Posts Tagged ‘Save Austin Now’

Two Killshots Against Texas Blue City Fraud?

Thursday, November 27th, 2025

Blue cities in Texas seem to have at least two general categories of fraud going on: voting fraud to keep Democrats in power no matter what, and old fashioned kickback/graft/featherbedding fraud to keep the money flowing to lefty NGOs and party activists. Now two separate initiatives are taking aim at both these problems in different blue locales.

First up: Harris County allowing voter registration at post office boxes in defiance of the law may open them up to serious state oversight of their voter rolls.

Harris County could face state oversight of its voter roll maintenance if an investigation confirms that voters are registering at post office boxes.

Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced Tuesday that she had received a complaint alleging Harris County’s voter registrar is allowing voters to register using post office box addresses instead of physical residence addresses as required by law.

Nelson said her office will begin “an immediate investigation.”

“If we find reason to believe the Harris County Elections Office is failing to protect voter rolls or is not operating in the good faith Texans deserve, we will not hesitate to take the next step toward state oversight,” she added.

The complaint was submitted on November 18 by State Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R–Houston), who is a former Harris County voter registrar.

Bettencourt authored legislation in 2021 that excluded commercial post office boxes as voter registration addresses and set procedures for voter registrars to confirm voters’ residences.

He also authored the 2023 legislation that allows the secretary of state to assume administrative oversight of Harris County’s elections or voter registration if an investigation reveals “a recurring pattern of problems.”

It’s impressive how many years Bettencourt has been lining up this bank-shot.

According to a notification letter sent Monday to Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector and Voter Registrar Annette Ramirez, “The complaint alleges a recurring pattern of problems related to the failure to conduct voter registration list maintenance activities.”

The letter also notes that state funding for voter registration could be withheld if Ramirez fails to perform required duties related to confirming residential addresses.

Ramirez has 30 days to respond.

if Nelson does succeed in putting Houston’s voter rolls under heavy manners, I’m willing to bet money that the P.O. box problem is far from the only way Harris County Democrats are breaking the law.

Next, Save Austin Now wants that city to undergo independent budget audits.

A bipartisan advocacy group that helped defeat Austin’s “Proposition Q” tax hike proposal now hopes to force the city to undergo periodic third-party financial audits to examine spending and efficiency, and analyze policies affecting affordability for residents.

The nonpartisan Save Austin Now PAC launched a petition effort last week to amend the city’s charter to include an “Independent Affordability & Efficiency Initiative” (IAEI), which would mandate the hiring of an independent and experienced entity through a competitive bid process.

The auditing agency would then be tasked with analyzing the spending, performance, and outcomes of all city departments and contractors, in order to identify opportunities to streamline and optimize staffing and management structure and identify fraud, waste, abuse, and conflicts of interest. The IAEI analysis would also include examination of how city policy, such as tax rates, affects resident affordability.

Attorney and former Travis County Judge Bill Aleshire drafted the charter amendment language and told The Texan that under Proposition Q, which would have raised the property tax rate by 20 percent largely to increase services for the homeless, the city’s leaders had not considered the burden placed on taxpayers.

“I think their focus has been on people who are receiving the tax money, but not nearly enough on those who are paying the tax money,” said Aleshire. “Hopefully this will bring that perspective back.”

Aleshire said much of the proposed Austin charter amendment language is drawn from the recent efficiency study completed for the City of Houston last year.

Houston’s efficiency study, completed by Ernst & Young LLP, found duplicative contracts, inconsistent vendor practices, and an outdated management structure under which about 40 percent of city “managers” supervised three or fewer employees. As a result of the study, the city cut spending to reduce a projected deficit and avoid imposing new property tax increases this year.

Under Save Austin Now’s charter proposal, Austin would also establish metrics for measuring the outcomes of programs and policies, something Aleshire notes is absent from the city auditor’s analysis.

“Governments all the time are measuring how many widgets they’re making. Almost never will you find an audit that says as a result of making these widgets how has it impacted the community,” said Aleshire. “It’s not just the work you’re doing, what is the impact of that work?”

The proposed charter amendment would require the city to hire an auditor within 120 days and then complete an audit within one year of the contract. Subsequent audits would be completed every five years, but at least one year before the city could place a voter-approved tax rate increase on the ballot.

What both these proposals have in common is that both blue dots might finally be getting some long-overdue adult supervision.

