Posts Tagged ‘Matt Mackowiak’

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Austin T Minus 2 Update

Thursday, April 29th, 2021

Two days from now, Austin voters will go to the polls to decide the fate of reinstating the camping ban, along with a number of other proposals. (Cheat sheet: Vote for Proposition B and against everything else.) So here’s an update on Austin news in advance of the election.

  • Austin crime has exploded, and it’s all due to the feckless actions of leftwing politicians:

    Three members of the Austin City Council (AKA local control/city government) politicians are guilty of promoting the crime-enabling policies not unique to Austin. Mayor Steve Adler, Greg Casar, and Natasha Harper-Madison are the main culprits who expedited this radical shift away from public safety. Mayor Steve Adler has shown a careless lack of leadership on the issue, most notably during the Summer 2020 city-wide riots. Greg Casar has used the issue to push his Marxist values. Natasha Harper-Madison has exploited the safety of Austin citizens in order to promote her racism and perpetual victim ideologies. History will judge the actions of these three local partisan politicians poorly. How long are Austin citizens going to continue to sit back while these three continue their radical progressive experiment to the detriment of the city?

    Austin was one of the most sought-after, safest cities, but in 2020, there was an increase in murders by 50% from the previous year. Currently in 2021, there have been a whopping 21 murders to date. Austin is well on its way to breaking last year’s record number of murders.

    Also, this is a pretty sobering chart:

  • Paul Martin on factors driving crime increases in Austin:

    First, our police department is losing officers. The latest information can be found here, but here’s a summary for the TL;DR crowd:

    Last year, the Austin Police Department lost about eleven officers per month through resignations and retirements. In the first four months of this fiscal year, the police department has already lost an average of fifteen officers per month. The department will have more than seventy-five vacancies by the end of January, in addition to positions previously cut from the budget.

    (emphasis original)

    Fewer officers in a city with a growing population means fewer officers per citizen. This means increased response times for even high priority calls. Increased response times mean less policing and thus less deterrence to crime.

    The second component to this is the new policy in the Travis County District Attorney’s office under which the D.A. “will present all use-of-force cases [of law enforcement] to grand juries that involve deaths or serious injuries.” In other words, any time a citizen is injured during an arrest, the arresting officer runs the risk of being subjected to the grand jury process. The concern here is that officers will be less likely to use force moving forward. Violent criminals know this, and they know the officer will be reluctant to use force to take them into custody.

  • Matt Mackowiak makes the case for reinstating the camping ban:

    1) The homeless community has exploded, from around 2,500 to what I estimate to be 5,000 now, although according to Austonia a report commissioned by consultants for the city recently put the estimate at 10,000.

    2) Homeless fires are on track to double last year’s all-time record (to 503), endangering homeless Austinites and their personal property and our courageous firefighters.

    3) City parks are being destroyed all over the city, despite the fact that the camping ordinance specifically exempts parks from legal camping.

    4) Every single major highway intersection is worse today, and this is especially visible on Hwy. 183 and Hwy. 71, as well as on IH-35.

    5) Public safety in Austin is at the worst I can ever remember (I arrived in Austin in 1984), with our homicide rate set to double this year (after last year’s all-time record), and regular violent attacks by homeless individuals happening almost daily at this point. A quick review of the Citizen app will cause you to lose sleep at night.

    6) Public health in our city is far worse today than it would be without the ordinance, as the city had no plan for the human and physical waste created by camping, and we regularly see human feces, drug needles and other waste at encampments across the city.

    7) Tourism has taken a direct hit. Major hotels are losing conferences, visitors are shocked to see what’s become of Austin, and the related economic effect on the hospitality and service industries has been profound.

  • Austin’s homeless policies have made the problem worse:

    What is happening in Austin is nothing short of a humanitarian crisis. It threatens the health and safety of the community, and in particular of those struggling with homelessness.

    According to pre-COVID-19 data released in late March by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the number of Austin’s unsheltered population—those who live in makeshift tents around the city—has risen a staggering 93% since 2016.

    The Austin metro area represents 7% of the overall population of Texas, but about 25% of Texas’ unsheltered population today resides on its streets today.

    Snip.

    It is important to understand the origin of Austin’s homelessness surge. In 2013, HUD rolled out a one-size-fits-all homelessness policy, called Housing First, with spotty evidence of efficacy. Their “solution” to homelessness? Provide life-long, “no strings attached” housing—no requirement of sobriety, no work requirement, no requirement to access services to change the behaviors that led to homelessness. Austin’s elected officials took the bait—hook, line, and sinker.

