DISTRICT 8 AUSTIN CITY COUNCIL MEMBER paige ellis VOTED to alllow homeless encampments everywhere
October 13, 2022
Years after Austinites suffered through the defunding of local police by ⅓ and a surge in crime, one city council member remains mysteriously silent. Paige Ellis has taken almost no blame for her central role in both passing the deregulation of homeless encampments all over the city as well as defunding the police with colleague Greg Casar.
Paige Ellis, more than any other city councilor, is responsible for the reduction in Austin’s quality of life, increase in crime and homeless, increase in taxes, and shift of city government’s attention from the things people care about to the things a narrow radicalized group pushes for.
The impact of her policies was recently chronicled by the Wall Street Journal:
Voters in this deeply liberal city overwhelmingly approved a proposal last week to reinstate a ban on camping in public places, dealing a harsh rebuke to Mayor Steve Adler and his fellow Democrats. It turns out there’s a limit to what even the most progressive electorate will tolerate.
The vote came amid a homelessness crisis in the city caused almost entirely by Mr. Adler and the Austin City Council’s 2019 decision to rescind a 23-year-old ordinance that prohibited camping in public places such as sidewalks, city parks and highway medians, as well as ordinances against panhandling and sitting or lying down in public. The predictable result was the emergence of San Francisco-style homeless encampments all over the city, especially downtown, which was soon inundated with aggressive panhandling, public intoxication and debris-strewn tent cities.
At the time, Mr. Adler said the answer to Austin’s homelessness problem wasn’t to arrest people for sleeping on the streets, an approach he called “ineffective and inconsistent with the character of this city.” He offered more publicly funded housing and services for the homeless, following the “Housing First” policy mantra of West Coast cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle. “We need places where homeless folks can be safe and surrounded by social workers and others getting them the help and support they need,” Mr. Adler said.
And he meant it. Along with the repeal of the camping ban, Mr. Adler and the all-Democrat city council appropriated more than $73 million for homeless-related services in 2020, a record for the city. It was so much money that the city had trouble spending it. By December Austin had doled out only 57%, or $42.3 million, which still amounted to tens of thousands of dollars per homeless person. Yet the problem kept getting worse.
The issue came to a head in January 2020, when a homeless man attacked employees at a restaurant on a busy South Austin street on a weekday morning, stabbing one man to death and sending another to the hospital. The killing prompted Gov. Greg Abbott to weigh in, blaming Austin’s political leaders for the violence and threatening state action.
In response to growing frustration and outrage from business owners and residents, Matt Mackowiak, an Austin-based political consultant and the Travis County Republican Party chairman, co-founded a group called Save Austin Now, whose goal was to gather enough signatures to get a reinstatement of the camping ban on a citywide ballot. This would be the first chance Austin residents had weigh in on the issue.
City Hall fought the group’s efforts, throwing out enough petition signatures to keep the measure off the ballot last year. Save Austin Now sued and came back with another petition, successfully getting the issue onto this year’s ballot as Proposition B.
The city wasn’t done fighting. Save Austin Now had to sue again when City Council adopted ballot language that intentionally distorted the meaning of Proposition B, making it seem overbroad. In March, the Texas Supreme Court ruled against the city, forcing a change to the ballot language.
In November, Paige Ellis will face the voters of District 8. We must vote her out.