Does This Year's Austin Budget Reflect Our City's Values?
Note: This piece was first published on August 4, 2026 on the Neha for Austin City Council Substack.
Do you remember the NBCUniversal 2009-2015 TV series “Parks and Recreation”?
If so, you’ve likely laughed at clips of Ron Swanson (played by actor Nick Offerman) try to shrink the City of Pawnee budgets to oblivion, or you’ve likely rallied behind main character Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) as she fights against all odds to make a difference through actions such as converting a dirt pit to a park. This light-hearted show was many people’s introduction to city budget fights, and the different ways that local government works (or some may argue doesn’t work).
Well, I’ll do my best to make the details of our Austin City budget, and how budget reviews work in our own local Austin city government, just as interesting as Hollywood might. :)
Welcome to the first round of my Austin Budget deep-dive series. I’m going to do my best to Leslie Knope this with cheerful yet grounded energy… because the reality of Austin’s budgetary needs are neither fictional nor much laughing matter.
Here’s the main point - for two very intense weeks we have an opportunity for community discussions; and we have the opportunity to see how city government and city council make decisions that impact the lives of seniors, families, and individuals. All of us are figuring out how to survive in an increasingly tough macroeconomic climate on a local, state, and federal level. There’s a lot at stake!
The numbers, in binders and bullet points
Sources: City of Austin, Fiscal Year 2026-2027 Proposed Budget Vol I and Vol II and Taxpayer Impact Statement.
Total proposed budget: $6.63 billion for Fiscal Year 2026-27. This budget is about 5% larger than the current year’s adopted budget.
This $6.6B budget number is on top of a separate $6.2 billion in new capital appropriations (multi-year infrastructure authority, not a single year's cash spending — the two figures aren't meant to be added together).
General Fund (the tax-supported operating budget) is set to increase by 3.6% to $1.54B. However, purely by numbers most of the larger increase is concentrated in the city enterprise funds (Austin Energy ($62.6M), Austin Water ($37M), Austin Airport ($62.1M which is a 13.9% increase tied to the airport's ongoing expansion) and related debt service, not general city services.
Total citywide taxable property value has reportedly decreased by 7.8B (3.4%) to $222.0 billion. It is attributed to real estate market conditions and increase in homestead exemptions for seniors and vulnerable populations.
Proposed property tax rate of 57.953 cents per $100 of value, up from 52.4017 cents. This increase when combined with utility rate increases is estimated to add ~$350 a year to a typical household’s total city costs. It is also expected to raise the median homestead property tax bill by about $2,248 (an increase of ~ $174–177). (KXAN)
Important to note that this property tax increase follows a failed ballot measure from last year’s November 2025. Austin voters rejected Proposition Q, which would have let the city raise more property tax revenue than the state’s 3.5% cap allows. This forced a mid-year rewrite of the prior budget because Prop Q would have brought about $110 million in annual revenue.
“Public safety” has been totaled as 64.7% of the General Fund ($994.6M).
Social services face real cuts. This budget proposal has ~$8 million in social service reductions, about $5 million of it from nonprofit contracts. In an earlier staff draft, there was a proposed cut to the housing voucher program for people exiting homelessness which the city’s own housing director warned could displace hundreds of people before City Council members pushed back. Note- the budget also calls out a further $8.8 million reduction in social services grants over three consecutive years.
A wage freeze impacting city of Austin employees…but not leadership. The city's own five-year forecast states the FY 2028 budget assumes no wage increase for civilian employees. Austin's highest-paid public employee is the City Manager T.C. Broadnax ($538,608 in total compensation). Also important to call out here is that in 2022 Council voted to raise its own base salary by 40% (from $83,158 to $116,688) and also the Mayor's salary by 37% (from $97,656 to $134,191). This was the first such increase to council members in 16 years, funded by an unexpected sales tax windfall rather than a budget line anyone had to cut to pay for it.
Some money in this budget can't be redirected through the ordinary annual budget process, though the reasons differ. Project Connect ($194.0M) is funded through a permanent tax rate increase voters approved in 2020 as a "tax rate election" to independent body Austin Transit Partnership. Council can't redirect it on its own, and the only real paths to change it are another voter referendum or the Texas Legislature.
A political lens at what’s been proposed (because it’s always political!)
City Manager Broadnax has framed this budget around fiscal restraint: “Like the community members we serve, we must live within our means”, he wrote in page 16 of the Vol 1 of the Budget document section “Message from the Manager”.
