Austin’s voters can save their city today. Of course, they are the very same voters who have so stupidly continued to elect city council members and mayors and district attorneys dedicated to destroying their city over the last decade, so whether they will save it or not remains to be seen.
Saving any town from the excesses of Soros-funded social destruction Austin has subjected itself to over the last 10 years will be a long and hard road for sure. But they do have a choice on the ballot today, Proposition A, that would force the Marxist thugs in the Mayor’s office and city council offices to go hire more officers for their police department, which the idiots de-funded during the George Floyd riot festivities last year.
The city council stupidly cut $150 million from the police budget last year and re-allocated the money basically to hire social workers in the city’s public health department. Very predictably, that and other actions taken by the city’s “leaders” has resulted in a massive spike in murders and other violent crimes - 71% over the last year, well above the spiking national average. The direct cause and effect relationship here is undeniable and tragic.
Elon Musk, who recently announced he would be moving Tesla’s headquarters to the Austin area, has obviously noticed the terrible decline the city’s Marxist leaders have set it on, a path towards San Francisco-like chaos. He told reporters Monday that this path to becoming a San Fran copy-cat burg, complete with out-of-control crime, homeless encampments littering the cities and human waste cover the sidewalks is a severe mistake, saying “Austin should be its own city, not a San Francisco copycat.”
Until the Marxists came into control the city government, Austin has always been its own city. It can be its own city again, but only if the voters there take control and begin the process of reversing their own tragic errors made in the last decade. Austin is verging on gaining the reputation of being an unsafe place to do business, putting its long-held goal of becoming a mecca for the high-tech industries in great peril.
Musk made his announcement of his plans to relocate Tesla’s headquarters there just a month ago. If today’s vote goes the wrong way, showing that Austin voters remain intent on placing the city on an inevitable path to terminal decline and chaos, he and other CEOs with plans to relocate to Central Texas have plenty of time and money to change their minds.
It’s fine to want to “Keep Austin Weird,” as the city’s motto goes. But when the world begins to equate the word “Weird” with chaos and death, the city’s future will become dark and bleak.
That is all.
If Austin is using the Keep Austin Weird mantra then they are more like Portland than San Franschitsco. That's what you hear in Portland and it's on billboards, bumper stickers, yard signs.
and they're right up there with the defund policy. so much so that they are on pace to set a new homicide record, having already surpassed passed last years record this September.