AUSTIN (KXAN) — After Austinites overwhelmingly voted down Proposition Q, the city’s tax rate election proposition, community groups and city leaders acknowledged residents have clearly lost faith in how the city is spending taxpayer dollars.
“We will not accept anything less than an independent audit of our city budget … We all know where taxpayers are. The question is, has City Hall learned a lesson tonight? There’s no education in the second kick of a mule,” Save Austin Now co-chair, Matt Mackowiak, said on election night.
Austin’s Proposition Q failed: Now what?
But it wasn’t just vocal community groups asking the city to look at its spending. In his statement accepting the defeat of Proposition Q, Austin Mayor Kirk Watson also said he was invested in a performance review and Council Member Marc Duchen called for one as well.
“Clearly one of the lessons of this election was that we’re not demonstrating enough to the public that we’re evaluating how best to perform services in the most cost-efficient manner and so let’s learn from that, let’s hear our voters and let’s act on it,” Watson told KXAN.
City manager to expand review of spending, services
In a memo to the mayor and city council members from Austin’s City Manager, TC Broadnax, the city’s effective CEO said he intends to expand an ongoing “Citywide Efficiency and Optimization” process. That memo came out the day after Proposition Q failed.
“These efforts are designed to strengthen accountability, improve performance, and ensure that our investments are aligned with City Council’s policy priorities, identified best practices and community outcomes,” Broadnax wrote.
That initiative is broken into several focuses:
- Citywide strategic technology initiative
- Optimization and shared services
- Social service contracting transformation
- Departmental assessments
The city has already taken steps in some of those areas. Earlier this year, “the city moved forward with a major citywide technology reorganization,” Broadnax wrote. He said the city has twice the number of IT staff and double the technology spending compared to other cities of the same size.
MAP: How did your neighborhood vote on Austin’s Prop Q?
The city has worked to consolidate those teams into a single IT department and to streamline its software systems to cut down on those costs. That process could take years, though, the city manager wrote.
Similarly, the city has already begun looking at how it can share services among departments — like human resources, budget and communications staff — to avoid redundancy and make the services more universal.
Moving forward, though, the city manager says the city will also look at social services contracts for investments in things like public health, homelessness response and community courts.
Austin launches initiative to consolidate overlapping services between departments
“Our contracting structure, funding levels, and outcome measurement methods have developed unevenly over time,” Broadnax wrote. He said the city will therefore look at its contracts to, in part:
- Look at funding amounts to “ensure alignment with community priorities”
- Create universal performance metrics that can be shared with the public
Broadnax said the city will also look at its “department structure, programming and performance to identify service-delivery gaps and inefficiencies or duplication of services.”
