldn't be here. Campaigns are like that. Politics are like that. Communities are like that.
Community is a tapestry that needs every thread -- kids, cops, coaches, EMS drivers, teachers, bankers, borrowers, the people who clean and the people who make policy. Democracy is that way.
You know the first democracy, Athens (in ancient Greece, not east Texas, for those of you who aren't taking the TAKS test tomorrow), Athens in the beginning was a tiny experiment in democracy, a lonely city-state vulnerable in an ancient world based on raw military power. The Athenians were artists and sculptors and traders. Their neighbor to the east was the great Persian Empire, ruled by an all-powerful hereditary king with absolute power that stretched across a dozen nations. A potent figure -- like the mayor of Austin, you might say. But the Athenians, free men and women, held off the Persians and changed history by creating a navy of free men in a time when most navies were literally driven by galley slaves. They made the revolutionary discovery that willing hands could out-pull, out-maneuver, and even out-fight slave galleys rowed by fear and despair.
At its best, local government is a little like those ancient Athenian triremes when all the oars hit the wave at the same instant. It's quiet and you can hear the drum beat calling the strokes and the oars dipping the blue water as one, and you feel your hair blowing in the wind as the ship slides forward in common purpose.
Oh, there are the times when the boat just turns in circles, every oar pulling in a different direction, and you think, 'You know, one good bullwhip could do a lot of good'.' But the truth is, of course, we've got to remember we're all in the boat together.
I was at a conference in Rockwall, Texas, last week, east of Dallas -- part of a gathering of the Conference of Urban Counties, there to talk about the challenges facing the state's largest and fastest growing counties. We're now the 13th fastest growing county in the nation. The first night a storm blew in. The generators were knocked out. It was a brand new hotel. The air conditioning units were zapped off line. It was hot. There were fumes from new paint and fresh plastic. No big deal. It was a cool, spring night outside. But this was one of those modern hotels where the windows will not open. No windows at all. Who does that' Who designs that'
It's like scissors and modern packaging. One of our speakers there mentioned his pet peeve -- which is one of mine also -- about the way things are packaged these days. Music CDs are wrapped in this mass of hard plastic that's impossible to tear open. You have to have scissors to get it open. Hands won't do it. Pocket knife really won't. You need scissors. And of course, if you don't have any scissors handy and you go to buy a pair, they're likely to come wrapped in -- hard plastic. You can't open the scissors because you've got no scissors.
I know government feels that way to people sometimes. They feel like they can't get in. Can't make it work. It seems like it is designed just to frustrate.
The researcher Frank Lunz has polled this. He says more Americans now would rather have a root canal than be audited by their own government. I get it.
So it's important we do it right. That we be effective, accountable, apply common sense.
And play to our strengths.
And for all our petty squabbles, we have strengths aplenty in this county. We have the richness and diversity to do it right. This is where the limestone meets the black lands, here on the Edwards fault -- where bio-zones meet, and an amazing variety of trees and grasses, birds and fish flourish and cross-pollinate. That fault line can be a measure of our differences or we can make it a tectonic rule of compromise: even the continental plates are pushed together. These soils, so different east and west, watersheds that flow to different outcomes north and south, they are made up of the rich, mixed grinding of the bones of Tonkawa and Comanche, Spaniard and Scot, Englishman and Czech -- Germans who fled here to escape persecution, Africans brought here against their will, then successive waves of Mexicans and Asians -- like my friend Davood back there, who fled Iran -- escaping turmoil in their land to make this home. So that finally, today, we are made up of every race and creed, enriching this community and this county in countless ways.
The constant is that we continue to change. The water flows and the road moves on. Many of us are sad to see the old ways pass, just as we are nostalgic for quieter streets and untouched green fields. But as I said recently at my party's county convention, the pace of change here is a reminder to all of us that life is about change, that it is inevitable in one fashion or another. We adapt or stagnate. Change is always about loss, but it can also be about gain -- about growth, both literal and spiritual, about replenishment, restoration,rededication, about expanding horizons. Change is many things, including often, fear, but it is at least in part -- always -- about what we choose to make of it.
We are destined to change more tomorrow and the next day, to change faster. We are destined to double and triple again in population in the near future. The demographers tell us we will be a county of 400,000 people or more within the planning life of this road outside. We are here tonight to stand at a crossroads, figuratively at one, literally near one, to recommit to a choice -- to make something of change rather than just letting it happen to us.