    HUD promised the Housing First approach would end homelessness in a decade. Instead, it resulted in an over 16% increase across the nation, including a 21% increase in the “unsheltered” population—ironically, the population for which this approach was originally designed.

    Because Austin elected officials chose to follow HUD down an uncharted rabbit hole, Austin has experienced the same disastrous results, indeed the same disastrous results California has seen since it adopted Housing First in 2016—a stunning 37% increase in homelessness.

  • Could the Austin police department animal units be defunded?

    Austin’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force recommended in a work session Wednesday the idea of doing away with several police units in the next budget cycle. It suggests reallocating the money for other needs.

    Two of the units one workgroup focused on are those that involve animals — APD’s Mounted Patrol and K9 Units.

    “There are many tools police have. These happen to be very costly,” said Kathy Mitchell, chair of the workgroup that made the recommendations.

    The Reimagining Public Safety Task Force estimates that APD’s Mounted Patrol and K9 units collectively cost the city nearly $5.5 million a year.

    The real reason, of course is that the hard-left “Reimagining Public Safety Task Force” hates the police and wants to free up that money for left-wing crony graft. Plus they hate those units because they’re effective and provide good publicity for APD. Plus the mounted police are particularly good at breaking up riots before they start, which the #antifa/#BlackLivesMatter loving Austin left all but encourages.

  • Austin criminals are getting bolder:

  • Austin city government may finally be letting APD graduate a cadet class, but they’re changing training to “increase community engagement and involve citizen groups in the cadet training process,” which I’m pretty sure are codewords for cramming leftwing indoctrination into the curriculum.
  • More evidence of what Adler and the city council have brought to Austin:

  • It looks like conventions are returning post Mao Tse Lung, but a lot fewer groups want to have their conventions in Austin now that it’s turned into bumsville:

  • Speaking of conventions: Austin voters properly kicked leftwing City Councilman Jimmy Flannigan to the curb in 2020. Surprise! Right after his defeat, Flannigan landed a cushy $140,000 job with “Austin Convention Enterprises, or ACE, [a] public facilities corporation that was created by the city to own, finance and operate the downtown Hilton.” Evidently once you’re a corrupt leftwing insider, you get cushy sinicures carved out for you to keep you on the government teat no matter what voters think… (Hat tip: Adam Loewy.)
  • Steve Adler, liar:

  • Lots of Austin restaurants are bailing on downtown:

    “In downtown, we depend on foot traffic and vehicle traffic driven primarily by visitors, hotel guests, conventioneers and locals who want to bar hop,” [B.D. Riley’s Irish Pub] co-owner Steve Basile said. “There was no path that we could draw that was anywhere more optimistic than 10 or 12 months of financial loss before downtown began to see the things that made downtown what it was pre-pandemic.”

    Convention-less. Festival-less. Tourism-less. In downtown Austin, the pandemic has taken the regular menu of revenue drivers off the table, and the public health risks now attached to large, in-person gatherings and out-of-town travel have placed a particular burden on small businesses in the city’s central business district bound by Lamar Boulevard, I-35, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Lady Bird Lake.

    The drain has made the math especially difficult for restaurants and bars, where bottom lines also depend on a now-dissipated office workforce, and smaller real estate footprints exacerbate the impact of social distancing rules. According to Community Impact Newspaper’s tracking of business closures, at least 10 locally owned restaurants and bars have permanently pulled out of downtown since August but, like B.D. Riley’s, have maintained business operations in other parts of the city. Their reasons signal a pessimism about the pace of recovery in the city’s center.

  • Proposition E wants to move to ranked voting (which is illegal under Texas law anyway). Here’s why it’s a bad idea.
  • Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell speaks out against the Wilco homeless hotel”

  • A montage of Adler’s Austin:

  • First-hand evidence of sex trafficking among the Adlervilles, and how no government entity would help:

  • Truth:

  • Some numbers:

  • Your city government in action: “Nobody knew how to restore power at Ullrich Water Treatment Plant during the freeze.”

    On a normal day, Ullrich Water Treatment Plant produces roughly half of Austin’s drinkable water and is crucial to keeping the city’s water system functioning.

    State regulations require the plant to either have access to a backup power source or a substantial amount of water reserves in case the plant sees an unexpected shutdown. Ullrich has both.

    So when a tree limb fell on an electric line leading to a substation that powered Austin’s largest water treatment plant on Feb. 17, backups should have snapped into place to keep power running and water production churning.

    But there was a problem: Nobody on site knew how to operate a 52-year-old gear switch that would have restored power to the plant.

