Austin downtown court relocation plans draw mounting criticism

Resistance appears to be growing to a slate of resolutions on the agenda for Thursday’s City Council meeting that would lead to the permanent relocation of the Downtown Austin Community Court to a circa-1800s municipal building on West Eighth Street. The resolutions would follow action taken in February on the proposed move, allocating $27 million to renovate the three-story building and selecting the design-build method as the framework to begin seeking bids for the work. One of the loudest voices against the move to the West Eighth location has been the Downtown Austin Alliance. In recent weeks, the organization has proposed using mobile courthouses to house the court, which has temporarily operated out of One Texas Center since losing its longtime lease on East Sixth Street due to redevelopment plans for the site.

The community court was created in 1999 to address class C misdemeanor offenses not requiring imprisonment, while also providing case management and housing-focused services for those experiencing homelessness. The nature of the court’s clientele makes a downtown location key, and the passage of Proposition B in 2021, which reinstated many penalties related to homelessness, has made the court’s role more critical than ever. In a recent post for Austin Towers, Bill Brice, a DAA vice president, wrote that residents and businesses that oppose the relocation to West Eighth Street argue “the location is neither appropriate to address the complex and profound needs of the court’s target population nor proximal to treatment and service providers that serve the court’s clients,” while also calling into question the cost to renovate the structure. The prospect of roughly three dozen daily visits by homeless or distressed clients in the area adjacent to prominent businesses and high-dollar residential projects such as the Brown Building Lofts has drawn resistance from residents. Some of that criticism also comes because of the city’s decision in May 2020 to designate the entire West Eighth site as being eventually converted to use for creative and nonprofit space.