Texas Jeff

Almost everyone who is elected once will be reelected if they run again. I think they are limited to two terms. Conservatives fair poorly... The 2014 election resulted in 11 new council members. Since then every seat has been up again. In 2016, five seats were up. Don Zimmerman and Sheri Gallo lost, and 3 of 5 were reelected. Gallo actually won the initial election but lost in a runoff. Don is the only person to run again and lose in the initial election. In 2018, five seats were up plus the mayor. Ora Houston and Ellen Troxclair did not run again. Incumbents won the other four seats, including an unopposed Ann Kitchen. In the 11 elections held so far after the initial 10-1 council election, incumbents have 7 wins (one unopposed), 2 losses, and 2 did not run again. So if you have a freshly elected council rep and they are not conservative, get used to them ... they are not likely to lose a reelection bid.

You may have better luck promoting camping in Ramsey Park, close to Martin Middle School, the median of Barton Springs Road, and in front of City Hall. There are no city council members in Tarrytown or Clarksville.

In Texas, is it possible for one part of a city to decide to split off and be an independent city, or join an adjacent city? West Lake Hills is adjacent to much of that lake property and they have a lower city tax rate than Austin.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in future years. The state is going to constrain the M&O growth by 2.5% per year by "compressing" tax rates (forcing them to go down so that the revenue does not go up by more than 2.5% per year). This is great for taxpayers but I suspect the growth in cost of education will be more than 2.5%, so the effect will be that every year the Robin Hood payments will get smaller and smaller. In theory, the state is going to step in to provide money to fill that gap. In reality, they really didn't provide a funding mechanism (a tax) to do that. They are OK for the next two years but beyond that who knows. I read one paper that said they could fill the gap by constraining state government spending elsewhere, but who knows if that will happen. If the state fails to provide funding, then non-Robin Hood districts will start to feel a pinch as Robin Hood funds drop. Robin Hood districts (wealthy) will be OK for a while, but tax rate compression may mean there are eventually no Robin Hood districts and their funding is also capped and reliant on the state to fill the gap. If school spending rises more than 2.5% per year, I think we are on a path to eventually eliminate Robin Hood. I could be wrong...

The formula is complex, but the basic concept is not hard to understand. Each school district raises funds to pay the employees and funds to build the buildings. There is a tax rate to pay the employees, called M&O, which is about the same for most districts. There is a tax rate to build the buildings, called I&S, which varies from district to district. For example, Austin's M&O rate is $1.079 with an I&S rate of $0.113, Del Valle's M&O rate is $1.04 with an I&S rate of $0.35. Put the M&O and the I&S numbers together and you have the tax rate for the school district. Multiply the tax rate by the taxable value of your home, divide by 100 and you get your annual school tax bill. The part for the buildings (I&S) goes up when your district passes bonds. They decide they need to build something, pitch the idea to you, hold an election, borrow money if the election passes, and figure out the tax rate based on how much money they need to pay back the loan, just like you would for a house payment. Del Valle's rate for this part is higher than Austin partially because the total value of everything in their district is lower than Austin and partially because they have been building stuff (borrowing money). For example, Del Valle has an indoor football practice facility and Austin ISD has, well, a bunch of grass and weeds. They do mow the weeds... All of the money for the buildings stays in the local school district. It is not part of Robin Hood (recapture). Recapture comes from the money to pay the staff. To pay staff, the state uses a formula to decide how much money is needed to educate the kids in that district. The formula is really complicated, but it's roughly so many dollars per kid per day. In theory, this tax rate is determined by your local district. In reality, most districts are stuck at the maximum rate they are allowed to charge, around $1.02 to $1.17. In each district, the money they collect for staff is the M&O rate times the total value of the property in the district. The state says the money they need is so many dollars per day per kid, using the complex formula. If the amount of money they collect is greater than what the state says they need, the district has to give the extra money to the state. If the amount of money they collect is less than what the district says they need, the state gives them extra money to fill the gap. The amount of money the school district has to pay the staff is decoupled from the amount of money they raise via taxes. Since there are two funds, one for the staff and one for the buildings, a poor school district can vote to build a football stadium or new school and also receive Robin Hood money from the state to pay their teachers. That is why you see things like a Jumbotron at the Seguin stadium, or a water park at a school district in the valley. There are limits to what they can borrow, but one part is separate from the other. When Austin ISD says they sent $500 million to the state for recapture, what they mean is that the money raised to pay the staff was $500 million more than what the state calculated that they actually needed to educate their students. Since they were over the limit, they have to send the excess money to the state. From 2002 to 2019, around $3.7 billion has been collected from Austin taxpayers and been diverted to to pay staff somewhere else. That, in a nutshell, is recapture.

