On a spring Sunday morning in a northwest Austin neighborhood, the quiet was shattered by a deafening boom. The sound came from a large single-family home exploding, injuring six and damaging two dozen homes, with destruction reaching blocks beyond the fiery site. Within hours, city crews were relying on specialized technology to assess damage.
Braniff Davis, a geospatial analyst for the Austin Fire Department’s Wildfire Division, remembers getting a message from his duty officer shortly after the incident, asking if he was available to help with the response. He quickly joined the multi-agency staging on scene.
“I’m a member of what we call the red team here in the fire department. That’s our drone program,” Davis said. “In a matter of hours, we had an updated aerial view of the explosion … It became very easy to identify homes that were particularly structurally damaged and needed to be looked at.”
That kind of rapid, specialized response is now at the center of a broader debate inside City Hall.
Austin is expected to complete the first phase of its IT consolidation — an effort called One-ATS — in April or May, part of a sweeping reorganization announced in November after an assessment found the city had been spending more on IT staff and tech than its peer cities, with much of it spread across departments instead of centralized. City leaders have framed the plan as a push for efficiency, but union and technology employees warn it could weaken emergency response and expose critical systems to cyberattacks. They say they’ve had little input in the process and limited communication as the changes move forward.
Raising alarm bells
Davis, a member of the city’s labor union AFSCME Local 1624, which represents city and county employees, said he worries if the plan is successful he may no longer be able to use the skills he’s built throughout his career.
“People like myself, 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 said. “That’s disheartening.”
Despite raising alarm bells for several months, union members say their calls for collaboration have been ignored.
“The city manager has not communicated to us at all,” said Brydan Summers, the labor union’s president.
Some union members raised their concerns during last week’s City Council meeting. Austin Current requested comment from the city Tuesday, including whether City Manager T.C. Broadnax would respond to the union’s concerns. The city did not respond before publication.
City technology staff said they first heard about the consolidation plan from Broadnax’s November memo, which was sent to the mayor and Austin City Council the day after the Nov. 4 election, when voters overwhelmingly rejected Prop. Q, the measure that would have raised property taxes to pay for city services.
The memo, titled “Efficiency and Optimization of City Services in Fiscal Year 2026,” detailed efforts aimed at improving efficiency and accountability, including the sweeping technology worker reorganization and consolidation proposal, now known as One-ATS.
It referenced a consultant-run assessment that found Austin had “nearly twice the number of IT staff and double the technology spending compared to similar cities, yet most of this investment is spread across individual departments rather than centralized,” the memo read. “To address this, the City began a process to consolidate all departmental IT staff into the Austin Technology Services (ATS) department.”
Despite projecting the full consolidation would take two to three years, the city has indicated the first phase would be completed by May 2026, when employees are expected to be notified of their new assignments and receive onboarding information, according to a recent presentation to council members. The accelerated timeline has intensified concerns among workers who say key details remain unclear.
Uncertainty spreads as rollout nears
In early March, the city’s labor union delivered a set of demands to city leaders, including calls to involve employees in the process and halt contracts with Gartner Consulting, the firm that led the assessment and is guiding the reorganization.
Summers said the union has not heard back from the city manager’s office, but will meet with Broadnax on Wednesday. He said the Austin City Council recently passed a resolution requiring monthly meetings.
“The consultation was a big win for us,” Summers said. “This is really an issue we need to work out with the City Manager because he sets the direction for city staff.”
Summers said many of the union’s concerns center on technology workers embedded in “enterprise departments,” such as Austin Energy and Austin Water, and public safety departments, including APD, ATCEMS and AFD, where specialized skills and institutional knowledge could be drained from those teams.
“My team got basically a message in early December that said there would be a big change coming in April or May,” said Sadie Lambert, a union member and IT manager with Austin Energy who has been with the department for 14 years.
“At that point, they would find out what their new job responsibilities would be, who their new supervisor would be, what their new telework schedule would be and what their new reporting location would be,” she added. “We’ve been told nothing since then.”
Lambert said Austin Energy’s technology workers have unique requirements that demand a higher level of security, so “bad actors can’t deploy ransomware or shut down our electric grid.” She said operating within its system requires different programs and more advanced security than IT systems in other city departments to protect the grid from disruption.
Lambert said the city has a lot to lose if the consolidation goes wrong. Beyond keeping the lights on, Austin Energy contributes revenue to fund libraries, parks and public safety, raising the stakes of any errors.
“We’re doing work that is often done in other cities by private sector organizations,” she said. “What happens if Austin Energy does a bad job [and] the state gets rid of Austin Energy … that would have huge implications for the city of Austin as a whole.”