    And so Ullrich Water Treatment Plant went dark for three hours in the middle of the worst winter storm to strike Central Texas in decades. It cut off roughly half of the city’s potable water production and deepened the winter weather crisis that at that moment had thousands shivering without electricity in their homes.

  • Hey, remember Mellow Johnny’s, the Austin bike shop that announced they would no longer sell bikes to APD? Well, guess which bike shop was recently burglarized?

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    Posted in Austin, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Waste and Fraud | 12 Comments »

    Reinstatement of Austin Camping Ban Makes May 1 Ballot

    Thursday, February 4th, 2021

    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.

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | 3 Comments »

    Austin Update For January 17, 2021

    Sunday, January 17th, 2021

    Austin news has been accumulating in heaps in drifts like trash strewn from a homeless encampment in a public park. So let’s grab a shovel:

  • First up: the case of the missing $6 million:

    More than $6 million in taxpayer money flowed to Austin nonprofits affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, but taxpayers might never learn the identities of the organizations that got the money or get a chance to dig into their stated need for assistance.

    Citing a little-known state law that government transparency experts are only now learning exists, the city has refused to turn over a list of the 365 nonprofits that were granted the funds.

    The $6 million was funneled through the city from the federal government and distributed out of the Austin Nonprofit and Civic Health Organizations Relief fund, more commonly known as the ANCHOR fund.

    On Oct. 19, the American-Statesman requested a list from the city of the fund’s award recipients. On Nov. 16, the city denied the newspaper’s request, saying in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that it thought the information was exempt from public disclosure and requested that Paxton’s office affirm that determination.

    The law invoked by the city’s legal department, House Bill 3175, went on the books after the 2019 Texas legislative session.

    Filed by state Rep. Joe Deshotel, D-Beaumont, the bill made confidential the name and other identifying information of individuals and businesses that apply for state or federal disaster recovery funds. The definition of disaster, as spelled out in the law, includes such things as floods, earthquakes and hostile military action. It also includes epidemics, such as the COVID-19 crisis.

    The disclosure of federal relief dollars is not exempted from public records if the money is awarded by the federal government. For example, news organizations, including the Statesman, have obtained through public records the names of businesses that received financial assistance through the federal Paycheck Protection Program.

    But under the new state law, Austin was able to withhold the identities of businesses that received assistance from the ANCHOR fund because the money, although originally from the federal government, went to the city before it was distributed to the nonprofits.

    I just naturally assume the money was handed out as graft to members of the Homeless Industrial Complex, Greg Casar’s leftwing cronies, and various antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riot instigators (I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap between those categories).

  • Speaking of the homeless, Austin’s homeless situation continues to get even more out-of-hand. “It’s not uncommon to walk out the door and find a pile of human feces on the patio behind us.”
  • A close, personal look at the problem:

  • If you live in Austin, you have until tomorrow (Monday, January 18) to sign the petition to reinstate the homeless camping ban. Go here to sign the petition.
  • There’s also a petition drive to recall various City Council members who reinstated the homeless ban. But you have to live in their respective districts to sign the petition.
  • I know you’re going to be shocked, shocked to find out that the City of Austin give preferential treatment to leftwing businessesin the form of property tax breaks…including one for Mayor Steve Adler’s own law firm.
  • Matt Mackowiak and Brad Johnson discuss the Austin homeless problem.

    • As the cherry on top, the City of Austin’s Stage 5 Wuhan coronavirus restrictions are still in effect through February 16…

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 3 Comments »

    Austin City Council Steps Up War On Austin Citizens

    Saturday, August 15th, 2020

    The Austin City Council’s determination to destroy the city’s quality of life in an apparent effort to make Austin as dysfunctional a hellhole as San Francisco or Portland continues apace:

    After recent nationwide riots and lawlessness have left a trail of burned cities, destroyed livelihoods, and murdered citizens, Democrat local officials in Texas’ capital city are pushing further by slashing a third of the local police budget.

    On Thursday, the all-Democrat Austin City Council voted unanimously to take away $150 million from the Austin Police Department in next year’s city budget. The council decided to strip roughly $20 million immediately and spend it on other city projects, and the rest will be defunded and reallocated over the coming year.

    Among their cuts, the council removed 150 vacant police officer positions from the already understaffed department, canceled three upcoming cadet classes, and diminished APD’s overtime budget. Council members also proposed closing the police academy for a year and even demolishing the police headquarters building downtown.

    Ironically and tragically, the council is taking some of the police money and will instead spend it on killing children. Councilmember Greg Casar, a self-proclaimed socialist, said doing so will make Austin a “safer and better place to live.”

