AUSTIN — Paige Ellis will be the new voice for Southwest Austin in the Austin City Council.
This comes after she won the runoff election for the District 8 seat, beating Frank Ward, according to Travis County unofficial results.
The sitting city council members still need to vote on Ellis' appointment.
According to the unofficial Travis County results, Ellis won the election with 56 percent of the vote, while Ward received 44 percent of the vote.
The District 8 seat was previously held by Ellen Troxclair, the lone conservative member of the city council. Troxclair announced in July that she would not seek re-election for a second term.
Four candidates originally threw their hats into the ring to take Troxclair’s place. It came down to Ellis and Ward after the Nov. 6 election, when Ellis took 30 percent of the votes with 9,461 votes and Ward took 25 percent with 7,808 votes.
Ellis is a marketing and public involvement specialist for Austin-based environmental consulting firm, aci Group, and has been an activist and financial supporter of progressive causes for almost 10 years.
She said she aims to address affordability and traffic during her time on the city council.
“The key to addressing our affordability problem is updating the 1984 land development code,” she previously told KVUE. “Our code needs to allow for increased density along urban transit corridors, and it needs to encourage missing middle housing like duplexes and quadplexes in transition zones. Increasing the housing supply is the most important way we can stop the constant increase in housing cost.”
She is also very adamant about environmental issues.
"We are largely covered by watershed protection areas and we have a number of creeks that are really sensitive. And I think someone with an environmental background should be the person making the decisions about those particular natural resources," Ellis said.
Ellis was endorsed by Mayor Steve Adler.
We sat down with her a few weeks ago for a Q&A. You can read that here.
For more results from the runoff elections, click here.
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