Copyright The Austin Chronicle
Austinites have a lot to be upset about: the city’s high cost of living; tax increases from the county, school district, and ACC; the plan to close neighborhood schools; controversial, high-dollar investments in a new convention center, a police contract, a city logo; delays in breaking ground for Project Connect. Add to that a general distrust of government that has pervaded the city since summer, and it wasn’t shocking that Prop Q, the proposal to increase property taxes, went down in defeat Tuesday night. Voters rejected Prop Q by a stunning 63%, one of the most lopsided outcomes in a city election in recent memory. City leaders, who almost universally endorsed the proposal, recognized the blowout as a strong rebuke. As the magnitude of the defeat sank in on Tuesday night, they spoke about the importance of regaining voters’ trust. “The City Council needs to rebuild trust with the people of Austin, plain and simple,” Council Member Mike Siegel said. “We need to give voters reason to trust us,” Mayor Kirk Watson said. CM Marc Duchen called the vote “a referendum on trust.” Mayor Pro Tem Vanessa Fuentes said she was heartbroken that voters’ distrust of government had reached from the federal to the local level. CM Ryan Alter said he had “heard from too many people that they didn’t trust where the money was going to go.” All these leaders – except for Duchen – were part of the 10-1 majority that approved a new city budget this August. The budget was larger than that allowed by state law, triggering the election on Prop Q. The proposal asked voters to raise the city portion of their property taxes by 5 cents for every $100 of property value – about $200 for the owner of a $500,000 home. The tax would have generated $110 million. One-third of the money was to be used to fully implement the Homeless Strategy Office’s newly developed plan to reduce homelessness. Millions more were to go to improving the city’s 911 response and other public safety needs. A great deal of the money was earmarked for parks, social services, and cost-of-living pay bumps for city employees. The proposal drew a furious and well-funded opposition. Republican political strategist Matt Mackowiak’s Save Austin Now PAC created a website warning that Prop Q would cost taxpayers over $1,000 a year. Former County Judge Bill Aleshire threatened lawsuits against the leaders of the pro-Prop Q political action campaign Love Austin, after they filed an ethics complaint questioning who was funding a different website which claimed the proposal would cost the average homeowner $482 a year. The Prop Q opposition celebrated the vote Tuesday night and promised to continue focusing on City Council. “This is just the beginning of the pushback against the city hall spending we all saw uncovered, in real time, during this campaign,” Save Austin Now posted to X. “The spending must stop, we do not need more taxes,” local attorney Adam Loewy said at an election night watch party. In the weeks before the vote, Prop Q’s supporters denounced the numbers floated by Save Austin Now as dishonest. But there was widespread anecdotal evidence on social media that the affordability argument foregrounded by the group was resonating with Austinites from different ideological backgrounds. Activist Susana Almanza, former state Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos, and former Council Member Ora Houston came out against the measure. A pair of mini-scandals reported by the Austin American-Statesman, about the city’s adoption of an expensive new logo and the Council members’ approval of higher budgets for their lunches and travel, also got traction. CM Alter said that the Statesman stories resonated because people already believed Council was spending too much. “We need to look at all parts of the budget, our office budgets included,” he said. “And when cuts are made, I believe cuts need to be made across the board, including our office budgets. And we’ll be having that discussion.” Mayor Watson called on City Manager T.C. Broadnax to bring forward a new budget soon. “[T]he manager and, subsequently, the Council should adjust the original proposed budget, if at all, modestly,” Watson advised in a message after the vote. “This is not the time to engage in or relitigate significant, drawn out, divisive policy fights in the budget. There was general agreement as to the original proposal.” The new budget will inevitably include cuts to many programs that had the deep support of Council members and community advocates. CM Siegel said he didn’t think the voters “appreciate how deep these cuts are going to have to be.” CM Fuentes said, “That might look like fewer paramedics, that might look like less people getting into housing, that might be less individuals getting access to mental health assistance. And that’s going to have a tremendous impact on our community, and particularly on the homelessness front.” Union leaders worry that cutting the programs will lead to layoffs for city workers. “The positions in Austin Public Health alone that were built into the Prop Q proposal, we’re talking about hundreds of members,” Brydan Summers, president of AFSCME Local 1624, said. “As we look at the budget, what do we start taking away to balance it? That’s going to be parks and libraries, the things that are considered nonessential. And again, for us, all of those programs are tied to people’s jobs directly.” The mayor and several Council members also spoke of the necessity to conduct what CM Duchen called a “top-to-bottom efficiency audit of the kind recently undertaken by Houston,” a proposal Duchen has been pushing since the August budget negotiations. “We’ve enjoyed surpluses for a long time and have not had the necessity to go look closely at a lot of the city spending,” Duchen said. “I think this really gives us a chance to trim away some of the duplication, the inefficiencies, and possibly include some of the low-cost/high-impact budget amendments that were part of Prop Q.” These numbers are totals for Travis County only. A handful of neighborhoods in Williamson and Hays counties also voted on the measure. Source: Travis County Clerk This article appears in November 7 • 2025.
