{"id":25202,"date":"2015-11-10T08:43:01","date_gmt":"2015-11-10T14:43:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/?p=25202"},"modified":"2015-11-10T08:43:01","modified_gmt":"2015-11-10T14:43:01","slug":"have-austin-taxpayers-finally-had-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/?p=25202","title":{"rendered":"Have Austin Taxpayers Finally Had Enough?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the more surprising results from last week’s election was Austin voters defeated a courthouse bond package<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Austin City Council Member Don Zimmerman, who led the opposition to the courthouse project, said the last-minute defeat of the bonds was an \u201cabsolute stunning result.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe corporate downtown special interest lobby spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this,\u201d he said. His anti-courthouse campaign through the Travis County Taxpayers Union barely spent anything, he said. \u201cI think a lot of people heard that and said, \u2018Well why are hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent if it\u2019s such a good idea?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He said part of the reason the bonds were rejected is that Austin-area voters are increasingly concerned about affordability and increasingly loathe to support tax increases.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Because I live outside the city limits and in Williamson County, I was only vaguely aware of the Courthouse bond issue. As long as I’ve been in the Austin area, I can’t recall another bond issue going down in flames like this one. Could the People’s Republic of Austin finally have had enough of tax increases<\/a>?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is not that complicated,\u201d said local attorney Mark Pulliam. \u201cTravis County homeowners are sick of property tax increases.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOnly pompous, out-of-touch downtown lawyers \u2014 like those who belong to the Austin Bar Association \u2014 would think that a 14-story high-rise costing more than The Austonian, and almost as much as the just-completed JW Marriott, the largest in the North America, made sense,\u201d he told Watchdog.org.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Watchdog piece suggests that the long overdue move to single City Council districts may have been a factor in defeating the bond issue. <\/p>\n

Also, Travis County suburbs may finally have become populous enough to balance out the liberal central city for county elections like this one. Indeed, that’s what this map<\/a> suggests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the more surprising results from last week’s election was Austin voters defeated a courthouse bond package. Austin City Council Member Don Zimmerman, who led the opposition to the courthouse project, said the last-minute defeat of the bonds was an \u201cabsolute stunning result.\u201d \u201cThe corporate downtown special interest lobby spent hundreds of thousands of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":25,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,12],"tags":[2859,2994,2862,2861],"class_list":["post-25202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-austin","category-texas","tag-austin","tag-don-zimmerman","tag-elections","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25202"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25221,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25202\/revisions\/25221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}