More than two-thirds of Austin residents say they’re willing to support a tax increase to fund the city’s next bond package, with housing, transportation, and parks emerging as the most widely shared priorities among the 2,002 people who responded to a recent public survey.
Those findings were presented at Monday’s meeting of the Bond Election Advisory Task Force, where members also reviewed long-term capital needs for cultural facilities and confirmed key milestones in the bond planning timeline, including a curated shortlist of projects totaling more than $3 billion expected this week, and a series of public town halls scheduled for September.
The survey, conducted as part of the city’s community engagement phase for the 2026 bond, asked residents to identify pressing needs, allocate a hypothetical $100 budget across issue areas, and indicate whether they’d support a property tax increase to fund new projects. In open-ended responses, 34 percent of participants named housing and homelessness as Austin’s most urgent issue, followed by 22 percent who cited transportation and mobility infrastructure.
When asked to allocate spending, respondents directed the largest shares toward transportation (19.8%), housing and homelessness (18.5 percent), and parks and parkland (16.3 percent). About 70 percent said they would support a tax increase, with the most common response being a willingness to pay an additional $10 per month.
The results were drawn from 2,002 responses collected through an online platform and in-person events held throughout the spring and early summer. Staff noted that input was received from every Council district, using a mix of digital and physical outreach including postcards, email blasts, and community pop-ups to generate more than 53,000 datapoints.
Sustainability also emerged as a consistent priority, with 81 percent of survey respondents saying it was very or somewhat important for the city to consider sustainability or “climate” when selecting bond projects.
The meeting included presentations from the city’s newly formed Office of Arts, Culture, Music & Entertainment, which oversees 16 major cultural properties and is revising its initial bond request to reflect updated goals and equity concerns. Task force members also heard from Rally Austin, which proposed an expanded cultural trust to address more than $300 million in unmet facility needs and from Municipal Court staff, who requested a permanent North Austin location to replace leased space.
Task force members also began discussing how to structure their upcoming deliberations, weighing whether to develop a shared set of evaluation criteria across all working groups or allow each group to set its own. Broad filters such as sustainability, equity, geographic distribution and long-term operational costs are expected to guide the scoring process as the group narrows the city’s $10.4 billion in identified needs to a more feasible shortlist.
City financial staff have previously recommended a bond cap of approximately $687 million, based on current debt capacity and the city’s long-term financial modeling. That figure represents less than 7 percent of the total capital needs identified by city departments during internal planning processes. The curated shortlist expected later this week is expected to narrow that pool to about $3.9 billion in projects deemed most ready for consideration.
The task force is expected to submit a final package of projects and financial requests to City Council in early 2026. Council will make the ultimate decision on the composition of the bond package, which would go before voters next November. That proposal would likely follow a tax rate election expected to go before voters this fall to address budget deficits forecast for the next several years.
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