“Got a yen for public service? See yourself on the City Council dais, voting to extend another meeting past 10pm? The newly founded Center for Austin’s Future wants your number – and your application to its “ATXelerator” program for potential Council candidates (and perhaps a board commissioner or two). Finding and training potential candidates is the “signature” initial project of the CAF, the brainchild of Ward Tisdale. “I think the real problem of Austin’s city politics,” explains Tisdale, “is that we don’t do enough to grow future-focused leaders.” After a career in high tech, Tisdale served three years (until late 2016) as president of the Real Estate Council of Austin, and describes the current state of the city’s political debates as polarized between “growth vs. no-growth” – although it’s undeniable that, from its founding, Austin has essentially doubled in population roughly every 25 years. “This infatuation with nostalgia,” Tisdale says, “is not doing the community any favors.””
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