Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

Austin for Austinites: That's the mantra of rival groups vying to get every non-local to go back to wherever they came from. In an unprecedented push to thin the population, they want everyone deemed insufficiently Austin to be recalled to whence they came from, and for no one else to move here, ever. However, the varying organizations cannot come to a consensus on how Austin you must be to be considered an Austinite.

So far, there are three competing petitions being circulated. The leading group seeking ballot access is Go Back West, Young Man, but spokesman William Dudley Pelley said the group is having trouble getting sufficient supporting signatures because most everyone they talk to is a recent resident. He said, "This town has gone to hell ever since I moved here from Oklahoma in 1996."

Pelley's GBWYM group is proposing that anyone that moved here after 2000 leave willingly. A rival group, Austinites for Austin, has set the clock at 1980: Its president and founder, Gerald P. Nye, called Pelley's group "exactly the kind of people that wrecked Austin to begin with. I remember my first day here, I went to Hut's Hamburgers and got seated straightaway. It was just like dining with my family in Lee's Restaurant, back home in Lincoln, Nebraska. And then Pelley and his Johnny-come-lately friends wrecked it for everyone."

Pelley's group is also demanding the withdrawal of all businesses established by people who moved to Austin, including the Alamo Drafthouse, The Austin Chronicle, the Driskill Hotel, SXSW, and Robert Rodriguez's Trouble­maker Studios. Austinites for Austin is instead proposing that newer residents can stay, but must pay an additional 1% in property tax to subsidize the reopening of the Soap Creek Saloon.

As for the third group, Mostly Austinites for a Mostly Austin Austin, spokesman John P. Oster­hout explained they don't want to kick out anyone who wasn't born within city limits, but will allow internal migration for anyone born within the Austin-Round Rock Metropolitan Statistical Area (except for Williamson County because, he added, "WilCo, you know."). He said, "Wimberley totally counts as Austin, doesn't it? Isn't that where Aquarena Springs was? Man, I miss that diving pig."

Not everyone is happy with the competing plans. Speaking on behalf of the Comanche Nation, spokesman Quanah Parker said, "You carpetbaggers do realize we were here first, right?"