But here’s what is missing from that statement. 'Living within your means' usually implies the city planned for the lean years before they arrived. Broadnax started working in his role in May 2024. Austin's own reserves are set to miss the city's own savings target the same year it's asking residents and nonprofits to absorb the shortfall. So one may ask whose means, exactly, weren't lived within? Standard public finance practice says build reserves in good years so a city can hold the safety net steady in a downturn. Austin seems to have been doing the opposite.
I agree with critics in that City Manager Broadnax’s framing understates how much of this budget’s pressure is self-imposed, and is also a result of decisions made over the last few years without consideration of challenging, cyclical financial downturns in economies.
Here are three things in particular that stand out —
1. “Public Safety” budget decisions of the past, and the overwhelming focus on police as the tool
Let's start with an understanding that police join the force to play the role of "law enforcement." Officers are trained for confrontation and use of force. Too many tragic encounters amount to evidence that they're not trained, or not consistently equipped, for de-escalating a mental health crisis. Asking APD to be the first and only response to what may be a person in psychiatric distress is a flawed public safety strategy for everyone involved. It's a mismatch between the job and the resource sent to do it. With this budget, this becomes an even severe mismatch especially with so little investment planned in the mental health response resources that may serve communities better.
The Austin Police budget, in the context of the HB 1900 floor, reflects a choice to comply with state law without contesting it. Rewind back to 2024 (the same year that Broadnax started in his role). Notably, only Council Member Zo Qadri was the single dissenting vote on the October 2024 police contract. That decision is now driving much of this year's locked-in cost, something CM Qadri called out in that "prioritiz[ed] the police department over all other city services and employees for the next five years."
What City Council will decide this budget year is particularly relevant following the July 24, 2026 police killing of 17-year-old Anthoneil Williams II. The young teen called APD for help under mental health duress, and his call was answered by APD officers with already problematic records. When officers arrived, Williams was in a troubled state but unarmed, carrying only a water bottle. Video shows officers firing more than a dozen shots as he fell, then firing again as he lay on the ground, with at least two officers reloading before the video ends. Instead of de-escalating the situation as public safety should be trained to do, the handling of this incident has completely broken any limited sense of trust and safety that communities, especially Black and Brown communities, may have with APD. This simply cannot be ignored.
Advocacy groups and residents disrupted a recent City Council budget meeting at Austin City Hall demanding Council to reconsider these additional funds being provided to Austin police budgets (that will set a new floor). It is time to reconsider the balance of police resources being treated as mental health or social service alternatives.
There is also concern around the continued increases in police spending that seem to now function as a contractual and state-mandated floor rather than a discretionary choice each budget cycle. Police's General Fund budget alone is increasing by $24.2 million this year — and city budget documents itemize only $504,000 of that as new spending. The remaining $23.7 million is baseline personnel and wage cost growth under the department's existing five-year labor contract, not new investment in services or capacity.
Grassroots Leadership, Equity Action and other community organizations who have put forth a Community Investment Budget argue that treating police spending increases as "public safety" investment obscures cuts to the mental health and social service side of that same category.
2. Capital Investments Without Accountability and Oversight
The same budget that cuts $8M from social services in FY27 also includes $643 million in capital spending for the Convention Center expansion, a $12.0 million General Fund line for corporate incentive rebates, and locks in $194 million a year for Project Connect by law.
None of that to say those choices on these expenditures were wrong at that time. However, the problematic present day reality is that the Project Connect and Convention Center debt are legally untouchable, as covered earlier in the summary bullets. It's a painful example of how the city leadership had already decided, through a mix of legal commitments and discretionary choices, what gets protected in our budget versus the social safety nets, and what taxpayers can be asked to absorb future shortfalls.
The Convention Center is a sad example of spending without a future visions or even reality checks built in. The $1.6 billion rebuild is proceeding on a bet that Austin’s convention-and-tourism model will still looks like it did a decade ago. However, things are different, even in 2026. SXSW, the city’s own flagship event, and the biggest user of the old convention center shrank to seven days, dropping its second weekend. It’s unclear who the new convention center construction is seeking to serve in a world where corporate budgets, sales conventions, and meeting trends have changed.
Project Connect shows the same pattern on the transit side. Voters approved a $7.1 billion plan in 2020 that promised a direct line to the airport. Costs have since climbed as high as $8.2 billion by some accounting. Most egregiously, the airport connection has been dropped from the first phase entirely, and the route has been cut by more than half .
