Covington Middle School RN Sandra Stehling teaches a school staff member how to use the EpiPen.

Austin Independent School District parents received news at the beginning of the school year that while the number of health assistants would be almost doubled, the number of registered nurses would be reduced in elementary schools. Parent testimony to school board members at the Aug. 28 meeting reflected their shock, anger and sense of betrayal. It also revealed a misconception of just who was staffing the “nurse’s room” at the schools.

But first, a little history. In the summer of 1995, new AISD Superintendent Jim Fox did what he had done in Georgia: he threw all registered nurses out of the schools. Too expensive, he said. All hell broke loose. School staff didn’t feel comfortable caring for sick or injured children. Pediatricians were up in arms that without an RN to assess problems, they would be inundated with needless calls to their offices from school staff. Parents were beside themselves.

The community came to the rescue. The Seton health system created a large stakeholder task force, on which I served, and a partnership was born between the former Children’s Hospital of Austin and AISD to provide school health services, the first such hospital/school district partnership in the country.

The model introduced student health assistants trained by school nurses. An RN and assistant were assigned to each of the schools, but with limited resources, they shared schools. Parents, teachers and school staff were greatly relieved and liked the new program.

Fast-forward 22 years to now. With a student population of almost 87,000, Seton made changes to the program.

A non-controversial change was the addition of virtual care technology, which promises to greatly increase efficiency and quality. Cameras installed on health-room computers in each of the district’s 130 schools allow assistants to instantly connect virtually with the nurse when needed and on some campuses with the child’s pediatrician’s office. Before, RNs in shared schools had to rely solely on verbal descriptions via telephone and if needed, drive through this dreadfully congested town to see the child.

The reduction of nurses, in whom parents place their full trust, is what caused the explosive reaction from parents. And it didn’t help that a public hearing wasn’t held before the changes were announced, which Seton admits was a mistake.

Seton’s Kristi Henderson, an architect of the school health program and also a nurse, was taken aback by the community’s reaction and set about to make it right. She visited schools and met with nurses, teachers, principals and parents. One thing she learned is that many parents never realized that health assistants were on staff. Just as in hospitals, assistants help RNs by performing lower-level tasks.

In response to the input she received, rather than reducing nurses, Seton is hiring 33 registered nurses. With those numbers, all of AISD’s large (greater than 700 students) schools will have an RN in the health room all day for the first time. That’s many more nurses than the program has ever had and a 33-percent increase from last year.

All school districts across the country have many students with chronic health conditions, many life-threatening, which require complex and frequent intervention. RNs write individualized protocols for each student with a condition that may become emergent, conditions such as severe food allergy, diabetes, asthma and epilepsy. RNs case-manage medically fragile students. RNs meet with parents and school staff. RNs conduct health teaching in the classrooms. RNs provide trainings for health assistants, teachers and other school staff to learn procedures such as gastrostomy feedings, urinary catheterizations, giving epinephrine and insulin and much, much more.

Parents put their trust in school nurses to be there for their children, many with special needs. Maybe some day every public-school campus will have the security of a trusted, expert registered nurse on site all day. But not today.

Frank wrote about her friends being rounded up, placed in cattle cars and taken to camps to be gassed. Now, for the first time since reading her book, I’m feeling the same quickened heartbeat, horror and fear, but this time for our Latin American immigrants. Thanks to our new president, these “bad hombres,” “bad dudes” are being rounded up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arrested and deported to countries they may not know, countries with gangs and extreme poverty.

Feb. 11, 2017 raid

And what a sloppy job ICE is doing. Supposedly, only the most dangerous, violent criminals are targets. Yet in the February raid, according to ICE data 55 percent of the 51 people arrested from the Austin area were non-criminals, and only two had convictions of a violent crime: assault. The majority were merely suspected of being here illegally.

I know these people. Having earned a Spanish degree before becoming a nurse, my charge nurses knew that my favorite families were the monolingual Spanish speakers, so for more than 30 years I got to care for their babies whenever possible.

