Tagged: public safety

Update: Travis County Parks reversed its decision to change boating rules at Hippie Hollow on Lake Travis at a public meeting last night.

In fact, after about a week of tension between Travis County Parks and people who frequent Hippie Hollow, the meeting ended with laughter and applause.

“This is a great example of a grass roots movement. Where people are trying to reach out the administrators who work in their government and the guys come to the table and listen to what the folks have to say,” Friends of the Hollow member Randall Huntsinger said.

There’s an ongoing dispute in and around Pflugerville about how much fire and emergency services protection the area wants, and how much it’s willing to pay. The firefighters local wants to meet a number of national standards for service levels.

“We’re just trying to meet those standards and possibly exceed them,” said firefighters association spokesman Trevor Stokes. “We’re not doing that currently.”

It’s the second day of the year and Austin already has two traffic fatalities.

An Austin man and his 13 year-old son died in a motorcycle crash yesterday. Neither was wearing a helmet even though Texas law requires anyone under 21 to wear a helmet.

People over 21 have to maintain a certain level of health insurance or they have to have taken a motorcycle safety course to ride without a helmet legally. Before 1997, all motorcycle riders had to wear helmets.

Austin's Public Safety Commission will stay busy this evening discussing a medley of public safety topics:

• The commission will get an overview of homeless and transient demographics today. Austin police have recently been cracking down on crimes often committed by the homeless.
• The commission is also looking staffing and other issues at Austin-Travis County EMS. The department recently suffered a black eye when an audit found money-handling processes were so bad that EMS was at risk of having money stolen and not even realizing it.
  

The Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services department is warning drivers to be on high alert for deer in the road during November and December.

These two months are what’s known as the “rut,” or deer mating season. During this time, deer can be inattentive to their surroundings and are more likely to dart out into the road and into the path of an oncoming car.

According to data released by the City of Austin and APD, there were 50 deer-involved collisions in 2011.  There have been 11 so far this year. Nationwide, research has found that approximately 200 people a year in the United States die in deer-related car accidents. Eighteen percent of all accidents involving deer occur during November. December is the third most common month for accidents involving deer.