Good Thursday afternoon --
As the New Year begins, Save Austin Now PAC has taken some time to consider what we have achieved and what work remains to make our city the best place to live, work and raise a family in the country.
We will have more to say on our future plans soon, but for now we hope you will watch this year-in-review video that we put together, looking back at a consequential and very busy 2021.
Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67wtu4kePog.
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While Austin remains a booming city with much to offer new residents, Austin families, businesses relocating here and tourists visiting here, Save Austin Now PAC remains deeply concerned about standard of living for our residents and the direction that city leaders are taking us.
Let us review four recent major failures by Austin Mayor Steve Adler and the rest of the City Council:
1) Third 'Boil Water' Notice in Four Years -- Thankfully the 'boil water' notice has now been lifted, after 75 hours. On Saturday night, Austinites were shocked to learn that following several already difficult days, they were now being asked to boil water before using it for an undetermined period of time. This is Austin's third 'boil water' notice in four years, which poses health risks, harms businesses like restaurants and hotels, and forces another major inconvenience for Austinites who expect readily available, affordable, clean drinking water in the 11th largest city in America. Here's a story that details the situation. Seeking to avoid blame for yet another crisis, city leaders are blaming 'human error', rather than taking responsibility for their utter failure to oversee Austin Water, demand competent leadership, or expand Austin's water infrastructure to meet demand in a rapidly growing city.
This week we called for:
> Immediate firings if human error caused this latest problem
> Immediate system upgrades if system error caused this problem
> An end to the city council raiding $45-$50M/annually from Austin Water and directing that money go to water infrastructure upgrades
> A thorough, independent audit of Austin Water to be completed in 90 days and released in full to the public.
2) Homicides on Track to Break Last Year's All-Time Record -- Our city suffered at least eight and perhaps as many as ten homicides in January 2022, doubling last year's total in that month and putting us on track to already break last year's all-time annual homicide record of 89. Meanwhile we are 230 police officers down from a year ago and the city council is reportedly only considering the hiring of 100 new patrol officers this year, which will not even replace the 15/month we are losing to attrition every month. Save Austin Now PAC tried to fix this issue with Prop A, but city leaders lied about the cost of the plan, raised $1M in dark money from outside the state and manipulated organizations into opposing our effort to ensure adequate police staffing. Meanwhile violent continues to get worse, at a time when cities like Dallas, Nashville and Miami are all seeing violent crime decease as they make additional investments in law enforcement. Austin has no plan to make our city safe.
3) Homeless 'temporary warm shelters' house only 225 people -- Save Austin Now's work to reinstate the ban on unsafe, unsanitary, unregulated public camping is well known at this point. Much to our disappointment, the City of Austin continues to fail taxpayers and our homeless population. One month ago, the city announced that for the second year in a row they will not conduct a thorough count of the homeless population, citing COVID as the excuse yet again. But even more concerning was seeing news reports that during the recent ice storm, the city only provided 225 'temporary warm shelter' beds and only during the daytime. With at least 2,300 homeless as of the last count (2 years ago), and likely as many as 7,000-10,000, there is almost no doubt that homeless Austinites died last weekend because they could not stay warm. Where the hell is the $70M we spend annually on homeless services going? We will continue to hold the city accountable and demand answers and reforms.
4) Illegal Public Camping Returns -- The Austin American-Statesman's Ryan Autullo reported at the end of 2021 that camping has returned to downtown, in violation of Save Austin Now's Prop B which passed 58-42 in May 2021 and in violation of state law which banned unregulated public campaign statewide (passing on a bipartisan basis last May after Prop B passed). Recall that we sued the city last year over lack of enforcement of the campaign ban and that lawsuit is pending. We will keep fighting the city on this critical issue.
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DONATIONS NEEDED
You can see what we are tracking and the work we are continuing. We need your continued, generous support to ensure we can focus on holding Austin leaders accountable for these and many other failures.
Please donate here.
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As I have said before, we have only begun to fight!
Thank you!
-Matt Mackowiak
Co-founder, Save Austin Now PAC
> Questions? Email Matt.
> Learn more: http://www.SaveAustinNowPAC.com
Will you please support our efforts now?
You may donate here: https://secure.anedot.com/save-austin-now-pac/hold-city-hall-accountable-c9e1ad79648f72e6b8778.