I loved these recently immigrated families. They were so uncomplicated, so grateful for everything we did for them. They were practicing Catholics with small altars in their homes decorated with a candle, flowers and images of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. They did not smoke or drink. They were relatively uneducated and poor, but many of them rich in ways we can only imagine. They loved their babies as much as any other family in neonatal intensive care.

Merida from El Salvador has been a close friend for 25 years. Thirty years ago, she left her three young children with her parents to come to this country to earn money to send back home. She told me of the harrowing ordeal of traversing some 1,200 miles to Texas with a small group of hopeful immigrants led by the “coyote.” She talked about hunger, bad weather and hiding from police and gangs.

Only a desperate person would leave their children and suffer that kind of hardship. They come from places with no opportunity to the land of opportunity to toil and live like paupers so they can send money home. According to the World Bank, in 2015 they sent $67 billion home to lift their families out of poverty.

They pick our fruits and vegetables, clean our toilets, work in hot restaurant kitchens, lay our tile, plant our landscaping, build our buildings. The vast majority of the construction workers I see downtown are immigrants. They work hard. They are dependable and loyal. Ask any employer.

For all the bluster spewing forth from our president, you’d think they were taking our jobs. They are not. They are doing work that Americans don’t want.

And don’t talk to me about their coming here to use our services. The ones I know are too fearful to sign up for Medicaid. When Merida’s body gives out, she will return to El Salvador to enjoy her golden years with her children and grandchildren, who she knows only by telephone. She will not be taking social security nor Medicare.

During hard times in Anne Frank’s post-World War I Germany, the Jews were scapegoated — and murdered. Now, with manufacturing job loss due to automation and globalization, immigrants in our country are being scapegoated — rounded up and deported. Does history really have to repeat itself?

Immigrants are real people, just like you and me. They are here because of simple supply-and-demand economics, and I’m grateful. They have certainly enriched my life.

On a brisk night in October of 1990, many of us had gathered for a hastily called rally for gubernatorial candidate Ann Richards. She was standing on a makeshift stage in the parking lot of the American Civil Liberties Union building on Lavaca Street, across from the Capitol.

We had watched her electric keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, where she proclaimed: “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards in high heels,” so we were excited to see her in person. She talked about issues facing the state with clarity, charm and irreverent, quick-draw quips. But when she got to women’s reproductive rights, she became deadly serious. She told us never to take them for granted, that the day would come when those rights would be under siege.

That seemed far-fetched, but I tucked the scary thought away for a day I hoped would never come.

But here we are.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, by last year more than half the states, mostly in the South and Midwest, are deemed “hostile to abortion” based on number of restrictions.

Not to be outdone by Southern states, nor deterred by last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Texas’ senseless and extreme abortion rules, Texas continues in its tireless, jihadist quest to oppress women by depriving them of abortion services.

It’s interesting how quick our leaders are to hurt poor women. Despite Planned Parenthood’s being indisputably the provider of choice in underserved areas — and despite abortion comprising less than five percent of its services — state health officials moved in December to oust the agency as a Medicaid health provider, a move the agency immediately filed suit to block.

Financially, the effect on the agency would be minimal since only around five percent of its revenue comes from Medicaid. But it would cut 11,000 women from receiving any of its services including birth control and life-saving screenings. Importantly, it would devastate morale, as the people who work there are deeply motivated to help low-income women.

Planned Parenthood has been around for 100 years and is deeply trusted by health care professionals and women of all income levels. My neonatal intensive care co-workers and I have referred countless mothers to the agency.

This session, priority bills are being introduced by the lieutenant governor to prohibit third trimester abortion, ban insurance coverage of abortion and ban abortion providers from donating fetal tissue for medical research. Really? That makes about as much sense as outlawing organ donation.

Another bill would eliminate an exception that allows for third-trimester abortions for fetuses with “severe and irreversible abnormalities” that are incompatible with life outside the womb. And Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, has proposed a constitutional amendment “guaranteeing the right to life of unborn children and prohibiting abortion to the extent authorized under federal constitutional law.” I guess the senator hasn’t heard which way Roe v. Wade went.