    “We did it!!” Casar tweeted after defunding the police, posting a picture proudly proclaiming, “We won.”

    Snip.

    “The council’s budget proposals continue to become more ridiculous and unsafe for Austinites,” tweeted the Austin Police Association. “They are going to ignore the majority who do not want the police defunded.”

    “The unwarranted attack by the Austin mayor and city council on their police department’s budget is no more than a political haymaker driven by the pressures of cancel culture,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a press release. “The City of Austin already struggles to combat widespread crime, violence, and homelessness. … The mayor and the city council should immediately reconsider this ill-advised effort at virtue signaling, which will endanger lives and property in Austin.”

    “Data says your recommendations have made us less safe, not more,” tweeted tech analyst Patrick Moorhead to Councilmember Casar. “[Austin is] #1 in murder growth and #3 in robberies. Why should anyone trust your new, fairytale policies? Zero effectiveness. Anywhere, any city. #SocialistPlaybook”

    Chuck DeVore has more on the madness:

    Of Texas’ six most-populous cities, five plan to increase their law enforcement budgets: Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. El Paso looked to increase its public safety budget 3%. Dallas Police Chief Hall emphasized countering violent crime while also “reimagining public safety.” Houston budgeted a 2% increase to its police department while San Antonio considered a 1.6% increase.

    But Austin just approved a $150 million cut to its police budget. Shifts in funding account for about $80 million, with the funds going to other departments, such as forensics and the 9-1-1 call center.

    As for the other $70 million in cuts to public safety in Austin, here’s where things get weird.

    More than $21 million in cuts come in the form of an amendment from Councilmember Greg Casar and include cancelling the three planned 2021 police cadet classes, reducing overtime by $2.8 million, and cutting supplies. Cutting overtime while reducing staffing will be especially difficult, as overtime typically results when an understaffed agency has to deploy existing personnel for more hours than anticipated.

    The remaining more than $49 million in cuts, also by Casar, comes under the rubric of “Reimagine Safety Fund.” It includes ongoing annual cuts of $3 million from overtime, $2.2 million from the mounted patrol, $1.3 million from the organized crime K-9 unit (drug interdiction), $279,086 from the police explorers program for youth ages 14 to 20, $18.5 million from traffic enforcement, $2 million from the regional intelligence center (focused on detecting, preventing, apprehending, and responding to criminal and terrorist activity), $10.7 million from training (which is odd, given the almost universal agreement that more police training is needed to avoid the potential for police abuse), $3.6 million from recruitment, and $7.3 million in reductions to the specialized units that patrol the lake and the parks.

    Of the cuts, $21.5 million is shifted in the form of “reinvestments” to programs such as $100,000 for abortion access and $6.5 million a year for the homeless under the “Housing First” policy of sheltering and feeding the homeless, with no expectation for them to seek treatment—essentially allowing them to live off taxpayer support until they die.

    So, “defund the police” looks like fewer cops and more abortions. Who knew?

    Meanwhile, downtown Austin has become like a ghost town due to COVID, as white-collar professionals do much of their work remotely, only making quick trips into the city for key meetings. This has left Austin’s burgeoning homeless population short on people to ask for money. The result is increasingly dystopian, as the homeless frequently outnumber office workers on the sidewalk—with the latter trying to find a place to eat that’s still open or quickly making their way to the parking garage, while the former call after them for drug and alcohol money.

    Snip.

    Austin’s preening politicians are playing politics with policing. The result is predictable: police morale will suffer, officers’ effectiveness will decline, crime will rise, and more people will be killed, injured, and robbed. Welcome to your brave new, post-logic world.

    This despite the fact that Austin is experiencing the largest increase in its homicide rate of any major U.S. city and that polls repeatedly show that Austinites don’t want the police defunded.

    Is it any surprise that the attrition rate in the Austin police department has more than doubled since 2017?

    The cherry on top: The just-cancelled cadet class would have been 51% minorities. (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)

    This is what happens when you put the hard left in positions in power, when raking off the graft and waging cultural Marxism against “class enemies” like police and the middle class is more important than public safety.

    “Prepper Dad” and KR Training firearms instructor Paul Martin suggests two organizations Austinites worried about this decision might consider joining:

  • Save Austin Now
  • The Greater Austin Crime Commission

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 2 Comments »

    Austin City Clerk Refuses To Let Homeless Ban Appear On November Ballot

    Thursday, August 6th, 2020

    The fix is in:

    KXAN has obtained a letter signed Wednesday from Austin City Clerk Jannette Gooddall which states that the petition effort to place reinstating Austin’s public camping ban on the November ballot was “insufficient.” The city’s analysis indicates that the petition effort did not gather the total legally required number of signatures to bring the measure to a vote.

