Trick question; the state is violenceWho says Texas is all hat and no cattle? We practice conservative ideals while everyone else just preaches it. This is great. Finally I can get away from the state which is truly holding me down from parking my van wherever I want and growing dope. In Texas, we put the narco in anarcho-capitalism.
https://www.texasobserver.org/the-rise- ... -in-texas/
The abandoned cop cars sat in Trina Reyes’ yard for eight months. She wanted them gone, but there were no police to come get them. Last September, the police department in Von Ormy — a town of 1,300 people just southwest of San Antonio — lost its accreditation after it failed to meet basic standards. Reyes was mayor at the time, so the three patrol cars, as well as the squad’s police radios and its computers, ended up at her home. It was just another low point in a two-year saga that she now counts as one of the most difficult experiences of her life.
“This is one of the worst things I’ve ever done,” she said of being mayor. “I’ve never dealt with such angry people. I’m washing my hands of everything. … I’m going to travel. I’m going as far away from Von Ormy as I can.”
Wait so you mean to tell me that if we eliminate big government Mexicans will self deport? Wtf? I hate walls now.
In 2006, fearing annexation by rapidly encroaching San Antonio, some in Von Ormy proposed incorporating as a town. But in government-averse rural Texas, incorporation can be a hard sell. Unincorporated areas are governed mainly by counties, which have few rules about what you can do on private property and tend to only lightly tax. There’s no going back from what municipal government brings: taxes, ordinances, elections and tedious city council meetings. Still, the fear of being absorbed by San Antonio — with its big-city taxes and regulations — was too much for most Von Ormians.
Enter Art Martinez de Vara. At the time, Martinez de Vara was an ambitious third-year law student at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, a local boy with a penchant for Texas history and right-wing politics.
Martinez de Vara suggested a compromise of sorts. Von Ormy could become a “liberty city” — a stripped-down, low-tax, low-government version of municipal government that’s currently en vogue among the tea party in Texas.
Initially, the city would impose property and sales taxes, but the property tax would ratchet down to zero over time. The business-friendly environment would draw new economic activity to Von Ormy, and eventually the town would cruise along on sales taxes alone.
There would be no charge for building permits, which Martinez de Vara said would be hand-delivered by city staff. The nanny state would be kept at bay, too. Want to shoot off fireworks? Blast away. Want to smoke in a bar? Light up. Teens wandering around at night? No curfew, no problem.
Today, there is no city animal control program and stray dogs roam the streets. The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office patrols the town instead of city police, and City Hall resides in a mobile home with one full-time staffer — though that’s a step up from the dive bar where City Council met until the owner bounced them out. If you go to the city’s website, you’ll be informed that it’s still under construction.
But two things happened around this time: First, the bottom fell out of the oil economy. With oil prices in free-fall in 2014 and 2015, the drilling rigs in the Eagle Ford Shale started packing up, as did many of the workers, trucks and ancillary oil field services.
Second, some were beginning to sour on the liberty city model. On the five-member City Council, three council members — Jacqueline Goede, Verna Hernandez and Carmina Aguilar — had banded together in a bloc that was increasingly at odds with Martinez de Vara and the two other council members, one of whom was Sally Martinez. The most explosive issue was property taxes. The three women thought it was foolish to eliminate property taxes altogether. Sales taxes rise and fall with the economy, and few cities rely on them alone.
She had all but stopped speaking to the two commissioners — longtime City Council member Sally Martinez and Alex Quintanilla, another stalwart in the city government. Reyes simply stopped showing up for council meetings in early 2017, accusing Martinez and Quintanilla of ganging up on her.
“The evidence room had very little to no control measures,” he told me in an April interview. “It was literally an 18-wheel trailer that was unsecured. There was no cataloging. I found unmarked boxes filled with everything from weapons to narcotics … and anybody could walk in, and they did. A lot of the City Council members would just walk in and want to see a file or just grab things.” (Greg Reyes did not respond to numerous requests for comment.)
Much more at link. Good readJake Galvan, a retired mechanic, says that the police department was an embarrassment to the town and the source of rumors about misconduct and other illegal behavior.
“They didn’t hire anybody that’s a veteran,” he said. “They just hired a bunch of rookies with no experience.”
In Galvan’s view, the liberty city experiment has gone all wrong.
“This ain’t going well at all,” he said. “We’ve got a bunch of empty buildings, a lot of [federal] grant money spent, and for what? We have a fire station that nobody wants to operate and a police station with no police. Where did all that money go?”