Facts, science and reason — endangered concepts — do not support legislators’ assault on abortion. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the abortion rate has fallen to well below the 1973 rate when abortion was illegal and Roe v. Wade decided. So, what’s the point?

On Jan. 20, a confidence man who bragged about assaulting women will be inaugurated as the U.S. president. The day after, tens of thousands of us will gather on the south grounds of the Capitol at noon to demonstrate that the right of women to freely decide whether and when to have children is important. As Ann Richards said, we’ve got to fight to keep our rights from being taken away.

Sheriff Greg Hamilton, left, clowning around with Sgt. Craig Hutchinson

News reports paint a picture of a respected, even beloved member of the sheriff’s department. Sheriff Greg Hamilton publicly expressed his love for “Hutch,” the man who trained and mentored him, saying he was like a “big teddy bear.” By all accounts, his suicide came as a total shock to his coworkers and Hamilton.

Anecdotally and from research, we know that males in general are naturally predisposed to avoid seeking psychological help — especially first responders, who tend to have traditional family values with the male as the honorable, strong provider and protector who likely views psychological help as a sign of weakness.

Frontline law enforcement officers suffer trauma from the multiple sentinel events involving gunfire that they encounter, all too often caused by bad actors within their own force. Rather than seek help, they often fall silent, fearing stigma or being placed off duty with service revolvers taken away. (An an aside, our community just learned 50 years after the fact that it didn’t help to fall silent after the Charles Whitman shooting.)

Hutchinson, 54, was due to retire in September. It’s likely that during his career he suffered trauma, didn’t talk about it and became depressed and anxious. Symptoms typically include magnifying something small into something huge, feeling trapped and feeling they’re the only one who feels that way. They tend to isolate themselves and often self-treat with addictive behaviors. But they manage to pull themselves together at work.

It’s no wonder that more law enforcement officers die by suicide than in the line of duty, according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Compare their suicide rate of 17 against the national average of 12 per 100,000 population (National Center for Health Statistics). Like Hutchinson, officers who commit suicide are primarily married white males of a lower rank, such as sergeant.

The investigation found that Hutchinson was prescribed medication to treat anxiety and depression in December, but his autopsy revealed no trace of antidepressant in his blood. Did he stop taking his medication, unaware that antidepressants take three to six weeks to take effect?

The death investigation also found that Hutchinson, who made about $99,000 per year, had significant financial problems. His car was repossessed in June. On July 11, two weeks before his death, he received a foreclosure notice. His home off McNeil Road outside of Round Rock was to be put up for public sale on Aug. 2, the day that hundreds gathered for a hero’s funeral. To the sergeant, losing his car and home may have meant the ultimate symbol of failure, shame and disgrace.

It is possible to be suicidal and goal-directed at the same time. Once a plan is developed, often the individual becomes ebullient, which explains why the upbeat sergeant’s suicide stunned Sheriff Hamilton. The plan to make it look as if he died in the line of duty would achieve many goals. It would protect his name. With nearly $1 million in local, state and federal survivor benefits, it would provide for his family. And importantly, it would end his suffering.

In a recent press conference, Sheriff Hamilton tearfully stated a determination to help his staff. Many things can be done for all first responders at low or no cost. To name a few, conducting a professionally led staff debriefing session after each sentinel event; having counselors in line who specialize in trauma treatment for first responders; mandating yearly suicide inservices; and posting the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — 800-273-TALK.

Mental health apps are a promising new treatment modality. They can help individuals understand, track, treat and cope with their conditions. They are free, easy to use on a smartphone or tablet and can be very effective for a variety of conditions including post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression. The Anxiety and Depression Association of America website has reviews of these apps.

Sgt. Hutchinson’s suicide has brought a new awareness to our community. Let’s make something of it.

