Austin city workers fear that the plan to consolidate the city’s information technology staff into one central department – called the “One ATS” initiative, or OATS – could lead to hundreds of layoffs over the next two years. They also believe the consolidation could harm city residents’ health and safety. AFSCME Local 1624, the city workers’ union, presented a letter to City Manager T.C. Broadnax on March 4, demanding that he halt OATS.
“Our members in offices and in the field throughout the City of Austin and Travis County stand in solidarity with city IT workers whose expertise they rely on day in and day out,” the letter, signed by AFSCME leaders Brydan Summers and Carol Guthrie, states. “OATS will reduce the quality of our work, jeopardize our services, threaten our livelihoods, and put our city at risk.”
AFSCME presented the letter the same day that Kerrica Laake, the chief information officer of Austin Technology Services – the city’s dedicated IT department and the “ATS” in One ATS – shared information with the city’s Audit and Finance Committee suggesting that Austin could save $200 million a year by consolidating IT staff. Laake said the city spends 81% more on IT services than peer cities. She said only about 30% of city IT staff works in the Austin Technology Services department, with the remaining 70% spread out in other departments like Austin Energy, Austin Water, and Transportation and Public Works.
“We have duplicate functions, redundant systems, inconsistent standards,” Laake said. “And our departments are maturing at a different level across the city in terms of their technology capabilities.”
Laake’s data comes from research conducted last summer by Gartner Consulting, a third-party auditor working under a contract with the city. Gartner shared an initial report, which has not been made public, on the IT services with city leaders last August, according to the Austin American-Statesman. The report – which the Statesman and AFSCME obtained through open records requests – estimates that the city employs 583 more IT workers than comparable cities. Gartner recommends consolidating the city’s IT workers and cutting the number of applications used to provide the services. City officials have repeatedly said that the consolidation would not necessarily lead to layoffs.
AFSCME’s letter to Broadnax notes that several departments have raised internal concerns about the consolidation and stresses that the city’s IT workers perform jobs that safeguard residents’ health and safety. “Some of these include Austin Energy’s coordination with ERCOT, traffic signaling and emergency traffic controls, air traffic communications, GPS guidance for first responders, protection of private health records and personally identifiable information, and development and improvement of department-specific tools and applications,” the letter states. “These systems and the knowledge to operate them are not interchangeable.”
AFSCME members rallied on the steps of City Hall on March 4 to introduce the “Stop One ATS” campaign, with workers from different departments warning about the effects they believe the consolidation will have. Braniff Davis, a geospatial analyst with the Austin Fire Department Wildfire Division, said OATS would “drastically gut our ability to fight wildfires by moving me and my staff to ATS.”
David Gimnich, an analyst with Austin Transportation and Public Works, said it is essential that his team stay embedded at TPW to provide lifesaving information to colleagues in the field during emergencies. “If we don’t, those operational decision-makers won’t know who to contact, those field crews won’t know exactly where to go and what to do in those split-moment decisions,” he said.
Austin Technology Services’ Trish Niswander said the department is not ready to absorb hundreds of people in the consolidation. “This whole process has been totally obscured from the employees inside the department,” she said. “We have not been able to provide adequate input.”
This article appears in March 13 • 2026.