I think they also plan to nuke the IH-35 upper deck. UT, toss in some bucks to cap your section and create a contiguous campus! if they do all of that work, many of the capitol view corridors along the east side of downtown will protect a view from a location that no longer exists. I say get rid of most of the CVCs, especially those that provide a view from a place that is gone. Keep the really iconic ones. The east side of downtown could use the height.

For many people, there is a big difference between early 70's and late 70's. I have seen it in my parents and my parents' friends. Somewhere around 75, plus or minus a few years, people tend to really slow down. They may still be engaged in life ... active, smart, intelligent, funny ... but their batteries are running out. Reagan was almost 78 at the end of his presidency and IMHO you could see him slipping at the end of his 2nd term. He was diagnosed with Alzheimers five years after leaving office. Only Ike, Trump and Reagan have been president after their 70th birthday.

Some kid from Lake Travis is attending Texas A&M. The kid wants to go home on the weekend to vote, because he forgot to update his registration to his college location. And the kid has three slacker LT friends who want to vote but also did not change their registration. So the original kid volunteers to drive all four home for the weekend, so that they can vote and spend the weekend at home. This original kid has to know to complete a form at the polling place saying that his friends could not enter the polling place on their own, which I'm guessing that once they get to the polling place, is not true. Let's say the kid does not complete the form, because he has no idea that such a thing would be illegal because why would someone make a law like that? The kid is now guilty of a crime punishable by a year in jail with a fine of $4000. LT parents are going to be pissed. Can you provide people with transportation not to the polling place but instead the KFC that is 300 ft from the polling place? After some killer KFC, can everyone walk to the polling place and vote? We don't have a lot of drive-in polling booths in Texas, at some point you have to park and walk. What are those limits? My car breaks down and I call an Uber to take my family of four to the polls. The driver has no idea that we are going to vote. He picks us up and drives us to a polling location. Now the guy has to go fill out a form inside the polling location because he unknowingly dropped us off to vote, or go to jail. A Cap Metro bus stops next to a polling location. Five people get off to vote. The bus driver does not complete the form because he is just a bus driver. Off to jail for that guy. C'mon Ted ... don't mess with voting. It's hard to believe that it would be legal to limit transportation if one of the outcomes might be that someone votes after you have provided the transportation.

How exactly would Trump just "stay in office"? Each state elects electors, they all fill out ballots, they send them to the House, the House opens them and counts them. If Trump loses there, then it's over. On Inauguration Day, the person who won shows up and takes the oath of office, and that person is the President. Trump's out at that point unless he's the one taking the oath of office. His stuff should be out on the lawn by sunset if he refuses to leave. How exactly do people see Trump just deciding not to give up power, and then staying? He could contest a very close election aka Bush/Gore in 2000, but once the electoral college has voted that should be it.

Nestande also claimed that she was distracted because she was checking her phone to make sure here alarm was set ... while driving a car. So that works too.

A buddy of mine created the Sundial app for the iPhone and Apple Watch. It shows you how far off your local time is from solar time. You can set notifications for sunup, sundown, solar noon, etc. Today's solar noon in Austin is at 1:28 pm local time, so we are off about 88 minutes from noon actually being mid-day. So, if you want to just say screw it, I want my own time, you can do it. Wake up 6 hrs before solar noon every day, whatever. I think everyone will vote to go on DST permanently and that first winter people will be bitching about taking their kids to elementary school in the dark.

My parents parrot Fw:fw:fw:fw emails and what they see on Fox News all of the time and I have decided to not respond. I realize they have been sucked into this mindframe and that propaganda works, and it has worked on them. If Fox News decided to just switch sides next Tuesday, my parents would be realigned by Friday. They are still my parents and they sacrificed a lot to have a family and provide me with a great childhood. So, when we're together and bullshit comes my way, I talk about something else. I hope like heck that when I am their age I am able to avoid getting sucked into the propaganda of the day.

