This Thursday, the Austin City Council will discuss whether to award the California-based consultants working on the controversial CodeNEXT process $2.3 million more in taxpayer funds that the group has requested “for additional architectural, urban design, planning, and engineering services.” That would bring their total contract for revamping Austin’s municipal code to nearly $8.5 million, busting their original budget by more than $6 million.

That’s bad — but it isn’t the only problem.

First, a bit of background info: To anyone who’s lived in Austin for more than 10 minutes, CodeNEXT is little more than the latest attempt by big land developers to scrape our longstanding single-family neighborhoods clean, strip out the city’s affordable-housing requirements, and build luxury condos for wealthy tech workers as far as the eye can see. CodeNEXT’s supporters don’t see it that way, of course—they like to talk about Austin’s current land code as inherently racist and herald $400,000 “micro-lofts” as the future of housing for low- and middle-income residents.

That’s what makes former Austin Independent School District Vice President Paul Saldaña’s recent discovery so alarming. Saldaña found that CodeNEXT’s authors haven’t met the Small & Minority Business Resources (MBE/WBE) requirements that the City of Austin set for them when awarding them the contract. Those are the rules that public contractors follow in order to assure “minority-owned or woman-owned business enterprise participation” in public contracts, to use the city’s own words.

According to Saldaña’s analysis, the CodeNEXT consultants haven’t even come close:

  • The City of Austin required 15.8% of CodeNEXT’s contract to go to firms owned by women, but the consultants reportedly spent only 5.59% on them
  • The City of Austin required 9% of CodeNEXT’s contract to go to Hispanic-owned firms, but the consultants reportedly spent only 3.58% on them
  • The City of Austin required 4.9% of CodeNEXT’s contract to go to Native/Asian-owned firms, but the consultants reportedly spent only .45% on them
  • The City of Austin required 2.1% of CodeNEXT’s contract go to African-American-owned firms, but the consultants reportedly spent only .81% on them

You can read Saldaña’s full report here:

Better bring a book to this week’s council meeting—looks like it could be a long one.