Nate McGuire is just a guy. A native Austinite and tech entrepreneur who started a website, because he didn't want his property taxes to go up.
McGuire's website aims to take down Proposition Q, the $110-million proposal to raise Austin's property tax rate would fund social programs like housing for homeless Austinites, parks and emergency services.
McGuire spent a couple hours on the website about the potential tax increase and published it, and it got a lot of attention. He realized other people shared those same concerns.
"You know, we're spending a bunch of money, we're taxing a bunch, and we don't feel safer," McGuire said. "We don't think the city is getting cleaner. We don't think things are getting better. If anything, they're getting worse."
The week before last, McGuire was scrolling on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, eating dinner, when he saw he had been accused of violating state law by one of Mayor Kirk Watson's staffers, Joe Cascino. Cascino, who leads the Love Austin Political Action Committee (PAC) in support of Prop Q, said the site flouted state and local guidelines around political campaigns and should have been registered as a PAC.
As politically minded people do these days, McGuire and Cascino argued on the internet.
McGuire said he’s just a guy — a tech entrepreneur with a serviceable level of coding knowledge who spun up a website. He said he didn’t coordinate with other people, and he’s not seeking donations.
"It 100% felt like they were trying to intimidate me," McGuire said. "And the, I guess, funny part to me is they didn't even bother to figure out who owned the website. So it just seems like they are, you know, grasping for straws because they know that Prop Q, if it passes, is going to make Austin more unaffordable for everyone."
For Cascino, the site had all the trappings of a political campaign: glossy graphics on what the measure would cost taxpayers, information on polling locations and downloadable campaign signs that have started popping up around town.
"Everybody is allowed to say their opinions on Prop Q or anything else, you know," Cascino said. "But at the same time, like, if people are ... clearly engaging in political advertising and are using your [messaging] around town with stuff that doesn't have disclaimers on it, that's a problematic fact for you."
Last week, Cascino dropped the ethics complaint. McGuire, exalted online by austerity-minded Austinites, did a victory lap.
Ethics concerns
This whole legal morass cuts to the heart of gaps in Austin's ethics laws, said Andrew Cates.
Cates used to live in Austin. He's familiar with the eccentricities of the city's ethics laws, which are different and, arguably, more stringent than state ethics laws. If you want to know about Texas' ethics laws, you ask Cates. He literally wrote the book on it, called "Texas Ethics Laws."
Cates said this tactic, filing an ethics complaint concurrently with a press release, is a classic political move. For years, campaigns would use these complaints as a "sword" against their opponents. They would file a complaint which could result in a fine, then issue a press release, and — whether it was a valid complaint or not — the damage was done.
"The fine isn't the problem," Cates said. "It's the P.R., you know, and in this case, that's probably the biggest hit ... that it's a P.R. hit [and] that there was an ethics complaint filed."
McGuire's lawyer, Michael Lovins, said that is the case here.
"The process is the punishment," Lovins said. "And when you're losing an argument, sometimes your best strategy is to try to shut up your opponent, and that's what's happening here."
Lovins has called on Cascino and the Love Austin PAC to publicly retract the complaint by Nov. 12.
Another website
Asked whether he believes he violated state and local ethics laws, McGuire said no. Asked whether he coordinated with anyone — a key metric in Texas' ethics laws surrounding political action committees, he, again, said no.
But ahead of an interview last Wednesday, KUT discovered code for a similar project that McGuire was working on at the same time as his anti-Prop Q site — one that was branded as "Rise Up Austin PAC" — on his page on GitHub, a platform where developers can collaborate and host projects.
"The most important thing we can do to defeat the tax rate election is educate voters and make sure that they turn out to vote against Prop Q," it read.
McGuire didn't speak to why Rise Up Austin's messaging mirrored that of his published website.
Asked why he didn't simply start a political action committee to avoid the ethical dust-up, he said "because I don't need to."
"That's not my PAC," McGuire said. "That doesn't have anything to do with me."
Shortly after speaking with KUT News, McGuire deleted the folder, which included a landing page, graphics and a style guide, from his GitHub page, though it can still be found on the Internet Archive. But the graphic for the PAC popped up on an X forum later that day.
KUT asked McGuire why he pulled down the code. He said he "had forgotten it was on there because it's just a draft that I abandoned," and that he "took it down to minimize any confusion."
Cates said this whole ordeal is moot at this point. With early voting now underway, he said it’s too late for an ethics investigation to have any real impact on the issue.
But Cates said these guardrails exist for a reason: voters should be free to question who is behind these campaigns. No matter where you fall politically, he said people should know where their political messaging is coming from.
"That’s a valid question to ask," Cates said. "The point of the law is for transparency."
