After weeks of fierce pushback from the city’s labor union, Austin leaders are backing off on a key piece of their plan to centralize all technology workers into a single department, a shift that signals early cracks in a sweeping internal overhaul.
In a Wednesday evening memo to department directors, Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax said his office has “heard the concerns” from staff that consolidating all technology workers into a single department, called One-ATS, could negatively affect city services, particularly public safety. The city will no longer move workers with specialized, operations-focused roles, known as “operational technology” staff, into the centralized technology system.
The president of the city’s labor union, AFSCME Local 1624, which represents city and county employees, said members are pleased with the memo but argue the rollback exposes an ill-conceived plan not worth pursuing.
“This is a partial retreat on their end. It shows that this was a flawed approach, and that there were serious concerns that they needed to address,” said Brydan Summers, the labor union’s president.
The memo comes just weeks before the city was expected to complete the first phase of the consolidation, when all Austin technology workers were slated to transition into the centralized department and be onboarded into new systems and processes. The late-stage revision underscores the tension between city leaders’ push for efficiency and workers’ warnings of a plan that could disrupt critical services. City leaders have previously framed the plan as a cost-saving measure, which followed an assessment that found Austin spends significantly more on IT staff and technology than its peer cities.
Summers said the union’s fight is not over, and it is still demanding the city stop the consolidation and end the contract with the consulting firm behind it.
“I think we’re all pleased that they’re taking this seriously,” he added. “We can tell that the concerns that we’ve raised are widely felt among [the City Council] and the community.”
Broadnax said city staff will work with department directors to determine which IT roles should remain embedded within their current departments. Non-operational technology workers will still transition into One-ATS this spring, but “many existing teams may stay together, where practical. In many cases, staff could remain embedded within their current department performing their current responsibilities, but with more technology-focused guidance from ATS,” Broadnax wrote.
Austin Current previously spoke to technology workers from several departments who had been fighting the proposal alongside the city’s labor union, AFSCME Local 1624, which represents city and county employees.
Braniff Davis, a geospatial analyst for the Austin Fire Department’s Wildfire Division, said he worried the years he spent building his career and refining his skills would be wasted if the program moved forward as originally planned.
“I’ve spent all of my recent years studying wildfire … becoming a wildfire scientist, and then to be told that the city could just very well decide maybe that’s not necessary,” Davis, a city union member, said before the release of the memo. “That’s disheartening.”
After looking over the memo, Davis said he still wasn’t certain whether his position falls under “operational technology,” leaving questions about how the changes will be applied in practice.
Sadie Lambert, a union member and IT manager with Austin Energy who has been with the department for 14 years, also spoke to Austin Current before the memo was released, raising concerns that the consolidation could leave the utility vulnerable to ransomware attacks.
Austin Energy has unique requirements that “require a higher level of security to ensure that… bad actors can’t either ransomware or shut down our electric grid,” Lambert told the Current, underscoring fears that centralization could weaken safeguards around critical infrastructure.
In the memo, Broadnax acknowledged the speed of this transition has caused uncertainty, and the One-ATS team has “committed to offering a more predictable schedule for updates about One-ATS transition milestones to help you know what to expect.”
