More than two-thirds of Austin residents say they’re willing to support a tax increase to fund the city’s next bond package, with housing, transportation, and parks emerging as the most widely shared priorities among the 2,002 people who responded to a recent public survey.
Those findings were presented at Monday’s meeting of the Bond Election Advisory Task Force, where members also reviewed long-term capital needs for cultural facilities and confirmed key milestones in the bond planning timeline, including a curated shortlist of projects totaling more than $3 billion expected this week, and a series of public town halls scheduled for September.
The survey, conducted as part of the city’s community engagement phase for the 2026 bond, asked residents to identify pressing needs, allocate a hypothetical $100 budget across issue areas, and indicate whether they’d support a property tax increase to fund new projects. In open-ended responses, 34 percent of participants named housing and homelessness as Austin’s most urgent issue, followed by 22 percent who cited transportation and mobility infrastructure…