Spend more, solve less
Year after year the bill grows. What do we have to show for it? The basics a city is supposed to handle are still broken.
Hundreds of millions spent, and our neighbors are still on the street while public spaces feel less safe.
Residents do not feel safe in their neighborhoods, parks, or downtown, and staffing shortfalls go unaddressed.
Our parks are eyed for commercialization and private deals instead of being protected for the people who use them.
Costs keep climbing. Working families are priced out while the council writes checks to billion-dollar companies.
The receipts
This is not opinion. These are the council's own recent decisions, with sources.
In May 2026 the council authorized Austin Energy to contract for new gas "peaker" plants, a deal estimated near $1 billion, in a closed-door executive session. When the press asked how each member voted, the city refused to release the votes, and no member has disclosed theirs. An open-government expert put it plainly: "It's fundamental to know who is voting on what. This is not my idea of democracy."
Source: Austin Free Press, KUT
The council annexed 2,600 acres along the river, then two months later approved roughly $1.5 billion in tax financing for the Dog's Head development, anchored by an Amazon robotics facility with data centers listed as a permitted use. The deal allows up to 100 percent impervious cover and cuts the river's protected zone to 200 feet. Hundreds of residents packed City Hall to oppose it. It passed 7 to 3. Two weeks before the annexation, the same council adopted an economic development framework targeting "data management," over residents' pleas to exclude data centers.
Source: Community Impact, KUT, Travis Audubon, Community Impact
In August 2025 the council set a property tax rate high enough to trigger the Prop Q election, asking for $110 million more per year. Ten of eleven members voted for it. Austin voters rejected it, 63 to 37. The same council that could not find restraint in its own budget found a billion for a secret gas plant and a billion and a half for Amazon's developer.
Source: KXAN, KUT, Ballotpedia
Not a single council member voted against the $1.2 billion in convention center construction contracts. In a Public Policy Polling survey of 586 Austin voters, 76 percent opposed the project. When 21,000 Austinites signed the Austin United petition to put it on the ballot, the city clerk threw the petition out, and City Hall is now fighting its own residents in court to keep it off.
Source: Austin Monitor, Spectrum News, Statesman; Public Policy Polling, Oct. 2025
Voters approved a permanent property tax increase in 2020 for Project Connect. The light rail bill has since grown from $5.8 billion to $8.2 billion while the plan shrank to 9.8 miles, with no airport connection, no downtown tunnel, and no trains before 2033. That is almost $840 million per mile, three times the 2020 price.
Source: Texas Tribune, The Austin Bulldog
Secret votes on billion-dollar plants. Billions for the richest corporation on earth and a convention hall nobody asked for. A petition from 21,000 residents, tossed. Meanwhile the potholes, the crime, the cost of living, and the parks you actually use go to the back of the line. This is a council that works hardest for the people who need it least.
Read our position on the Amazon deal on the Issues page.
The way back
Two races. Two people who will not sell out our neighborhoods, our river, or our wallets.