Also: Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

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Posted in Austin, Budget, Democrats, Elections, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 4 Comments »

Austin Voters Reject Odious Proposition Q

Wednesday, November 5th, 2025

On an election night that was pretty lousy for Republicans across the country, an unexpected ray of light shown out from a very unexpected spot.

The People’s Republic of Austin, against all odds, defeated Proposition Q.

The rubber match between the progressive Austin City Council and the collection of opposition organizations headlined by Save Austin Now (SAN) has gone the latter’s way.

Proposition Q is a voter-approval tax rate election (VATRE) worth $110 million, intended to close the $33 million deficit gap in the City of Austin’s budget.

The ballot language states the item is “for the purpose of funding or expanding programs intended to increase housing affordability and reduce homelessness; improve parks and recreation facilities and services; enhance public health services and public safety; ensure financial stability; and provide for other general fund maintenance and operation expenditures included in the fiscal year 2025-2026 budget as approved or amended by City Council.”

Though it was not the only spending item within the proposition, the headliner was the homelessness response appropriation.

This is the third time the two sides — the city’s dominant political establishment and the insurgent opposition made up of Austin’s few Republicans, Independents, and even Democrats — have grappled over a ballot proposition.

The first was the May 2021 reinstatement of the public camping and lying ban, a rebuke of the progressive city council headlined by then-Mayor Steve Adler and then-Councilman Greg Casar; 57 percent of voters, including 40 percent of Democrats, voted to reinstate the camping ban.

Playing into SAN’s favor at that time was the visceral nature of the council’s policy. Overnight, encampments cropped up on Austin’s boulevards, under its overpasses, and within its creekbeds.

The next bout between the factions came on a November 2021 proposition from SAN that would have established a minimum staffing threshold for the city’s police department; a year earlier, the city council had cut and redirected $150 million from the Austin Police Department budget that included nixing financial authorization for 150 patrol positions.

SAN’s progressive opponents came out on top in that instance, with nearly 70 percent of voters rejecting the proposition.

It was a heavy blow to the group trying to build a bipartisan oppositional coalition in the city, but it set the table — along with other electoral skirmishes in the years since — for what came this year.

When it came to reinstating the camping ban, the message for SAN, led by Matt Mackowiak, was provided for them in the form of unsightly encampments on many street corners and increased confrontations between homeless individuals and pedestrians. That didn’t take much creativity.

But for the police staffing proposition, it was harder to fashion a winning message out of crime statistics that, while higher than the city’s historical levels, remained less tangible in what is still a historically low-crime city. The messaging cut the other way, too.

Opponents of the minimum staffing item framed it as a mandatory spending increase — which it was — and it worked to a prolific degree.

This November, the “spendthrift” theme fell squarely on the city council; SAN and its allies ran with it to a great effect.

SAN, with donations from donors like attorney Adam Loewy, purchased billboards across the city that read, “Stop the largest property tax increase in Austin history.”

Countermessaging by Proposition Q supporters focused heavily on President Donald Trump, including a mailer quote from City Councilwoman Vanessa Fuentes that read, “Passing Proposition Q tells Donald Trump and Greg Abbott they don’t call the shots in Austin. Our Community takes care of its own, and Proposition Q shows it.”

In short, the messaging dynamic was one of bipartisan opposition to more increased spending, versus a partisan rebuke of the GOP and its faces at the federal and state levels; the former won out, a remarkable feat in a city that has generally approved ramping up spending levels.

SAN’s $300,000, together with $120,000 from Ellen Wood’s Restore Leadership ATX, lapped the pro-Proposition Q Love Austin PAC’s $94,000 spent in the closing weeks of the campaign.

Snip.

With multiple elections of voter data to reference, SAN identified 70,000 likely supportive voters across both major parties and unaffiliated voters — and through early voting, that voter universe turned out at a rate of 2.3 times more than the rest of the voter universe.

SAN’s money paid for mail to 140,000 households, 300,000 text messages to voters, radio ads on five stations, a digital ad blitz, and billboards and small-scale signs across the city, per data shared with The Texan. Get-out-the-vote robocalls and digital ads continued along with the radio spots through the close of polls on Tuesday.

I didn’t cover Proposition Q because I live just outside the Austin city limits, I’ve had plenty of other stuff to blog about these past few months, and 40 years of experience has led me to believe that Austin voters will vote for pretty much any cockamamie spending increasing that comes down the line. So I didn’t have much hope they’d defeat Proposition Q, but I did see signs against it just about everywhere I went.

