Many Texas voters reject raising property taxes for schools, law enforcement; vote in favor of a cut

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Texas voters this week showed wariness toward raising property taxes — and embraced cutting them.

Voters across the state shot down bids by school districts and cities to increase funds to hire teachers and police officers, pave roads and keep schools humming. More than half of those measures failed in Tuesday’s elections, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.

The most dramatic failure came out of Austin, where voters in one of the state’s most liberal cities rejected a measure to boost tax bills to tackle homelessness, bolster public safety and close a multi-million dollar budget gap — a stunning rebuke against Austin City Hall.

At the same time, Texas voters handed homeowners and business owners significant property tax breaks by wide margins.

To tax-cut proponents, that suggests a continued appetite for tax cuts.

“The public is signaling they want more,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who pushed the tax-cut measures.

State Republican leaders plan to push hard on their desire to cut taxes during the 2026 midterms and when they get back together in Austin in 2027.

Once upon a time, Texas voters were more open to tax increases. School districts held 751 elections asking voters for higher tax rates between 2006 and 2019, according to the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, a business lobbying group that pushes for tax cuts. Voters signed off on 80% of them, according to that group’s analysis of Texas Comptroller data.

That’s a stark contrast from Tuesday’s results, when some 44 school districts asked voters for permission to adopt a higher tax rate, according to a partial Tribune tally of tax-rate elections held across the state. Voters rejected more than half of them.

“Taxpayers really said ‘enough, we don’t have any more money to give,’” said Genevieve Collins, director of the conservative political group Americans for Prosperity’s Texas chapter, which pushed to defeat some of the measures.

In Austin, city officials pushed a 20% tax hike to produce about $110 million to plug a $33 million hole in the city budget, tackle the city’s homelessness crisis and improve public safety and parks. For the typical Austin homeowner, that would have meant an additional $303 toward their annual city tax bill, not including other fee increases the city enacted this year.

The measure drew pushback on affordability grounds. Local officials in recent years had already gone to voters several times asking for tax-rate increases. Five years ago, Austin taxpayers signed off on a 20% tax increase to pay for Project Connect, the city’s multibillion-dollar public transit expansion that has since been plagued with delays and cost overruns. Last November, voters approved tax increases for Austin Independent School District and Travis County. The county again raised taxes this year to help pay for damage caused by the July 4 floods.

Still, the average Travis County homeowner’s tax bill was effectively flat from 2019 to 2024 when adjusted for inflation.

At the same time, opponents ridiculed questionable city spending practices, many of which were unveiled by the Austin American-Statesman. To Matt Mackowiak, who heads the group Save Austin Now that pushed against the tax measure, the proposition’s defeat is indicative of a lack of trust in City Hall.

“They want to keep the party going and they’re sending the bill to taxpayers,” Mackowiak said. “And for once, taxpayers sent the bill back and said ‘no.’”

In the wake of the measure’s defeat, Austin Mayor Kirk Watson acknowledged that Tuesday’s result was a “referendum” on City Hall. He called for a “systemic evaluation” of the city budget to look for ways to cut costs. Houston Mayor John Whitmire initiated a similar audit that found about $122 million in savings. And Mackowiak vowed to force a city charter amendment for an independent audit of the city’s finances if officials don’t make sufficient strides to rein in spending.

“We need to give voters reason to trust us — to trust that we will strike the right balance between services and the funding needed to provide those services,” Watson said in a statement Tuesday night.

Despite Tuesday’s defeat, property taxes in Austin will still rise — but not by as much as they would have had the proposition passed.

Austin wasn’t the only city where city voters said no to a higher tax rate. Voters in Mesquite rejected a tax-rate increase that would have enabled the city to hire two more firefighters and three police officers, among other matters.

Pushes to raise taxes didn’t fail everywhere. Voters in 19 school districts, including in Waco, Garland and Denton, signed off on higher taxes this week.

Texas officials face continued pressure to put a further dent in property taxes. Gov. Greg Abbott has signaled he wants to make property tax cuts a central feature of the 2026 midterm elections. But just how state lawmakers would go about delivering more in tax cuts remains to be seen. Texas is already set to spend $51 billion over the next two years to curb school property tax bills, a massive sum that includes the tax breaks approved Tuesday. The state’s slowing economy may put a crimp on efforts to expand tax breaks for homeowners and businesses.

Abbott and Bettencourt have expressed an appetite for making it even harder for cities and counties to raise more property tax revenue. The state already has tight limits enacted in 2019 on how much in property taxes localities can raise each year, and cities and counties have felt the pinch on their budgets as the state booms and demand for services grows.

There are signs that lawmakers’ years-long push to rein in property tax bills has worked. Property taxes in Texas sit about where they did in 2019, according to the Census, and have fallen in most metropolitan areas. But other costs, like homeowners’ insurance, have eaten into any savings delivered via tax cuts.

Some of Texas’ most die-hard conservatives would love the state to eliminate property taxes altogether. Some of Texas’ most influential Republicans, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, have vocally poo-pooed that idea as highly unrealistic and costly. By one estimate, the state would need to find more than $81 billion a year in new taxes or budget cuts to abolish all property taxes.

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This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.