Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, October 5, 2010,
Citizens Communication
>> citizens communication is next and this item gives residents an opportunity to address the court on any matter not on the agenda for up to three minutes. Morris priest has signed in, number 1. Speaker number two is ronnie reeferseed. Speaker number three is vicky carr.
>> morris priest speaking on my own behalf. I did want to say the enormous debt in our current budget that was proposed and vote odd by this court has quite a bit of unnecessary expense and increasing debt, which is in a result raising our taxes. We have a corporate welfare county government forcing taxes -- taxpayers to pay for abortions. We still have electronic voting issues not solved. We have broken promises from our commissioners. No jobs, massive tax incentives for businesses, foreclosures are up, higher and higher taxes, fees and toll fines, elected officials getting pay raises. We still have employee problems, communication issues and fairness issues, notice issues. Cell phones in our jails, county stealing property. We still have code enforcement issues. We have no information when we ask for information. We have some of the most horrible opponents to boards and commissions such as the health care district, campo, cap metro, too numerous boards to mention. The voters are constantly being undermind. Our zoning matters and traffic signs on roads that we need to have no truck through signs such as at txi, a failing infrastructure, foreign trade zone, environmental issues, conflicts of interests, basically a nonresponsive government. The first amendment violations, poor treatment of citizens and staff, an overbearing judge and court. Requests are denied in a disregard for solutions given by people that are far more -- with far more authority. We have people running for office, we have david butross who is running for precinct two. We have mike mcin a mara running for travis county judge. We've never had an opportunity to have people that we can vote for instead of against. These people have creative ideas such as having citizens communication at 5:30 every once in awhile to people at work can come down here and not only voice their concerns, but have their concerns addressed. We see time and time again people bring situations to this court and they're either not addressed or years go by. We have historical tax issues. We have tax issues with businesses not paying their fair share and time and time again we bet rebuffed. We have citizens communication pulled from the campo board. There were 10 people that were going to go speak at the campo board this coming monday and speak out against many of our transportation issues and our rising taxes, and financial matters and environmental concerns, but we have too much time spent on having hearings why we shouldn't have a road built that the voters vote understand, like southwest 45. And i wanted to say, commissioner huber on your comments last week, if it was such a great idea why was jeff mills the only one that support it had on the cam bow board and yourself and commissioner eckhardt relented.
>> thank you, mr. Priest. Mr. Reeferseed?
>> thank you, sir. I'm ronnie reeferseed and that's part of my own non-violent revolutionary weapon of mass communication. Provocative name pronunciation for me. Again, it's ronnie receiver seed. A topic to which i'm uniquely qualified to speak. Another thing that's going on is in gentlemen minute. The prime minister told the saudi owned newspaper that it's true that the u.s. Has delivered air strikes to yemeni men, women and children and the killings only ended last december because the, quote, yemen government ascertained it wasn't achieving result. That means we're just killing yet another group of innocent people. Now yemen is in there too and it includes the severe devoted hatred from -- this earns severe devoted hatred for generations of grieving, affected family of friends for each and every person in yemen and now of course iraq and afghanistan and on down the line. We execute wherever we go for what? And who gave us that right? And i wonder why are we so hated worldwide? Hmm, let's put on our thinking caps here. We now have for years brandished these death droners, yet another death dpiz mow that -- gizmo, high-tech death gizmo that costs out the wazoo, but still kills uncle bill half the time and always seemingly a nearby school bus or something. And again, the yemeni foreign minister told us that the high dollar terror weapon is just to punish the political decision made by the sovereign nation of yemen. He's probably a cia created stooge identity patsy just like obama -- i mean just like osama bin laden to advance their game plan. And speaking of which, they're so-called also u.s. Born so-called -- the probable cia created stooge identity patsy, so-called barack obama, iesotorro has now chosen to shuffle our troops to iraq and afghanistan and now yemen to kill people and we're supposed to win the hearts and minds against terrorism. Get it? Keep on drinking that fluoride, people. Yes, that's what we've got to do. And to learn more of course we all need to call to get to ron paul and ronpaul.org campaign for liberty.com. And moron paul can be found, articles about him and by him at american free press.net. And to subscribe it's 1888-696398. And that's just the starting to through the hog wash of the mainstream media, which as you know they don't ever bother to talk about decriminalizing marijuana. I wonder why.
>> [ buzzer sounds ] are they controlled by organized crime thugs.
>> thank you, mr. Reeferseed. Vicky carr is next. And would richard bow din and karen renik please come forward.
