The City of Austin, by the end of Monday, will be one step closer to deciding whether to put a bond proposal before voters. It’d be the first time residents would be asked to approve funding for projects through a property tax increase since the defeat of Proposition Q last fall, a politically fraught backdrop for the decision.
The citizen-appointed bond election advisory task force has spent the past 18 months identifying Austin’s most pressing capital improvement projects and is expected to finalize its recommendations Monday. While members identified more than $750 million in urgent projects, an unexpected request from council members on April 20 to cut the package in half means many projects risk being left out of the final proposal.
“Over the course of the last 18 months-ish, we’ve been marching towards making a recommendation in the $700 to $750 million range based on bonding capacity projections,” said Mary Hager, who chairs the task force. “They knew that we had a deadline. We needed to make a recommendation. Everyone’s fairly frustrated with the process.”
‘11th-hour change’ reshapes months of work
The request for a smaller package came from five City Council members — a subquorum — who said the cheaper option “strikes the right balance of meeting the critical needs of today and the cost to taxpayers of less than $5 a month, if approved,” Council Member Ryan Alter wrote in a post on the City of Austin message board.
The task force, formed by the city in December 2024, was divided into five working groups: affordable housing, public facilities, parkland and open spaces, stormwater and drainage infrastructure and transportation infrastructure.
Hager said the group will conclude its work Monday and is likely to recommend two bond packages for the city to choose between. After that recommendation is released, city staff will use it to develop a final proposal to place before the Austin City Council decides whether to call a bond election.
If the smaller bond package is chosen, it would not include funding for affordable housing or stormwater and flood mitigation projects, two major areas of need identified by the task force.
“It was just kind of a last-minute, 11th-hour change,” Hager said on the recent request to produce a lower-cost bond. “It was unfortunate, because it would have been more helpful had we been tasked earlier on with that, and could have given it much more thought.”
What is in the bond proposals?
In the most recent update to the proposal, the larger option, totaling about $765 million in projects, includes:
- $220 million for affordable housing,
- $185 million for parks and open spaces,
- $87 million for public facilities and assets,
- $157 million for transportation and electrification, and
- $116 million for stormwater and flood mitigation.
The option the task force arranged for the subquorum of council members excludes some categories entirely, and includes:
- $225 million for parks and open spaces,
- $95 million for public facilities and assets and
- $80 million for transportation and electrification.
Hager, who was part of the parks and open spaces working group, said that department is among those with the greatest funding needs.
Austin is “developing gray space a lot faster than green space,” Hager said. “Parks are sorely, sorely struggling, given their lack of funding and importance in our world.”
Hager said since the city doesn’t have a ton of money to spend, the bond projects focus on maintaining and improving what the city already has.
An example of this is the Garrison Municipal Pool, a large swimming pool in South Austin at risk of being decommissioned. Community members spoke at a recent task force meeting about how important this space is.
“Garrison Park Pool is one of the few multi-generational gathering places in [South Austin] for swim lessons, neighborly connection, accessible exercise, lap swimming and summer heat relief,” said Heather Van Dyke of South Austin during the meeting. “The pool is aging, as we have discussed in the past. Without funding, we’re looking at closure, and for our community, this has a significant impact, especially during the brutal summers here.”
While the task force is likely to finalize its recommendations on Monday, Hader said the city should make its final decision on whether to call an election towards the end of May.
“There’s just so much need,” Hader said.
