Well, that’s it.  I am no longer proud to call myself an Austinite.  I am proud to say I am from Houston.  A great city.  a real city.  I have tried so hard to be proud of you. I put up with the skinny jeans; I put up with the jorts, I put up with the yoga pants, I put up with the ridiculous looking tank tops; I even put up with gladiator sandals…on dudes.  I put up with your ‘I’m too creative to be burdened with society’ crap.  I put up with seemingly half of you having no real jobs and not adding any real value to our economy.  I have managed a great amount of restraint in wanting to believe you were worthy of the accolades you have received in being named one of the greatest cities to live in the USA.  But no longer.

Yesterday’s November 6th election was proof that you really are no better than any other city in the US.  You truly do not care about your fellow neighbors; you don’t pay attention and you blindly follow the pack of lemmings before you.  You’re just not that damn smart after all.  I know, your too busy being clever with your blogs sipping $8 french press coffee to truly give a damn about this city you love to call home.  My prediction, in 10 years 50% of will have already moved on to the next ‘great city’ because you have certainly f***** this one up.

Let me tell what you did yesterday since you either don’t know (ignorance is absolutely no excuse) or, worse, knowingly don’t care.

Yesterday, you voted to spend hundreds, maybe thousands, of millions of dollars to revamp your entire system of government and likely did not even know it.  You voted to grow the council from 7 members to 11 members. Really?? Any idea what the personnel cost alone will be annually? Let’s use Council Member Riley’s office as an example: the Council member plus his three staff earn $202,966 annually (Texas Tribune lists salaries of all staff so this math is exact).  That means for 6 Council members we spend $1.218M annually.  Adding another four Council members adds another $811,864 annually.  Then lest add another 30% for benefits, pension, etc and you get an additional $1.156 million annually!  That’s

I am mad you spent this money.  It’s completely unnecessary.  Completely!  On top of that, you did a lot of other bad things as well including voting for a new civil service agreement that no longer allows the City to hire and fire at will, like every other business in Texas.  It has been estimated this new change will add additional millions of dollars to our city government.

What else could you do?  You also decided to vote for single member districts to be drawn, approved by the Court system and then by all of you.  What were you thinking?  Better representation?  Really?  How much will this legal battle cost us? $100 million?  $500 million?  More??  For the same reason you hate the Republicans at the State level, you just approved this form of redistricting at the City level!!

Now we get to divide the City in to 10 pieces and select the one person who gets to represent that one district.  Not the City of Austin, one district.  How could that end poorly??

All I heard from you was “no more taxes” yet you just spent $1.156 million annually in salaries, who knows how much in administrative costs plus the costs of changing our entire city charter to add ten single member districts.  What’s a $1 billion or so dollars over the next few years… Additionally, you passed every single bond initiative; every single one except one: Prop 15: Affordable Housing

And then the coup de grace: You let your true colors show.  I have already proven this election was not about money.  You just went on a spending spree that would make a drunken Sailor and his gold-digger wife from Tarrant County proud.  So what, then, caused you to vote to spend hundreds of millions of dollars (most needlessly) and then decide that  you can’t spend $78.3 million on affordable housing??

The truth is, Austin, you are nothing more than a bunch of NIIMBY’s.  It wasn’t about the money.  You passed Proposition 18 for arts and culture with flying colors yet our museum system in Austin is barely third world worthy.  Would it surprise you to know that $3.8 million was buried in there for the Women’s and Children’s Shelter?  It’s probably a good thing you didn’t know that or you would have voted that down too.

You are pathetic.  You’ll spend millions on anything, anything, as long as it does not mean building housing for those disgusting poor people in your backyard.  How dare they build housing for the poor, sick, dying, vulnerable and needy.  The homeless.  You’d rather do anything than stop people from dying on the streets.  Like they deserve, right?  One person dies on our streets every three days yet you don’t care.  So long as they don’t die in your backyard, housed or otherwise.

Wake up, Austin, you’re not so damn clever after all.  You’re just like everyone else.