You Can Petition to Put a Measure on the Ballot; but What Does That Cost Taxpayers?

"Petition initiative" elections in Austin have become increasingly common as a way for political organizations to push for policy change that may not have been viable through the usual legislative process. Organizations can spend around $150,000, collect at least 20,000 signatures from Austin voters, and voilà, we have an election.

But these elections cost taxpayers real money, too – data provided to City Council in response to a budget question shows that since 2018, the city has spent more than $4 million processing the petitions in support of initiative measures and administering the elections to decide them.

In a budget question document, Council Member Macken­zie Kelly asked staff for a tally of the costs associated with regular and petition initiative elections over the past five years. The Chronicle analyzed the data provided by staff and found that elections in which only local initiatives were on the ballot – i.e., not those in which an initiative was added to the ballot of an already scheduled election, such as the 2018 City Council election – cost a total of $4.3 million. That includes the costs incurred by the city to process petitions submitted in support of a ballot measure, which ranged from about $30,000 in 2018 to more than $83,000 in 2023. That covers the time City Clerk's Office staff spends reviewing petition signatures to make sure they belong to qualifying voters (for petitions with large numbers of signatures, the city pays a statistician, who then uses a statistical sampling method to verify signatures).

Most of the time this process is straightforward, but the police union-backed Austin Police Oversight Act of 2023 (with the same name as the act backed by justice advocates) cost $83,250 to process. That was due partly to hundreds of people asking the clerk to remove their names after the petition campaign was found to be deceptive and misleading, and because the petition was submitted in December when clerk staff were on vacation. Sometimes, the city has to pay to process petitions that don't even make the ballot. In 2021, when Save Austin Now's first attempt at forcing an election to reinstate restrictions on public camping failed, the city still had to pay $59,219 to process it.

Administering the elections is much more expensive; it requires payments to Travis and Williamson counties who actually run the elections, newspaper ads providing notice, and translation services for ballot language. The city spent more than $382,000 to hold an election in November 2021 in which only one item was on the ballot: Save Austin Now's police staffing plan, which voters rejected overwhelmingly.

Supporters often frame the petition initiative process as a vital tool of democracy. But these elections are often decided by a much smaller slice of the electorate than elections that include even local political offices. In 2018, Austin hit about 60% voter turnout; the following year, when Austinites were asked to vote on the expansion of the Neal Kocurek Memorial Austin Convention Center and the city's hotel tax rate, only about 14% of Austin voters turned out.

But change could be coming to Austin's petition initiative process. A Charter Review Commission initiated by Council in March and tasked with considering potential changes to the City Charter – including to the number of signatures required to get a petition initiative on the ballot – has finally seated enough members to begin meeting. The seven volunteers currently serving on the committee are in the process of scheduling their first meeting now.