Austin mayor dubs city 'Green Lantern'

AUSTIN (KXAN) - DC Comics superheroes Batman, Superman and the Flash snuck into the State of the City address on Friday morning -- amid the typical talk of jobs and growth.

Austin got the bold honor of being dubbed the "Green Lantern," possessing a power ring and power lantern that gives Austinies great control over the physical world as long as they have sufficient willpower and strength to wield it. New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are Superman, Batman and the Flash, respectively.

"Austin is the Green Lantern," said Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell. "We are a city without fear. We are a city that can create anything we can visualize, through sheer force of will. We are a city with a special charge to shine a light into the darkness and lead the way to a new and better day."

The optimistic mayor depicted a city "full of smart, driven, courageous and compassionate people" during the State of the City on Friday morning.

"People who make things happen," said Leffingwell. "People who keep moving forward no matter what."

The mayor said the state of the city is getting stronger. While Leffingwell said that there have been many obstacles, he was adamant that the City of Austin has remained strong even in the face of those difficulties.

During the mayor's second State of the City, he outlined three basic approaches:

• Focus on the fundamentals
• Play to our strengths
• Tackle big problems head-on

Jobs, a growing Silicon Valley-type tech industry and unique differentiation all made it into the State of the City on Friday.

"We're different," said Leffingwell. "A lot of cities and towns across America, especially suburban communities, are becoming more and more indistinguishable from one another."

The mayor talked about the need to keep Austin's ecclectic and homegrown mom-and-pop stores open amid the big box store fabric throughout the town.

"It's weirdness breeding weirdness, success breeding success," said Leffingwell.

It's that success that plants Austin amid the numerous lists of top-somethings throughout the nation.

"If there were a list of cities that appeared on lists, we'd be on that list," said the mayor.

An unlikely pairing, the mayor stressed the necessary merging of the city's strengths -- the music and tech industry -- to better strengthen the local economy, which has seen 15,000 new jobs in 2010.

That boost of jobs leveraged the city's unemployment rate to sit 1.2 percent below the state unemployment rate of 8 percent, while the national unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent.

"A good quality of life begins and ends with a good job," said Leffingwell. "If Austin's population is going to grow dramatically -- and it will -- then we have a responsibility to help ensure that our economy comes with it."

Home to a strong, mature technology industry, the city is also a base for the fifth largest university in the country -- the University of Texas at Austin.

In addition to the promising growth trend, the city's progressive culture has been able to attract some substantial businesses to the area -- most notably Facebook's "like" of Austin.

Facebook's "friend request," of sorts, brought a 200-person Austin-based sales and operations facility to the heart of Texas, widely viewed as the Silicon Valley of the South.

It also marked the first major online sales and operations expansion for Facebook outside of Palo Alto, Calif., where the business is headquartered. And it may be a perfect connection between high-tech Austin and a social-media phenomenon used by 400 million worldwide.

Samsung was another business that made a cameo in the State of the City on Friday morning, when the mayor mentioned the city first brought the semiconductor fab here more than 10 years ago. The $3.6 billion investment into the expansion of the fab is the largest and most advanced of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.

And while Austin is not a stranger to opportunity, Leffingwell said he plans to take advantage of tourism by tackling convention business, specifically. He said there just isn't sufficient hotel space downtown.

The goal he outlined: The city will break ground an a new, 800-room hotel in Downtown Austin within the next 12 months.

"We will rock it to the top of convention destinations," said the mayor.

Leffingwell said the city will capitalize on its opportunities, overcome its challenges and will make it clear that it is capable of doing anything as well, or even better than, any other city in America.

"Austin is not like other places, and we need to keep it that way."