I hope you are healthy and doing well during this difficult time.
Our community is doing everything we can to stop the spread of coronavirus. We are grateful that Austin is below the national average in confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
But there are still some concerning developments.
The City of Austin has asked all Austin residents to shelter at home, to practice social distance, and most recently, to wear masks at all times in public.
However, inexplicably they have exempted the homeless from these requirements.
And this week we got the first indication that this absurd policy has been bad for public health.
The Austin American-Statesman reported that a Salvation Army homeless shelter is a confirmed coronavirus cluster, one of a total of nine in our city.
An emergency room professional at a local Austin hospital recently told me that on one day in late March, more than half of the confirmed coronavirus cases in their E.R. were homeless individuals.
If you drive by a highway underpass, for example at 8th and I-35 downtown, you will see a large number of homeless people who are not practicing social distance.
The city has not informed the public about infection rates among our homeless and they have not explained why public health guidelines exempted that population.
This is another reminder why we must reinstate the ban on public camping.
As you know, on March 3, we launched our effort to put our ordinance to reinstate the ban on public camping on the November ballot.
To date, we have 4,000+ signatures collected -- more than 25% of the way to our goal. We need to submit 20,000 signatures from Austin residents by July 18 to qualify for the November ballot.
There is no doubt that shelter-at-home guidelines have slowed down our progress.
With social distancing in place and no large gatherings allowed, traditional methods of signature collection are temporarily not available to us.
So we have migrated to utilizing mail as our primary method of collection.
Using volunteers, we have personally mailed several thousand petitions to willing signers in the past two weeks. Using a local mailhouse, we mailed 13,000 petitions this week!
If you want to receive the petition by mail, please click here to give us your address.
So how will we meet our goal?
We will be launching an ad campaign next week, to ensure that we can educate thousands of Austinites about our plan for a safer Austin.
We also want to expand our mailing program.
I know this is a difficult time. I am sorry to be asking for financial support for our efforts.
But our deadline is July 18 and that deadline does not respect the challenges presented by coronavirus.
Would you help us fund our advertising campaign and additional mail efforts?
> You can securely contribute here.
> You can also mail a check to "Save Austin Now" and send to 807 Brazos Street, Suite 408, Austin, TX 78701.
Thank you!
-Matt & Cleo
Save Austin Now co-founders