Local nonprofit Save Austin Now PAC has filed a Mandamus Action, with concurrent filing with both the 3rd Court of Appeals and the Texas Supreme Court, challenging ballot language passed by the Austin City Council last week which is deceitful and in violation of the city charter.
Save Austin Now PAC co-founders Matt Mackowiak and Cleo Petricek said: “For many years the Austin City Council has conspired to use their ballot language power to both ignore the City Charter requiring that captioned language be adopted and instead pass their own biased language to affect voters. For far too long, past petition efforts have not taken this gross abuse of power seriously enough. Those days are over. In April, we sued on the Prop B ballot language and won at the Texas Supreme Court. We humbly expect a similar result here. We will always fight for the rights of voters to utilize the petition process without inappropriate interference from the City Council.”
“This is an important lawsuit that stands up for all Austin voters and their right to petition for new ordinances,” said former Travis County Judge and election law expert Bill Aleshire, lead counsel for Save Austin Now PAC. “This lawsuit challenges the deceitful ballot language the Council adopted for the November 2nd election and their refusal to obey the City Charter. After carefully reviewing the SAN-PAC Petitioned Ordinance and preparing this lawsuit, I am really disappointed with tactics by the Mayor and City Council members (Mackenzie Kelly excepted) to mislead voters about the Petitioned Ordinance. No, it will not mandate $600 million in expenditures for the Austin Police Department, nor destroy the rest of City programs.
“These politicians also left out of their comments (and the unlawful ballot language) the progressive elements of the Proposed Ordinance:
- to help diversify the police force to be reflective of the ethnicity and gender of the people of Austin;
- to prize officers who are multi-lingual in non-English languages spoken in neighborhoods they patrol and reward officers who earn honorable conduct citation;
- to set standards for representative community policing, and
- to require the Mayor/Council and key staff who oversee APD to attend the Citizen’s Police Academy and the Ride-Along Program to better understand policing in Austin.
“They didn’t mention these parts of the Ordinance and some in the press has not let the public know about that either. I suspect that the hyperbole and hyperventilating by the Mayor and Council at their meeting over the Petitioned Ordinance was to try to deflect attention from the fact that their actions have made Austin less safe and depleted the police force from 1,959 officers budgeted in 2020 to only 1,809 this year and next, with vacancies causing the force to now be at only 1,637 officers in a city of over 1 million residents and, at any point in time, tens of thousands more visitors. I respect the fact that good people in Austin will disagree about this election, but it should be a fair election and voters should not be misled by anyone. We are asking the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court to make sure of that.”
