City voters won’t consider a measure aimed at stopping the Austin Convention Center redevelopment and reallocating associated tourism tax revenue this spring, although the group behind the proposal is now seeking to call an election on the issue this fall.
The big picture
After years of planning, the $1.6 billion convention center expansion project was formally detailed in early 2025. The facility was then closed for what’s expected to be a four-year demolition and redevelopment; ground broke last spring, and the old convention center was torn down by the fall.
The new complex will be open for business by late 2028 with about 620,000 square feet of rentable space, a roughly 70% increase over the old convention center, and room for a future expansion of 140,000 square feet. Exposition space will also move underground, and portions of the property at 500 E. Cesar Chavez St. will reopen to vehicle traffic and as public gathering areas.
The project has advanced with support from City Council, and local hoteliers and other tourism officials have said it’s critical both for their operations and drawing major events in Austin. The redevelopment also received pushback from a group seeking to halt construction, but its effort to have city voters weigh in for or against the project stalled out in court this year.
The specifics
The Austin United political action committee ran a petition campaign last year for a ballot measure seeking to halt the old convention center’s demolition, with voter approval.
The PAC’s petition also called to reprioritize some of the city’s hotel occupancy tax, or HOT, revenue to “substantially increase promotion and support” for other cultural and tourism initiatives. Those taxes, collected from hotel and short-term rental stays across Austin, are dedicated to both the convention center project and various city cultural arts initiatives under state law.
Austin United submitted its petition to call an election on its proposed ordinance last fall. In Austin, resident petition initiatives must be signed by at least 20,000 registered city voters to be validated and either prompt an election, or have City Council adopt the ordinance outright.
Supporters of the Austin United campaign in October submitted a petition aiming to pause the convention center redevelopment and shift how the city uses tourism tax revenue. (Ben Thompson/Community Impact)While the PAC turned in more than 25,000 signatures, a review by City Clerk Erika Brady and her team—including a third-party random statistical sampling—resulted in thousands being discounted due to duplication, residency, voter registration and other issues. Brady said the petition drive fell just short with an estimated 19,506 valid names.
Austin United disagreed with that finding, prompting a lawsuit against the city in an attempt to validate some signatures and hold a May election. After a two-day trial in late January, Judge Jessica Mangrum sided with Austin and upheld the petition’s rejection.
“We are pleased with the Court’s ruling and thank the judge for the thoughtful review of this case. The decision affirms that the City Clerk adhered to established legal procedures and properly disqualified only signatures that did not meet legal standards,” an Austin spokesperson said in a statement. “With this matter resolved, we are ready to refocus on the Convention Center project and move forward on a development that will benefit Austin for years to come.”
A Feb. 6 statement from Austin United said the PAC strongly disagreed with Mangrum’s decision, and that it was immediately organizing a new petition drive for a potential November election.
“This ruling allows the City to sidestep a public vote and move forward with a $5.6 billion, 32-year debt-financed project without a direct vote of the people, despite clear evidence that thousands of eligible voters were wrongfully excluded from the petition process,” the PAC said.
The PAC also sought emergency review by the Texas Supreme Court in a final attempt to compel Brady to certify the petition and land the original measure on this May’s ballot. However, the court didn’t take action before the Feb. 13 election filing deadline. Paul Trahan, an attorney representing Brady, called the PAC’s request “wholly improper” with an approach that disregarded the recent trial outcome.
Dig deeper
Attorneys for the city and Austin United laid out their cases in the petition dispute to Mangrum Jan. 28-29.
Arguing for the city, Trahan repeatedly said Brady’s team “bent over backwards” to count every signature it legally could and properly disqualified signatures that weren’t valid. He also said the original petition, which called to pause the convention center’s demolition, is no longer viable as the old building was fully torn down months ago.
“Even if they had gotten the required number of signatures, the ordinance can no longer do what they told signers it would do. We believe that renders it legally infirm. You simply can’t put ballot language in front of voters that we all acknowledge is wrong,” he said.
With Brady unavailable at trial, Deputy City Clerk Stephanie Hall testified about how the city reviewed the PAC’s thousands of submitted signatures.
Hall said a majority of clerk’s office employees spent a month on the in-person validation project, which the city estimated cost “at least” $62,000 of staff time. The clerk’s team was responsible for determining whether signers filled out all required parts of the petition, then matching their records with local voter rolls to ensure they were registered within city limits.
Lawyers representing Austin presented in court on the city clerk’s review of the thousands of signatures submitted for Austin United’s petition. (Ben Thompson/Community Impact)Tom Sager, a statistics professor at The University of Texas at Austin, also testified about the signature sampling process he oversaw. Sager has served as an independent contractor for Austin assisting with similar sampling for all of the city’s resident-initiated petitions since the early 2000s.
Sampling to determine a petition’s validity is allowed under election law when large volumes of signatures are involved, as is the case in Austin. Sager detailed how his proprietary formula was used to randomly select lines from a spreadsheet compiled by the clerk’s office, which corresponded to petition signers that were then reviewed.
Austin United’s lawyers pushed back on some of Sager’s and the city’s methodology. They claimed Austin’s of Sager’s statistical method wasn’t transparent, and that the clerk’s office disqualified dozens or hundreds of people that should have counted toward the petition total due to minor errors on petition forms.
One of their key arguments centered around whether voters in Austin’s extraterritorial jurisdiction, or ETJ—unincorporated area within 5 miles of city limits—were eligible to participate in the petition drive. ETJ voters typically can’t vote in city elections unless a ballot item directly concerns them, and scores of those residents were rejected from the petition last year.
Austin United argued their removal was faulty as HOT-related funding has previously gone to initiatives in the ETJ, meaning the convention center measure could be relevant to them. And as several hundred ETJ residents were disqualified by the city, the PAC’s team argued their inclusion would’ve pushed the petition over the 20,000-signature threshhold.
In closing, attorney Bobby Levinski said the clerk’s review produced several irregularities that invalidated hundreds of registered voters for technicalities.
“The law should not prevent the voice of the people from being heard by the application of an empty technicality,” he said.
While several arguments against the convention center redevelopment itself were also laid out by the PAC’s lawyers, Mangrum noted the lawsuit concerned only the petition validation process and that issues related to the project were irrelevant.
“At the end of the day, the court is tasked with determining, ‘Were the decisions made by the clerk in disqualifying signatures appropriate under state law or not?’” she said. “I’m not going to be making a choice about, what’s the better policy, or what should the city do, what should the petitioners be putting forth? That’s not going to be any part of my inquiry.”
Austin United said it was notified of Mangurm’s decision against the PAC by email Feb. 6, and no written court order was available as of Feb. 16.