The City Doesn't Need to Be Involved in This At All

Friends & Neighbors,

A memo landed at City Hall last week responding to a resolution the Council passed back in August 2024: a feasibility study for a future LGBTQIA+ Cultural Center in Austin. I read the full study, all 96 pages plus appendices. This is exactly the kind of item that deserves a careful look at the numbers rather than a reaction to the headline. I want to walk you through what’s actually in it, what Austin has already built like this before, and why I think the timing and the funding mechanism matter more than anything else in this document.

In August 2024, Council passed Resolution 20240814-022 directing the City Manager to study potential sites, funding strategies, and a timeline for a future cultural center. The City spent a small amount of money from the FY2025 budget for the study, hired the Hayat Brown Team with McKinney York Architects, and spent twelve months working with a 12-member community Task Force. The final report doesn’t commit the City to anything. It’s a feasibility study: here’s what a space could look like, here’s what it might cost, here’s how other cities have done it.

The report’s own four recommendations are modest on their face: form an implementation committee, identify an organization to govern it, find funders, and find a physical space. Nothing in the report obligates the Council to spend any additional money beyond the small amount already spent on the study itself.

This may come as a surprise to many of you, given everything I’m about to say: I didn’t vote against the original resolution in 2024. Resolution 20240814-022 passed 11-0, and I was one of the eleven, yet I voted against the entire budget a few votes later. You can read the full meeting transcript here.

At the time, I believed a feasibility study would actually give us more information, not less, and that’s exactly what it was: a study, not a commitment of funds toward building anything. As a general rule of thumb during my time on Council, I was fine voting yes on studies. A study spending a very small amount of public dollars to answer real questions about sites, costs, and governance models is a different thing entirely from a City appropriation to build or operate a facility, and I didn’t think withholding that information from ourselves and the public was the right call, whatever I might end up thinking about the underlying project once the numbers came back.

Here’s the context I think is missing from how this gets discussed. Austin already operates three cultural centers built on the same basic model: the Mexican American Cultural Center, the Asian American Resource Center, and the Carver Museum and Cultural Center. All three are useful comparison points because they show how Austin has actually chosen to pay for this kind of thing.

The Asian American Resource Center’s land and initial construction were funded through a $5 million voter-approved bond, with a further $17 million in renovations now underway. The Mexican American Cultural Center’s two phases cost $16 million and $27 million, funded through prior bond programs. The Carver Museum’s most recent $7.5 million renovation came from the 2018 bond. Every single one of these went through a bond election, meaning voters were asked directly and got to decide.

That’s the pattern worth noticing. When Austin has actually built this kind of civic cultural infrastructure before, it has done it by asking voters, not by pulling from the General Fund or issuing debt that skips that step.

The feasibility study benchmarked 42 peer LGBTQIA+ centers nationally. A few of its own findings are worth sitting with. Median acquisition and renovation cost across those centers was $3.9 million, but the mean was $11.7 million, pulled up by outliers like the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s $141 million campus. Median annual operating revenue was $2.3 million, and the study notes plainly that centers earn less than 10% of that from their own programs and services. The rest comes from philanthropy and grants, and the study adds, without much emphasis, that “many centers struggle with funding and report having recently lost federal funding.”

None of the three sites Austin identified as possibilities are actually available without a real fight or a real bill. The Guadalupe Fire Station is still an active APD Arson Unit facility that may not be vacated until 2031. The Municipal Building downtown scored highest but carries a facility condition index of 25%, which the report itself calls “poor and approaching the critical stage,” with $3.2 to $4.8 million in estimated renovation costs that explicitly exclude exterior work or utility upgrades. The report’s own bottom line: total costs to actually deliver this range from $5 to $12 million, before a single year of operating subsidy, which similar centers nationally have needed for years after opening.

This part, I think, deserves the most attention, because the study doesn’t treat all funding sources equally, and it shouldn’t. Of the funding options it evaluated, private and philanthropic support is rated the only “high viability” source for both capital and ongoing costs. The City’s General Fund is rated only medium viability, described in the report’s own words as facing a “challenging financial outlook.” General Obligation bonds are also medium viability, but the report notes plainly that this option isn’t part of the current 2026 bond program and “next opportunity may be 2028 or later.”

Then there’s Certificates of Obligation, city-issued debt that, unlike a bond, doesn’t require a voter election. The study rates COs as low viability and says so in blunt terms: “Controversial because it bypasses voter approval for non-essential facility,” and separately, “Legislature introduces bills to restrict use of COs every session, and this type of use may be unauthorized in future years.” That’s not my assessment. That’s in the feasibility study the City commissioned.

I’ve spent a whole lot of time on this Substack writing about a City budget that just raised property taxes to the maximum rate allowed without a voter election, cut millions from social service contracts even after a partial restoration, and still carries nearly $2.4 billion in outstanding bond debt from prior commitments. Against that backdrop, I don’t think the City has any business committing General Fund dollars or new debt to this capital project right now. Not a small amount to get started, not a one-time gap-funding gesture, none of it. That standard should apply the same way to every capital asking for the same tight budget this year, and I’d hold the line just as hard on any other project making a similar pitch, regardless of who it’s for.

The study already laid out why City money isn’t even the strongest option on the table, that’s the funding hierarchy above. My point here is narrower and doesn’t depend on that ranking at all: even if City money scored higher on that chart, this still wouldn’t be the year for it. The City’s role right now should stay limited to what it’s already offered during this process: identifying possible sites and staying at the table. Anything beyond that, opening the General Fund or reaching for Certificates of Obligation, is a shortcut this timeline doesn’t need.

