The Austin City Council is supposed to serve the people of Austin, but recent actions suggest that they’re a lot more interested in doing the bidding of a Fortune 5 company than serving mere citizens.
The Austin City Council has approved a series of agenda items to facilitate a colossal new development just east of the city’s current limits. Amazon Robotics, a subsidiary of the online megaretailer, will anchor the proposed complex.
The council approved these items during a marathon meeting on Thursday.
At issue is a proposed municipal annexation followed by the creation of a so-called “tax increment reinvestment zone” that supporters say is necessary to coordinate the extension of basic infrastructure to the currently unincorporated area.
The proposed facility would be located on a spit of land known colloquially as “Dog’s Head” between US Highway 183 and the Colorado River.
Name checks out.
This is just east of Austin’s Montopolis neighborhood, near the city’s airport.
“This is double the size of downtown. This is ten times the size of the Domain,” one speaker stated during public testimony.
(The Domain, for those of you outside Austin, is one of those hoity-toity mixed use developments with high end retail, restaurants and yuppie apartment complexes (assuming anyone still uses the word “yuppie” anymore). The nearest Apple store is there. Some people blithely call it “a second downtown,” but they seem do a much better job keeping the gibbering street lunatics out. Parking is a pain.)
The controversial 2,600-acre proposal came to light this past May when area residents discovered a 37-page development agreement on an Austin City Council agenda. The residents, some of whose homes were directly in the path of the proposed new roadways, had just 57 hours’ notice before the May city council meeting.
All Austin City Council members are lefty Democrats these days, and nothing says “service to the downtrodden” like bulldozing some peon’s house to satisfy an international megacorporation.
In addition to the Amazon facility, proponents envisage an interconnected series of residential developments, commercial developments, and outdoor recreational facilities.
You don’t need secret annexation plans to do most of that, you just need to buy the land, fill out the proper filing permits and zoning requests, and pay the money to get it all built. It’s not easy, but Austin developers have been doing it for a long damn time.
The development in question does not currently have a public-facing website.
Funny about that.
Beyond the suddenness with which the project was sprung on local residents, its mechanism raises additional questions.
Tax Increment Reinvestment Zones (TIRZ) are a legal vehicle for Tax Increment Financing (TIF), which typically diverts property tax revenue from the area into a special development fund instead of a municipality’s general budget. They are governed by Chapter 311 of the Texas Tax Code.
Proponents argue that TIF funding eases new development.
Opponents argue that tax carve-outs narrow the tax base, which inevitably begets higher tax rates for everyone else.
“The state law is very clear and it starts with the Constitution, which requires fair and uniform taxation,” local activist Bill Bunch stated during public testimony.
“This is nowhere close to being fair in uniform taxation.”
Snip.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation has described TIRZ/TIF funding as a form of “invisible government.”
“TIRZ is a speculative scam that always ends up raising other people’s taxes to subsidize the TIRZ projects,” former Austin City Councilmember Don Zimmerman told Texas Scorecard.
The Dog’s Head TIRZ controversy comes at a time of unprecedented fury at municipal fiscal priorities.
Earlier this month, the city manager released the latest in a string of record–setting budgets that included a record-setting tax increase.
Last month, the city clerk officially certified a ballot measure that could impose new fiscal transparency requirements.
If passed, the referendum would amend the city charter to require independent audits of municipal finances every five years.
Additionally, if the city council wants to pursue a future tax rate election, the proposed charter amendment would require the municipal government to complete such an audit before calling the election.
The referendum follows the landslide defeat of Proposition Q, a ballot measure that could have enshrined hundreds of millions of dollars in municipal spending, in November 2025.
The article doesn’t say whether eminent domain will be used to seize land if existing property owners refuse to sell, but I rather strongly suspect so. (Thanks, Kelo vs. New London.) I also wonder whether this super-secret fast track gets around Texas law requiring majority approval of any municipal annexation. If it doesn’t, and it still requires a majority vote for the annexation, and for Amazon and/or Austin to negotiate a fair market value purchase with the landowner, then fine and dandy. If it doesn’t…
As for the business itself, I’m sure it will be a successful, profitable venture that will create jobs in Austin while reducing jobs by replacing people with robots elsewhere.
