Think Tank Asks Legislature to Require 60 Percent to Pass Local Bonds

The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) is asking the Legislature to require a 60 percent vote, rather than a simple majority, before local governments can take on bond debt. The Austin-based think tank made the case in a report released this month on the bond elections Texans voted on in May.

Voters considered 439 bond measures in the May 2026 cycle and approved 276 of them, a 63 percent passage rate, according to the report by John Bonura and Sukhadeva Mitta, which draws on the Texas Bond Review Board’s election database. With interest, the approved measures will cost $96.7 billion to repay. Under a 60 percent threshold, the authors calculate, 233 would have passed, 43 fewer, and local governments would have about $6.4 billion less debt to repay.

Many of those decisions were made by very few people. In Denton County Municipal Utility District 7, Proposition C was approved with one person voting, authorizing $5.9 billion in total repayment, the report says. Saginaw’s Proposition B passed 767 to 766. In Tarrant County, 4.1 percent of registered voters took part in the May bond election, against 63.8 percent in the November 2024 general election.

The supermajority is the first of four recommendations the report makes for the session that opens in January, and the authors point to House Bill 96 from the first special session of 2025 as a model. The second is a minimum turnout for bond elections; Senate Bill 702 sought a 30 percent floor in 2017 and failed. The third would hold bond elections in November instead of May, as Senate Bill 1209 proposed in 2025.

The fourth concerns the ballot itself. The report would print the estimated total repayment cost, with interest, on every bond ballot, bar bundling unrelated projects into one proposition, and raise the home value used in tax-impact estimates from $100,000 to $339,000, the statewide figure the report takes from the Texas Real Estate Research Center.

Under current law, the report notes, a simple majority authorizes the debt. School bond propositions must carry the words “THIS IS A PROPERTY TAX INCREASE” at the top of the ballot, The Texan reported.

The report covers only the May cycle. On November 3, many large proposals failed. Houston-area voters rejected every school bond and tax rate election on the ballot, including the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District’s (ISD) $1.6 billion bond package, according to The Texan’s count of unofficial Harris County results. All four Keller ISD bonds, totaling $828 million, failed, as did Irving ISD’s $952.4 million package and the City of Dallas’ $443 million public safety bond. “I think that these were good signs that people are upset about their property taxes, and they’re willing to reject these large bond propositions,” economist Vance Ginn told the outlet.

TPPF’s authors note open questions in their own plan. They write that further research is needed on whether some of the changes would require constitutional amendments. They would also exempt districts with fewer than 250 residents from the new thresholds, so that new utility districts can still be created and financed.

That exemption goes to the core of their argument. A utility district can be created on one person’s petition and approve bonds with a single vote, and the debt then falls on the families who buy homes there later. TPPF wants the people who will pay the bill to turn out, and to agree in larger numbers, before a local government borrows in their name.