We have our differences. Where libraries should go and where roads should be built, which land should be preserved and which plowed under. Water patterns, altitude, attitude, demographics, traffic, water availability, rainfall, temperatures, ethnic breakdowns -- you can see traces of that fault line in a hundred different ways -- in the very soil itself. We are brown and white and black, of the county seat and not, newcomer and crusty old-timers. Kyle Panther. Buda Bulldog. Lobo and Rebel. Among as are the retired and the wealthy, the working and the impoverished, young and old, dreamers and the deeply disillusioned.
Among us too, with each of us -- vivid and tangible -- are those who cannot be here in the flesh, those like my friend Dot Moore who are ailing or away, and those who have been a physical part of our lives and now have crossed over a different bridge to live in our hearts and minds -- Susie Fuentes and Jim Cunningham, Lena Guerrro, my grandparents, Billy Reeves, so many others -- men and women who touch us still and whose esteem and respect we seek to earn, to preserve, even now.
Like John Dunne we all live on our own islands, choosing to be either separated or connected by bridge after bridge. As a country, we revel in our differences. More than most places in the country, Texas has these vast, different landscapes -- expanses that demand long and expensive bridges. More than most counties in Texas, Hays has our own divides. It is a problem sometimes. It is a challenge, always. I am one of those who believes though that you cannot overcome a challenge until you recognize it, acknowledge it, face it head on, face it down. But standing here on the eve of profound change, on the avenue of change itself, I want to reaffirm to you also my unrepentant belief that those differences across this country and across this county are also our greatest strengths.
We have a range of ideas and rowdy competing politics -- and we are stronger for it, better for it. Here and there are deep divides, canyons and arroyos of mistrust and misconception between us, but it is within our power to build bridges of commonality and compassion to cross over -- to join up and pitch in, to shape change, leash it, so that it more than simply an agent of destruction and division.
We must not let the choice become beautiful neighborhoods OR fair housing. We should not let it be good transportation OR clean rivers, roads OR rail, health care for our poorest neighbors OR reasonable tax rates.
Back to women -- a preoccupation of mine, I admit. Our future is in that womanly art -- sewing and weaving. To weave together the golden threads of our diversity, to sew up the tears in our fabric-- not to hide our different colors and cloths but to stitch them into a stronger and more vivid tapestry -- a shirt that will clothe against the cold, a sail to catch the wind.
We can make public health care more efficient and more reachable in this County even if the feds and the state fail to act. With innovation and smart land planning we can protect drinking water. We can preserve parkland. Agree on reasonable rules for shooting guns and opening businesses. Plan ahead against floods. Embrace regional rail solutions. And we can, we must, be a leader in the fundamentals of county government -- law enforcement and roads, freeing people from the tyranny and pollution of fear, danger and congestion.
We can treat each other with respect and those of us in office can treat the people we serve with trust.
We won't agree on every stroke, or how to tack in every shift of wind. But we must find ways to set common direction, to follow guiding stars instead of passing lights.
We need that vision of the far horizon, our eyes on the prize, because everything in the foreground is blurring. We're moving that fast.
Up stream on the Onion two years ago we talked about how the water water flows from a thousand points into this creek, this creek right outside. We talked then about building bridges. So we circle back to being here on the edge of a bridge over Onion to talk about bridges on the Interstate and on FM 1626, bridges that will be built, to talk about bridges that will connect this precinct to others in the county, and this county to the region -- the most dynamic region in the most influential state in the most influential nation in the world. We can't cure the world until we're healthy at home, until we learn to balance economic growth, social opportunity and social equity. Until we band together to pass bonds for transportation as we did for parks -- as some of us will do this month for schools.
Those things can be done. I believe they can. And I believe that even if they can't, what matters in life is striving for it.
It is May Day. which is an international call for help and a rallying cry. In English tradition it is also a day of celebration, a festival of spring looking forward. Thank each of you again for being here, for answering my May Day call and for celebrating May Day with me. Together we built a bridge in the campaign and together we will move on to build bridges that connect us in the here and now to the common aspiration I believe most of us hold in our mind's eye -- a summer harvest that is within reach if we pull together, plow the field, and will but sow the right seeds for our future.
We can make this a place loved not just for what it was, or is -- but for what it could be, not just a place we happen to live but THE PLACE we choose to live. The distinction makes all the difference.
I'll close with this. The New Yorker Magazine recently featured a story about a book that collected people's autobiographies in exactly six words. A few friends and I had a lot of fun with that, exchanging emails, trying to sum up our lives in six.
Tonight here are several sets of six-word books to sum things up for me:
1. It is wonderful to have friends.
2. Now go forth and do good.
3. Leave your money at the door.
And, finally, perhaps the most poignant six words in the English language:
'Yes, there is still more beer.'
Thank you again. God bless.
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