Austin Mayor Steve Adler sent his police chief a long and anxious email from his personal email account Oct. 6, shortly after Manley suggested reinstating a ban on public camping and aggressive panhandling.
The City Council in June amended or repealed laws relating to public camping, sitting or lying down in public places, and aggressive panhandling.
Proponents said the changes ‘decriminalized’ homelessness and allowed the homeless to live with greater dignity and security. But Chief Brian Manley was cool to the changes and ended up calling for reinstatement of the old ordinances.
He said at a press conference Oct. 3, “I have had conversations with the mayor, and although I know it doesn’t necessarily meet the political will of our mayor and council right now, as the police chief charged with maintaining public safety I have suggested that we put the old ordinances back in place while we work through a final solution.”
He added, “I have suggested that we make all sidewalks in the downtown area a place where camping and obstructing is prohibited. So we’ve made these recommendations knowing that they did not necessarily meet the direction that the mayor and council were going.”
Adler then fired off a missive to Manley on the morning of Sunday, Oct. 6, three days after the chief’s press conference. “Sometime, soon I hope, I’d like to discuss with you your press conference of last week because I have a lot of concerns about it,” he wrote, according to a copy of the email obtained by public information request.
The mayor went on to urge Manley to get behind him on messaging, though he did not ask him to retract his position on the old ordinances. He proposed that they try to shift the public’s focus away from the ordinances themselves to public housing instead. Public housing, he argued, would be the best way to ensure public safety in the long term.
In a bold and underlined paragraph, Adler wrote, “Can you and I agree that the most important thing we could do to ensure public safety is to get people experiencing homelessness off our streets… and into housing with services (even more than returning to the old ordinances)”?
The mayor concluded by dangling an offer to “tweak” the ordinances, if the two could first unite on messaging: “If there’s common ground here, then there may be a couple of tweaks to the ordinances that might get us all on the same page.”
It’s not clear how Adler and Manley continued the conversation. However, less than two weeks later the city council caved to outside pressures to roll back the June changes, restoring a ban on tent camps on sidewalks but allowing people to sit or lie down on sidewalks.
Chief Manley had not been alone in pressing for such a change. Several city council members wanted to scale back the June changes, and Governor Greg Abbott on Oct. 3 threatened to clear homeless camps using state law enforcement. Manley, asked about this by a journalist, appeared to respond positively to the initiative of the governor.
Manley also publicly pushed back against a suggestion by the mayor that police carry a tape measure or measuring string for purposes of checking whether a homeless encampment obstructed a sidewalk.
He further threatened to cite persons for “illegal dumping” if they provided furniture to persons at homeless encampments, saying, “Although you may think you are helping someone who is homeless by providing them with a mattress or some kind of furniture, it is illegal dumping for you to stop and drop those items off on the side of the road.”
