Travis County Commissioners Court
August 19, 2008
Citizens Communication
Of the years, whri know what the budget looks like here in this catastrophic situation at the city. But mhmreeds more funding and they're doing a good job. Travis County, dave evans and the rest of the people. Judge and Commissioners, I thank you very much. And as mr. Castro said, please watch out for the kids in the school crossings, good bless you and have a good day.
>> ms. Samez is next and she will be followed by vicky carp.
>>
>> [inaudible - no mic]. Public or community input regarding the north central Austin. Taxation without accountability or representation. Tchd chose this site without any community input as far as we know today, no one from the city human services, local area hospitals or health care providers, local social agencies, charitable organizations, faith-based organizations, neighborhood associations, community groups, citizens or patients were ever consulted, interviewed, asked, informed or included in any way in the formation of the site selection criteria. Review of potential sites or any part of the decision-making process. There is no accountability or oversight of this process or entity. Our county Commissioners elected by this community should intercede on our behalf to review the process and assure adequate community occurs. As a taxing entity, tchd should be governed with checks and balances to ensure fiscal responsibility of how our tax dollars are spent. We would like public dialogue on how to achieve accountability with tchd. The proposed legislation does not best serve its clients. By restarting the site selection process, the community and stakeholders' input, the best site for a new health center can be found. The community should also have a voice in the fate of the existing clinic in northeast Austin. There is no public confidence in the data presented by the tcdh for the proposed site. New data is required for a comprehensive analysis to determine the best location for a new central location and to determine the impacts of closing the existing clinics and confirm this grave action. The neighborhood associations in this area opposed to changing the zoning of this site. We feel the current zoning is appropriate and will maintain the character of our neighborhood.
>> thank you, ms. Samez. Ms. Cart is next and she will be followed by david calboski.
>> I wanted to know if I could reverse order with my colleague here. Noim. Letmer go before me.
>> that's fine with me. So this is Karen renick.
>> yes, it is.
>> good morning.
>> morning.
>> nice to see you all again. Thank you for having this time. My name again is Karen renick. I'm the founder of vote rescue. We are a nonpartisan citizens group located near in Austin. We're very concerned about the accuracy of our elections, particularly the way they are being secretly counted with the electronic voting machines. We are also part of a statewide coalition called texans for real elections. It's been may since we have been here before you during the citizens communication. We want to come back just to be sure that you know we are still here. We have been very active in the meantime, both working on the legislative front at the state level and we have also been talking with members of the Commissioners court. I wanted to just brief you on what we've done in -- I think it was in mid may we did meet with judge Biscoe. He gave us a generous amount of time. We appreciate and we were able to express our concerns. Following up in June, June 25th was the date for our interim hearing that the elections committee in the house, the Texas state house, held specifically about voting technology, electronic voting technology. We were able to fly in four experts from around the country to testify at that hearing. We were actually asked by the committee chair to bring in our experts because they understand that we understand -- that we understand this issue very clearly and have been following this for quite some time. Our experts did testify and they -- too lengthy to obviously fill you in right now, but we do have record recordings of that testimony that we want to share with you and I know judge Biscoe had interest in attending. We will provide you with with that. The bottom line is all of our experts did clearly state that the source code and the programming that run these machines is incredibly easy to rig before it is even used by the counties. And anything that you can think up a programmer deliver. We have been talking with Commissioner dawr. Immediately the day after the hearing we met with dana debeauvoir and some of her staff. Commissioner Daugherty attended. We are very grateful to that. And we are right now at a point where we would like to have a sit-down meeting with our experts, perhaps not the exactly the same people we flew in --
>> [ buzzer sounds ] -- but with the experts that dana relies on so that we can come to a head with with this issue. Thank you very much.
>> thank you.
>>
>> [inaudible - no mic].
>> either way is fine with me.
>> i'm vicky carp with vote rescue and I have met most of you. Thank you for your time today. To follow up on Karen's statement, I just wanted read you a statement from another computer expert that -- that came to our attention the other regarding electronic voting systems. This gentleman's name is peter newman. He is with sri's computer science lab. He has doctor rats from harvard, 10 years at bell labs. He's worked with mit and honeywell. He's been an expert witness at the senate and legislature. He's got a resume that's quite impressive here. I wanted to read his statement here about electronic voting system. He says even if you can look at the source code you can't guarantee that there's not a trojan horse imbedded somewhere in the code. Any programmer can hack be the innorthward of a system. All this stuff is trivial to break for the most part. And most computer systems out there it is child's play. Given the fact that the underlying systems are so penetratable, it is relatively easy to fudge data, for example, to start out with 3,000 votes for one guy and zero for the other before the counting even starts. Even though the counter shows zero. Essentially a trojan horse in the coding. I can do it in the operating system, I can do it in the application program. This more or less validates the information of the experts that we brought in to the house committee on elections, so many experts are saying the same -- coming to the same conclusions. And so I just wanted to read this to you this morning to make a point that I know that y'all rely upon the county to give you information about the integrity of the systems we're using here. And I think you all are aware that there was a lawsuit filed with very serious allegations about hart. We met with judge Biscoe. We helped send some to dana's office and we've been in communication with her about that. Right now where that stands is she has send those questions up to the secretary of state because at the state level there's an examiner's board that does certification, and she relies upon them. For her information. And she hasn't heard back yet. So we have this avalanche of data that indicates that these machines are not safe. I understand that item 25 today on your agenda is to request an allocation for yet more funds that have to do with the use of these machines in November. So we wanted to come here today, make the statement and some summary about where we are with this right now and just say we would like you to consider postponing, putting on hold any further expenditures that are related to these machines and to remind you that it's within your authority from our understanding to say, you know what, there's enough reasonable doubt here on the use of these machines and let's look at more information before we continue to fund them.
