The Economic Development Resolution was adopted on May 7, 2026. The City Manager and Assistant City Manager have 180 days to bring a policy to Council, so we anticipate that the EDR will be submitted for approval by November 2026. That may be the first time the public sees what is in the proposed policy.

Between now and then, our coalition is asking for a more transparent process, more stakeholders at the table, and a Community Values document developed in public and delivered with the policy rather than promised afterward.

Once the package reaches Council, the window for shaping largely closes.

Before that document is written, we ask that the City Manager and City Council commit to six guardrails:

1. No incentives for defense, weapons, war, or surveillance technology, public or private, research or development, including dual-use applications. Companies in otherwise incentivized sectors should forfeit their incentives if they expand into weapons or defense uses.
2. No incentives for data centers or autonomous vehicles.
3. An open public process to define shared community values, run through city commissions, stakeholder meetings, and public comment. The resulting Community Values document should ship as part of the November policy package.
4. Adoption of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights as the evaluative framework for deciding which companies Austin incentivizes or contracts with, including their human rights and environmental records.
5. Clear accountability and check-in requirements for every company that receives a city benefit.
6. Ongoing audits to confirm that recipients have not drifted into prohibited sectors while continuing to draw public support.

We are not asking for Austin to stop growing. We are asking for a say in what Austin grows into.

THREE THINGS YOU CAN DO

1. Sign this petition.
2. Email the City Manager and your City Council member about what you want to see in this process and in the final policy.
3. Show up. Council work sessions, commission meetings, and public comment periods are where the Dog's Head concessions were won. We are working to stay ahead of the economic development policy planning, but when the final policy comes to council in November, we still need to show up.

Our Recommendations for the Economic Development Resolution:

Defense: With Austin’s history as a hub for defense companies, the current resolution language isn’t strong enough. There should be no loopholes. We believe that, unless explicit language prohibits it, the defense industry will benefit enormously from city incentives under these new economic development policies. These incentives include a fast-tracked development process, exclusive rights to city-owned land, tax benefits, reduced fees, and more. Specific target sectors were softened in the resolution as adopted after public pressure. That is a real win. But it does not resolve anything. The sectors can be reinserted at the staff level in November. Removing the explicit target sector list is not the same as adopting an explicit limit against them.

The coalition's core demand is that the City of Austin decline to subsidize weapons, defense, war, and surveillance technology—including dual-use research and development—and that companies drifting into those applications lose their incentives.

“Dual-use” is a category that can change after the deal closes. A company incentivized as "advanced manufacturing," "semiconductors," or "artificial intelligence" in 2027 can be a defense contractor in 2030 without renegotiating anything, unless the policy requires ongoing verification and provides for clawback. Guardrails need to be written at the point of application and must include ongoing monitoring that would require city incentives be returned to the City of Austin if the company moves into defense.

Austinites do not want a resolution that paves the way for Palantir and defense start-ups to get priority treatment and city benefits. AI killer drones could end up receiving City of Austin taxpayer land or taxes.

We do not want our city contributing to endless wars abroad. We do not want our city contributing to needless deaths. Austinites have already rejected surveillance technology like automated license plate readers. They have rejected war profiteers at SXSW. They have been working against ALPR’s and getting Flock kicked out of cities around Central Texas. Students at UT protested against investing in defense companies and were violently brutalized for it. There needs to be ethical guardrails against the types of businesses we incentivize.

AI Data Centers: We know that AI data centers lead to the depletion and poisoning of drinking water, exploding energy costs, and have deleterious human and animal health impacts. AI development is generally unregulated and has critical effects on war, privacy, and safety. It is also part of an anti-worker agenda that threatens job security and the livelihoods of Austinites. Data centers are the least popular development category in America, and the opposition is bipartisan. Austin would not be the first city to disincentivize such development if guardrails were adopted. We know the Dog's Head development agreement already contemplates data centers on the site and that Endeavor and Amazon have NOT ruled it out.

Auditing: Even where incentives are defensible in principle, the verification is routinely absent. A lack of transparency then makes it nearly impossible for anyone outside the deal to check whether taxpayers got what was promised.

We want to see a robust system that monitors companies receiving incentives and plans in place for companies that may go back on their word.

Dog's Head: The city negotiated "from a place of weakness", with non-transparency in the process, and bad environmental and labor terms secured. This development agreement was an early draft of the kinds of economic development packages the city might put out to attract big companies to Austin. The ground beneath and around the planned Amazon plant is being serviced by up to $1.5 billion in publicly reimbursed infrastructure, delivered through an exploitative financing mechanism created under the threat of the parcel walking out of the city limits, and approved before the anchor tenant was ever publicly named. While Austin did not write Amazon a check, the City restructured four square miles of its tax base, its water quality protections, and its approval timelines to make sure Amazon came.

Public pressure did extract real concessions. That is what organizing wins at the back end of a bad process. The point of the November policy is to stop having to fight at the back end.

Regional: Interjurisdictional competition is the premise of the current policy, and it is the premise most worth rejecting. Central cities compete against their own suburbs for the same companies, and the suburbs usually hold the advantage. What the region gains from this is nothing; a company moves eight miles and collects a subsidy for "creating jobs" that already existed. Austin should put a Central Texas regional non-aggression framework on the table with Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop, and Caldwell county jurisdictions. A policy that responds to suburban competition by competing harder only raises the price everyone pays.

Better Policy: Haegi Kwon of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy argues that economic development is too often conflated with economic growth. Cities pursue more jobs, more people, and more business without asking what happens to the people already there. Her working paper finds that traditional attraction strategies produce uneven growth that can deepen existing inequities. When a sought-after employer arrives, the benefits are concentrated among homeowners and the highly educated; low-income renters absorb the vulnerability and, at worst, displacement.

Austin's November policy should be measured against resident outcomes (wages, housing security, health, displacement rates), not against announced investment totals. The most effective programs require permanent, full-time jobs at living wages with real benefits for local workers; dedicate a share of incentives to small, local, minority- and women-owned businesses; secure housing at all income levels on residential projects, including below-market set-asides and transit-served locations; and hold companies accountable when they fall short.

See our full document with the above points expanded with research and citations here.

Supporting Organizations:

• Austin for Palestine Coalition
• PODER
• Austin DSA
• Save Our Springs
• PSL Austin
• CAIR Texas
• Hands Off Central Texas
• Vocal Texas
• YALL
• PSC UT
• UT SILS
• Austin Tan Cerca De La Frontera
• Extinction Rebellion

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