District 5 · The full accounting
Austin publishes every council vote. We pulled Ryan Alter's, all 6,616 of them, straight from the city's open data portal, and matched them against what he said at the dais and in print. No paraphrase. No characterization where a document will do.
Council vote data: City of Austin Open Data Portal, dataset j48w-feyx, 6 January 2023 through 28 May 2026. Items after that date are cited to published reporting.
The Dog's Head Development is roughly four square miles of land bounded by the Colorado River, US 183 and SH 130. Ryan Alter voted for the agreement. Then he voted for the money.
21 May 2026 · Item 38 · Voted YES
The city's own agenda language describes what he approved: a 45-year development agreement for approximately 2,614 acres in the extraterritorial jurisdiction "bounded by the Colorado River," establishing allowable land uses, "impervious cover requirements, water quality requirements, drainage and floodplain requirements," and setting out the parties' expectations for "the creation of a tax increment reinvestment zone (TIRZ)."
Source: City of Austin council vote record, item 260521_RG_038. Approved as amended.
23 July 2026 · Voted YES
Roughly $1.5 billion in tax increment financing, reimbursing a share of $5.6 billion in infrastructure costs, for a development anchored by an Amazon advanced robotics facility. It passed 7 to 3 after months of organized public outcry and a packed City Hall. Velásquez, Siegel and Qadri voted no.
Source: Community Impact, KUT, KXAN, 23 July 2026.
I think this process has not lived up to what it needs to from our side. We should have required more: Required more public engagement, required more public information, and we didn't.Ryan Alter, at the dais, 23 July 2026. He said it, then voted yes.
I will be the first to admit that we should not have put in 100% impervious cover in the first deal, and today we are fixing that.Ryan Alter. He voted for the first deal. Then he voted to finance it.
He read the eulogy. Then he voted for the funeral.
Ryan Alter authored the rule requiring new gas peaker plants to come back to Council in public. When roughly a billion dollars of them came back, the public item vanished from the agenda and the decision moved behind a closed door.
Council adopts Austin Energy's carbon-free-by-2035 resource plan. Alter's own amendment requires Austin Energy to return to Council after a feasibility analysis for new peakers and to "explain why a carbon-free alternative wasn't available."
Austin Energy comes back, asking for roughly $1 billion in new gas peaker generation.
The public agenda item, "Approve implementation of efficient, local, natural gas-powered peaker generation units as part of Austin Energy's Resource, Generation and Climate Protection Plan," is withdrawn. The city's own vote file records it. The authorization moves into executive session under a "competitive matters" exception to the Texas Open Meetings Act. The city has never released the votes.
Seven days later, Alter votes for three emissions and siting "guardrail" resolutions on gas peaker units. Approved on consent.
Writing in the Austin Free Press, Alter defends the outcome: "This guardrail will require Austin Energy to emit less greenhouse gases and other pollutants after the new peakers are placed into service." And: "While this is not a perfect fix, it moves this action closer to affordably keeping the lights on without more pollution."
What we do not claim
We do not tell you how Ryan Alter voted in that closed session, because nobody can. The city refuses to release it. That is the point. What is public is this: he wrote the rule requiring the decision to be made in the open, the decision was made behind a closed door instead, and three weeks later he was in print defending the result.
Public guardrails. Secret authorization. Then a green press release.
Sources: Public Citizen (the December 2024 amendment); City of Austin vote record items 260521_RG_007 and 260528_RG_098 through 100; Austin Free Press, "Ryan Alter helped decide Austin's fossil fuel future behind closed doors," 11 June 2026; Austin Free Press, "Ryan Alter: Balancing reliability and sustainability," 12 June 2026.
In May he voted for a forty-five year agreement that permits data centers beside the Colorado River. In July he voted for the money. In August he announced a plan to ban them.
On 27 August 2026, ninety-eight days after voting the agreement through, Alter joined the push to ban hyperscale data centers outright, saying he did not want "any data center to come here without receiving approval and without showing that they're not going to be sucking us dry from a water perspective, using our electricity when others need it."
The agreement he approved is still binding. The developer's public commitment not to build a standalone data center on the site runs about ten years. The agreement runs forty-five.
Ninety-eight days from holding the door to pulling the fire alarm.
Sources: City of Austin vote record item 260521_RG_038; Community Impact, 7 May 2026 and 23 July 2026; Austin Current, 19 May 2026; KUT and Community Impact, August 2026. Full links on the sources page.
An Austin American-Statesman investigation published 2 November 2025 found that Ryan Alter had routed roughly $10,000 in taxpayer funds from his council office to outside groups, among them Liberal Austin Democrats, HABLA, Texas Gun Sense, Clean Water Action, the Save Barton Creek Association, the Blazier Elementary PTA and a $2,500 lifetime membership in the Texas Bar Foundation. He expensed solo meals more than 70 times at a cost of about $1,200. In October 2025 he moved $100,000 of leftover office budget to the parks department for two parks in his own district.
Austin had just been told it needed to raise taxes.
Out of my desire to help our community, I made choices that harmed the trust and reputation of city government.Ryan Alter, days after the Statesman report
23 January 2026 · Voted against
Less than three months later, council took up a $50,000 cap on how much unspent office money a member could roll into the next year. Alter voted against the stricter cap. It failed, 6 to 4 with one abstention.
The apology was public. The vote was quiet.
Sources: Austin American-Statesman, 2 November 2025 and follow-up reporting; KUT, 23 January 2026.
