Some very preliminary results are in from the deployment of DPS (Texas Department of Public Safety) troopers in Austin to help the understaffed Austin Police Department (APD). Data on the first week of the partnership runs contrary to the longtime assertions of police...
Austin housing prices have made the national news in a new way recently, but there has been a paucity of local coverage about it. According to multiple national media outlets, the financial giant Goldman Sachs predicted that Austin will be one of four metropolitan...
Austin voters stepped up and pulled City government back from the brink on Tuesday (and in early voting) with a sound trouncing of Prop A, 68% against. Prop A was the petition driven proposition from Save Austin Now to require Austin to have two police officers per...
In yesterday’s installment we looked at whether the Prop A election — Save Austin Now’s petition driven referendum on whether to require two cops per 1,000 residents — will more closely resemble May’s election on the reinstatement of the camping ban (Prop B) or or the...
For anyone wanting to assess the possibilities in the upcoming Prop A election, studying the results from the May 2021 municipal election is a good place to start. Prop A is the costly, high stakes, petition driven referendum on whether to require two cops per 1,000...
As the election nears on Prop A — a petition driven measure on the November 2 ballot which would require Austin to have 2.0 police officers per 1,000 people — the Prop A campaign is reassuring citizens that their measure would only raise the City budget by a tiny...
One thing that the Prop B results exposed was that there is a lot of unoccupied ground in the political middle. By that I specifically mean between the majority of citizens and the Austin City Council, and often between the majority of citizens and the more active and...
Let’s start by checking in on Governor Greg Abbott, who we haven’t discussed in a while. Abbott is actually an Austin voter and he took time after voting early on Tuesday April 20 to tell waiting media that he voted for Proposition B. That is the proposed reversal of...
On March 25 the Austin City Council moved a step closer to authorizing a new police cadet class beginning June 7 — after over a year without a cadet class. The vote was eight to one with two Council Members abstaining. Council Member Greg Casar voted no while Mayor...
Among other items, today’s Austin City Council agenda features a choice on whether the Council will approve a police cadet class beginning in June. Last summer the Council zeroed out the budget for new cadet classes at the Austin Police Academy, the training...
