ORGANIZATIONS INITIATED BY CIVITAS

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Austin’s advocacy has led to the creation of several respected, thriving organizations and a group that openly challenged the leaders of Erie (a city named in Wall Street 24/7 as 2017’s “worst” for African-Americans).

The community battle over the McBride Viaduct bridge attracted the attention of Michael Kimmelman, who authored a March 12, 2018 front-page New York Times story about the controversy. Three days later after the NYT’s story, the Erie Times-News dismissed Kimmelman’s observations as “preconceptions and generalizations” by the kind of writer who “parachutes in from somewhere else.”

Despite an ongoing Federal Civil Rights Complaint the bridge was torn down in 2019 over the objections of residents, and without a single on-the-record Public Hearing. In the end, the cost of demolition exceeded the $1.2 million cost of saving the bridge. Despite the painful loss of the Viaduct, the group is working to protect the easement and plan a replacement bridge.

Renamed Connect Urban Erie the community members are challenging a proposed $100 million expansion of Erie’s waterfront highway/parkway. This PennDOT project, a vision created by traffic engineers, ignores the advice of existing neighborhood, city and county plans in favor of creating a vehicular corridor to support ongoing suburban-like development on Erie’s bayfront.

ORGANIZATIONS

initiated by CIVITAS

Invited to run for public office, Austin was a candidate for Erie County Council in 2013, and for Mayor in 2017.

Seeing an opportunity in Erie’s under utilized manufacturing industries, Austin co-founded the Innovation Erie Product Design Competition at the Erie Art Museum in 2009 with support from local stakeholders. The competition has attracted more than one hundred submissions, and has helped in the establishment of a dozen new products and new businesses in Erie by offering design, marketing, engineering, manufacturing advice - and some cash to get started.

Karen Rzepecki, Innovation Erie’s 2011 winner, credits the experience and support of people she met through the competition as the starting point for her successful ReCAP Mason Jars business.

Recognizing the need for product design education, in 2015, Austin collaborated with Dr. Greg Dillon at Penn State, Behrend, to create the Made in Erie Product Design Lab (now renamed the Innovation Erie - IE - Product Design Lab). Held at the Erie County Blasco Library, this educational project works well with the library’s Idea Lab, which opened in 2019. Both the IE competition and lab were “adopted” in 2018 by the Erie Management Group’s Idea Fund, under the guidance of Rebecca Styn. Styn outlined some of Austin’s contributions in her 2019 ErieReader essay, “An Innovation Timeline.”