>> good morning, commissioners and judge. I'm vicky carr, director of vote rescue. This is week five that our hand count coalition has cm before the commissioners requesting a public hearing on the continued use of computerized voting systems that count our votes in secret requesting that the county provide paper ballots to people who request it on november 2nd. We believe that the clock has run out once again as we have experienced in the past and so the hand count coalition, which is this wonderful group of organizations of which vote rescue is only a part, we have decided not to wait any longer on this court or the county election office and we will be executing a parallel election with paper ballots at one or more presings on november 2nd. A parallel election is one at which voters will be invited to cast a duplicate ballot after they have voted officially in the polling place and come hand mark that ballot and cast it in a clear plastic, sealed box and then they will be invited to come back after 7:00 and watch the votes be counted by citizens in a public manner in the manner in which we described in protocol and other communications, and as mentioned before, we will -- we would certainly invite this court, if not if you're running for office and unable to participate in counting ballots, to at least come and observe the process and we'll be letting y'all know where we're going to be before the election begins. The hand count coalition is growing by the week. I'd like to mention briefly who our current and new members are. We have the gray panthers of austin, lulac, district312, the travis county green party, vote rescue, texans for accountable government, austinites lobbying for municipal accountability, fluoride-free austin and just this week our three newest coalition members include capital cruisers, progressive hispanic democrats and instruments for peace. And this fine gentlemen here will be speaking on their behalf in a moment. The will of the people is to restore transparent elections into the control of citizens and away from corporations. It has never belonged in the hands of corporations, it's always belonged in the hands of the citizens. That is what we intend to begin doing on november second.
>> thank you. Mr. Bowden.
>> thank you. I'm richard bowden. I'm a long time musician in austin, violin player. I played with lots and lots of people here. I have lots of connections here. And i find that my -- the musician friends that i am closest too are very community minded and very civic minded people, and so we do a lot of events in support of causes that we think need more support, causes that aren't getting enough media attention. So i've known vicky and the hand count coalition people karen for a long time. And they're really smart women and they work really hard and they have a point here. And the point is and what she's talking about corporations having control of our elections, i mean, you go no, they really don't. Well, actually, these machines are corporate produced and they have priority software. We can't look at the software. Really they do have control of our electrics. We're having to trust them. So that doesn't make sense to any of my friends. This doesn't make sense. How can we trust elections where we can't really clearly see the votes. I mean, especially in these times. We need more security in our elections, not less. So this hand count, this parallel election they're doing, i'll be supporting that and will be raising as much dust as we can, hoopla with music and whatever to get media there and show what a better way to do things this is. And actually, it's more fun. People will feel more involved in their elections and i want to see things start rolling back the other direction. Where people feel more involved in their elections. They can actually see their vote being counted. And not feel that they're all separate from their elections in other government.
>> i'm using all my connections to spread this important information. I'm in this with them and thank you so much for letting us make our point here.
>> thank you, mr. Bowden. Ms. Renek.
>> good morning, judge and commissioners. My name is karen, i'm the founder and co-director with vicky carr of vote rescue. As vicky said this our fifth week in a row and we have made a point of bringing our new friends and our coalition with us each week and am real pleased to have richard with us today. And i think i'm just going to do a little cleanup on some previous one way conversations that we've -- that we've been having with you. One of the things i propsed to do is read a quote from ronnie dugger. His son gary is with the gray panthers, who is one of our coalition members. Gary's father, ronnie dugger, really sounded the whistle on electronic voting as early as 1988. And this -- i was going to read this before. It's a little ending quote to an article that he actually wrote in 2000 when the nation was really just torn apart by the problems that were being seen in florida. So here's the final paragraph to this article. He says i'm wondering myself about vote counting. What the heck is the hurry? The media demand instant results, but that has nothing to do with good government. The last line of the official back to the wall defense of computerized vote counting is trust us. But in vote counting we should trust no one. That is why we watched each other counting the votes in the old days. Computerized vote counting is simply an inappropriate use of technology and democracy. I suggest that people throw out the vote o'matics and the dre's and go back to counting their own paper ballots. Let's have a revolt in some of the precincts. Tell the policy litions and the -- politicians and the election companies that we're going to vote our ballots together. We'll bring in coffee and donuts and pizza and fiddle players and have a party as if we can still enjoy democracy with our neighbors. Will they put us in jail for counting our own ballots? Let's find out. I think that sums up what we are moving forward with now. I'm not sure if we will continue our coming to the court because we've got some important things to plan. You may see us, you may not, but we have the pilot hand count project to get all the details worked out and we're very excited about that. And we're sad that the fact that the county is not going to be assisting us on this, but we're not going to wait. And as the title of our media advisory said today, it says that the hand count coalition leaves travis county officials in the dust by taking pilot hand counted into our own hands on november 2nd. In the remaining few minutes or minute that i have, i wanted to clear up something about the department of justice, a comment that i made last week. And i think it may have been misinterpreted by the judge.
>> [ buzzer sounds ] i guess i'll be back next week to clarify that. Thank you very much.
>> by the way, the study group that you're on meets on the 13th, which is wednesday of next week.
>> it is.
>> i understand that group will make recommendations to us on this very issue. Thank y'all for coming.
>> 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:
Tuesday, October 5, 2010 2:27 PM