>> [ buzzer sounds ] and realize that we can go back to hand counted paper ballots in November. There's still time to do that. Thank you.
>> thank you, ms. Carp.
>> good morning, county Commissioners and judge Biscoe. My name is david and I wanted to share with you this morning a very successful event that we had this past weekend. It's not too often that we're able to come out and really talk about a homerun that we hit here in Austin. So I wanted to just share that with you today. The gray panthers of Austin, which i'm on the board of, have hosted an event right here at the afl/cio on Sunday, August 17th from 1:30 to 4:30 called rehabilitation, not incarceration. We didn't know what to expect. We gave out about a thousand of these fliers all over the neighborhoods and different meetings throughout the last month or so. We were very surprised to have over 150 people attend this event on a Sunday afternoon. So this clearly showed us there's a strong appear site at least from the community, and I know Travis County is a leader in the state of Texas in understanding the power of rehabilitation as opposed to locking individuals up that are typically non-violent drug and alcohol offenders. So you guys, we know you get it, but I want to reinforce how powerful this message is right now in the community. Unfortunately there is a perception out there that if you support some of these programs that you're weak on crime. I want to say right here on record that anyone that is supporting these programs is strong on crime. And I want to change that perception little by. I think along with the 150 people that joined us on Sunday, we had -- we had a phenomenal diversity of individuals there. I, agewise, ethnically. Also had state representative donna howard was there who represents Travis County district 48 in the state house. We had Travis County sheriff greg hamilton, Travis County constable, we had gary cobb, Travis County assistant da. Judge charlie baird was one of our panelists who represent the 229th district court of Texas. Judge nancy o'hen gar 10. So it was a homerun. Just to give you some facts be and figures the. It was in Monday's paper as well with in the statesman, they covered it. This is coming from district judge charlie baird. He said about two-thirds of the offenders on his docket, and this is straight out of the "austin american-statesman" from Monday, August 18th, 2008. Two-thirds of offenders out of his docket are there because of alcohol and drug related crime. He said too many of them are being sent to prison creating an unreasonable burden on our taxpayers. It's literally a revolving door. It's a vicious cycle of individuals that are just going in and out constantly. I want to reinforce the fact that we're wasting a ton of money, billions of dollars per year. We're spending over $40 million a year, $43.4 million per year just on the Travis County jail alone. You add five million dollars --
>> [ buzzer sounds ] so anyway so anyway just wanted to let you guys know we had a fan stas event and thank you for your interest in this.
>> thank you. Anybody be else for citizens communication, whether you signed in or not?
>> hi, Travis County. Judge Sam Biscoe, Commissioners Margaret Gomez, Commissioner Gerald Daugherty, Commissioner sawyer ra eckhardt and Commissioner Ron Davis from precinct 1. Our county bus system has been decimated by the two-tier system. --
>> state your name for us, please.
>> sure. As everyone well knows, i'm jennifer gale. Candidate for Austin city council, five-time candidate for mayor. Of our city here in the center of Travis County. Our county bus system has decimated by the two tier system. That's still going to be in place with the new contract the new contract is going to be voted on by the bus operators tomorrow. Only 91 employees voted last time. It's election day for our bus operators and our workers and mechanics by 7:00 p.m. Tomorrow, August 20th. They have now hired more union busters at capital metropolitan transportation authority. This can only be because of the light rail larceny. They're stealing money from the public through higher fees. They're charging us -- it goes from $10 to $18 for a bus pass. But they don't provide a booklet so you know where you're going. So you're sitting at a bus stop hoping the bus is going to come. They stop the buses Sunday night 8:30, 9:30. So you could wait for hours and not have a bus come by. So they're stealing money through our time. This new light rail doesn't even come up the downtown area. It goes through east Austin that has been destroyed through gentrification. Obesity is destroying our bus operators. And now they're looking for anything to get rid of our bus operators at cap metro. Our military veterans aren't getting benefits because of properly maintained records. And by shuffling them in and out of the theater and you see we're still losing children, our in iraq. Insurance is insane for our bus operators that are already sick. They have to send $600 for their family before they can even get benefits and then have to pay 10 percent and all research on diagnostic. I want a five-year contract, three-year contract and then the one-year contract last time, there's no back pay for our bus operators, no cost of living. After suffering for 14 months without a contract, it's time for our bus operators to go on strike to tell that we've had enough.
>> [ buzzer sounds ] why are we not using paper ballots? I'll be very succinct. Election results are so easily manipulated. Has anyone heard of a machine not being able to be manipulated? Has anyone? On the Commissioners court. It's time to enjoy our labor day, to help our children, our students through big brothers and big sisters and scouting. And for everyone to prepare for the upcoming 2012 olympics in london. Thank you.
>> thank you. We will need you to complete one of these forms for us, if you would. If there's one left over there. The consent items are next.
>> judge, before we go to that, if you don't mind. You know for those folks who may not be aware, we did lose -- this weekend we lost dr. May marian. Those of you who didn't know her, she was a giant of a person in this community. All over Austin and Travis County. And we're going to sorely miss her. And I would just like to say to this -- if we would offer a moment of silence for her family members with a moment of silence for may marian and her family.
>> > thank you.
>> thank you.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Wednesday, August 20, 2008 8:37 AM