Reid Minot, co-author

Inglis, a retired nurse, served on the Austin Travis County Integral Care Board of Trustees for 12 years. Minot is a psychiatric clinical nurse specialist practicing in Austin.

The companies found the ordinance unacceptable. How did they deal with it? The same way they’ve bullied regulators around the world. Here, they circulated a recall petition to oust the council member who worked hardest on the ordinance, Ann Kitchen, and they actually wrote their own ordinance that we will vote on May 7.

Really? If Uber doesn’t like our law they write their own?

Hey, I want to be Uber. The proletariat can vote on which ordinance they want, but not until I’ve aired TV and radio ads and flooded them with constant mailings of large, color, glossy fliers giving the impression that a “for” vote is for us to stay in town, or a for vote is for criminal background checks of drivers; an “against” vote is for a “city takeover.” That’ll scare ’em.

The elderly woman in an Uber flier bears a striking resemblance to Hallmark’s Maxine character.

And I’ll bet the younger folks got a big kick out of my flier that depicted an elderly woman as Hallmark’s Maxine. Haha. They love me!

And I organized a political action committee recruiting my drivers to lobby for me. We call them “peers.” It’s heart-warming, but strange that they’re so passionately loyal to me. After paying for their own gas, car maintenance and car insurance — and my capturing 20 percent of their fares — they’re barely earning minimum wage a lot of the time! Some call it labor exploitation, but they seem to like it, and the genius is since they contract and are not my employees, I’m not accountable or responsible for them! The peers don’t even seem to know I’m working on driverless cars to replace them.

These Austin folk, on the other hand, they’re trouble. I think their intelligence quotient may be higher than the other cities I’ve manipulated. Hell, it’s cost me north of $10 million. If these smarty-pants remember the fox guarding the henhouse proverb before they vote, I may be done for. Hopefully they won’t figure out until after the election that a vote “for” Prop 1 is a vote for my ordinance and that a vote “against” Prop 1 is to stick with the city ordinance.

Help me brainstorm here about the three sticking points in the city’s ordinance that really burn my bacon:

•      Fingerprinting — This comes up in every city I go into, and I’m getting pissed off about it. There’s nothing wrong with my method where the applicant gives me his or her or someone’s name that we can run a criminal background check on. Alleged sexual assaults by our drivers are giving us a bad name, dammit, not to mention that jerk in Kalamazoo who went around randomly killing six people, picking up fares between shootings.

Thing is, fingerprinting, if done by that outfit that Texas contracts with, IdentoGO (what kind of name is that?!), would cost $42 per driver. $42 here, $42 there, pretty soon you’re talking real money. The pesky media, they say I’m worth around $50 or $60 billion, but hey, I can’t afford fingerprinting while I’m trying to get my initial public offering going.

•      Distinctive emblem — I can’t afford that either. Taxis have visible emblems, but they’re oh so old-school. We’re cool and don’t need the hassle. Besides, I’d rather passengers have to hunt around for our drivers. Although I will say Lyft’s pink mustache was almost cute.

•      Blocking a travel lane — What’s the problem with loading and unloading passengers in a travel lane? It’s not as if this town is congested or anything. If they knew it was Uber, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind the delay.

Thank you for letting me talk through all this ridiculous falderal. Clearly, the city is harassing us. If you like the ordinance I wrote prohibiting those annoying requirements, then vote for Prop 1 — my ordinance. If you want to get all nanny-state about it and stick with the city’s ordinance, then vote against Prop 1, my ordinance. But if you do, I’m warning you, I may gather my marbles and go home. Or not. I’ve made a pretty penny here.

In 1971, Austin lawyer Sarah Weddington argued Roe v. Wade to the U.S. Supreme Court at age 26.

There was a time in the very recent past when even birth control was illegal in this country, not to mention abortion. Then in 1971 and ’72 a bright, articulate, charismatic 26-year-old lawyer from Austin named Sarah Weddington argued the case of Roe v. Wade before the nine male justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. She argued her case on the basis of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Ninth and Fourteenth amendments to the Constitution — a document that the far-right extremists talk a lot about, but apparently have never read. Her arguments were so convincing and authentic that she opened the eyes of the justices, and in January 1973 abortion became legal in this country.