Out of 5,903 recorded yes or no votes, Ryan Alter has voted no seventeen times. We pulled all seventeen out of the city's file and read every one. Here is the complete list of what a District 5 council member has been willing to fight.
| Date | Item | What he voted no on |
|---|---|---|
| 5 Oct 2023 | 40 | Hyatt West PUD amendment rezoning, 151 South 1st Street |
| 2 Nov 2023 | 37 | The same Hyatt West rezoning, second reading |
| 7 Nov 2024 | 44 | An alcohol distance waiver for a Wheatsville Food Co-op location |
| 30 Jan 2025 | 92 | An appeal by Save Our Springs Alliance, the Bull Creek Foundation, the Lake Austin Collective, the Northwest Austin Civic Association and the Lakewood Club, of a site plan approved in the Loop 360 Hill Country Roadway Corridor. The motion failed. |
| 6 Mar 2025 | 40 | Historic zoning for Running Rope Ranch on Knox Lane. It failed. |
| 10 Apr 2025 | 62 | Far West Multifamily rezoning, Shoal Creek watershed |
| 22 May 2025 | 70 | The same Far West rezoning |
| 5 Jun 2025 | 16 | Water service extension into the Drinking Water Protection Zone |
| 5 Jun 2025 | 17 | Wastewater service extension into the Drinking Water Protection Zone |
| 24 Jul 2025 | 131 | A floodplain variance for a garage conversion on Waller Creek |
| 6 Nov 2025 | 43 | Updated policies for concessions in city parks |
| 11 Dec 2025 | 10 | An outside legal services contract amendment |
| 5 Feb 2026 | 57 | A jobs-based incentive worth $1,000 per job for one employer |
| 26 Feb 2026 | 4 | Another outside legal services contract |
| 26 Feb 2026 | 67 | Montopolis-Fairway mixed use plan amendment |
| 26 Feb 2026 | 69 | The companion Montopolis-Fairway rezoning |
| 12 Mar 2026 | 2 | The rewrite of Austin's lobbying ordinance, City Code Chapter 4-8 |
Read the list again.
A co-op's liquor license. A garage in a floodplain. Park concession rules. Two law firm invoices. A thousand dollars a job.
Now find the $1.5 billion tax financing package. Find the 45-year agreement on the Colorado River. Find the 20 percent tax rate increase. Find the convention center bonds. They are not on this list, because on every one of them he voted yes.
And when the environmentalists came
On 30 January 2025, Save Our Springs Alliance and four neighborhood organizations appealed the approval of a site plan in the Loop 360 Hill Country Roadway Corridor, arguing it conflicted with the Save Our Springs Ordinance and the Hill Country Roadway rules. The motion failed and the approval stood. Alter voted no.
City of Austin council vote record, item 250130_RG_092; council action notes for 30 January 2025.
Seventeen times in three and a half years. Never once on a billion-dollar item.
Complete list compiled from the City of Austin's published council voting record for Ryan Alter, dataset j48w-feyx, filtered to vote_cast = No.
| Date | Item | Vote | What it was |
|---|---|---|---|
| 13 Aug 2025 | 1 | Yes | Adopting and levying the property tax rate for FY 2025-2026, roughly 20 percent above the prior year. |
| 13 Aug 2025 | 10 | Yes | Ordering the 4 November 2025 special election to put the rate to voters. This became Proposition Q. |
| 4 Nov 2025 | Voters | Austin rejected Prop Q, 63 to 37. Only one council member, Marc Duchen, had opposed it before the election. Not Ryan Alter. | |
| 20 Nov 2025 | 6 | Yes | Reducing the tax rate to the voter-approval rate. He voted for restraint only after voters ordered it. |
| 23 Oct 2025 | 9 | Yes | Convention Center special tax revenue bonds. In an October 2025 poll of 586 Austin voters, 76 percent opposed the project and 9 percent supported it. |
| 21 May 2026 | 16 | Yes | More Convention Center special tax revenue bonds, Series 2026. |
No money for your tax bill. A billion for gas. A billion and a half for Amazon's developer.
Sources: City of Austin vote record; KXAN; KUT; Ballotpedia; Austin Monitor; Public Policy Polling, October 2025.
Between January 2023 and May 2024, the Austin Free Press examined 238 developer rezoning cases. A council majority rejected exactly one. Asked about the pattern, Ryan Alter defended it.
He voted yes on HOME Phase 1, the citywide rezoning that passed 9 to 2 after thirteen hours of public testimony.
He is not a bystander to Austin's development economy. Before taking office he was a townhome developer himself, building eighteen units on Harold Court in East Austin on a $6.4 million loan; the project was foreclosed on by the lender. Asked whether he should abstain from the HOME vote, he said: "No. I no longer have any financial interest in this development."
Sources: Austin Free Press; Community Impact; The Austin Independent; Alter's filed statement of financial information.
The room where 237 of 238 developer rezoning cases were approved.
Photo: City of Austin.
Read this part too
We publish what cuts against us, because that is why the rest of this holds up.
Two of his seventeen no votes, on 5 June 2025, blocked water and wastewater service extensions into the city's Drinking Water Protection Zone. He has pushed rooftop solar on city buildings and sponsored local solar and storage goals. The record is not empty.
On 12 March 2026 he and Vanessa Fuentes were the two votes against the rewrite of Austin's lobbying ordinance, warning that moving reporting duties off city departments and onto lobbyists themselves would remove a layer of independent verification. They were right, and they lost. We will not pretend that vote was anything other than a good one.
He amended the Dog's Head deal to cut impervious cover from 100 percent and to steer TIRZ revenue toward affordable housing and parks. He calls the peaker guardrail an imperfect fix that still reduces emissions.
An amendment is not a no vote. Every one of those improvements ended with him voting for the thing he had just criticized. Amendments are how you get credit for the speech and the outcome at the same time.
