We get a little sales tax, but not much, and with everything that happens to the west, I get the traffic and not the tax revenue. Both Bee Cave and West Lake Hills reap astounding amounts of sales tax for cities so small. Which means Rollingwood is providing a home for weekly wrecks and daily traffic jams as a public service to its neighbors farther west, and is now dependent on the kindness of the Texas Department of Transportation to fix the mess. All of us have an ultimate interest in how that road's designed. While Rollingwood isn't a very demographically diverse community, there's plenty of diversity of opinion on civic issues.
Voter turnout is high, and city councils can and do get turned out on their collective rumps.
This hands-on government eliminates much of the role played in Austin by neighborhood leaders and their associations, he says. Instead of having to go to boards and commissions, and having outside agents control the public agenda, the citizens here form informal coalitions among themselves that are constantly changing, depending on the issue. On some of the hot-button issues the city has been divided, and we've sidestepped getting into the middle of most of those frays. Easter egg hunts and summer barbecues, neighborhood-watch programs and beautification campaigns. This may seem like purely soft stuff until you remember that in other cities the taxpayers foot the bill for them.