Through early voting, SAN’s internal modeling put “No on Prop Q” ahead 57 percent to 43 percent, basically the final breakdown of the camping ban reinstatement election. SAN reached that conclusion by extrapolating their polling from a couple of weeks ago that put “No on Prop Q” at 40 percent among Democrats, the largest voter universe in bright blue Austin.

More than 30 percent of the early vote turnout was modeled to be from SAN’s universe or a universe of strong Republican voters, all likely to be “Nos” on the proposition.

After initial results, Proposition Q went down in flames with over 60 percent of votes against it.

Maybe the lesson here is that bond issues are one thing, but tax increases are quite another. While the former almost inevitably leads to tax increases down the road, maybe even Austin’s notoriously left-wing voters have had enough of being taxed to death. Forcing governments to seek voter approval for tax increases means a whole lot less tax increases get enacted.

Finally, Austin voters may simply be sick and tired of their hard-earned money keeping drug-addicted transients shuffling down their streets. There’s evidently no homeless scheme the Austin City Council won’t throw money at, but actual voters seem tired of shoveling taxpayer money into the insatiable maw of the homeless industrial complex.

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Posted in Austin, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Welfare State | No Comments »

One Soros DA Gone, Another Targeted

Wednesday, September 6th, 2023

Some good news: One Soros-backed DA resigned rather than face a recall vote:

Beset with controversy that has culminated in a looming removal trial for incompetency, Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzales resigned his office, mooting the case, and immediately announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for United States senator with the intent to challenge incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

For those unclear on Texas geography, Nueces County is on the Texas gulf coast, and includes Corpus Christi. Trump beat Biden there by a few points in 2020, but Gonzalez won the DA race by three points.

Gonzales has faced criticism from law enforcement organizations and other groups who have described him as “soft on crime,” dismissing high rates of criminal cases and facing a barrage of other accusations such as failing to qualify for office by properly executing a bond and being suspended by the State Bar of Texas for failing to pay annual dues.

The removal lawsuit, brought by attorneys with Citizens Defending Freedom (CDF) on behalf of CDF State Director Colby Wiltse, was endorsed by Nueces County Attorney Jenny Dorsey and was set to go to trial after a district judge approved the case to move forward.

“This is a great day for justice in Nueces County,” Wiltse said in a press release. “Mark Gonzalez, like many of the Soros-aligned District Attorneys across the country redefined the role of the district attorney in the name of social justice, often at the cost of public safety in the communities they swear an oath to protect.”

Gonzales was quick to pivot out of the controversy and into a new political endeavor: launching a campaign for U.S. Senate. He published a campaign video on YouTube wherein he briefly characterized the effort to remove him as “bull—” and stated, “I was such a threat, they tried to remove me from office.”

He joins front runner candidates state Sen. Roland Gutierrez (D-San Antonio) and U.S. Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX-32) in the Democratic primary race for Texas’ U.S. senator, as well as nine other contenders.

Gutierrez only joined the race in July, so I’m not seeing any polling on him yet. Having two candidates with Hispanic surnames probably helps Allred.

Vacancies in the office of district attorney are filled by gubernatorial appointment for the remainder of the unexpired term, meaning Republican Gov. Greg Abbott will decide who the next Nueces County district attorney will be.

Hopefully he’ll appoint someone who will actually, you know, indict criminals.

Speaking of Soros stooges, Dwight made me aware of GarzaWatch, aimed at Soros-backed Travis County DA Jose Garza and backed by some of the Save Austin Now people (Cleo Petricek and Matt Mackowiak), among others. We’ll see if that effort bears any fruit…

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Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 4 Comments »

George Soros Just Dropped Half A Million Dollars To Oppose Hiring More Police In Austin

Saturday, October 2nd, 2021

George Soros, the man whose money helped install radical leftist Jose Garza in the Travis County DA’s office, is so displeased with the push to put more police back on the streets of Austin that he’s dumped half a million dollars into the fight against proposition A.

The billionaire benefactor of progressive causes across the country, George Soros, has waded into the political fight over Austin’s police staffing — pumping a half-million dollars into a campaign to defeat Proposition A.

Among other reforms, Proposition A would establish a minimum staffing level for the Austin Police Department (APD) of 2 officers per 1,000. Earlier this summer, APD was floating around 1.2 officers per 1,000 residents. From current staffing levels, it’d require the hiring of roughly 500 officers.

