Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax, left, and Mayor Kirk Watson discuss a new city budget at City Hall on Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025. The Austin City Council is set to vote on a budget that includes millions of dollars in spending cuts after voters rejected Proposition Q in November, a ballot measure that would have raised property taxes and generated $110 million in new revenue.
Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman
The Austin City Council is expected Thursday to vote on an amended ordinance creating a citywide efficiency review program, an initiative Mayor Kirk Watson launched weeks after Austin voters overwhelmingly rejected a major city property tax hike in November.
Watson and several council members said the failure of the measure, known as Proposition Q, reflected deep skepticism among residents about how the city spends taxpayer dollars and underscored the need to demonstrate fiscal discipline. The ordinance now under consideration would establish a “comprehensive efficiency assessment program” to examine city operations and identify potential savings with the help of an outside consultant.
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“If the economy goes south, if other pressures force us to make difficult decisions, [those] decisions will be less severe having done this work and identifying efficiencies, cost savings, creating resources or freeing up resources that are being spent,” Council Member Marc Duchen, who proposed the citywide efficiency study, said.
Austin City Council member Marc Duchen speaks at a city council meeting onThursday, Sept. 25, 2025.
Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman
In a Feb. 2 letter to council, union leaders said members had “strong concerns about the intent, impact and timeline” of the ordinance and urged officials to slow the process, arguing the measure had been posted for action too quickly and without meaningful consultation with frontline employees.
Save Austin Now volunteers Rebecca Young and Kelley Wallace validate signatures on a petition to change the city charter and force the city to hold an audit at their headquarters downtown, Feb. 6, 2026. Save Austin Now will check that all the signatures on the petition belong to City of Austin voters and make a count of valid signatures before delivering the petitions to the clerk.
Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman
Save Austin Now President Matt Mackowiak stamps a “00001” on the first page of validated signatures at SAN’s headquarters downtown, Feb. 6, 2026. The page contained two signatures- of Mackowiak and his wife.
Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman
“We are writing this letter to call on the Austin City Council to operate at the speed of trust,” the union’s president, Brydan Summers, wrote in the four-page letter, which detailed a variety of additional concerns with the audit, including the cost and expected return on investment of hiring a third-party consultant to conduct the analysis.
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The amended ordinance council will vote on Thursday incorporates several changes to address those concerns, including directing the city auditor to create a process for employees to submit suggestions and requiring written responses from department leaders to any recommendations. It also mandates notification to the city’s Audit and Finance Committee if proposals involve major reorganizations, reductions in force or outsourcing. The revised language acknowledges city employees as partners in identifying efficiencies and signals a preference for minimizing layoffs and privatization.
Brydan Summers, President of AFSCME 1624, speaks to reporters at a news conference at Parque Zaragosa to announce the “Care Not Cuts” campaign to support Proposition Q on Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025. A coalition of unions, first responders, social workers, and community leaders announced a coalition of over 20 organizations in support of the upcoming City of Austin’s tax rate election Proposition Q.
Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman
The Watson-backed measure appears to have sufficient support to clear the 11-member council. Duchen and three other council members — Zo Qadri, Krista Laine and Mike Siegel — told the American-Statesman they planned to vote in favor of the ordinance while Council Member Ryan Alter has expressed support for it publicly.
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Summers told the American-Statesman the union now supports the ordinance but remains concerned about the potential for layoffs amid the city’s ongoing budget crunch.
“What we’re more interested in looking into is: Do we have a bloated upper management structure at the city? Are there too many people in the executive roles, which are the highest paid?” Are we making the best use of our contractual resources, our software systems and things like that?” Summers said. “They will find inefficiency there, and [it] will be good for us to resolve it.”
Brydan Summers, second from right, President of AFSCME 1624, joins Austin workers and first responders to announce the “Care Not Cuts” campaign to support Proposition Q at a news conference at Parque Zaragosa on Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025. A coalition of unions, first responders, social workers, and community leaders announced a coalition of over 20 organizations in support of the upcoming City of Austin’s tax rate election Proposition Q.
Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman
Steve Goodson, an accounting professor at the University of Texas who reviewed the revised ordinance, said it was a “more mature approach” to seeking efficiency in government and that the AFSCME additions strengthened the policy.
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“The timeframe allows for a mature process that will be fair to those that are being reviewed and provide better information to the citizens and to the decisionmakers,” he said. “Looking at these things can be good and will provide more effective and efficient services to the citizens of Austin.”
A similar efficiency push in 2020 in Sacramento was successful but some of the recommendations were difficult to implement due to political blowback, said Jorge Oseguera, who was the city auditor at the time.
“It is a worthwhile effort to undergo,” he said. “I think the big question is: Is there political appetite to pursue some of the more challenging options that come out of an effort like this? That, only time will tell.”
The efficiency effort comes amid an external push to enshrine a similar audit requirement in city charter.
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That effort, led by the Save Austin Now PAC, originally aimed to get a measure on the May ballot to require a similar review. After missing the deadline to submit petition signatures to the city clerk earlier this month, the PAC told the Statesman they expect to get the amendment on the November ballot.
“Save Austin Now supports any effort to seriously review city spending to seek efficiencies, but this ordinance is not a serious substitute for the charter amendment,” Save Austin Now co-chair Matt Mackowiak said, adding that a charter amendment can only be removed by another charter amendment while city ordinances can be overturned with a council vote.
The parallel efforts come not just amid voter skepticism of the city’s fiscal oversight but also an ongoing budget crisis driven by a variety of other factors including the expiration of federal stimulus dollars, rising costs and state-imposed limits on property tax growth.
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Council is also set to vote Thursdayon two austerity-minded policies: a framework City Manager T.C. Broadnax will use to decide what social service contracts to recommend cutting in next year’s budget — and a “decision tree” that will help the council decide whether to ask voters to approve a bond package in November.