Joe Cascino suspected that someone was throwing around dark money to persuade voters to reject Prop Q, the proposal to hike property taxes in the November election. Cascino, the consultant who leads the Love Austin political action campaign supporting Prop Q, had seen a website – austintaxrateelection.com – which had popped up opposing the measure.
The website was detailed. It was full of charts and calculations, many of which Cascino thought were misleading or flat-out wrong. In his view, it constituted political advertising. That meant, by law, that it needed to include information on who had created it and whether it was the product of a political action committee. But the website had no such information.
“They’ve clearly been engaging in political activity since August and doing political advertising,” Cascino told the Chronicle last Thursday, as he contemplated whether to file an ethics complaint against the website’s unknown creator. “There’s no PAC, no treasurer, and signs are going up around town with no disclaimer but with their URL. Distorted information on the website aside, we just want to know who is funding what, because Austinites deserve to know.”
The next day, Cascino and the Love Austin PAC filed the complaint. “The mystery figure behind austintaxrateelection.com has violated multiple sections of the Texas Election Code,” the press release announcing the complaint read. “Proposition Q opponents clearly believe they are above the law. They are proudly using dark money to fund their mission to make cuts to core city services.”
Within hours, the mystery figure identified himself on X as Nate McGuire, someone local politicos had never heard of. McGuire declared that he had put the website together with $2 and 45 minutes of coding, using publicly available information. “The whole point of the site is to educate,” McGuire wrote. “If you see something inaccurate, I’m here – let’s talk and correct it. Instead, we get the usual: an attempt to silence open, intelligent discourse.”
Anti-Prop Q commenters lionized McGuire on X. Local attorney Adam Loewy called him a hero. Local attorney and former elected official Bill Aleshire suggested a way to stick it to Cascino. “If the expenditure by [McGuire] was less than $100 (which it easily could be if [he] did the work and just bought the URL), then Joe Cascino, Leslie Pool, and all those listed as paying for this letter, have set themselves up for a nice defamation complaint,” Aleshire wrote. He addressed Cascino directly in a separate post: “The faster you and your funders pull this crap down and retract it, the less you will have to pay later.”
On Monday, Love Austin withdrew its ethics complaint, citing McGuire’s comment to KXAN that he would “comply with any filings required.” But the group didn’t exactly back down. “We look forward to ‘austintaxrateelection.com’ complying with the law moving forward,” their second press release said, “as all political committees in the state of Texas should. We also look forward to learning who is uploading designs for advertisements to the site and who is printing and putting out yard signs with their URL and no disclaimer. These are all actions that would constitute that of a political committee and not an individual.”
McGuire responded by opining that Love Austin had personally attacked him. By the end of the day, he announced that he had hired attorney Michael Lovins. Lovins demanded that Love Austin retract the statements in its second press release which, he said, accused his client of acting as a political action committee and violating election law. “If you fail to comply with this request, then we will file a lawsuit against you, which will include a claim for punitive damages,” Lovins wrote in a letter to the PAC.
Cascino has now hired his own attorney. As of this writing, the Love Austin PAC has not complied with Lovins’ demands. Local attorney Rick Cofer, who is not part of the legal back-and-forth, told us that defamation cases are rare in Texas because they are difficult to prove. “I would characterize all of this – whatever the “for” side said and whatever the “against” side said – as an example of the silly season that happens in political campaigns toward the end, that doesn’t have any likelihood of affecting the outcome of the election,” Cofer added.
In an email interview with the Chronicle, McGuire said he is a UT graduate who owned a software engineering studio in San Francisco before moving back to Austin two years ago. We asked about a claim on his website – that approval of Prop Q would cost the owner of a median-value home worth $500,000 an additional $482 per year. That’s twice as much as calculations from the city of Austin and media outlets, which have put the figure at about $200 a year, plus an additional $100 that is already in the city budget and is not being voted on.
“I can’t speak to how anyone else is calculating the total but I think the bigger point you need to make to readers is that this tax increase is not necessary,” McGuire said. “There was not a budget deficit.”
Meanwhile, Loewy announced on Wednesday that he will have anti-Prop Q billboards up by the weekend. The Austin Chamber of Commerce has come out against the proposal, as has the Real Estate Council of Austin. A group called More Affordable Austin, managed by conservative strategist Michael Searle, is spending money against it. And then there’s Save Austin Now, the perennial thorn in progressives’ side, run by another conservative strategist, Matt Mackowiak, who is currently working to save Sen. John Cornyn’s political career from a primary attack by A.G. Ken Paxton. Save Austin Now debuted a digital ad on Prop Q Tuesday. All-caps mailers went out last week.
“The radicals at Austin city hall are pushing the LARGEST property tax increase in city history,” the mailers stated. “If Prop Q passes, every HOMEOWNER, every BUSINESS OWNER, and every RENTER will see their property taxes GO UP.”
This article appears in October 17 • 2025.