Bozo_Casanova

“Challenge accepted” - South Austin’s mom

You’ll get 25 and you’ll like it

Wait- are you saying you don’t think this election is close?

Again - I think we’ll see a 3% move in one or the other direction at the end of the move that may or may not be visible until Election Day and will represent the consolidated intent of truly undecided and/or unmotivated voters. I think they will move as a herd, and that we’ll know who wins the election by midnight on the East coast, because they will win >300 EVs

I’m fine with all of it and I want Democratic voters to feel like their individual vote is the most crucial vote in history

I want to believe I don’t, but I want to

Exactly.

I get it, but the rate is not especially high compared to other cities and the fact remains that most of your tax burden is not city taxes. The school district is being strangled by recapture and student loss, and many of the other things are just the cost of waiting to long. I hope I’ve been clear- I am not trying to defend anything. I don’t think the long term outlook for Austin is great, without some real surprises to the upside.

You are absolutely right that’s what the article says, and I posted the article because it does a good job of summarizing the facts. But what I’m saying is that the discussion about community interest was very shaped by land speculation- in other words that the neighborhood and environmental activism was shaped by its leadership circle in a direction very friendly to land speculators who would be benefit from the route much further east, and the downside would be that 130 wasn’t viable as a bypass route. Doesn’t it strike you as funny, for example, that many of Austin’s most traditionally powerful environmental leaders (like SOS) have become implicitly or sometimes even explicitly pro-sprawl? Doesn’t it seem strange that most or many of Austin’s neighborhood leaders are stridently against changes to the code that would repopulate their neighborhoods with children and thus stabilize their public school district? This is what I think people don’t get- they think that the problem with Austin is graft, and it’s not. 130 isn’t useless as a bypass route because someone was on the take. 130 is useless because the people who wanted it routed further east in the early 2000s were part of the same ruling coalition as the traditional environmentalists and the most powerful neighborhood groups. Your property wealth is rising even faster, so congratulations.

Oh, no. Now see this is a story of just how powerful the people who show up can be in Austin, and it had so many twists and turns that I don’t know where to begin, so I’m going to leave a lot of detail out but the essentials are are pretty straightforward and covered well here. Upthread I posted a highway plan map from the mid 1980’s. Around that same time, the Texas Transportation Commission ordered what was then called the highway department to figure out an alternate route from San Antonio to Austin that would bypass I35. Originally that was called highway 297, and then it was merged into the “MoKan” expressway route from the map I posted and where the planners landed was to build the section around Austin where 183 currently is. This was inconvenient for land speculators, who enlisted allies in the environmental movement and their allies on the Eastside to oppose it, and managed to pressure CAMPO and the city yo fight to move the route east, where land could be cheaply acquired, and along came TTC. BTW- would anyone like to guess the name of Austin‘s most successful eminent domain attorney?

CNN now reporting that he was the target. Goddammit people.

I’ve been saying that. Ideally they would both do it. She would do it in mid late September and then he would do it 2-3 weeks later. But she should really do Theo Vonn

Oh no, of course not.

Uh, I think we’re saying the same thing, but her taxes would not be meaningfully lower if she hadn’t voted for the bonds. But thank you for the cheap seats illustration of the mindset that prevents Austin from ever trying to do anything meaningful.

City of Austin is about 1/4 of her property tax burden and the *city* rate isn’t high vs other cities. Her problem is that Texas is a high tax state that punishes middle class people for making good long term real estate investments in growing cities to subsidized football stadiums and road construction in outer ring suburbs that vote for the party in power. And, as a retired teacher in an outer ring suburb you know this. But the fact remains that we could waive her city of Austin taxes and she would still be suffering, and for the same reasons.

I already reupped for next season but I don’t see myself going for the rest of the season, and if Wolff stays I will probably try to dump my seats. My issue is not losing. Losing is part of sports. My issue is that this team isn’t fun or entertaining or inspiring or even very interesting to watch in any way, and the franchise seems complacent about it. I guess they got shots off yesterday? That’s an improvement I suppose.

It’s possible that provoking race riots is the purpose at work here

This is all over the weirdosphere- as a call to action. The mainstream press just ignored it because sanewashing. Just walking right up to a blood libel.

I basically agree, but with the color commentary about process above. It’s less about how often we say yes and more about what is put in front of us and why it is put there.

There’s no particular agenda AFAIK. Everybody with stroke wants Garza gone- establishment Dems, the city hall crowd, the county courthouse people, even his uncle. Unfortunately, because he’s deeeeeep in the Travco Dem circle the optics are bad so they had to outsource the job to Mackowiak and his captive DINOs and the Republican circle, who did about at well in a Dem primary as you would expect. Musk is just in the money tap.

???

We can’t, for example: - go back to the 90s and move 130 to where it was supposed to be. - go back to 2000 and pass the rail - go back to 1984 and listen when they tell us that it will cause massive sprawl when the city starts growing again. Etc Et al.

That’s the irony of it all. What to do (or what could have been done before it was too late rather) was well understood and discussed, thus the discussion of plans. As a city (citizens, staff, officials) we’re quite good at collectively figuring out what to do. We just don’t do those things, because of who dominates the process and what they care about. And who lets them dominate - the rest of us. it’s just the culture of the city, and it’s changing somewhat, but too late to really make things work well. About all we can do is reactively mitigate things now unless something terrible happens and presents the opportunity to start some things over again.

Holy shit, people. I better go ahead and put a binary trigger on my AR-10, because the Venuzuelans got ahold of the AK-47 Supreme! Your heard right! Where the hell do they get these guns?!