A quick thought on impeachment .... the House gets to impeach it but nothing compels the Senate to try the case on any time schedule. Impeachment generally needs both houses to be controlled by the party opposite the president, something we do not have today. Only two presidents have ever been impeached. Andrew Johnson in 1868, for firing Edwin Stanton as secretary of war, and Bill Clinton in 1998 for lying under oath. Nixon came close in 1974. In 1864, Johnson and Lincoln ran on a split party ticket (the National Union ticket). Lincoln was a Republican and Johnson was a Democrat, but supported Lincoln. Lincoln was elected but killed shortly after taking office, so Johnson became president. In 1867, a Republican Congress passed a law requiring the Senate to give advice and consent before removing people from the cabinet, partially to protect Stanton. Later in 1867, Johnson suspended Stanton, a Republican, during a congressional recess, which was allowed under the law. Johnson was impeached and tried by the 40th US Congress, which had Republican majorities in the House (150-65) and Senate (57-9). Johnson was found not guilty by one vote. In 1974, during investigation of Nixon's involvement in the Watergate break-ins and cover up, the US House started to draft articles of impeachment. Nixon was a Republican but the 93rd US Congress was controlled by Democrats, both in the House (291-144) and the Senate (around 57-40). By the end of July, the House had three articles of impeachment passed out of committee. No article of impeachment against Nixon had majority Republican support from the House Judiciary Committee. Knowing that the House would probably impeach him and that the Senate might convict, Nixon resigned. In 1998, I got to hear my grandmother argue that a president should not be removed from office because of a blowjob. You can't un-hear that. Over her objections, the 106th Congress gave it a shot. Clinton was a Democrat but Congress was controlled by Republicans, both the House (223-211) and the Senate (55-45). Clinton was not convicted on two charges, one for perjury and one for obstruction of justice. The votes were mostly along party lines. Today, we have a split Congress. The House could impeach but the Senate could just say meh, we're busy, come back later. No president has come close to an impeachment conviction in the Senate without both houses controlled by the opposing party. Did Johnson or Clinton commit crimes meriting removal from office? Maybe or maybe not, but they were both fighting an opposition Congress, something Trump does not have to face.

The endgame for Uber and Lyft is self-driving cars. Cut out the cost of the driver and simply have fleets with the exact same car nationwide, maintained at a local depo. Whoever does this well first wins. I could see Waymo (google) or Amazon being the eventual winners. Maybe there is room for about as many companies as we have rental car companies today, some more expensive with newer cars and some cheaper with older fleets. I think you are correct that price will matter most, with quality of service next for those than can afford nicer stuff. Citywide bus services will struggle to keep customers.

What is the purpose of the big ass doors you go through you go through your way to baggage claim? Do other airports have these? Seems like they are intended to make sure people can't sneak past security but I have not seen anything like this in other places.

I would go for that, including more for those taking on active duty. On the other end of life, I would seriously consider taking a public service role for 18 months to 2 years if I could buy into Medicare at a younger age at a reasonable price. Corporate retiree healthcare is going away for lots of us, including me. The uncertainty of knowing what I may or may not be able to get during those last 5-10 years sucks. So maybe a basket of benefits to entice people to volunteer ... some folks might enjoy it so much that they just keep going after their time is done.

I worked for a German company in the 1990s and met a lot of German engineers that went through their compulsory military service. In their program, you could do active duty for some amount of time, like 12 months, or a public service job for longer, like 18 months. Most of them did it after college and before starting their first "real" job. I don't remember the exact details but that's the general idea. The Germans I met seemed to have a broad perspective on the range of people in their country, partially from meeting all kinds of people during their service. I would be OK with a program here if it was voluntary, but I'm not sure I'm ready for a compulsory program. It would be nice if you could do it at any age, so that even people in their 60s who had not yet "done their time" would have a chance to do it and feel like they had given some service back to their country.

In 1980, the University of Texas had 8,981 freshman on campus and a total enrollment of 46,148. The population of Texas was 14.75 million. In Fall 2018, the University of Texas had a freshman class size of 8,960 and had a total enrollment of 51,832. The population of Texas is currently about 29 million. UT hasn't grown much since 1980 and Texas has doubled. So somewhere around the state we need room for at least another 9000 or so kids that would have gone to UT if the Texas had grown at the same rate as the population. A&M is trying to solve this problem by getting bigger. Texas, by staying the same size, is getting better just because it's harder to get in. We need other schools around the state in the UT system to get bigger and better too, just to keep the same level of opportunity that Texans had in 1980. The lege is helping by dumping money into UT-Dallas to attract kids. As a result, UT-Dallas's SAT scores are on par with UT-Austin's. Hopefully they keep going with other UT schools until we have a true California style system rather than two big schools plus everyone else.

Travis County folks, you can now see your assessed values for 2019: https://www.traviscad.org/property-search/ They also publish a pretty cool breakdown of how your 2018 taxes were allocated here: https://www.travistaxes.com/taxTransparency/propertySearch

For those of you worried that your kid did not make CS at UT ... don't worry ... a job awaits the kid who loves to code. UT Dallas and Texas A&M are good state school alternatives to UT Austin. I've interviewed a ton of students straight out of undergrad or a masters program and I was surprised how many of them could not think logically about a problem or code the correct solution after 4-6 years of school. Those that can stand out. In my experience, most large companies have a standard entry level package. It does not vary by school, although schools with larger pools of STEM majors are likely to have more companies interviewing on campus. So a UT Austin grad is likely to make about what a UT Dallas grad makes, at least to start. So .... code, code, code, code .... learn some interviewing skills .... code some more ... get an internship ... keep coding ... work on teamwork skills ... keep coding ... and you'll land a job no matter where you went to school. Once you get a job, put away the damn phone and code. Getting your second job will rely more on what you did at your first job than where you went to school.

