Austin City Council Members Greg Casar, Jimmy Flannigan, Delia Garza, and Pio Renteria spent months trying to convince us that CodeNEXT was good for our community.
Boy, were they were wrong! City Hall wasted five years and nearly $9 million on CodeNEXT, only to withdraw it when grassroots leaders discovered that land developers had hijacked the plan in hopes of replacing longtime residents of Central and East Austin with wealthy condo-dwellers.
The pro-CodeNEXT crew is back—and now they’re doing everything in their power to stop you from voting for Proposition J. Prop J is the November ballot proposition that gives Austinites a voice on big changes to our land-development laws. Casar, Flannigan, Garza, and Renteria are saturating local airwaves with ads and videos falsely claiming that Prop J will hurt our city.
Don’t believe them.
Prop J simply calls for a short waiting period and a public vote before any big revision of Austin’s land-development laws (like CodeNEXT) can be implemented. Prop J applies only to comprehensive, once-in-a-generation rewrites of those laws (like CodeNEXT), so it will not impact specific development projects, incremental changes to the code, or individual programs like flood mitigation or affordable-housing initiatives.
Austin City Council Members Leslie Pool, Ora Houston, Alison Alter, and Kathie Tovo support Prop J because they believe you should have the right to vote on big changes to our local land-development laws. Those laws can have a huge impact on your home and neighborhood (not to mention Austin’s affordability and livability), and they want you to have a say on them. You can read more about Prop J here.
Casar, Flannigan, and the rest of the pro-CodeNEXT council members are trying to defeat Prop J for one simple reason: They are hoping to revive CodeNEXT sometime very soon. They know if Prop J passes, voters will have the power to shut down their plan on a later ballot.
CodeNEXT’s resurrection may be happening sooner than anyone anticipated. As of last week, the CodeNEXT supporters on Austin’s illegally constituted Planning Commission were trying to give land developers the freedom to build vertical mixed-use structures a quarter-mile away from virtually every major street in Austin.
Community Not Commodity will continue to monitor this situation and will provide the public with updates in the near future.
In the meantime, let’s prevent the “next” CodeNEXT. Let’s make sure you and your neighbors have the right to vote on big changes to our land-development laws. Let’s have our say and vote YES on PROP J!
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