As my policy professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, said many times, Americans are not comfortable with fundamental change. The problem with abortion is that it’s either legal, or it’s not. You can’t incrementally get to that. At some point in time, it had to be made legal because women were dying from infection from unsafe induced abortions using hatpins or hangers or whatever else they could find.

Texas and other states have progressively hacked away at that ruling by passing laws that restrict abortion including the despicable requirement that a woman look at the fetus on ultrasound as a doctor points to the features and listen to the heartbeat. That’s called state-endorsed torture. Perhaps we should waterboard women who have accidental pregnancies, maybe stone them to death.

The anti-abortion jihadists that are our state leaders (all male, all Republican) line up to profess their intent to protect the unborn, code for oppressing women. Gov. Greg Abbott states that yanking Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood “provides greater access to safe health care for women” — the opposite is true — “while protecting…the unborn.”

Evangelist Sen. Ted Cruz was right when he said, “I’m proud of Texas for leading the way in affirming the sanctity of life.” Yep, Texas is leading the way to oppress women, and damn proud of it.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the most rabid of all, declared in an Oct. 19 Fox News interview that Planned Parenthood pretends to care about women’s health, “but we know that they’re only in the business to profit from killing babies and selling body parts.”

That’s simply untrue. Nowhere near. But truth and reason have no place in the holy war that our anti-abortion state leaders are fighting.

I understand these men are pandering to their Tea Party base, but abortion rates in Texas have steadily fallen to about half what they were in 1991 and have been lower than the national incidence all along. Why not leave well enough alone?

In 32 years of neonatal nursing, I’ve referred countless moms to Planned Parenthood for birth control because I know they’ll get wonderful care. Many of the 35 centers throughout Texas are in rural and medically underserved areas, which confirms the organization’s intention to increase access to care. More than 175,000 Texans each year count on Planned Parenthood for a variety of crucial services such as family planning, birth control, well-woman exams as well as screening for breast and cervical cancer, urinary tract infection, HIV and sexually transmitted diseases. Abortion represents less than five percent of the services the organization offers in Texas, and that needed service is entirely privately funded.

Around three in 10 American women by age 45 will have obtained an abortion. Accidental pregnancies happen. Dire and different life circumstances surround each abortion.

State laws and policies that restrict a woman’s ability to make her own health care decisions have no place in America in 2015. Isn’t there something better state leaders can do with their time other than oppress women? Like maybe work on education or transportation or access to health care?

My pick for worst bill passed was the one removing corruption prosecution of public officials and state employees from the Travis County Public Integrity Unit to the home counties of those being investigated, with the Texas Rangers doing the official’s initial investigation. All of us know that good-ol’-boy clubs are as emblematic of Texas as cowboys and oil wells; doesn’t the Legislature?

Anne Mitchell (foreground) and Vickilyn Galle

You have to look no further than the Winkler County whistleblower imbroglio to see how local prosecutions can go bad and why this law stinks. But you have to look pretty far west; it’s located in the dusty Permian Basin practically on the border with New Mexico.

Here’s how the story goes: Kermit (population 5,000) desperately needed a doctor. An affable Rolando Arafiles rode into town. The town’s prominent good ol’ boys all liked the smiling doctor. So, despite having a stipulation on his medical license for corruption in Corpus Christi, the hospital hired him in 2007.

By the following year, a doctor, a nurse practitioner and two quality assurance nurses employed by Winkler County Memorial Hospital, separately reported Arafiles to the Texas Medical Board for substandard care. After the medical board sent Arafiles the reports with names redacted, he complained of harassment to his golfing buddy, the sheriff.

