As Austin has grown, with cars still the dominant mode of transportation, city leaders have rolled out measures to manage long-term parking and reduce congestion on residential streets.
One of those programs is the Parking and Transportation Management District. Launched more than a decade ago, the initiative charges for hundreds of paid parking spaces and reinvests a portion of that revenue into the surrounding neighborhoods. The Transportation and Public Works Department said 51% of the money goes back into the district for mobility improvement projects, while the rest goes toward city parking and transportation operations.
How the 51% is spent is supposed to be community-driven; each management district has an advisory board made up of neighborhood representatives. But some East Austin community leaders say the city has moved to allocate a significant portion of the neighborhood’s PTMD-generated revenue — potentially approaching $1 million — without their input, raising concerns the funds aren’t being used for the community and instead still fill funding gaps in larger projects.
“We don’t have much of a neighborhood voice as it stands,” said Eric Pace, chair of the East Cesar Chavez Neighborhood association. “We don’t really have much control over these funds.”
Dispute over who controls the funds
Despite having a list of neighborhood priorities aimed at improving walkability in East Cesar Chavez, Pace said the public works department directed the management district funds to Capital Metro for a pedestrian sidewalk project at its Plaza Saltillo Station, located at the corner of East 5th Street and Comal Street, without neighborhood approval.
While Pace says he understands the value of the project, it was not identified as one of the neighborhood association’s priorities for the management district’s fund use.
“They’re basically trying to find money to cover that shortfall,” Pace said. “The first time we heard about this money being allocated to the Cap Metro-specific funds was from Cap Metro.” He said the decision underscores a lack of collaboration with the neighborhood.
Austin Current requested more information from Cap Metro about the project. The agency failed to provide those details before the publication deadline.
Ryan Saunders, another East Cesar Chavez Neighborhood community advocate, said the group has in recent years been pushing more actively to use these funds to transform the district.
“There are a lot of people in our neighborhood and in our circles that really care about Plaza Saltillo,” Saunders said. “We want it to be more of a public space.”
Neighborhood plan rejected, funds redirected
Saunders and others on the committee recommended hiring a consultant to develop a master plan for the district to help guide its transition into a denser commercial corridor. But after weeks of back-and-forth, he said the public works department ultimately told them that wasn’t a viable use of the funds.
“We put a ton of time and effort, like over a year’s worth of work, building this [request for proposals] to put out to design firms,” he said. “They just reached in and took the money, and they violated the process, the honor of the program. That is very dishonest at the least.”
Regarding the master plan rejection, the public works department’s Parking Enterprise Manager, Joseph Al-hajeri, said the district’s generated revenue is supposed to go toward “realized projects that can be implemented to improve mobility.”
“We don’t like to put money towards those studies unless there’s some realized outcomes that can actually be done,” he said.
At a time when funding for major projects is not guaranteed, Al-hajeri said the management district’s revenue can be used to fill funding gaps without voter approval.
There are currently a significant number of identified projects without dedicated funding. While it’s not been formally called, the city is likely to push forward a $700 million bond election later this year, with more than a third expected to go toward transportation projects.
The management district’s revenue is available as “real-life dollars spent within the district that can be reused,” Al-hajeri said.
The way the process has unfolded has left those living along East Cesar Chavez questioning how much control the community actually has over its own funds, and whether the program is meeting its original intent.
“Seems a bit unethical,” Saunders said.
