Weather!, Election Results, an iPhone Tip and More!

*****Weather!*****

Get ready!  It looks like it will be nice until about noon on Monday - then the rain chances pick up, the wind starts blowing and the temperature goes down.  Supposed to be in the low thirty's Tuesday morning.  Protect those plants and pets!  There is a chance of frozen precipitation - so please be aware!  If it looks to be bad, I will post a special notice.

*****Election Results*****

I thought you might want to see the results of the Election on November 5th.  I was a Judge at the Lakeway Randalls (Thanks so much for the voting place!) and we processed 1021 ballots on election day.  The Activity Center processed 304 on election day.  In Travis County there are 804,465 registered voters, a total of 122,059 folks voted for 15.7%.

Final Results:

Prop 1 - (Municipal Judges)  Failed -  Doesn't allow Judges to serve in more than one jurisdiction.

Prop 2 - (Rural Water Projects)  Passed allowing the Water Development Board to issue up to $200M to develop water supply and sewer projects in economically depressed areas.

Prop 3 - Passed allowing the Texas Legislature to give a temporary property tax exemption in a governor-declared disaster area. The exemption would be 15%, 30%, 60%, or 100%, depending on the amount of property damage. 

Prop 4 - Prohibit income tax - Passed statewide, (Failed in Travis County) 

Prop 5 - Passed dedicating sales tax to parks.

Prop 6 - Passed - $3B for cancer research.

Prop 7 - Passed School funding distribution increase.

Prop 8 - Passed - Flood infrastructure fund.

Prop 9 - Passed exempting precious metal in storage (failed in Travis County).

Prop 10 - Passed allowing Law Enforcement Animal adoption.

Travis County Prop A - Passed Expo Ctr Hotel Tax - increase in hotel taxes for all hotels in Travis County (including Lakeway)

The Groundwater District passed with about 75% of the vote.  This was an interesting issue that was not advertised a lot.  The State requires this Groundwater District but does not fund it.  Lakeway is part of the district - the issue is Lakeway does not use groundwater, all ours comes from Lake Travis (surface water).  The claim is there are no taxes as part of the district. 

This election was very interesting!  New election machines and new methods.  Almost everyone like the new machines, you checked in and got a ballot, fed it into a voting / printing tablet, made your choices and then it printed the ballot.  You were given the opportunity to check your selection and then took the ballot over to a scanner - that is where your vote is counted.  It did a digital count and then the paper ballot was stored in a ballot bin in the machine.  There was a little confusion about the last step, some thought the vote was counted when they made their selections - we stopped several folks walking out with the ballot.  

The down side was, it was slower!  There were 1021 votes counted at the Lakeway Randalls on election day.  We had all nine machines set up and there was a waiting line about 80% of the day.  We had less than 16% of the registered voters vote.  They will need to speed it up somehow for the November 2020 election or the lines will be out the door.  

Thanks to all that voted and a special thanks to the folks working the polls with me!

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*****iPhone Tip*****

If you have updated your iPhone to IOS 13 you have the option to silence any calls that are not in your contact list on the phone.  The calls still have the option to leave you a message and will show up on the recent calls list.  If you don't have your friends in your contact list on your phone, this may not be for you.  I'm personally tired of all the spam calls.  To enable this function, go to the "Settings" icon, scroll down to "Phone".  Click on "Phone" and scroll down to "Silence Unknown Callers" and turn it on.  From that point forward, calls that are not in your "Contacts" will no longer ring on the phone.  You can turn it back off at the same place.  Try it out!

Church construction is picking up!  They've got a lot of dirt piled up behind the existing building - hope we don't get a BIG rain!  

If you've been hearing a lot of construction noise (those that live around the Church area) it's the machines moving around this dirt and digging out a hole for a retaining area.  Lots of rock there!  Of course, you can click on any of the pictures for a larger view.

That's all for today - more soon.  Please tell your friends about the Lakeway Update- it is a great way to find out what is going on in the City - we need to be aware of how things are changing!

Thanks again, if you would like to be added to the email list, send a note to lakeway@bain.us (Google shut that off too, but it's working now).

Joe Bain
lakeway@bain.us