Just months after Austin voters decidedly rejected Proposition Q, city leaders are preparing to return to the ballot, this time with a bond proposal they hope will be easier to justify and harder to reject.
City leaders say Austin faces roughly $4 billion in capital needs, from roads and drainage to parks and public facilities. Over the past two years, the city manager’s office and a committee of appointed residents and staff have whittled that list to about $700 million in projects they believe could be funded without jeopardizing the city’s credit rating or sharply increasing tax bills.
The effort comes amid lingering doubts about how City Hall manages taxpayer dollars after Prop Q’s failure. Like that measure, the bond would raise property taxes if approved, but unlike Prop Q, the increase would be time-limited and tied to specific projects. City leaders are betting those differences, along with new transparency measures, will yield a different outcome at the polls.
Historically, the city has limited bond elections to about once every six years to fund major infrastructure projects and new facilities, such as public libraries and police stations, and to create more affordable housing.
For longtime residents who feel those elections have come more frequently in recent years, that perception is accurate. Since 2016, the city has asked voters to approve four bond packages, amounting to over $1 billion in funding.
Another this fall would make five. Austin Capital Delivery Services, the department that oversees the city’s infrastructure projects, has said this should be the last bond election until 2032.
“Clearly, that six-year program has been violated over time,” Mayor Kirk Watson said at a recent Audit and Finance Committee meeting.
City staff and a citizen advisory committee have held more than 500 meetings since 2024 to shape the proposal. On Wednesday, the City Manager’s Office and Capital Delivery Services released a draft set of recommendations for the 2026 bond. The committee’s recommendations are expected in the next several weeks.
One thing is clear: the proposed projects fall into five categories: transportation, watershed protection, parks, community facilities and public safety. Under the current plan, voters would be asked to approve funding for each category through separate propositions on the November ballot.
Bond packages work much like home mortgages. Austin borrows money to fund projects and repays that debt over several decades, even as it aims to complete all projects approved in a bond election within six years.
The central question for many voters is what this means for their tax bills. Regardless of whether a new bond is approved this year, city staff projects property taxes will continue rising slightly through 2030 to pay for debt from earlier bond elections.
At a recent Audit and Finance Committee meeting, Kim Olivares, the city’s director of financial services, said the typical Austin homeowner is expected to pay about $450 a year in city property taxes in 2026 to cover the city’s existing debt. Even if a new bond does not go forward, that amount is projected to rise to roughly $615 annually by 2030.
If voters approve a hypothetical $750 million bond package in November, Olivares said the typical homeowner would pay about $722 a year in 2030, a little more than $100 higher than in the no-bond scenario.
That raises a key question: why would voters approve a bond just one year after rejecting a tax rate election? Capital Delivery Services staff say bond packages often succeed because they fund visible projects, including roads, sidewalks and libraries, that residents use every day.
Unlike Prop Q, a bond is not a permanent tax increase. Some city staff believe the services funded under Prop Q were less tangible, making them harder for voters to support. By contrast, a bond would finance concrete projects with defined timelines.
Transparency is also central to the pitch. Beyond the lengthy process, voters would be able to review a clear list of projects their bond dollars would fund.
After the failure of Prop Q, Watson introduced a series of measures aimed at restoring voter confidence in how the city stewards public funds. One is a decision tree, designed to help voters understand why a bond election would, or wouldn’t, be called.
Watson also proposed new guidelines for how city council offices could spend taxpayer funds. Watson said his goals are to make those rules easier for the public to understand and to better clarify what offices are allowed to purchase.
The Austin City Council approved the new guidelines on Thursday, but didn’t add as many restrictions as some city leaders felt necessary, per KUT reporting.
“It wasn’t very long ago that, in part because of questions about council spending, the voters gave us a clear signal,” Watson said, referencing Proposition Q before the Thursday vote. “I’m disappointed in that. I think we have better ways to achieve the goals we all want to achieve.”
The bond task force and some city staff are expected to meet several more times before delivering a final recommendation to the City Council in May, setting the stage for a decision that could send Austin voters back to the polls a year after they last said no.
