Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

A tiny bit of good news in a sea of gloom: The petition to restore the camping ban has been garnered enough signatures to be placed on the May 1 ballot:

A group’s petition to reinstate Austin’s camping ban will appear on the May ballot after the city clerk certified enough signatures.

The Office of the City Clerk confirmed Thursday the petition submitted by Save Austin Now met the minimum requirement of 20,000 verified signatures to put it before voters. This is the second time Save Austin Now has attempted to bring this issue to the ballot, the first time they gathered signatures during the summer of 2020, the city’s analysis indicated the group did not gather enough valid signatures to do so.

A city spokesperson told KXAN that the City Council will now have to decide whether to adopt the ordinance changes as written in the petition, or call an election for May 1. The council has until Feb. 12 to make this decision, and there is expected to be a special meeting to discuss these issues on Feb. 9.

Up to this point, Save Austin Now has identified as an educational nonprofit and is led by Matt Mackowiak (the chair of the Republican Party for Travis County) and Cleo Petricek, who has been vocal about her opposition to the city’s recent policies related to homelessness. The Save Austin Now website notes its leadership includes Austin Police Association President Ken Casaday, president of UT safety group SafeHorns Joell McNew, and former Austin City Council Member Ora Houston. Now that this measure will be going before voters, Save Austin Now will have to register as a Political Action Committee with the city to handle activities for the election.

It’s good that they finally got enough signatures to exceed the threshold of fraud.

An Austin City Council who respected common sense and the will of citizens would go ahead and reinstate the camping ban, so that will never happen. Instead expect a vicious campaign from Mayor Steve Adler, Austin City Councilman Greg Casar and the other advocates of the Homeless Industrial Complex to smear those backing reinstatement of the ban as “white supremacists” (the reflexive go-to smear for the hard left in 2021) and wanting homeless people to die.

Tags: Austin, Greg Casar, homeless, Joell McNew, Ken Casaday, Matt Mackowiak, Ora Houston, Save Austin Now, Steve Adler, Texas

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2021 at 12:35 PM and is filed under Austin, Texas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.