Sheriff Robert Roberts

Through nefarious means, the sheriff found the nurses’ report to the board on one of the nurse’s computers. The hospital administrator immediately fired the nurses, and the county attorney charged the nurses with misuse of official information, a third-degree felony punishable by up to a $10,000 fine and 10 years in prison.

No nurse ever had been criminally prosecuted for reporting a doctor, and national headlines were made. One of the nurses chose to retire early, and charges against her were dropped. But the case against the other nurse, Anne Mitchell, went to trial. After four days of a trial attended by nurses from across the state and a reporter and photographer from the New York Times, Mitchell was acquitted in less that an hour.

Smelling rot, in an anomalous 180-degree judicial turnaround the attorney general’s office investigated and charged all members of the good-ol’-boys club — the doctor, sheriff, hospital administrator and county attorney — with two counts each of two felonies: retaliation and misuse of official information.

All were found guilty, resigned their positions, were fined and served time behind bars. The doctor, sheriff and county attorney all lost their professional licenses. Justice was served, but not for the two nurses whose brilliant careers were ended for exercising their ethical duty to protect the public. And not for Kermit, the previously peaceful town that was, and remains, torn apart.

Judge David Glicler (former assistant attorney general) brought justice to the corrupt local officials.

David Glickler, a Hays County judge and former assistant attorney general who so brilliantly prosecuted the case against the local officials, told me he believes the Winkler County case was a prosecutorial aberration. But Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Austin) believes the bill in effect leaves “legislators proclaiming themselves and statewide elected officials as a privileged class with benefits their constituents don’t have.” Amen.

It took a statewide prosecution to right the wrongs of a local prosecution. Gov. Greg Abbott has refused comment on the bill, but we’ll know within a week if he allows it to become law without his signature. As former attorney general, he above anyone should know that this bill doesn’t pass the sniff test and that corruption cases of state officials should be prosecuted by a statewide entity, like say, the attorney general’s office. The Texas Rangers already investigate most of their cases anyway.

It’s only because the nurses’ case received national media attention that the local villains came to justice. It’s hard to shine the light of day on all 254 Texas counties in this huge state with vast rural and frontier areas — and lots of small good-ol’-boy clubs made up of the counties’ prominent citizens who have personal and business relationships with each other.

We all know by now of the measles outbreak of more than 100 cases since January including eight babies from a suburban Chicago daycare center who were too young to be vaccinated. How the (expletive) could this happen after measles was declared eliminated in the year 2000?

Truth is, I could see this coming. When I began working as a staff nurse in neonatal intensive care in 1980, all my co-workers got the flu shot every year. All the babies got their immunizations. No questions, no doubt, no hesitation. Boom.

The ax fell in 1998 when the British medical journal The Lancet published a study by Andrew Wakefield, who now lives in Austin. His study, which had only 12 study subjects, linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine with autism.

As we know by now, news of his study ricocheted around the world and use of the vaccine plummeted worldwide. An anti-vaccine movement was ushered in. The Lancet reassessed the scientific methods and financial conflicts of Wakefield and in 2010 retracted the study; his medical license was subsequently revoked. But the damage had been done.

In 2004, I had no trouble getting parents to immunize their children. According to Texas Department of State Health Services data, that year only 0.09 percent (just under 3,000 kids) of Texas’ overall school-age population had nonmedical exemptions to school immunization laws. But in the 2013-14 school year, that percentage jumped to 0.75 percent (more than 38,000 kids). That’s almost a 13-fold increase in 10 years, and that aligns with my experience in neonatal.

In 2009, three years before I retired from neonatal, Central Texas experienced a large pertussis outbreak, the first in 50 years. Pertussis in our hospital! With a shiver, we feared it was the canary in the coal mine. It was. About the same time, parents began to refuse to sign vaccine consents, and nurses even began questioning flu shots.

I’ll never forget a prescient 12-hour shift in the winter of 2009. I received report from a night-shift nurse who was wearing a mask because she had refused the flu vaccine. Rondah Kentch, a nurse with a limp from polio she contracted at age 4, and I cared that day for eight premature babies in our neonatal intensive care bay. All of them were adorable, nearing discharge and had unsigned immunization consents on the fronts of their charts.

