AUSTIN (Talk1370.com) -- Calling it a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity", Austin City Council members on Thursday voted to approve a spending framework that would allocate more than $100 million towards the city's homelessness crisis.
Council gave its approval to the framework detailing how the city will spend $263.5 million over two years - most of which comes in the form of relief funds from the Biden administration's American Rescue Plan, with some additional local funding.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our community to join forces and get our neighbors off the streets," said Austin Mayor Steve Adler, in a statement following Thursday's vote. "While the American Rescue Plan provides unprecedented federal funding, we still need support from other public entities, businesses, and our philanthropic partners to achieve our community goal of housing 3,000 people in 3 years.”
Thursday's vote came in the last regularly scheduled City Council meeting before a six-week summer break. The next regularly scheduled meeting is set for July 29.
All of this is happening as the city works to re-implement a ban on public camping, after 58% of voters approved Proposition B on May 1. The second phase of City Manager Spencer Cronk's plan goes into effect on Sunday, with police officers beginning to issue written warnings to those who are violating the ordinance.
During the summer recess, the third phase of Cronk's plan will begin on July 11 - when police officers can begin arresting anyone still camping in an area that is deemed to be dangerous, including places that are at a high risk of fire, flooding, or pedestrian or vehicle accidents. And after council members return from their break on July 29, they'll have less than two weeks before the fourth and final phase of the plan is set to begin on August 8.
Little progress has been made on determining sites for potential sanctioned encampments, after a preliminary list of 45 sites released on May 18 was cut down to only two viable sites by city staff on June 1.
That lack of progress has some critics calling for council members to cancel the summer break. Matt Mackowiak and Cleo Petricek, co-founders of Save Austin Now, the group that spearheaded putting Proposition B on the ballot, called the move "unconscionable." “It is now clear that Mayor Steve Adler and Council Member Greg Casar have learned nothing," Mackowiak and Petricek said in a statement. "Their 60-day enforcement plan, released by the City Manager, appears to be a delay tactic rather than a good faith effort to buy time to generate a consensus plan for identifying and creating safe and regulated encampments where the homeless can go while housing is identified and constructed."