    More than a year ago, in an effort to decriminalize homelessness, Austin City Council voted to repeal a previous city ban on camping, sitting, and lying down in most public spaces. This petition from local group Save Austin Now aimed to reverse the council’s action from last year by barring camping downtown and near the UT campus, placing a citywide ban on panhandling at night, and restoring the ban on sitting or lying down in public. While Save Austin Now believes these changes will make the community safer, [this sentence fragment is sic – LP]

    Save Austin Now identifies 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 that 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.

    There are loose cannons among Austin Republicans; Matt Mackowiak is not among them. He’s a safely mainstream conservative Republican. I have a hard time believing that so many signatures from his petition drive would be invalid, as he strikes me as the sort of guy who would dot all the is and cross all the ts.

    Save Austin now launched a mailer campaign during the pandemic, mailing letters to many Austin households and asking them to mail back in their signatures.

    Save Austin Now delivered the petition signatures they gathered to the city on July 20 for the city to count and determine the validity of the signatures. Mackowiak said three-quarters of the signatures Save Austin Now collected on this petition effort came to them by mail.

    He also said Save Austin Now was notified by the city clerk’s office of this decision Wednesday and has requested more information on why the clerk reached the conclusions she did.

    “I simply do not believe that of the 24 thousand or so [signatures] that we turned in that five thousand of them are invalid,” Mackowiak said. “I just do not believe it, I reject it entirely.”

    He explained that Save Austin Now did not even turn in petitions to the clerk that were not properly signed or that were from people who didn’t live within the city of Austin. Mackowiak said his group removed hundreds of petitions that did not have all the required information.

    Snip.

    In the letter sent Wednesday, the city clerk’s office said the raw count of total signatures on the filed petition from Save Austin Now was 24,201.

    As is allowed by the Texas Election Code, the Austin City Clerk’s office used a random sampling method to verify this petition, using a sample size of 6,051 signatures.

    In Austin, the minimum number of signatures required to place a petition measure on the ballot is 20,000. The clerk’s office wrote that based on the random sample results, the petition did not meet the required amount of signatures from valid voters. Of the 6,051 signatures, the clerk said that 1,147 were disqualified for signing more than once and another 1,106 were disqualified for other reasons, leaving 4,904 unique signatures from qualified voters in the sample.

    So where are all those Democrats screaming “Count every ballot!” over this one? The City of Austin is going to deny the will of the public via sampling?

    I smell a rat.

    I hope Mackowiak and Save Austin Now file a lawsuit over this, and force the city to explain each and every petition that was rejected. Discovery over just what communications Gooddall received from mayor Steve Adler and his cronies would be worth the cost of such a lawuit all by itself. .

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Deadline Filing Passes: Quick Impressions on Texas Statewide Races

    Tuesday, December 12th, 2017

    Monday was the deadline to file for the 2018 Texas primaries. You have to give credit to whoever in the Texas Democratic Party was in charge of candidate recruitment: unlike many previous years, “Democrats put up candidates for every statewide elected post, except one open seat on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, an initial tally of filings showed Monday night.”

    Here are my quick impressions of some of the more competitive statewide primary races to be fought between now and March 6.

    Democratic Governor’s Race

    See this post. The press is going to cover this as an Andrew White vs. Lupe Valdez race. I think there’s a 50% chance Grady Yarborough makes the runoff.

    Republican Agricultural Commissioner’s Race

    This race has already turned nasty, with incumbent Sid Miller and challenger Trey Blocker launching nasty Facebook attack ads at each other. One of Blocker’s consultants is Matt Mackowiak, who was just elected to a 2018-2020 term as Travis County GOP chairman unopposed, and whose Twitter feed I follow.

    Republican Land Commissioner’s Race

    Former Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson has filed to run against incumbent George P. Bush. Patterson is going to have a real uphill fight to unseat Bush, since Patterson lost badly in his last race for Lt. Governor, coming in fourth in a four man race, and the Bush family machine has a legendary fundraising network, having raised more than $3 million in a down-ballot race in 2014. But various Alamo controversies and the fact that Bush has never run in even a slightly competitive race might give Patterson a chance to make the race close. Even so, Bush is still the heavy favorite.

    Tomorrow (hopefully): A look at competitive U.S. congressional district races.

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | No Comments »

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