APD is suffering not only from a dearth in approved positions compared with its staffing level two years ago, but also from rampant attrition within its ranks, averaging 15 to 20 departures per month this year.

According to the Austin American-Statesman’s Ryan Autullo, the Open Society Policy Center, one of Soros’ advocacy arms, gave $500,000 to Equity Austin which opposes Proposition A.

The proposition is on the November ballot for Austin voters and is openly opposed by Mayor Steve Adler, Councilmember Greg Casar, and the city’s numerous progressive activist groups who each pushed for the $150 million APD budget cut and redirection last year.

Here’s the filing document showing the filing. And they’re not the only ones opposing Proposition A:

As I’ve written before, the hard left opposes adequate funding for policing because it’s much harder for them to rake off money from policing than various “Social Justice” initiatives for which their bureaucratic functionaries control checkbooks. And because they view police officers (probably correctly) as competing institutions of legal force and legitimacy that stand in the way of complete overthrow of capitalism and the current American constitutional order and its replacement with the neo-Marxist/Social Justice/Critical Race Theory “successor ideology.” To them, soaring Austin crime rates are a sign of their success.

All the more reason for ordinary Austinites to show up and vote in droves for Proposition A.

(Hat tip: johnnyk20001.)

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Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 4 Comments »

Lawsuit Filed Over Austin’s Refusal To Enforce Homeless Camping Ban

Thursday, August 26th, 2021

Since the City of Austin is still refusing to enforce the will of voters when it comes to clearing out illegal camps of drug-addicted transients, Save Austin Now and several business owners have filed lawsuits against the city:

Two lawsuits were filed in Travis County District Court this week alleging that the City of Austin has failed to enforce the public camping ban that was reinstated back in May.

Austin voters approved the reinstatement by a wide margin after the activist group Save Austin Now collected 26,000 signatures in 50 days to place it on the ballot. Rather than implement the camping ban immediately, the city council decided to move toward a phased re-enforcement over the course of four months.

The fourth phase, begun earlier this month, was the first during which illegal campers that refused to move could be arrested. At the time of its start, numbers released by the city showed 572 warnings and 24 citations had been issued. No citations have been issued since July 20.

Since Phase 4’s beginning, some larger camps have been cleared out, but tents and encampments remain scattered throughout the city.

“That refusal leaves voters and residents of the City in the same position as they were before the ban was reinstated,” reads the first lawsuit filed by Save Austin Now co-founders Matt Mackowiak and Cleo Petricek.

The other lawsuit — filed by Headspace Salon and Co-op owner Laura North, Balance Dance Studio owner Stuart Dupuy, Dairy Queen franchisee Robert Mayfield, and Buckshot Bar owner Bob Woody — say the city’s actions have “resulted in severe business disruption.”

“[The business owners] have incurred substantial expenses to protect their property, their customers, and their clients,” it adds further.

Those businesses are requesting at most $100,000 in monetary relief along with full enforcement of the ban.

In his legal statement, Mayfield says he’s had to hire off-duty police officers as security for the establishments — to the tune of $72,000 per store per year.

I think Mayfield actually owns more Dairy Queens in the Austin area. But the two stores mentioned in the lawsuit filing are at 8728 North Lamar and 5900 Manor. Says Mayfield:

The problem is bad with homeless coming in to use the rest room and nothing more, hanging around the parking lot bothering customers, asking for money, and making DQ not a desirable place to visit. We have to run them off or real customers would not come in to the store. We have had customers harassed while in line at the drive up window.

Perhaps worst of all, it is costing us in the neighborhood of 572,000 per year, PER STORE, paid to off duty police, to keep these stores clean and inviting so that customers will visit us. Having off duty police has helped us a lot and sales are good, but at a cost that we should not have to bear. Try swallowing $140,000 per year and see what it does.

Perhaps people upset with the Austin City Council’s refusal to enforce the camping ban can organize a buycott of his Dairy Queens.

Youth Dance studio owner Stuart Dupuy had this to say about the huge problems caused by Austin’s refusal to enforce the law:

On our security cameras, we started seeing more people come up to our building at night. Someone broke through the roof, stole the cash register, and smashed the glass door on their way out. Someone stole a catalytic converter from one of our vans. We’ve been broken into three times in the past 18 months. At least once a week, we now see people park in our parking lot, and we watch a constant stream of people come up to their car from the Greenbelt or from under the overpass.

