EducationElections 2022Taxes & SpendingTexas Voters Approve $19 Billion in Local Bonds, Passing Two-Thirds of Ballot Propositions

Of those, 137 were passed, greenlighting $19 billion in new spending projects. Over 70 were rejected, but the dollar amount constitutes a small fraction of the total: just $3.3 billion.

Each debt sum will be paid for through the collection of property taxes over years, maybe decades.

The largest defeated bond is Dripping Springs ISD’s Proposition 2 which would have financed the construction of a new high school; it went down with the district’s two other propositions.

“Over the next several months, district officials will work to understand why the propositions failed and develop plans to serve its growing student population so that it can continue to deliver the exceptional and personalized learning experiences for which the district is known,” its website reads.

“Dripping Springs ISD is a fast-growth district and still needs to serve the students and families who live in and are projected to move into the district. Currently, three of the district’s eight campuses are over capacity with two more campuses expected to outgrow their campus capacity next year.”

The largest 17 propositions all passed, including Austin ISD’s $2.3 billion bond that will pay for security upgrades and other programs across the district’s schools.

“This is a day to celebrate, and now we roll up our sleeves and get to work,” Austin ISD Board President Geronimo Rodriguez said. “We are 90 percent finished with work from the 2017 bond package, so we can hit the ground running on these new bond projects to advance equity in our community.”

School districts accounted for the lion’s share of both the number of propositions and the dollar figure. Nearly $12.5 billion in school district bonds passed. The number of school bond dollars rejected surpassed the dollars approved in each of the other individual categories.

The “other” category consists of 16 water district bonds — most of which are from Municipal Utility Districts — and Austin Community College District’s $770 million proposal for campus renovation projects.

The vast majority of the bonds in the city, county, and other categories passed. Over half of the school district bonds passed but had the highest rate of rejection in terms of the raw number of propositions.

Last year, for the first time in almost a decade, voters rejected more school district bonds than were approved. But that trend will, for now, remain a one-off instance.

Among the propositions specifically for athletic stadiums, over 70 percent of the $517 million proposed was rejected. Almost every dollar in refunding bonds — debt issued to refinance debt like a homeowner would do their mortgage — was approved, and most of those refunding dollars are attributed to water districts.

In both the general and May local elections, this year saw an uptick in the number of bonds placed before voters.

See a full list of the results for each proposal that was on the November 8 ballot below.

Editor’s Note: The Bond Review Board’s dataset, from which the below chart is pulled, published wrong information on the results of Plano ISD’s bonds. Those have been corrected.