Austinites may soon be charged a new utility fee to support parks maintenance, as local leaders look for more funding to keep pace with the needs of the city's thousands of acres of public open spaces.

The setup

Underinvestment in Austin's hundreds of community parks has been a topic of concern among residents and elected officials for years, as the Parks and Recreation Department has contended with surging parks service needs for the city's growing population.

The parks department currently operates on a $180 million budget that that goes toward maintaining and improving Austin's parks, pools, playgrounds, trails, sports facilities, golf courses and other public features. The city also aims to ensure all Austinites live within walking distance of green space and continue parkland expansion efforts citywide—a process that's now more limited under new state law. Austin's traditional parkland dedication process, where new development must provide either land or payment to the city to grow its green space, has notably fallen off since that change.

"Based on the new requirements, PARD can require less than 1/3 of the parkland previously required," a department spokesperson said in an email.

Late last year, City Council signed off on a resolution acknowledging Austin is lagging behind parks maintenance and upgrades, and its goal to add thousands of acres of new parkland to serve around 1 million residents. The measure called to find new ways to support parks management, new land acquisition, amenity upgrades and maintenance.

That process has involved city staff, hired consultants and a public input process to shape funding recommendations for city leaders. While results were due in May, final project reporting is now expected later this summer.

The approach

In the meantime, many officials are hoping to firm up added parks funding during the fiscal year 2025-26 budget process kicking off in mid-July. Council member Paige Ellis proposed one option, an added fee imposed on city utility users to support parks, she said should be "strongly considered" given financial constraints the city's facing.

“Year over year, the one thing we see coming back is we need better parks. People want to see us buy more parkland, and then sometimes we get stalled out on maintaining it and building swing sets and making sure that there’s actually a playground for people to use," Ellis said in an interview. "We’re trying to figure out how to get that sweet spot of getting the funding we need for all these park spaces across town, and somehow try not to compete with the rest of the bulk of the budget."

Today, Austinites already pay several additional charges for public improvements on their utility bills. For example, Austin Energy adds on fees for trash collection, drainage system improvements, street repairs and community cleanup.

While that Clean Community Fee can benefit public spaces—the parks department said it's mainly used for homeless encampment cleanup on parkland—Ellis said Austin needs a more solid source for parks system needs without affecting the department's budget.

"We’re actually falling behind, and we’re trying to correct that. We’re trying to make sure that we go from a position of less and less maintenance and enhancement opportunities, to actually being able to get more than just maintaining," she said.

It remains to be seen how council tackles parks funding this summer, but Ellis' fee proposal already has some initial support.

Council member Ryan Alter said officials should find creative ways to address critical green space investments. Mayor Pro Tem Vanessa Fuentes said Austin "can't keep doing things the same way" on parkland funding, while any new costs should be equitably rolled out to avoid impacting working families. Ellis' plan would exempt utility customers already receiving civic financial support, like those enrolled in AE's Customer Assistance Program, and Fuentes said more relief options could be considered.

A new fee, if implemented, would add to resident costs as officials prepare to ask voters for a tax hike to maintain basic city services this fall, and ahead of a multipart bond package in 2026 that would add to city taxes if approved.

Some context

For the first time, Austin slipped this year to the bottom half of the top 100 U.S. cities' ParkScore, nonprofit Trust for Public Land's park system rating.

Accounting for factors like parkland acreage, access and equity, public amenities, and financial health, Austin now sits at 54th in TPL rankings—well behind peer cities like Dallas, Seattle or Denver, and below others like Albuquerque, Arlington, Boise, Buffalo and Omaha.Austin's relatively low ParkScore was referenced in the 2024 council funding resolution and discussed by the resident Parks and Recreation Board this week. TPL found:

• Austin's parks account for 9% of the city's total area with a median size of 6.7 acres, representing lower to middling nationwide statistics
• Austin annually spends $211 per resident on parks, on the higher end of civic spending nationally
• Austin has a relatively poor distribution of park amenities per resident. The city's 0.98 sports fields per 10,000 residents falls near the bottom end of all major cities, and features like recreation centers, basketball hoops and splash pads also rank on the lower end—although dozens of public pools weren't included in TPL scoring

Just over two-thirds of Austinites now live within walking distance of a park—"about average" among major U.S. cities, according to TPL. However, the nonprofit also found parts of town with more nonwhite residents have nearly 50% less parkland than white neighborhoods, and that low-income neighborhoods enjoy 64% less park space.

Board member Ted Eubanks said that "dramatic" disparity represents a policy issue the city needs to tackle, a sentiment shared by other residents at the meeting concerned about inequitable park and amenity spending based on geography.

“One of the things that’s clear is, it seems to me from these data we have two issues. One is funding, we know that, it has to be fixed. And second of all, there is an issue with equity. It’s real," he said at the board's June 23 meeting.

The department spokesperson said TPL's new ParkScore doesn't account for some of Austin's public spaces that were previously included, like greenbelts and nature preserves, which he noted as playing a "vital role" in the city's system. He also said the parks department has taken strides on parks access based on the city's own goals of providing a park within a quarter-mile walk for urban core residents and a half-mile walk for residents farther from downtown.

"Since 2020, the percentage with a ¼ or ½ mile walk has increased from 63% of residents to just over 70% of residents. This goal is the basis for the park deficiency map used in determining parkland dedication requirements as well as a planning tool for prioritization of new parkland acquisition," he said.Austin's full 2025 ParkScore report can be viewed here. An interactive map of the city system is available from TPL here.

The new ranking wasn't seen as a negative "performance review" for the parks department and staff, residents said, but as a sign of room for improvement. Robin Rather, representing the Rewild Austin green space advocacy group, said funding needs further scrutiny. She and others also suggested some shortcomings are tied to the city's recent reliance on various nonprofits to manage public spaces and related investments.

“Dropping 10 points in the TPL ranking is a sign that our park system is in serious, serious trouble. Austin parks should be in the top 10, not at the bottom and dropping like a stone," she said June 23.