City Council Punts Contract Debate While OK’ing Widely Approved Investments • The Austin Chronicle

Last week’s Sept. 10 City Council meeting was not polarizing, depressing, perplexing, or even that interesting. For a brief moment, it was like Austin was a normal city. 

That sense of normalcy was made possible by the exclusion of the only item on the agenda that might have engendered dissension – a proposal to approve 17 contracts with outside consultants worth a total of $5 million. The proposal was thick with city-speak, describing the contracts as necessary for “shared services optimization,” the term City Manager T.C. Broadnax employed this spring as he tried, with only limited success, to consolidate hundreds of city IT workers into a central department in the “One ATS” initiative.

The vagueness of the language caught the attention of Council members Ryan Alter and Mike Siegel. The day before the contracts were to be considered, Alter suggested amending the proposal to require city staff to provide written descriptions of the “scope and objective” of each proposed contract. He also suggested lowering the total allocation to $3 million. 

In a post to the Council message board, Siegel emphasized that city management had provided little information on the contracts and how they might affect the city budget. He pointed out that during the One ATS debate city leaders heard concerns about overspending on consultants and doubts about the quality of advice they provided. He said he wanted to discuss the item at greater length. CM José Velásquez joined Siegel in calling for a deeper discussion. Two hours later, the city took it off the agenda.   

With the consultant contracts off the table, Council was free to approve a series of feel-good measures. One was a tweak to the new Citywide Density Bonus Program rules, which allow developers to construct taller, more profitable residential buildings if they set aside 10% of the units for people making lower incomes. The new rules, approved in May, give developers a “fee in lieu” option: They can pay money into the city’s Housing Trust Fund rather than actually make the affordable units available on-site. The city can then use that money to create affordable housing in other developments. 

Council approved two tweaks to the fee-in-lieu rules. The first requires money deposited into the Housing Trust Fund to be used, whenever possible, to create more deeply affordable housing for people making 30% of the median family income, rather than the higher levels of 60% to 80% MFI. The second prohibits the use of the fee-in-lieu approach for developments with rental units near the future Project Connect light rail line. The idea is to make sure that the city encourages the placement of lower-income families near the stations, CM Zo Qadri said, so they benefit not just from the affordable housing but also from access to inexpensive transit. “We especially have a hard time getting any new low- and moderate-income housing in my district along major transit corridors, because the land is just too expensive,” Qadri explained.

Council also approved one of Mayor Kirk Watson’s priorities, a $2,550,000 re-upping of support for the Austin Infrastructure Academy. The infrastructure academy was created in 2025 to provide workforce training for Austin residents, so they can qualify for good-paying jobs in the mobility and infrastructure-related projects going up around town, like the I-35 redesign, the expansion of the airport, and the imminent construction of the convention center and Project Connect. Watson celebrated the academy’s early successes, saying it has already connected 1,856 Austinites to career opportunities and awarded 210 training scholarships. 

“It’s not just counting the number of new jobs created, but the number of people who are actually getting into jobs that are Austinites,” Watson said. “With around $25 billion worth of mobility and infrastructure projects, this is probably the biggest economic development sector we have. And it creates the opportunity for people to move into those jobs in such a way that they can then afford to stay in Austin.” 

Council also approved funding for three groups providing vital social services: the African American Youth Harvest Foundation, the Austin Asian Community Health Initiative, and SAFE Alliance. The money will support the juvenile delinquency prevention services provided by AAYHF and the work done by the Asian American health initiative to connect linguistically isolated groups with healthcare. SAFE Alliance will receive a one-time payment of $200,000 to keep the domestic violence shelter it operates alongside the city up and running. 

SAFE’s finances have been a concern for city leaders since funding negotiations between the group and the city collapsed last spring, and Council moved the money it had earmarked for SAFE’s forensic nursing program to the Brave Alliance in Williamson County. At the time, SAFE’s leaders were also worried about the funding for Planet SAFE, a program which provides a space for parents to have supervised visits or exchanges of children, when such supervision is ordered by Travis County judges. On Sept. 10, the Travis County Commissioners Court preliminarily approved an allocation of $350,000 to help keep Planet SAFE operating. 

Assuming the allocation remains in the final budget to be voted on later this month, it will be the first time the county has helped fund the program, Commissioner Ann Howard told the Chronicle. “When you think about Planet SAFE, I see that as an extension of the court system – and as safety,” Howard said. “And those are both things that the Texas Constitution requires of county government. When Travis County is ordering families to conduct supervised visitation with their children or supervised drop-off, we shouldn’t shy away from making sure those services are provided.”

This article appears in September 18 • 2026.