UT-Austin student runs for Austin mayor, wishes to improve disability access and public transportation
August 3, 2022
Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the August 2, 2022 flipbook.
At just 21 years old, government senior Phil Brual will have his name printed on Austin’s mayoral ballot this November.
Brual used sign language to announce his campaign on Instagram on June 6, officially becoming the youngest candidate in Austin’s mayoral race this year. Growing up with deaf moms, Brual said he wants to make his campaign deaf-friendly and increase accessibility services in Austin.
He’s running against Kirk Watson, Celia Israel, Jennifer Virden, Anthony Bradshaw, Erica Nix and Gary Spellman. Brual said getting voters to see him as more than “just a student” will be difficult. However, Brual said he believes his studies as a government major and his experiences as someone born and raised in Austin will help him to connect with voters.
“We’ve been trying to run on the idea that we aren’t out-of-touch millionaires who are pretending to understand what Austinites go through nowadays,” Braul said. “I currently live downtown. I pay my high rent.”
Brual said he regularly attends city council meetings to stay updated on Austin politics. He also has a legislative internship at the state capitol, where he frequently hears Austinites’ complaints about the city and the state. Hearing these complaints helps him pinpoint problems every day Austinites face and issues he wants to solve as mayor, Brual said, such as public transportation, homelessness and public safety.
“The biggest thing that we’re running on right now is public transportation because we need to make sure that the city can become a non-car commute city,” Brual said. “We can make (Austin) a green city that we’ve always strived to do in the past.”
Brual hopes to replan some of Project Connect to preserve places like Dirty Martin’s, Halal Bros and The Ballroom at Spider House, which he said are integral to UT and Austin’s culture.
Electrical engineering senior Tyler Parkan said he has known Brual since elementary school and was initially surprised to see him running for mayor, but supports Brual because he wants to see a “young, fresh face” in Austin politics.
“People are going to point out how young he is,” Parkan said. “But if they do their research, they’re going to find out that he has been immersing himself in this environment for years now, and he is more knowledgeable than I would say the vast majority of residents of Austin. There’s no reason that his age should be a factor.”
Brual said that in the fall, one of the main ways he plans on winning over Austinites is talking to them face-to-face.
Government freshman Sumner Hill, Brual’s campaign manager, said that talking to voters is their strategy for getting them to take the young candidate seriously.
“Listening to him in person, it’s shocking how radically it changes people’s minds,” Hill said. “They really start taking him seriously, so we’ve been successful talking to people (and) getting them to see him as he is, instead of how it looks on paper.”
