Austin s elite funded $1 9M campaign to reinstate homeless camping ban statesman.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from statesman.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Group aiming to bring back Austin s homeless camping ban raises $437,000
Thursday marked 30 days before Austin s municipal election, meaning the political action committees that are raising funds for and against causes faced a deadline to submit financial disclosure reports.
Not surprisingly, much of the action was driven by the ballot proposition on the city s homeless camping ordinance.
Save Austin Now, the PAC whose leaders are seeking to reinstate the camping ban that the Austin City Council repealed two years ago, reported raising $437,000 through March 22. The report showed the PAC spent 319,000.
A financial report for the PAC in opposition to the ban, Homes Not Handcuffs, showed $23,000 in contributions and $423 in expenditures. The contributions, most of them small, came from roughly 350 donors.
1) Jan. 13: Red Guards Ambush Heidi Sloan The Democratic Socialists of America organizer and candidate for Congress in the TX-25 Democratic primary was waylaid and threatened by militants associated with the ostensibly defunct Maoist group Red Guards Austin, highlighting stress fractures at the leftmost edge of Austin politics even as the influence of DSA-aligned progressives surged in an increasingly deep-blue Travis County. Sloan would lose her race to the also very progressive Julie Oliver, who set up a rematch with GOP incumbent Roger Williams.
2) Feb. 23: Bernie Sanders Rolls Through Town As Texas found itself a pivotal state in the 2020 presidential primary, candidates with Austin connections, including (one-time UT prof) Elizabeth Warren and (friend of Mayor Adler) Pete Buttigieg, made late swings through town, but none drew a bigger crowd than Sanders, who was widely expected to pick up most of the locally awarded delegates and who, at this point, was the national front-runn