City Council Member Mike Siegel is calling it a partial victory for Austin's IT workforce after City Manager T.C. Broadnax sharply narrowed the scope of the One ATS reorganization, the plan that would have rolled technology employees from across city departments into a single agency.
Under the original proposal, more than 400 IT staff scattered across city departments would have been transferred into Austin Technology Services. The revised plan announced by Broadnax this month moves just 189 employees in what the administration is describing as the first of three phases.
In the wake of the scale-back, Siegel withdrew a resolution that had been set for a May 7 vote. Co-sponsored by CMs José Velásquez, Paige Ellis, Zo Qadri, and Vanessa Fuentes, the measure would have directed the city manager to pause any employee transfers into ATS until further justification was provided to council.
Siegel's decision followed two memos from Broadnax — on April 29 and May 6 — that reduced the size of the first phase and pledged a more transparent process going forward. The May 6 memo committed to ongoing employee meetings, work sessions with affected departments to map out roles and service requirements, and continued briefings and written updates to council.
AFSCME Local 1624, the union representing city workers, has spent the spring organizing against One ATS with public actions and repeated Council appearances. Union leaders thanked the council members who pushed back on the plan but stopped well short of celebrating Broadnax's revisions.
Since launching their campaign in March, AFSCME organizers have argued that the rollout began without an adequate plan, that communication with affected staff has been thin, and that consolidating IT under one roof creates risk for public safety operations, information security, and even the city's electric grid. The union has pressed for a hybrid model in which some departments continue to hire and manage their own technologists while a central IT department handles shared services.
Broadnax rejected that hybrid approach in a November 2025 memo, noting that Austin staffs roughly twice as many IT workers as comparable cities and spends about $200 million more per year on technology services. He shifted last week, telling council the city will now study hybrid models and report back, and pledging that workers caught up in the consolidation will keep their pay, leave, benefits, and seniority.
A separate piece of the reorganization will move ahead with union support: cutting duplicate software applications that have multiplied under the current hybrid arrangement. The city estimates that consolidation alone could save as much as $142 million a year.
One ATS lands inside a broader effort. In February, council approved the Comprehensive Efficiency Assessment Program, a rolling audit of Austin's 40-plus departments — meaning more reorganizations are expected. AFSCME Business Manager Carol Guthrie used the moment to send a message to city leadership about how the next round should be handled.
How council and the city manager handle the remaining two phases of One ATS — and whether the promised transparency materializes — will likely shape both the politics of efficiency reform at City Hall and the relationship between Broadnax and the city's largest labor union for the rest of the budget cycle.