In our first year under the new 10-1 form of government, your Austin City Council set high goals for what we could accomplish in the first year. We are proud to have made real progress toward improving Austin for everyone. We’re looking forward to an even more productive 2016.
See the full list here.
We did it. Thanks to all your help, we were able to find housing for 200 homeless veterans in Austin. Along the way, we created a new way to attack this problem and eliminated the waiting list for homeless veterans to get help. Great cities do big things, and this is a very, very big thing. Good job, Austin.
At the beginning of the year, there were 234 homeless veterans in Austin. When I took up this challenge in May, there were 200 remaining without homes. By Veterans Day, we still needed 118 homes for these heroes. Thanks to your overwhelming support –as well as the tireless work of homeless advocates and the Austin Apartment Association – we found the last of those 200 homes this week. Continue reading
I want to wish you and yours a very Happy Holidays and Happy New Year. Watch this video to find out about two things for your family to do on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day that are fun and free.
Also, I had a great time appearing in the role of Mother Ginger in Ballet Austin’s production of The Nutcracker on Monday. Diane and my daughters Sarah and Susan were in attendance to witness my ballet debut, and they assure me that I carried myself with the decorum befitting the occasion. Continue reading
Here are four things I know for sure:
First, Austin is safer with ridesharing companies such as Uber and Lyft because they take drunk drivers off the streets and provide more transportation options, and I’m certainly not trying to get them to leave town.
Second, fingerprinting drivers enhances safety for passengers.
Third, the City Council voted to create safety incentives to increase the number of fingerprinted ridesharing drivers in Austin. On January 28, 2016, the City Council will discuss what those safety incentives and disincentives will be.
Fourth, this is Austin, the city that reinvented the assembly line, country music, dinner-and-a-movie, and grocery stores. This is not an either/or city. We can find a creative solution that both allows Uber and Lyft to stay in Austin while at the same time protects women from sexual assault. Within the framework of safety incentives and benchmarks that the City Council approved on Thursday, I believe we can accomplish these goals.
I wanted to catch you up on what we’ve been up to during the holidays.
First, some good news from Washington — really
We all know that IH-35 through downtown Austin is the worst road in town, and one of the worst in Texas. For years – decades even – the best advice we could give newcomers is how to get around Austin while avoiding IH-35. And as the years go by and more and more people move here, IH-35 gets more and more congested. All of a sudden, the road ahead looks a little better. Just this week, the President signed a new five-year highway bill that provides $305 billion for highways, transit, freight, Amtrak, and passenger rail programs. Even better, the bill, called the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (“FAST”) Act, increases money available for highways and reserves a bigger portion of that funding for larger cities like Austin. In other words, right when Austin needs it the most, we are eligible for a bigger slice of a bigger pie for our biggest problem – IH-35.