Longtime Travis County Commissioners face challenges from their left

In the races for Travis County Commissioners Court Precincts 2 and 4, two strong challengers face two incumbents with decades of experience. As they tussle over criminal justice reform, affordable housing, and infrastructure disparities, liberal stalwarts Margaret Gómez and Brigid Shea find themselves attacked from the left by community advocates with big plans for the county seat. The March 1 Democratic primary will decide the final outcome – there are no additional candidates who could force a May run-off, and no Republican has filed for either seat.

Precinct 4 encompasses southeastern Travis County, including the county's poorest areas with the least amount of services – a disparity that Susanna Ledesma-Woody has flagged ever since her first challenge in 2018 to Margaret Gómez, the longest-serving member of the Commissioners Court, in office since 1995. (Should she be reelected, she'll become the longest-serving Travis commissioner in history, surpassing N.L. Gault's 26-year tenure, which ended in 1974.) Ledesma-Woody has been active in Pre­cinct 4 for more than a decade, having been a Del Valle ISD trustee since 2011. She founded the Del Valle Community Coalition in 2010, a nonprofit advocating for access to food and health care, with which the county has partnered on COVID relief and vaccine outreach. "Many parts of Precinct 4 are recognized as either food deserts or health care deserts; there's no excuse for this in one of the most progressive counties in the state," Ledesma-Woody says. Bob Libal, the former director of Grassroots Leadership who is running against incumbent Brigid Shea in Precinct 2, has made the Tesla deal a major plank in his campaign platform. "Tesla was coming, regardless of whether we gave them tax breaks or not. They were really there to extract that public resource from us. And that's bad public policy. Frankly, Commissioner Shea from 10 years ago, when she was running for mayor, agrees with me." Shea, who served on City Council from 1993 to 1996, ran in 2012 against incumbent Mayor Lee Leffingwell; she won the county seat in 2014. The current Shea justifies the decision saying that Tesla will bring jobs targeting those without a college degree and that "the previous landowner was a sand and gravel operation, [who] literally paid $640 a year [in taxes] to the county; Tesla's going to pay close to a million [dollars] or more each year. That money will go into diversion and prevention programs, social service programs, job training, all the kinds of things that we really do need to fund."