Once again, we need to question whom is this project intended to serve. I should qualify here that I am extremely pro-transit as someone who does not own a car in Austin (I only learned to drive when I moved to Texas 10 years ago) and I overwhelmingly prefers mass transit and walkable urban experiences.
3. Cutting Social Safety Nets at Exactly the Wrong Moment
The U.S. federal reconciliation bill signed in July 2025 cut an estimated $186 billion from SNAP over the next decade, and by mid-2026 more than 3.5 million people had already lost food assistance as a result.
A July 2026 GAO report found rideshare and delivery gig companies (Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Grubhub, Instacart) now rank among the top employers whose workers rely on SNAP and Medicaid, a shift from five years earlier when gig platforms weren't on that list at all. This is in addition the federal public assistance that low-wage workers at mega-corporations such as Walmart and Amazon continue to seek.
Austin’s own city budget document notes that there are about to be harder times ahead. The team cites “global uncertainty with regard to trade, tariffs, and energy prices” and “uncertain federal support” as planning assumptions. Austin’s unemployment rate has increased through 2026. Average hours worked per payroll job have fallen year-over-year. Both are early signs of a softening labor market, layered on top of the AI-driven layoffs already reshaping the local tech sector. Areas that see a boom are construction and financial services.
Serious financial institutions, not just critics of the information technology industry, have been flagging real bubble risk in AI-driven investments. The Bank of England has warned the risk of a sharp correction for the AI boom “has increased,”, as did the Bank for International Settlements in calling out that the debt-fueled surge in artificial intelligence spending risks a painful boom-and-bust cycle, highlighting over-investment, opaque circular financing, and heavy reliance on non-bank credit channels. Betting more of the city’s infrastructure and economic development strategy on the same sector, at the same moment serious institutions are calling it a bubble is a risk when the public needs more stability.
Furthermore, the services this budget is cutting are exactly the ones that help maintain safety and stability during challenging economies — rental assistance and housing vouchers that keep a roof over someone’s head after a layoff; food assistance that covers the gap between paychecks; as well mental health and domestic violence services that people turn to when the stress of job loss and financial strain hits hardest.
Social services are about keeping the fabric of humanity and society together. They are not charity, they are sustainability. It’s the difference between a bad month and losing a home, between a rough patch and a crisis. Deprioritizing these services now, or transferring them into departments not skilled in trauma-informed assistance, in the very same year the city’s own forecast warms of tough times ahead, means fewer places for people to get support and help when they are most likely to need it.
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Now, the General Fund reserves are projected to fall below the city’s own 17% policy target by FY 2028 — the same year a third consecutive round of social service cuts is already planned. The city’s own forecasting identifies it’ll be needed more, not less…
Timeline for public engagement
The official Council process and the separate district-by-district community meetings run on two different tracks that don’t always line up cleanly or with time to spare.
The above timeline image should help show why seeing the big picture matters, and especially observing how little runway is actually available to influence the budget decisions.
Official Council budget process:
July 10 - City Manager’s proposed budget released.
July 21 - Work session of the Austin City Council.
July 22 - Budget work session on Community Health & Sustainability, Homelessness & Housing, and Social Service Contracts.
July 23 - Regular meeting of the Austin City Council.
July 28 - Budget work session on Economic & Workforce Development, Mobility & Critical Infrastructure, and High Performing Government.
July 30 - Budget work session on Public Safety and High Performing Government II; public hearing to set the maximum tax rate and take public comment on the budget.
August 4 - Budget work session (tentative).
August 6 - Budget work session on Council budget amendments — this is the last formal point where Council members can still change the proposal before it’s finalized.
August 12-14 - Tax rate public hearing, utility rate hearings, and budget and tax rate adoption.
Where to learn more and how to weigh in
City budget hub: austintexas.gov/budget-excellence/city-budget . This is where the proposed and adopted budget documents, five-year financial forecasts, and tax rate history going back 15 years (most of what I referenced in this post)
Budget engagement portal: publicinput.com/budgetfy2026
Council meeting registration: austintexas.gov/council/meetings — this is where speaker registration links are posted before each public hearing; registration windows are typically short (often opening and closing within the same week), so check early if you want to testify.
What you can actually do right now - since the window is closing soon:
Register to speak at this and next week’s August public hearing on the tax rate and budget (both online and in-person registration are available, with in-person registration at Austin City Hall, 301 W 2nd St.);
Attend your district’s community budget meeting and/or contact your Council member’s office directly (social media generally gets more responses) if the meeting has already happened.