I have no doubt that there is a tremendous gap between those at the top and those at the bottom in today's society, even within the same company as this person describes. It's important to have a middle class and provide a living income for those who want to work and all children should have a stable home. IMHO, we should strive to provide everyone with those things as much as we can. However, once you introduce math in the conversation I am intrigued ... are those numbers correct? I did a quick 1040 for a $35k head of household filer. If the person has one child and is filing head of household with about $35,000 in income, they have a taxable income of around $17,000. Tax on that is $1,771, however a combo of the child tax credit and the earned income credit means that the $35,000 head of household should receive back a refund of around $1,075 with zero withholding. Now, this person also has to pay SS tax (around $2170) and Medicare tax (about $500) but if you add all of that up this person is paying about $1600 in income tax + SS + Medicare. This person also lives in California, so there is some CA income tax, maybe 2% of income above a threshold, I'm not familiar with CA state tax. So maybe $700 in CA tax. I'm not sure where the $6000 tax is coming from but it would be nice to know. If Rep Katie's tax calculation is off by $4,400, that's $366 of the $567 shortfall. There are other taxes like sales tax, property tax, car registration fees, and so on but it's hard to find the extra $4,400 in tax. Maybe MY math is wrong, but I'm not sure this theoretical bank teller is paying $6000 in taxes. This bank teller is in a rough spot, but it's always going to be tough to be in that spot. In theory, this person is a single parent with a six year old kid working an entry level job in a state with a high cost of living. The other parent, in this case, is providing nothing. The job, bank teller, is a candidate for automation and might not exist 5-10 years from now. The market-clearing price for that job is minimum wage, and it may drop to zero once physical banks go away. Part of the problem is income inequality but part of the problem is bad decision making leading to a tenuous existance. We need to work on both.

Crazy idea for that one penny local option in Austin: * Step 1: Ditch Cap Metro * Step 2: Give the penny to Austin ISD * Step 3: Don't tell the lege about this so they can't take it as part of Robin Hood * Step 4: Well, I'm not exactly sure how to fund a bus system at this point but maybe the city council could think about that one ... a problem for another thread! That one penny is worth $231 million per year to Cap Metro, for the entire service area ... which is mostly Austin. Round Rock ISD would probably get part of this pile since they are partially in Austin, as would other districts like maybe Del Valle and Pflugerville. But, Austin ISD might walk away with something like $160 million per year from the penny sales tax. Austin ISD spends about $670 million on salaries today, so that would give them 23% more revenue to work with.

This could be a pretty dangerous thing if rates rise back to "normal" rates of 7-8%. People might be able to afford to stay where they are because their rate is low but they might not be able to find a buyer for their house at a higher interest rate without coming down in price. And since no one wants to take a loss, people may just stayed glued to what they have hoping the market will eventually recover. I think the "tax-free cap gain on your house" policy plus low interest rates have been pushing up home prices for a while. No one wants to pay property taxes, but reducing property tax rates may cause additional upward pressure on home prices, so long as rates stay low. In the early 90's, most of my co-workers used a rule of thumb to buy a house between 2x and 3x of annual salary. Anything above that was considered to be too much debt. This was with interest rates around 8-10%. People today seem to have no problem buying houses that are 5x or more of their income, which is enabled by low rates and encouraged by the idea of potiential tax-free gains.

Bikers/Scooter people can't go 1000 feet west to 1st street, a bridge that has bike lanes on both sides of the bridge and cantilevered lower bridges for walking and biking attached to each side of the bridge, in addition to the bike lanes? Does every crossing need sidewalks and bike lanes and car lanes? Just a question... Personally I would rather spend money on more pedestrian bridges like the one by the Lamar bridge, maybe a bridge from where Trinity street ends on the north to somewhere on the Statesman site on the south. The Pfluger pedestrian bridge near Lamar totally changed the feel of that crossing, from OMG I am going to die crossing this bridge to hey this is a cool place to hang out for a while.

Well, maybe none if your employer just pockets the money .... but if they do some other employer might want to talk to you about a new job with a raise. Also, lots of folks who have enough to stop working but need the healthcare might quit, making space for younger people to move up the ladder. Some others might quit because they've always had some idea of a business to start, but the need for healthcare coverage kept them at a big employer. With the link between employment and healthcare severed, you might end up at an innovative startup. So, no guarantee of a higher paycheck but I think you'll see eventual higher pay and more innovation once companies don't have to think about healthcare for their employees.