Every Austin Bond Since 1984

Friends & Neighbors,

I’ve now spent a lot of my own Substack space grading the 2026 parks and libraries bond against my own standard. What I hadn’t done yet was step back and ask a bigger question: how does this one actually compare to every other time Austin has asked you for this kind of money?

So I went and built the list. This is City of Austin bonds only, not Austin ISD, not ACC, not Travis County; those are their own enormous stories for another day. And I’m starting the real accounting in 1984, because that’s where the record gets solid enough to write about.

Before that, a couple of things are worth knowing happened, even without full detail: Austin’s first-ever bond for water power, back in 1890, financed the dam that later failed catastrophically in 1900 (I wrote about that dam here). And in 1928, voters approved $150,000 for a permanent library building, the seed of what eventually became the Austin History Center. Somewhere between 1900 and 1983, there’s a real, comprehensive story still waiting to be pieced together from the archives. This isn’t that story. This is 1984 to now.

A note on how I built this: the figures above come from the city’s own capital planning FAQ page, contemporaneous KUT, KXAN, and Austin Monitor reporting, and the 2018 official bond election booklet. Where I couldn’t confirm a hard number, I said so rather than guess.

The Pattern Nobody Points Out

Line these up, and a few things jump out that don’t show up when you only look at one bond at a time.

First: Austin has failed at this exactly once in the last forty-plus years, and the full story is more interesting than “it lost.” The name “Project Connect” goes back to 2013, when a city advisory group started developing an urban rail proposal under that name. Capital Metro and the city took that plan to voters in November 2014 as a $1 billion rail-and-roads bond, pitched at the time as the largest single bond package in Austin history. It lost decisively, taking just 43% of the vote citywide.

Capital Metro didn’t drop the name. It spent the next six years reworking the entire vision, and brought Project Connect back to voters in 2020 as a very different package: a dedicated tax-rate proposition (Prop A) plus a $460 million transportation bond (Prop B). Prop A passed with 58% of the vote, and the accompanying Prop B bond passed with 67%. Same brand, same underlying ambition, two completely different outcomes six years apart, because the second attempt was rebuilt from the specific reasons the first one failed. Everything since 2014, the $720 million mobility bond in 2016, the $925 million mega-bond in 2018, the $295 million package on the ballot right now, has been built in that first failure’s shadow, whether the people writing them say so out loud or not. A city that gets burned asking for too much, too fast, tends to come back smaller, more specific, or willing to spend years rebuilding trust before asking again. You can see that instinct all over the 2026 package I’ve already written about.

Second: the “comprehensive, multi-category bond” is a relatively recent habit, not a constant. 1998, 2006, and 2018 all bundled transportation, parks, libraries, housing, and public safety into single elections, spaced almost exactly eight years apart in the last two cases. Everything else on this list, 2000, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2020, 2022, was a narrower, single-purpose ask. The 2026 bond is the first standalone parks-and-libraries-only package Austin’s tried at this scale, without transportation or housing riding alongside it. That’s either a sign the city is finally getting more disciplined about what it bundles together, or a sign that 2026 couldn’t get a consensus on anything bigger. I think it’s some of both.

Third: transportation has been in almost every single one of these, in some form, going back to 1998. Roads, mobility, sidewalks, bike infrastructure, it barely ever misses an election. The one time it’s genuinely absent from this list is 2026, the current bond you’re about to vote on. Given how often transportation infrastructure has been part of the ask for almost thirty straight years, its total absence this cycle is worth sitting with on its own.

I Need to Be Direct About Something

Someone close to me read my last bond post and came away thinking I was basically fine with this one. (Yes, Kevin, I’m talking to you. And not another Kevin, who actually liked that piece.) I want to correct that here, plainly, because it matters more to me than the ledger above.

I am not, generally, someone who is okay with bonds. I think the default posture toward more public debt should be skepticism, not enthusiasm, and I said as much back when this was still a $400 million task force proposal. What I did with the 2026 bond, specifically, was run it through the standard I already had: specific, transparent, geographically fair, focused on long-term value, with alternatives considered, because that’s the only honest way I know how to evaluate any single bond fairly, instead of just reacting to a number. Passing that filter better than past bonds did is not the same thing as me being fine with the debt itself. It just means this particular ask was built more carefully than some of the ones before it. I’d still rather the city ask less, less often, and prove it’s exhausted every other option first.

