Austin Convention Center Petition Trial Moves Ahead

The demolition of the Austin Convention Center continues on Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025.
Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman

A trial over a proposed ballot measure to halt Austin’s convention center expansion entered its second day Wednesday as Austin United PAC challenged the city clerk’s rejection of its petition.

The political action committee sued the city in December after the clerk disqualified the petition for lack of valid signatures. The proposed charter amendment would temporarily block the city’s $1.6 billion convention center expansion, which is already underway. Demolition of the old center was completed last year, and construction of the new facility began recently, with completion expected in spring 2029.

The PAC has long opposed the project, arguing the city is misusing public resources that could instead support local music and arts initiatives. The group has also accused the city of lacking transparency and improperly rejecting its petition.

Both sides delivered opening arguments Wednesday, and the PAC presented witnesses. The city is expected to begin its case Thursday.

The PAC asked the court to rule that the city clerk unlawfully narrowed the pool of eligible signers and applied unreasonable verification standards. A ruling in the PAC’s favor would deem the petition successful and send the matter to the City Council for further action.

Attorneys for the PAC argued the case does not ask the court to intervene in a legislative process, but instead focuses solely on whether the clerk complied with the law when reviewing the petition. They said the clerk improperly disqualified signatures based on jurisdictional labels, addresses, formatting and other technical issues.

“The clerk disqualified hundreds of registered Austin voters by posing criteria that do not appear in the charter or state law,” attorney for the PAC Bill Bunch said, adding that “she threw out signatures even though she was able to find them in the voter rolls.”

A central dispute is whether residents living in Austin’s extraterritorial jurisdiction — unincorporated areas where the city exercises limited authority — should have been allowed to sign the petition. The PAC argued that voter rolls classify those residents as Austin voters and that state law allows ETJ residents to participate in decisions that affect them. Attorneys said ETJ residents would be impacted by the convention center project and benefit from arts grant programs funded by the same hotel taxes the city plans to use for the expansion and that the money the city would feed into the convention center project would be locked up for the 32 year debt finance which would displace the county from collecting hotel occupancy taxes in the city.

City officials pushed back, saying the clerk followed the law.

“The City looks forward to reconvening tomorrow when we will have the opportunity to show that the City Clerk clearly and meticulously followed established legal procedures in reviewing the petition and only disqualified signatures that did not meet legal requirements,” city spokesperson Jenny LaCoste-Caputo said in a statement Wednesday. She added the city would also show its statistical expert used a reasonable method to analyze the petition.

District Judge Jessica Mangrum, who is presiding over the case, has previously ruled against the city in a related case, blocking the use of $354 million in property tax funding for development along Lady Bird Lake in 2024. On Wednesday, and again Thursday morning, Mangrum emphasized from the bench that she is not weighing the merits of the convention center project itself, but only whether the petition was reviewed lawfully.

Mangrum could make a ruling as soon as Thursday.