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Last month, the Austin City Council made one of the most consequential generational climate decisions for the city and the planet :a commitment to build new gas-fired power plants that could cost ratepayers close to $1 billion and burn fossil fuels in our city for decades. You weren’t allowed in the room where the council took the vote.
Neither was I. And to this day, we still don’t know what it will cost, where it will be built, or even how our own council members voted.
That is not how a city that calls itself a climate leader should make decisions.
On May 21, sitting as the board of Austin Energy, the council approved the utility’s plan to pursue new natural gas ‘peaker’ units behind closed doors, in executive session. City leaders justified the secrecy by pointing to an exception in the Texas Open Meetings Act for “competitive matters.” But the result was a binding vote with no public count, no record of who voted “Yes,” and no answers on cost, location, or terms.
After two days of public testimony that ran overwhelmingly against the plan and was opposed by groups including the Sierra Club and Public Citizen, the council retreated behind a closed door and approved it anyway.
A week later, the council came back into the daylight and passed a set of emissions “guardrails.” Among them was a resolution from the District 5 incumbent I am running to replace, Council Member Ryan Alter.
Setting an emissions cap is better than setting none. But a cap riddled with exemptions bolted on after a secret vote has already committed us to new gas, does not change the underlying decision. Austin is still building new fossil-fuel generation capacity. Those units won’t come online until around 2030, and peaker plants typically run for at least 30 years. Set that against our city’s promise to reach net-zero by 2040, and the guardrails start to look less like climate policy and more like an apology.
This is the part that should trouble us most. Austin adopted a Climate Equity Plan precisely so that decisions like this one would be made in the open, with the communities who bear the costs at the table. Instead, all 10 of Austin Energy’s existing peaker units already sit in the predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods of East Austin, and the short list of sites for the new ones runs straight through those same communities. These plants emit nitrogen oxides, which trigger asthma attacks and impair lung function, and fine particulate matter linked to heart and respiratory disease. The people who will breathe that air had the least say in the vote and the least access to the room where it happened.
There is a reason process matters as much as policy. I’ve spent my career fighting for clean energy and accountable government, and as executive director of the Texas League of Conservation Voters I learned that the fights you lose are almost always the ones decided before the public ever gets a seat. Reliability matters. Keeping the lights on matters. No one is arguing otherwise. But a city does not have to choose between a working grid and an honest process, and it certainly does not have to make a billion-dollar bet on fossil fuels in secret. I would never keep such an important policy vote a secret to constituents.
District 5 deserves better than guardrails on a deal we were never allowed to see. We deserve a council member who will insist that major energy decisions happen in public, who will push Austin Energy toward the storage and renewables that actually move us toward the city’s 2040 energy goals, and who will not accept “trust us” as an answer when the questions are our health, our air, and our climate.
David Weinberg has spent his career protecting the environment, defending voting rights, and standing up for working families, from preserving funding for state parks and fighting voter restrictions to leading local grassroots campaigns. After 16 years in District 5 raising his family and serving the community, he is running for city council to bring that experience to local government.
