When, in a 2020 referendum, Austin voters approved Project Connect, many urbanists hailed it as an ambitious plan to modernize the city’s public transit system. Five years and numerous delays later, proponents insist that they’re delivering what was promised. But frustration with Project Connect is mounting.
The original proposal was anchored by the Austin City Council’s “Contract with Voters,” a nonbinding resolution promising investments in affordable housing, sidewalk and road upgrades, fixed-rail improvements, and bus rapid transit. After a full-fledged campaign, Austinites overwhelmingly approved Proposition A, enabling the provision of tax dollars to launch Project Connect. But while many of Proposition A’s projects have moved forward, the city has dramatically scaled back the most ambitious component—light rail—amid soaring costs. Scrutiny has intensified over the project’s unique funding mechanism: a permanent, substantial tax increase. Though the light-rail project has diminished in scope, the tax hike remains in place.
As Texas’s 89th legislative session kicked off in January, reform efforts to clarify Project Connect’s mandate and define its responsibility to consult voters and taxpayers gave hope to its opponents—and for good reason. The previous session’s attempt at reining in Project Connect had enjoyed widespread support, with only a technical point of order impeding its path to becoming law. Even better, that bill’s coauthor, then-State Rep. Dustin Burrows, was now Speaker of the Texas House. If reformers failed, however, Project Connect would proceed in its current form—not the one that voters had originally approved. The initiative would risk becoming a case study in poor urban governance: city leaders winning tax hikes by promising transformative infrastructure, and then delivering something far less impressive…