| Ironically the Governor of Texas hates Austin because he (knowingly, he was AG at the time) chopped down a row of Austins very coveted pecan/cedar/heritage trees which is a huge deal to Austinites who love and value the ecosystem of their city, and was sued. And he has been trying to get the ordinance repealed for years. https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2017/06/13/gov-greg-abb... Austin also has to protect its Aquafier, which has been under constant attack for decades. https://www.texastribune.org/2013/11/10/drought-abbott-keeps... Austin has been under attack by out-of-city politicians for its entire existence. It goes back to the 1800s. Anything Austin does, the State tries to negate. > In January 2015, a few weeks before taking office as governor and four months before selling his Central Austin home, Abbott blasted tree ordinances as part of the “patchwork quilt” of local bans hurting the state. > “Texas is being Californianized and you may not even be noticing it,” Abbott told a 2015 conference hosted by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential think tank. “It’s being done at the city level with bag bans, fracking bans, tree-cutting bans. We’re forming a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.” |