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By Brian Hews
Publisher | Follow X
August 27, 2026
WRD candidate joined Long Beach Utilities Commission less than a year ago; court found his proposed ballot designation “particularly misleading.”
Water Replenishment District candidate Al Austin II is campaigning as an experienced water policymaker who says he has been involved in delivering clean and safe water for more than a decade.
The claim doesn’t survive contact with reality.
Austin joined the Long Beach Board of Public Utilities Commissioners less than a year ago and this week lost a court battle over his attempt to appear on the November ballot as a “Long Beach Water Commissioner.”
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Curtis A. Kin on Wednesday ordered Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean C. Logan to disallow Austin’s proposed “Long Beach Water Commissioner” ballot designation.
The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Tonia Reyes Uranga challenging the designation Austin sought to use in his campaign for the Division 3 seat on the Water Replenishment District of Southern California.
WRD manages groundwater for four million people — aquifer recharge, recycled water, contamination cleanup and water rights law. It’s technical work governed by its own body of law and regulation.
Austin spent 12 years on the Long Beach City Council, where water was one of many issues that could come before him. But City Council service is not the same thing as managing groundwater resources, aquifers or a regional water agency. His direct experience as a utilities commissioner began only last year — and the commission he serves on, as a judge just made clear, isn’t a “Long Beach Water Commission.”
Yet Austin’s current campaign materials emphasize his water experience.
“My background as a three-term Long Beach City Councilmember and current Public Utilities Commissioner distinguishes me as the only candidate with real experience delivering clean, safe water resources for nearly half a million people for over a decade,” Austin’s campaign statement says.
Decade? Austin did not become a Long Beach Utilities Commissioner until last year.
According to Long Beach Utilities, Mayor Rex Richardson appointed Austin to the Board of Public Utilities Commissioners on Sept. 2, 2025. The City Council confirmed him Sept. 16, and Austin joined the board Oct. 16, 2025. He previously represented Long Beach’s 8th Council District from 2012 through 2024.
Austin’s claim of more than a decade of water experience, in other words, is fuzzy math — folding in 12 years of council votes on things that have little to do with water to cover for the fact that he’s held an actual utilities seat for less than one.
But on the title itself, Judge Kin didn’t hold back. He drew a hard line between the water-flavored branding Austin wanted on the ballot and the job Austin actually holds.
Kin gave Austin this much: sitting through eight to ten meetings a month on the Utilities Commission counts as a real occupation under election law.
What he doesn’t get to do is rename the job on his way to the ballot. “It is undisputed that there is no Long Beach Water Commission,” Kin wrote — a phrase that reads less like legal reasoning and more like a judge describing a map to someone who got lost on purpose. Austin sits on the Utilities Commission. That’s it. That’s the commission.
And the stakes weren’t cosmetic, Kin found — Austin isn’t running for city council again; he’s running for a seat on an agency that exists, in its entirety, to manage water. Slapping “Water Commissioner” on the ballot next to that campaign wasn’t shorthand. It was a costume.
Austin’s team tried to argue that the title was just “generic descriptive” language, the kind of loose paraphrase campaigns use all the time. Kin wasn’t having it.
The designation would signal to voters that Austin holds a position on a government agency devoted exclusively to water issues, the judge found, calling that implication “particularly misleading” because Austin is running for the Water Replenishment District.
The court granted Uranga’s petition and ordered the Registrar-Recorder to prevent Austin from using the designation.
The county’s current candidate list now identifies Austin as a “Long Beach Utilities Commissioner.”
Austin’s ballot-title defeat comes as voters prepare to choose the next Division 3 director of WRD, the regional agency responsible for managing groundwater resources serving a large portion of southern Los Angeles County.
The court’s decision does not prevent Austin from describing his legitimate work on the Long Beach Utilities Commission. Kin specifically acknowledged that Austin’s commission duties can qualify as his profession or occupation.
What Austin cannot do, the judge ruled, is transform that experience into a government title he does not actually hold.
“A writ shall issue commanding respondent to disallow real party in interest Al Austin from using the designation ‘Long Beach Water Commissioner,’” the court ordered.
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