15th: Safety In Austin Homes & Streets

The Citizen Communications portion of today's City Hall meeting was opened with a statement by Anthony Walker of the Decker Lane neighborhood regarding reasonable access to bus stops. He described a situation in which those residents in Northeast Austin have to walk so far to get to the nearest CapMetro bus stop that elderly pedestrians have to stop and rest several times before arriving at the stop. He said wheelchair-bound citizens have to risk road traffic and uneven pavements, making the same journey. Mr. Walker spoke with eloquent passion and conviction about the need for the City Council to take responsibility for the risks his neighbors face when attempting to travel along the sidewalks and for the lack of more conveniently located bus stops.

He was followed by Patty Spinkle and a group of citizens from the South side of Austin, who presented a moving statement about the problems along the "Hippie Highway" residential area. They said their street has become a commuter's alternative to a more regulated roads because it has only one stop sign and no regular APD patrols or speed-deterrents. Cars have been speeding through their neigborhood during morning and evening rush hours when children are also up and about. Their neighborhood group, RespectGalindo.org, has tried to slow the traffic by putting up its own street signs, but to no avail. They showed a moving set of photographs of accidents including one SUV that plowed into a child's bedroom just minutes after the four-year-old had gotten up and left her bed. The car's tire landed on the child's pillow.

The third presentation was by Cynthia Valladez who spoke about problems in the East Cesar Chavez area. She said that a lack of coordination between two neighborhood groups has resulted in failure of City Hall to address issues of rising crime & derelict properties in that part of Austin.

The City Council called a staff member in to discuss the problems faced along the South Austin "Hippie Highway", which has been the subject of mass media coverage because of the dramatic accidents and of the Galindo Neighborhood (GENA) sign campaign. The staff member said that the Galindo Neighborhood is 19th in line for "traffic calming" attention.

What we at The Austin Egalitarian noticed was the spontaneous way the three groups, with no relationship with each other, made presentations that all went to the same point: the City Council seems to leave citizens of all types to fend for their streets themselves while attention is given over to more massive projects of urban planning such as the "McMansions" ordinance. We can see that there is a relationship between the City Council's need to control the tsunami of new building that is coming into Austin and the lack of time for attending to the existing streets and small householders.

Some of the candidates in the recent election have said that there is a need to empower the Neighborhood Associations with more authority as well as a need to restructure the City Council to make it more accessbile to the average person's concerns, perhaps by making some of the Councillors into district instead of at-large representatives.

This would not be an easy or quick solution, in our opinion. Ms. Valladez, when describing the problems along Cesar Chavez, showed that neighborhood associations can in fact become obstacles if they compete with each other. The process of re-structuring the City Council to accomodate district representatives could be slow and treacherous, even if worthwhile.

All of Austin's living, daily citizens have to become more involved in this struggle in City Hall. Too many of the building projects that Councillor McCracken is trying to address with the McMansion ordinance seem to involve absent investors and highly influential architects and developers while the risk of casualties described by the street-level citizens increases.

No solution will work if a larger percentage of the voting population doesn't wake up and pay attention. According to the figures published in The Austin Chronicle, the biggest voting district was the West at 11%. Most of the others came in well under 10%.

We at The Austin Egalitarian may express strong opinions one one side or another of any particular issue, but we really only have one goal for this publication: to see the overall voting percentage start to push 50%. We'd rather see our point of view get overwhelmed by active voters than see the city sink in an abyss of crumbling sidewalks and injured people while the City Councillors debate developers over variances and exemptions.

(This posting is what we have to say today, and we will expand it after reviewing the City Council meeting again on Sunday. Remember the runoff! Vote for Galindo!)