Building this ledger only reinforced that instinct. Look at how fast the city ramped up the pace of asking: One bond in 1984. Then a long gap. Then, starting in 1998, a bond was issued almost every two to four years, without much stopping to ask whether the last one had even been paid down. Is there a reason for that? Maybe. Maybe growth really demands it, maybe infrastructure needs to compound faster than anyone predicted. But nobody at City Hall has ever laid that reasoning out plainly for voters, and I don’t think “the city has always eventually needed more” is actually an answer. It’s just a description of what’s already been happening.

Here’s the mechanism underneath it all and why the pace matters: Every single bond on that table is debt. Not a grant, not found money, not something that appears out of a surplus of left over tax dollars. A “yes” vote means the city borrows the money now and pays it back over twenty to thirty years through your property tax bill, specifically the debt service portion of it, the part that exists purely to cover interest and principal on money already spent. That debt doesn’t retire when a new bond passes. It stacks on top of what’s still outstanding from 2018, from 2016, from 2006. Austin is currently carrying almost $2.4 billion in outstanding debt obligations, and hundreds of millions of dollars from past bonds still haven’t even been spent yet. Every new bond adds to a pile that isn’t finished being paid off, or even finished being spent.

And the current City Council is asking for it in a year when the cost of living in this city is not an abstraction for people, it’s the actual, current reason families are struggling. Water rates are climbing. Energy rates are climbing. The city already raised property taxes 8.3% this year, adopted at the maximum rate allowed without triggering a voter election, on top of everything else. Austin voters rejected a tax rate election outright a little over a year ago, and the message in that vote wasn’t subtle. People are not saying no because they hate parks or hate libraries. They’re saying no because they are doing math at their own kitchen tables that City Hall doesn’t seem to be doing at the same table.

That $40-a-year estimate for a median home sounds small in isolation, and I’ve said that plainly before. But nothing in a family’s budget arrives in isolation. The reality is it arrives stacked on top of the last tax increase, the last rate hike, the last bond that’s still being paid down, and the next one already being planned for 2028. A family living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t experience “$40 more a year” as a rounding error. They experience it as one more thing that got more expensive this year, on top of everything else that already did.

So to be clear, since apparently I wasn’t clear enough the first time: I think parks and libraries matter. I have never said otherwise, and I won’t start now. But caring about parks and libraries and being uneasy about how much debt this city keeps stacking on families who are already stretched thin are not in tension. Both of those things are true for me at the same time, and I don’t think City Hall gets to treat “it’s for a good cause” as a substitute for honestly reckoning with what, again, asking for more debt actually costs the people paying for it.

What This Means for the Bond You’re Actually Voting On

I’ve already told you where I stand on the 2026 parks and libraries bond specifically. Looking at it against this full ledger doesn’t change my verdict, but it does sharpen it. This is a smaller, more specific ask than most of what’s come before it, which is what I said I wanted. It’s also missing an entire category, transportation, that has quietly ridden along in nearly every Austin bond for a generation. Neither of those facts is automatically good or bad. But you should walk into November’s election knowing this isn’t just this year’s bond. It’s one data point in a forty-year pattern of a city relearning, slowly and unevenly, how much to ask for and how to ask for it, and I don’t think that pattern has caught up yet to what families in this city can actually absorb.

Until Next Time,

Mackenzie

P.S. If you want the deep dive on 2026 specifically, that’s here: Grading the Bond.

P.S.S I’m paywalling my upcoming review of Steve Adler’s memoir, coming Friday, and I want to tell you why now rather than let it just show up locked.

That piece is a full read-through of a 280-page book, cross-checked claim by claim against council records, meeting transcripts, and years of local reporting, with original sourcing on a few things nobody else has run down. That’s real hours of work, not a quick reaction, and I’d rather keep doing that kind of digging than something thinner and faster. That only works if enough of you decide it’s worth supporting.

To be clear, this doesn’t change what you’re getting the rest of the week. I’m still putting out three pieces a week, same as I have been. This is about being able to occasionally do the kind of deep dive as I did here that takes real time to get right.

I believe five dollars a month is nominal for that. Less than a coffee, and it goes straight toward making pieces like Friday’s possible. If you’ve already become a paid subscriber, thank you. I mean that. You’re the reason I can keep doing this the way I want to do it, and I don’t take that for granted.

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