People were bathing in our exterior faucet, between our buildings. We kept putting locks on the faucets, which they would break off. Eventually we just removed the handle completely. One time a lady was bathing, while kids were there, and I asked her to leave and she started screaming at me telling me that I was going to go to Hell.

These people, ordinary Austin taxpayers and business owners, don’t seem to figure in City Council decisions at all. Only the drug-addicted transients, and the left-wing activists of the Homeless Industrial Complex who profit off them, seem to count.

One thing about these lawsuits: Discovery is going to be lit…

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Posted in Austin, Crime, Texas | 3 Comments »

Austin Police Refunding Proposition Makes November Ballot

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021

It’s official: Save Austin Now’s initiative to refund Austin police cut by the hard-left mayor and City Council is officially on the ballot in November:

The petition is to restore a statutory level of 2 officers per 1,000 citizens, add an elected head of police oversight (not appointed by the council) and double officer training per year, among other things.

Hopefully Austin’s citizens will vote for this outbreak of sanity in November.

Now: When can we expect the City Council to actually follow the law and institute Prop B?

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Posted in Austin, Crime | 6 Comments »

Police Refunding Petition Makes Ballot To Fight Austin Crime Surge

Tuesday, July 20th, 2021

Just as they did with the homeless camping ordinance, Save Austin Now says they have enough signatures on their petition to restore police funding to make the ballot in November:

“107 days from now, we are going to have an overwhelming victory,” Matt Mackowiak, co-founder of the activist group Save Austin Now and Travis County GOP chair said while announcing the group’s collection of over 25,600 signatures to restore Austin Police Department’s (APD) funding.

The group was joined by representatives from the Austin Police Association, Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas, Texas Municipal Police Association, Texas Police Association, and the Austin Police Retired Officers Association (APROA).

Nearly a year after the Austin City Council approved a $150 million APD budget cut and redirection, it appears likely its restoration is well on the way toward this November’s ballot. The group says every petition has been validated by themselves and expects a validity rate close to their mid-90s percentage for the homeless petition effort.

While it fell short of the goal to collect 50,000 signatures in 50 days, only 20,000 is needed to secure a spot on this November’s ballot. Additionally, Mackowiak noted in a Monday press conference that 40 percent of the petitions sent in for this effort were from citizens that did not sign a petition for the camping ban reinstatement.

Save Austin Now announced the effort in late May, not even a month after the group’s resounding success at the ballot box to reinstate the public camping ban.

The APD-related petition effort does a handful of things:

  • Mandate a minimum staffing level of 2.0 officers per 1,000 residents
  • Establish a minimum 35 percent community response time standard
  • Require 40 additional hours of training
  • Oblige the mayor, city council, and city staff to enroll in the Citizens Police Academy
  • Facilitate minority officer hiring through foreign language proficiency metrics

    • “Our ballot measure ensures that the Austin Police Department is not solely subject to the [city council,]” said Save Austin Now co-founder Cleo Petricek, a mother and Democrat.

    APD currently has over 160 patrol vacancies and is 390 officers short of an adequate staffing level — widely considered two officers per 1,000 residents. APD is currently at 1.2 officers per 1,000 residents, according to department figures.

    The petition is extremely timely considered that almost every indicator shows everything getting worse post-defunding:

    Last year, the Democrat-run Austin City Council, urged by local anti-law enforcement activist groups, defunded the Austin Police Department by a whopping one-third ($150 million). Since then, APD has been forced to disband multiple units (including DWI, family violence safety and stalking, and criminal interdiction), cancel multiple cadet classes, and watch a growing wave of officers leave the force.

    On the streets, [APD Interim Chief Joseph] Chacon said 911 response times are “dramatically” slower, and violent crime has already surged to record numbers in 2021.

    “We’ve never really seen [that level] here before,” he said, referring to the rising number of homicides.

    Chacon said the department is losing 15-20 officers a month, and their understaffing is “not sustainable.” He projected 235 vacancies by May 2022 and 340 by May 2023.

    And make no mistake about it: The budget cuts are the main reason police are leaving the force:

    “Holly Pilsner” is the pseudonym she has used on Facebook for years. She didn’t want to use her real name for this story. She wrote a public post, after she turned in her badge, calling out the $20 million cut to the APD budget and the tense politics around it.

    “I think we all feel eviscerated to be honest with you,” she said. “We do love our community.”