If the Austin City Council is willing to drop everything to engineer secret annexation plans at the bidding of giant megacorps, one might well ask what the entire point of the mono-party, Democrat-run Council actually is…
Tags: Adam Cahn, Amazon, annexation, Austin, Austin City Council, Bill Bunch, Democrats, eminent domain, real estate, Regulation, robots, subsidies, Tax Increment Financing (TIF), Tax Increment Reinvestment Zones (TIRZ), Taxes, Texas, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Texas Scorecard
“assuming anyone still uses the word “yuppie” anymore”
That’s OK. It won’t be long before there aren’t any left.
“The article doesn’t say whether eminent domain will be used to seize land if existing property owners refuse to sell, but I rather strongly suspect so. (Thanks, Kelo vs. New London.)”
I still haven’t forgiven Trump for the part he played in that outrage.
“If the Austin City Council is willing to drop everything to engineer secret annexation plans at the bidding of giant megacorps, one might well ask what the entire point of the mono-party, Democrat-run Council actually is….
It seems their purpose is to act as a midwife to corporate welfare grandees.
What is wrong with jobs being brought to Texas? Even lefty Austin knows jobs bring prosperity. In Houston, a proposal like this is called Tuesday.
“What is wrong with jobs being brought to Texas? ”
Texas is a big state with lots of empty land. Why should Amazon site location be placed above the property rights of residents from The Domain?
Amazon isn’t building the robotics factory in the Domain (though they do have some office space there), but in the far less developed area of “the dog’s head.” I was just clarifying what the Domain is for those outside Austin because a speaker compared the size of the development to the Domain.
[…] IN ONE SENTENCE: Austin’s Secret Amazon Land Grab. “All Austin City Council members are lefty Democrats these days, and nothing says […]
Texas may have lots of land, but, there is a serious lack of water.
A Texas municipality can’t use eminent domain to condemn land for a transfer to a developer. The State took action to prevent this after Kelo. The description of the TIRZ mechanics are incorrect. The State has multiple vehicles for a municipality to attract new development.
“Texas may have lots of land, but, there is a serious lack of water.”
…unless you put your facility right next to the Colorado River.
A stretch of the Colorado River just minutes from downtown Austin — and known for its clean water, dense riparian habitat and rare Blackland Prairie ecosystem — has become the center of a high-stakes development fight as city and county leaders prepare to decide whether to fast-track investment into the area known as Dog’s Head.”
https://austinfreepress.org/river-risk/
The proposed facility would be located on a spit of land known colloquially as “Dog’s Head” between US Highway 183 and the Colorado River.
Is there a second Colorado river? The one I’m familiar with flows west of the Continental Divide, from Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona to the Gulf of California.
Yes, the Colorado River in Texas is the eleventh longest river in the United States.
Perhaps, since the Tesla Gigafactory is in Austin, the local pols are looking for a counterbalancing world bestriding behemoth company to participate in local politics. I would imagine, however, that they could get there without bending the rules into quite such a pretzel, especially as they had to at least imagine that their efforts to “expedite” things might be discovered and publicized.
It never fails to amaze me how local politicians, pretty much everywhere, seem to think they are so much smarter than the average bear that they can do stuff, and nobody will _ever_ find out.
The City of Austin (CoA) will eventually find ways to screw them over. Building permits and approvals that should take days or weeks to get will take months which become years. All the jobs and housing imply people; people who will need roads to get around all the while CoA is wiping out traffic lanes to make bicycle lanes for the tiny population that occasionally use them – which isn’t many – while the population of the city explodes with new residents.
CoA wants their hands on the pot of money they think they see coming, but they do not want the people who go with it.
And it would not be surprising if their isn’t some graft along the way, like hiring the brothers/cousins/friends/NGOs of various city council members to do million dollar studies for who-knows-what inside the area in question.
I wonder just how much tax money Amazon is going to pocket for this project from Austin/Texas taxpayers?