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Abbott won't stand for it and will punish CoA by withholding state funds.
Looks like we will get to see if it works out better than using jails and police to try to solve all of our problems.
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Austin City Council voted Thursday to use funds slashed from the police budget to purchase a hotel that will provide permanent supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness and to create an independent forensics lab separate from the police department.
The hotel is the fourth the Texas city has purchased for supportive housing since 2019. Under the measure, the city will spend approximately $9.5 million from its Housing and Planning Department’s general obligation bonds to acquire Candlewood Suites in District 6 and turn it into about 80 units of permanent supportive housing.
Last week, the Council voted to buy the Texas Bungalows Hotel & Suites in District 7 for $6.5 million, which will eventually support about 60 units of permanent housing. The hotels are not expected to reach full occupancy until next year.
The funding for the hotels uses money from a recurring $6.5 million fund taken from the Austin Police Department’s (APD) budget to provide wraparound services for residents. In August, the City Council voted to cut $150 million from the APD’s budget, with the bulk of the $21.5 million the city dedicated to housing and violence prevention programs siphoned from canceling cadet classes, reducing overtime spending and nixing contracts for surveillance tools like license plate readers.
“There were not that many cities that actually responded to the call to transform police budgets, and in those like Austin that did step up to that call in a significant way, we can now start showing the community the results. There are so many improvements to people’s lives that we can make just because we were willing to make moderate adjustments to the police budget,” Austin City Council Member Greg Casar told Truthout. “Throughout the whole campaign cycle, progressive cities were bashed by Trump and his allies for reconsidering their police budgets, I think now in the weeks to come, progressive cities can start showing the actual benefits.”
The city also voted and move about $11.9 million from the APD’s budget into a new Forensic Science Department, creating an independent forensics lab separate from the police department. The move does not eliminate any of the functions in the forensic lab — it simply ensures that the lab is administered independently.
Casar offered an amendment to clarify the language of the ordinance to establish that the lab’s purpose is not only to collaborate with law enforcement when appropriate, but to provide crime lab and evidence management services in an unbiased manner in the pursuit of truth and justice — wherever it leads.
He tells Truthout that the Council plans to buy hotels in every district and will soon move forward with proposals to move its 911 dispatch out of the police department. The Council provided additional funds for mental health first responders with Integral Care’s Expanded Mobile Crisis Outreach Team in 2019 to staff the city’s 911 call center, providing a fourth first-response option beyond EMS, fire and police. (Truthout observed on how that system works first-hand during a ride-along last year.)
The APD’s integrated forensics lab was shut down in 2016 after an audit by the Texas Forensic Science Commission found the lab used scientifically faulty practices. The city has since outsourced its DNA work to the Texas Department of Public Safety. By the time the lab was shuttered in 2016, the city had amassed a backlog of about 4,000 rape kits.
Sexual assault survivor Marina Garrett testified that it took about two years before the results of her kit came back. “I do think this is just one piece of the puzzle,” Garrett told councilors Thursday about the move to decouple the lab. “The amount of trauma I got from my kit being in the backlog was just exponential from what I would have received if my kit had been tested in a timely manner.”
[kind of a long article, but lots of information there:]
https://truthout.org/articles/austin...y-for-housing/
Abbott won't stand for it and will punish CoA by withholding state funds.
Republicans can't have Democrats actually solving problems that they can't.
It makes them look bad.
Gov. Abbott says Texas will make it 'fiscally impossible' for Austin to continue defunding police
https://www.kvue.com/article/news/lo...5-ba448528b56c
Eyup. He does look to be trying to tell a city what to do.
IT'S HABBENING!
It is indeed. We will get to see what happens when a major city shifts funding to something productive.
Good or bad, it is happening.
I give it good odds of actually solving some problems.
I give it great odds of bringing in all kinds of riff raff and crime.
I think it will probably not do as much as proponents want or detractors say.
We will get to see either way.
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