    Pilsner was on patrol for seven years in northwest Austin before moving to the risk-management unit.

    She says she started thinking about leaving the force last summer — claiming the protests were different than they were portrayed. “Everything was a peaceful protest, peaceful peaceful — it wasn’t peaceful,” she said.

    Meantime, the department is feeling the squeeze. Some units have been shut down. Just last week, officers at the scene of a deadly shooting told us they’re having a hard time responding to Austin’s surge in violent crime.

    And things just keep getting worse:

    Another big driver of higher crime rates is radical, George Soros-backed Travis County Jose Garza, who seems to see his job as keeping criminals on the streets of Austin:

    Garza seeks to end the prosecution of crimes: “As you know, on March 1st we implemented a bail policy that asked our prosecutors to ensure that no one is in jail simply because they cannot afford to get out. Our policy prioritizes the safety of our community and our prosecutors have been working hard to re-evaluate open cases according to that community safety framework instead of a wealth-based system.”

    Instead of handcuffing criminals, Garza is handcuffing the prosecutorial process and Lady Justice herself. Garza is inline with a national effort to cripple his department’s prosecutorial ability in advancing a radical ideology that’s focused on completely redesigning the city’s – and the nation’s – criminal justice system. This dangerous reality is also being peddled by a new brand of Bernie-endorsed Democrats across the country.

    As far as Garza is concerned, police and crime victims don’t count at all:

    On March 15, 2021, about two months into his tenure, Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza (D) issued a secret standing order regarding the handling of felony cases in the county. It went into effect immediately…

    Garza’s standing order opens with “In the interest of justice and fairness for all persons arrested for felony crimes,” never mentioning crime victims. In fact, the secret order fails to mention victims of crime even one time. It is solely focused on the DA’s power to decline to prosecute arrestees, and what it demands the Travis County Sheriff’s Office should then do when Garza’s office declines prosecution.

    Snip.

    I spoke with Charley Wilkison, executive director of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT), about this Tuesday morning. The easy-going Wilkison was livid about the order and told me that law enforcement officers have already seen its effects. They are seeing suspects they take in on felony charges released so quickly, per Garza’s order, that they are back on the streets before officers even return to their precincts. This indicates the DA office’s review may not be very thorough. He noted that homicides are up more than 50%. Northwest Austin suffered yet another fatal shooting Monday night, pushing homicides up near 50 for the year.

    DA Garza’s tenure has already come under scrutiny multiple times since he took office in January 2021. Crime is skyrocketing on his watch, while he has openly prioritized prosecuting cops on cold cases that have already been investigated. He has set up a catch and release system that put an 8-time felon back on the streets, where he perpetrated a 10-day armed robbery spree and led law enforcement on a chase from just outside Houston into Austin. More recently, an assistant prosecutor quit the office, claiming Assistant District Attorney Trudy Strassburger ordered her to delete evidence from case files. The Austin Police Association has called for an investigation into this disturbing case. If the name in that case rings a bell, Strassburger is the same assistant district attorney who solicited for lawyers who want to prosecute police officers to apply for work with the Travis County DA’s office. The Travis County district attorney’s priorities are more than clear with Garza at the helm: ignore crime victims, hastily release felons and accused felons, and prosecute police officers.

    And he just hired former Hayes County Judge Millie Thompson, who was crazy she had to resign after four months, for the “Civil Rights Division” (AKA, to prosecute police).

    The Travis County DA’s office doesn’t seem to hire the best:

    Mayor Steve Adler is, as usual, nowhere to be found:

    Crime is spiking hard in Democrat-run cities across the country, many of which defunded their police and then proceeded to demoralize them. Austin is not only not an exception to this, it led the way with one of the nation’s largest defuding efforts. Adler led the city council to gut the police budget by about $150 million, a third of its budget. The cuts included key community policing and intelligence units.

    What on earth did he expect would happen when he led defunding of the city’s police? Why hasn’t anyone in the mainstream media asked him how he expected defunding to play out, versus what’s actually happened?

    Why don’t the anchors ask him about a) defunding, and b) the consequences of defunding?

    The usual idiots, of course, are shocked at the very idea of adequately funding police:

    As previously documented, the hard left wants to keep police defunded so they can get their fingers on as much money and power as they possibly can.

    Austin’s leftwing citizens finally woke up enough to vote for proposition B in May. Let’s hope they do they same to restore police funding in November.

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats | 2 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 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 »