Our City Council is stealing from us.

THIS is why you can't afford to live here anymore.

The first step to being able to afford to live in Pflugerville without being robbed blind is to STOP ELECTING a City Council that WANTS to keep robbing you.

This week, Pflugerville announced a $792.8 million budget. Let me be crystal clear....that number is OUTRAGEOUS for a city our size. The city budget is the perfect barometer of how responsibly (or irresponsibly) our money is being managed. And the best way to measure that is to compare what we’re spending and taxing against other cities around us. So let's do that:

Per-capita spending (budget ÷ population):

Pflugerville – $792.8M ÷ 82,222 = $9,642 per person

Round Rock – $789.7M ÷ 140,304 = $5,628 per person

Leander – $311.9M ÷ 95,124 = $3,278 per person

Manor – $51.7M ÷ 22,743 = $2,273 per person

Austin – $6.3B ÷ 993,588 = $6,341 per person

Hutto – $399.5M ÷ 46,690 = $8,556 per person

Cedar Park – $215.2M ÷ 82,647 = $2,604 per person

Pflugerville is spending nearly DOUBLE per person what Round Rock spends. We’re outspending Cedar Park and Leander by a mile. And even insanely irresponsible Austin spends less per person than Pflugerville does.

That’s IS INEXCUSABLE.

It means our city council has taken our money and turned Pflugerville into one of the least efficient, most wasteful cities in Central Texas. That needs to STOP.

City property tax rates:

Pflugerville – $0.5350 per $100 value

Round Rock – $0.3720

Leander – $0.4173

Manor – $0.8537

Austin – $0.5740

Hutto – $0.3859

Cedar Park – $0.36

Our tax rate is also near the top. Higher than Round Rock, Leander, Cedar Park, and Hutto. The only cities with higher rates are Austin (who's surprised) and Manor, which has no tax base. Pflugerville has NO EXCUSE

Oh.....and that doesn't even include the $115/mo base water rate to pay for water infrastructure. Austin's water infrastructure debt service is baked in to their city taxes. So what is our actual tax rate with that baked in so we can compare apples to apples?

Using the Pflugerville average home valuation of $378,234 and adding in the water base rates gets us an effective tax rate of $.90 per $100 valuation!!!

Absolutely nuts!

And what does city council do with that money? They waste it. They bypassed voters to ram through a $250 million city hall complex nobody asked for. They drained money that should’ve been saved for water and infrastructure into pet projects and overpriced contracts. They hide true costs and then act like there’s no choice but to keep taxing and spending. And now their handpicked successors want to keep the cycle going, piling debt higher, filling every inch of Pflugerville with soulless apartment blocks, destroying the charm of our city just to grab more cash to pay for their own mismanagement.

This is not sustainable. It is not responsible. And it is not acceptable.

Pflugerville is running headlong into a fiscal insolvency spiral, when debt payments eat too much of the budget, services get slashed, residents leave, revenues fall, we still have to pay our insane debt, and the collapse feeds on itself. We are closer to that point than people realize.

We only get one chance to stop it. This is an odd-year election. Turnout will be low. Just a handful of votes will decide whether Pflugerville continues down this path or whether we finally take control back from the extremists.

If you think things are expensive now, wait until council digs the hole deeper. If you think water and taxes are bad now, wait until insolvency forces cuts and higher bills at the same time.

We have to make a stand while we still can. This is our city, our money, our future and it’s being wasted and sold off piece by piece. Either we fight back now, or Pflugerville becomes an unaffordable, hostile place nobody wants to live in. The time to act is this election, because if we don’t stop the madness now, we may not get another chance.

If you write in my name and elect

 I promise you we will clean this mess up. Not for the city, but for those of us who live here and want to raise our families here.