For the past two years, Travis County Judge Andy Brown has told the Austin Monitor he wants to double down on overdose prevention, mental health care and passenger rail. Looking ahead to 2025, those priorities have not changed – but significant gains have been made in those areas.
After a yearslong ideation process, the county’s long-awaited diversion program transcended hypotheticals and touched ground in 2024. In August, Integral Care’s Airport Boulevard walk-in clinic began offering 24/7 care, increased peer support services and access to psychiatric prescriptions for people undergoing mental health crises who interact with first responders. Instead of taking those people directly to jail or the hospital, neither of which would provide the lasting health care they need, EMS and APD can now drop them off at a stabilization facility specifically geared toward mitigating mental health crises. Soon, the county hopes to provide connections to long-term supportive housing and services.
“We’re making good progress – we put out a contract to hire someone to help design and build the diversion center,” Brown said. “The idea is the voluntary facility would get them mental health treatment, they could be put on medications and then if they need a place to stay while we try to find housing, they can stay at the place on 15th Street for up to 90 days.”
As far as the physical diversion center that could provide longer-term care, Brown says the plan is to petition the Legislature for permission build on the recently renovated Austin State Hospital campus.
“Who knows how long it’ll take, but I think we’ll have a lot of our ducks in a row after the session is over, assuming we’re successful,” he said.
As far as Brown’s other public health priority of overdose prevention, data from the county’s medical examiner shows that overdose-related deaths are declining – a trend reflected nationwide – which Brown says is a result of the county’s persistence on the issue. Further good news in that area came this month, as the county was awarded a federal grant to continue such work.
“Right now, people are eight times more likely to die of an overdose six months after leaving jail than people in our community in general. We don’t have perfect data, so we don’t know the exact circumstances of every person who’s overdosing – but what we do know for sure is that more people die when they leave the jail,” he said. “This grant will put $1.6 million towards our efforts of working with (those) people and also, very importantly, giving them access to longer-acting drugs (like the opioid use disorder treatment methadone). So this is a laser-focused program that will help us save lives in an area that we know needs help.”
Brown says collaborative efforts between the county, Austin Public Health and the Texas Harm Reduction Alliance in getting more Narcan, an overdose-reversal drug, into the community has led to the decline in deaths.
“But there are still people overdosing – putting more money into making more mental health services available, supportive housing and other efforts to get people the mental health care that they need are as important as ever, so it needs to be my No. 1 focus,” he said. “I think that will really change our community and have an effect on everything from homelessness to crime levels to people’s life situations. People will be able to stay in stable housing if we meet their mental health needs.”
Travis County and Austin are no strangers to uphill battles against the Texas Legislature and have weathered targeted attacks on their ability to pass progressive policies for years. But the new Trump administration will pose potentially greater and as yet unknown threats to the county’s functioning, especially when it comes to federal funding for local projects.
“The reality is, we continue to get unfunded mandates from the state,” Brown said. “I wouldn’t be sitting here talking about mental health diversion if the state met its requirements of providing indigent mental health care in a sufficient way.
“We’re trying to make Travis County a safer place where people’s needs are met – from child care, to mental health access, to education about overdose risk. And it’s these things that it seems like the Legislature does not agree with us on. I’m very fearful about what the Trump administration and the continued Republican Legislature mean for people’s access to basic things like health care.”
This year the county saw the passage of a sweeping child care tax rate investment that will address gaps in state funding, expanding the number of providers and offering more hours of child care outside of the traditional 9-5.
“I’m very excited that Travis County voters decided to support, in huge numbers, the investment in affordable child care. The funding starts in January, and for the first year, we will fund a lot of existing larger child care providers, and then the second year is when we’ll have a competitive process to make specific awards to new child care providers to try to address the child care deserts across the county.”
There is one priority issue that Brown is optimistic will draw support from both sides of the aisle in the next legislative session: passenger rail.
“It sounds like there is not an inherent disagreement about the need for better passenger rail service in Texas,” he said. “I’m hopeful that there are a lot of people, including our U.S. senators and members of Congress from the other party who were big Trump supporters and very excited that he won, who are interested in more passenger rail service.”
There’s already $66 billion in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funding available for rail projects across the country, but Texas must provide 20 percent of the funding – the Texas Passenger Rail Advisory Committee has indicated that it might have to come from a mix of private investors, but Brown has his sights set on the Legislature for some of that still.
“If we are able to find the money to do this, that would mean, instead of going 30 to 60 miles an hour between Austin and Taylor, trains could go 100 miles an hour,” Brown said. “So we’re trying to find a bill sponsor – the idea would be that we have to come up with 20 percent locally, and then the federal government would pay 80 percent. That’s the hope.”
For that issue, Brown is cautiously optimistic – but in general, he’s a realist: “I think we have to stay on our toes. We have to be ready for what challenges the federal government could present, and we have to work together as a community to make sure we’re standing up to the federal government as needed, and that we’re taking care of our residents with the resources that we have here locally. I think it will require continued collaboration between the city and the county and Central Health and CommunityCare. This is definitely a time when we all need to buckle down and work together and make sure that we are doing everything we can to help our residents.”
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Travis County Commissioners Court: The legislative body for Travis County. It includes representatives from the four Travis County Precincts, as well as the County Judge. The County Judge serves as the chair of the Court.