Before I get to the broader pattern, I want to point to something that already happened, on these actual streets, a few weeks ago.

In October 2025, Governor Abbott directed the Texas Department of Transportation to strip “any and all political ideologies” from Texas streets within 30 days, framing it explicitly as a taxpayer-dollar issue: “Texans expect their taxpayer dollars to be used wisely, not advance political agendas on Texas roadways.” Austin’s rainbow crosswalk at 4th and Colorado, the literal center of the city’s historic LGBTQ district, was one of the most visible targets. The City asked TxDOT for an exemption. TxDOT said no in May 2026. By the end of July, City crews were out with black thermoplastic covering it for good, along with similar rainbow crossings in the Crestview neighborhood and near Pedernales and Webberville, under a direct threat that Austin would lose state transportation funding and contracts if it didn’t comply.

Sit with the scale of what actually got targeted there: a painted crosswalk. A few thousand dollars of paint and city crew time. That was still enough to draw a direct gubernatorial order, a 30-day compliance deadline, and a specific, real threat against the City’s transportation dollars. Roughly 75 people held a vigil at the intersection. A drag performer spoke. The community painted a small replacement mural nearby, a quiet, careful gesture that still had to dodge triggering the same fight twice.

If a rainbow crosswalk drew that much state firepower, I don’t think it takes much imagination to guess what a multi-million dollar, City-funded LGBTQIA+ Cultural Center would draw, heading into a legislative session where lawmakers have already shown they’re willing to use funding threats as leverage over something far smaller and far cheaper than this. This isn’t a pattern I’m inferring from unrelated fights over sick leave or short-term rentals from years ago. It happened here, this year, over a crosswalk.

Here’s the piece I think is being underweighted entirely, and it’s not hypothetical.

Texas lawmakers have spent the last two legislative sessions building an increasingly aggressive preemption apparatus aimed specifically at local governments and specifically at anything coded as diversity, equity, or inclusion policy. In the 2025 session alone, legislators introduced more than 60 bills targeting local authority across a range of issues, including DEI initiatives and LGBTQ+ protections, and Republican lawmakers have been explicit about seeking the authority to impose financial penalties on cities that adopt policies the state disfavors. That’s not a fringe position. It’s the same legislative appetite that already produced HB 1900 after Austin’s 2020 police budget cuts, and the broader 2023 “Death Star” law that swept away local ordinances across entire subject areas. Austin has been a specific, repeated target of this pattern, not an incidental one.

I’m not predicting a specific bill. I am saying that a City-funded, City-branded LGBTQIA+ Cultural Center, paid for with General Fund dollars or non-voter-approved debt, is close to the most identifiable possible target for exactly this kind of legislative attention heading into the 2027 session. The feasibility study’s own national benchmarking data backs this up without meaning to: it notes that 73% of peer centers nationally already report anti-LGBTQ harassment, and that these organizations are already operating in what the study calls “hostile legislative climates” in a lot of the country. Handing the State an easy, symbolic line item to attack, using the exact funding mechanisms, COs, and General Fund transfers that the study’s own authors flagged as legally and politically risky, is a real strategic vulnerability, on top of being a bad use of scarce dollars in a tight year.

I want to be careful about what I’m arguing, because I think it’s easy to hear this as an argument against the center itself, and it isn’t. Nobody is saying Austin can’t have an LGBTQIA+ Cultural Center. I haven’t seen anyone, in any of this, actually make that case.

The question I don’t see anyone asking is a narrower one: does the City need to be involved at all? Every version of this discussion so far has assumed the City plays some role, identifying sites, offering space, putting some General Fund dollars toward capital gaps, whatever mix ends up on the table. Given everything above, the tight budget, the study’s own ranking of philanthropy as the only high-viability funding source, and a State government that has already shown it will threaten a city’s own funding over something as small as a painted crosswalk, I think the option that actually serves the community best is the one nobody’s proposing out loud: build this entirely with private dollars, with no City money and no City branding attached at all.

That’s not a lesser path. Several of the strongest peer centers in the study’s own benchmarking, the ones with the deepest community roots and the most durable funding, are run this way, independent 501(c)(3)s built and sustained by philanthropy, with no city government’s name or budget line anywhere near them. A privately funded, privately governed center doesn’t just sidestep Austin’s budget problems. It sidesteps the entire political target that comes with being a City program in the first place. The State can threaten to pull funding from Austin. It has a much harder time doing anything at all to a nonprofit that never took a City dollar to begin with.

None of this is an argument against the cultural center existing. Austin has built three comparable centers before, and the community process behind this one, a decade of advocacy, two Quality of Life studies, town halls, and a twelve-member task force, was thorough and genuine. My position is narrower and, I think, consistent with everything else I’ve written this year: I’m against using public dollars for this sort of thing, especially right now. Not because the community doesn’t deserve a space. Because that isn’t what our tax dollars should be going toward in a year this tight, and because the rainbow crosswalk already showed us exactly what happens when the City puts its own name and its own money behind something the state has decided to make an example of.

If Austin ever wants to revisit City involvement, the honest path is what its other three cultural centers actually did: a specific, transparent line item in front of voters in a future bond election, not a General Fund add-on or debt that skips that step. However, given everything in this study, the budget, and the crosswalk, I think the better answer right now is simpler than that: Build it privately. Fund it privately. Govern it privately.

Let the City’s involvement end where the study says its money isn’t needed anyway.

Until Next Time,

Mackenzie