With 65 years of neonatal nursing experience between us, Rondah and I could handle the babies. The tough part was obtaining consent from the parents to protect their children from communicable, deadly diseases. The poor, uneducated parents didn’t hesitate; they were grateful their children could receive the vaccine. It was the educated parents, those empowered with all of the information in the world at their fingertips, who balked. Scientific reasoning did no good. It was obvious at that point what the future held: a retreat from common sense.

But wait. The story gets better. Since I retired in 2012, the same ilk of parents who refuse vaccines is also refusing the vitamin K injection to prevent hemorrhagic disease and antimicrobial eye ointment to prevent blindness. I’m glad I’m not there to witness that.

Measles is awful. It makes you very sick. It can kill you. It can blind you. Pregnant women exposed to measles can miscarry or give birth to infants with deformities. Are pediatricians justified in closing their practices to children whose parents refuse to immunize? Absolutely. Are schools justified in requiring unvaccinated children to stay home for 21 days (the length of time between exposure and the beginning of the rash and fever) after an exposure? Of course.

What I don’t understand is … every baccalaureate degree requires passing basic science courses. Yet it’s the educated parents (and some health care workers) who are refusing vaccines. Immunization science is 65 years old and about as basic as evolution science. Resistance is especially odd coming from people with degrees that have the word “science” in the name.

moods of the sky ... and construction

Those are some serious negatives, but the positives listed below have remained static since we moved:

•          No yard work — When the last bird (lawn-mower) flew from the nest, Ian was determined not to have to mow the lawn again, his dreaded chore as a child.

•          Height — Probably the best part about living 100 feet in the air is there are zero mosquitoes or cockroaches. Our last home was nice, but we couldn’t relax outside lest we be eaten alive by mosquitoes. Inside, we triumphed over the cockroaches, but it was a constant battle. Here, the only varmints we see are on the balcony: the occasional moth or cricket in the doorjamb — to the supreme delight of Tina the cat. The many happy desert plants on the balcony attract welcome visitors — house finches, bees and ladybugs.

Here, we ride up eight floors to get views that we used to drive to Enchanted Rock to earn. There’s something energizing, purifying and calming about the vast openness of our place where we can see the horizon, the night cityscape and the moods of the sky — storms coming in, dizzying blue, the moon, the clouds — and the sun rising, moving across the sky and setting. The red-tailed hawks are as noble and majestic as the bats and nighthawks are fun to watch as they dive for insects in the evening.

•          Compact city — Our geographic boundaries for work, living and eating drastically decreased when we moved downtown. Most of what we do takes place within an area bounded by Lamar Boulevard, West 15th Street, Congress Avenue and West Second Street. We used to rarely see our neighbors. Now, it’s nice seeing neighbors often and lots of people on the street as they go about their day.

•          Getting out of your car — Ian sold his truck soon after we moved. Every day he walks to and from work along Shoal Creek where he communes with songbirds, wading birds, bats and turtles; he knows the homeless by name. If he needs to go somewhere out of his ‘hood, he’ll take the bus, happy to get in the exercise walking to and from bus stops.

I bought a scooter and have put 10,000 miles on it just driving around town (and to work) — that’s 10,000 miles less on my car. We walk to most places we need to go.

Public transportation is less than perfect. I wasn’t crazy about the route, but rail losing the last election was a major disappointment, although not as bitter and crushing a disappointment as the loss in 2000. In both cases, dubious arguments that rail would reduce auto traffic missed the real point of public transit — giving people an alternative to driving in the chaos and congestion. That’s a worthy goal for any city.

•          Footprint — Our building houses 82 units in a half block; 82 homes would normally take up about eight city blocks. When Sen. Kirk Watson was mayor in the late 1990s, he championed the then far-fetched idea of urban density. Subsequent mayors have followed through to where the ghost town that was downtown now has many thousands of residents.

