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Quote of the Day
“We want to do our best to assist the Planning Commission so they don’t have four-hour meetings every time they meet.”
— Commissioner Taylor Major, from Zoning and Platting Commission may want duties swap with Planning Commission
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Travis County proposes raising property taxes to pay for flood repairs
From Katy McAfee, KUT News:
The Travis County Commissioners Court is expected to raise property taxes to pay for damage caused by the flooding on July 5.
Commissioners have until Oct. 1 to decide on the 9.12% tax hike. If approved, the average Travis County homeowner can expect to pay $200 more than what they paid the previous year, according to the county’s preliminary 2026 budget.
State and federal emergency disaster declarations issued after the flood allow the county to raise property taxes without voter approval. Typically, the county can’t raise property taxes more than 3.5% without voters’ OK.
Zoning and Platting Commission may want duties swap with Planning Commission
From Miles Wall:
Specifically, Fouts said, the Zoning and Platting Commission duties would expand to encompass zoning cases, site-specific conditional overlays, amendments to site plans and other smaller documents, variances, plats, conditional use permits, restrictive covenants and “site-specific neighborhood plan amendments,” which Fouts said are “apparently quite common.” Fouts said they were still discussing Planned Unit Developments (PUDs) and Planned Development Areas (PDAs).
Meanwhile, the Planning Commission would retain work related to neighborhood and small area plans, transit-oriented developments and anything related to wider policy and legislating, like land use code amendments.
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ULI contemplates the local environmental impact of AI
Central Texas—particularly Austin, Hays, and Caldwell counties—is emerging as one of the country’s fastest-growing frontiers for hyperscale and co-location data center development. Panelists at a recent Urban Land Institute discussion described how the number of data center proposals in the region has surged in the last two years alone.
“We’ve seen no fewer than a dozen (data center) proposals in our area recently,” said Mike Kamerlander, president of the Hays Caldwell Economic Development Partnership. “Before 2023, we’d seen only a couple in our 15-year history.”
This growth aligns with ERCOT’s latest forecasts, which show that data centers could account for more than 24,000 megawatts of load on the Texas grid by 2031 — a staggering figure nearly eight times the peak load of the entire City of Austin, which is around 3,000 MW. Texas could soon host as much data center load as the entire U.S. has today.
As the number of proposed data centers grows across the Austin region, so does scrutiny over their potential impact on water supplies—particularly in drought-sensitive areas like Hays, Caldwell, and Travis counties, where many communities rely on strained aquifers.
Mitch Nelson, who is the director of entitlements at data center development company Tract said his firm now routinely assesses cooling options based on what’s realistic for each local basin.
The growing number of air-cooled systems in data centers use significantly less water than traditional evaporative or water-based cooling, though they are less energy-efficient and more expensive to operate.
Panelists noted that city staff and permitting officials are now asking for peak usage forecasts and pushing developers to either design systems with minimal or recycled water demands, or invest in private on-site infrastructure to avoid burdening local systems. In some cases, this includes commitments to recycled water loops or hybrid systems that only draw from public sources during rare peak conditions.
Nelson said while water may not be the ultimate limiting factor for data center expansion in the region, it is becoming a high-stakes design constraint and a political consideration, especially as residents and city leaders weigh the tradeoffs between economic growth and long-term sustainability.
— Chad Swiatecki
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Elsewhere in the News
The Austin American-Statesman accepts the challenge to find waste in the budget and reveals some questionable spending from the city manager’s office and Council members past and present.
CBS Austin looks at how this year’s city budget addresses flood prevention and management.
In looking for park funding answers, Council members contemplate selling naming rights.
The blowback over a new COTA-based Convention Center hath begun.
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