City Council returns this week from their annual June meeting hiatus, and they’ve got a lot of work to get through.
The agenda for their July 18 meeting currently sits at a whopping 184 items. It includes land use tweaks intended to make operating a child care facility more affordable, as well as improvements to two density bonus programs (which allow builders to construct taller buildings in exchange for adding affordable apartments). One density bonus change centers around the kind of infill development Council hopes to boost with the suite of reforms, under the Home Options for Mobility and Equity initiative, which they passed earlier this year.
But leading up to the meeting, some Council offices were focused on when to ask voters to approve a bond package aimed at combating climate change. Council Member Ryan Alter had been pressing for a bond election this November, writing in a Council message board post, “Climate change is an emergency …. To argue otherwise is to ignore what is right outside our front door – hotter and hotter summers, a decreasing water supply, and more extreme storms that inflict severe damage on our homes, trees, utilities, and daily life.”
“Climate change is an emergency.” – City Council Member Ryan Alter
Mayor Kirk Watson was on the other side of the Council debate, pushing for a bond no later than 2026. In his own post, Watson wrote that a climate bond initiative “must be appropriately conceived, well-reasoned, complete, and inclusive.” He suggested the “no later than 2026” language to give advocates, city staff, and Council time to develop a robust climate change response program where a bond initiative may end up just serving as one piece of a broader program.
“Anything the Manager’s office would bring to us at this point would be piecemeal and lack the rigor we should want,” Watson wrote of a 2024 bond election. Unsaid in the mayor’s post but very much a factor in the behind-the-scenes decision-making at City Hall per conversations with Council sources are the two tax rate elections voters will already be asked to consider. One is a tax increase proposed by the Austin ISD Board of Trustees and another by the Travis County Commissioners Court to support child care programs. Adding a bond initiative on top of that, in an already tough economic environment, could be a big ask for voters.
So now Council is set to approve a resolution, authored by Watson, that will direct city staff to work on two items: “a comprehensive bond package that funds and addresses climate, infrastructure, and any other public improvements” that could be presented to voters no later than 2026, and a “comprehensive climate implementation program” which would contain the bond.
The mayor’s proposal has received overwhelming Council support – including from Ryan Alter – and is virtually certain to pass.
This article appears in July 19 • 2024.