Austin’s Great Streets project has given us hope that downtown may become safer and more livable. If implemented, sidewalks would be 18 to 32 feet wide; streets would have benches, bike racks and trash bins; street trees would be planted and spaced to provide contiguous shade on maturity; telephone/utility poles would be buried; and several one-way streets would be converted to two-way, which would open the street up to businesses and reduce vehicle speed as well as the miles and turns drivers would make to arrive at their destination.

I guess there are tradeoffs wherever you live. In the end, the scale tips in favor of the positives. So we stay downtown.

It seems like everyone has asked us this year if we still like living downtown. The answer is yes, but the shine is off the diamond.

In 2004, we moved into a nice, sleepy neighborhood near Whole Foods (not the current one). There were only two other multi-unit residences: Plaza Lofts and The Nokonah. Loud/live music was limited to indoor venues: Antone’s, La Zona Rosa and Austin Music Hall. There were only two nearby bars — Opal Divine’s and Mother Egan’s Irish Pub. Both played soft music and had the feel of the idyllic British or Irish pub where neighbors gather for a beer, camaraderie, a few laughs, maybe a game of darts or live team trivia. Neither bar is still here.

Radical changes have occurred over the course of the decade:

•          Sloshed city — Bars have sprung up like poisonous mushrooms all over our “Market District,” where folks come to get throw-down drunk in a deafening atmosphere. We now live on the western edge of the drunkest zip code in Texas in one of the drunkest cities in the United States, at times outranking even New Orleans and Las Vegas. Therefore, every Friday and Saturday night around 2:30 a.m., we’re awakened by sloshed little darlings spilling out of the bars, preparing to drive their cars home because our so-called “progressive” city consistently votes no to rail.

Now West Sixth Street resembles so-called “Dirty Sixth” (East Sixth Street). Several bars in our neighborhood have alcohol sales exceeding $500,000 per month. Austin has ordinances on the books about 10:30 p.m. to midnight closing times, maximum decibel limits and the requirement for permits to play amplified outdoor music, but those laws are rarely enforced. Maybe the new City Council will demand enforcement.

•          Construction — Like Germany after World War II, downtown Austin is being almost totally rebuilt. From our balcony overlooking the Seaholm project, we can see 13 construction cranes. That’s not all bad news. A block away we’re getting a Trader Joe’s and a killer public library. Most of the new buildings are extremely handsome and make a beautiful skyline.

•          Cellphones and driving — In 2004, using your cellphone while driving wasn’t mandatory. Now, apparently it is. When I’m stopped at a light, I have one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the horn to notify the driver in front of me whose head is down when it’s time to go. Uber drivers blatantly hold their phones up at eye level to read instructions while they’re moving.

It’s super scary crossing the street on foot. As often as I’ve been clipped by ticked-off drivers who see pedestrians in crosswalks as annoyances, I’ve been almost hit by oblivious drivers on their cellphones. Austin has one of the highest pedestrian fatality death rates in the country.

Thank you, City Council, for passing the ordinance curtailing hand-held devices while driving after Jan. 1! Now how about some enforcement?

•          Motorcycle noise — Another phenomenon not present in 2004 is the overabundance of deafening motorcycles. “I know,” says the man with the IQ of a grackle, “I’ll replace my motorcycle muffler with straight pipes, parade up and down West Fifth and Sixth streets at all hours of the day and night, and women won’t be able to resist me!” A lot of men in this town are thus deluded.

•          Gun nuts — And then of course, last month there was Larry Steven McQuilliams, who shot up the BB&T Bank, one block east of us, before moving on to bigger and better things: the federal courthouse and police headquarters.

But despite the year-round drunks, car alarms, lack of decent public transportation, sirens, nightly loud amplified music played without permits and way beyond the legal decibel limits and cut-off times, distracted and aggressive drivers, deafening motorcycles, traffic congestion, construction noise/dust and the occasional machine-gun fire, we do still like living downtown.

To find out why, read my next column.