Six things the filings show
The Story
Money and access
Small Donors And Big Donors
Are Not Funding
The Same Politician
1,731 people gave him less than $100. Together they account for eleven percent of his money. 512 checks were written at the exact legal maximum. Those account for more than half of it. One of these groups is a mailing list. The other is a constituency.
Under $100 each
$0
VS
At the legal maximum
$0
Each dot is one contribution, drawn to scale against the dollars it carried. Austin's limit was $400 through August 2022, $450 through August 2025, and $500 after that, and it resets between a general election and its runoff.
The pattern that matters
The Bigger The Check,
The More Likely
It Is Real Estate
Sorted by size of check, largest first. The share of each band that came from real estate, development, and the land use industry that serves it.
Percentages are of all dollars in each band. Contributions where the filer reported no employer are included in the denominator, which makes every figure here conservative.
The underlying table
| Contribution size | Gifts | Total dollars | Real estate dollars | Share of band | Share where employer known |
|---|
Where the money comes from
One Industry
Dwarfs The Rest
Every donor with a known employer, sorted by industry. Real estate, development, and land use are shown as a single block, because to a council member voting on a zoning case they function as one. Click it to break it apart.
The map
He Represents Downtown Austin.
His Money Does Not
Come From There.
District 9 is the district he was elected to serve. For every dollar raised from a ZIP code lying almost entirely inside it, roughly two and a half dollars came from outside Austin altogether.
Money from outside Austin
Money from inside District 9
District boundaries are the 2021 Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission map, which governs the 2022, 2024 and 2026 elections. ZIP codes are mail routes, not district lines. Only 78701, 78705 and 78712 lie almost entirely inside District 9; 78703, 78704 and 78723 straddle district lines and are reported separately as indeterminate rather than claimed for either side. The map is a stylized illustration, not a survey.
Giving as a bloc
Two Firms Sit
Above Everyone Else
Contribution limits apply to people, not to the firms that employ them. Counting how many separate employees of one company gave to the same candidate is how coordinated giving becomes visible. The two largest private-sector blocs in the entire dataset are both in the development business.
| Employer | Separate donors | Gifts | Total | Industry | Business before Council |
|---|
Bundling
The Money Did Not
Arrive One Person
At A Time
A contribution limit binds an individual. It does not bind a household, and it does not bind everyone who works in one office. Counting donors by street address shows where money was gathered rather than merely given, and it requires no inference whatsoever. The addresses are printed on the filings.
| Address | City | Donors | Maxed out | Total | Employers reported there | Flags |
|---|
Click any row to see the individual donors at that address. Apartment and suite numbers are stripped when grouping, so a row can represent one household or one building. That distinction is shown in the row rather than assumed, and a multi-unit building is not by itself evidence of coordination.
Verified findings
On The Record
Each of the following was checked against a primary or reputable secondary source, and each source is linked. Where a link in the chain could not be closed, it says so.
The dossier
Who These
People Actually Are
What a donor writes on a campaign finance form is not always what they do for a living. Every significant donor below was researched individually against firm records, licensing boards, City rosters and the business press.
Donor File
Independently verified · sources on every entry
| Donor | Given | Filed as | Actually | Role | Before Council |
|---|
Click a row for the supporting sources and any caveat recorded during verification.
Data and method
Check Every
Number Yourself
Nothing here is asserted without a source. The full record set, the reconciliation, the classification rules and the known limits are all below.
How this was built, and what it cannot tell you
Sources
- Sixteen campaign finance reports filed with the Austin City Clerk on Texas Ethics Commission Form C/OH, covering 1,122 pages.
- Three of the sixteen are Correction Affidavits that amend earlier reports. All three correct ActBlue expenditure subtotals only, and their contribution schedules duplicate the originals. All three are excluded. One is misnamed: the file labelled a July 2025 correction actually corrects the July 2024 report. Counting them would have inflated the total by roughly $206,000.
- Thirteen unique reporting periods remain, running from July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2026.
Reconciliation
- Every period reconciles exactly to the schedule subtotals printed on that report's own cover sheet. Not approximately. Exactly, with zero dropped records.
- Every record was extracted twice, by two different tools using two different methods. The two agree on every contribution in every report.
- Loans are excluded, including the $2,500 the candidate loaned his own campaign in December 2022.
What this cannot establish
- ZIP codes are mail routes, not council districts. Contributions from ZIP codes that straddle district lines are reported as indeterminate rather than assigned.
- An employer is not a motive. Classifying a donor by industry says where their paycheck comes from. It does not establish that any contribution influenced any vote, and no such claim is made here.
- Occupation and employer are self-reported by the filer and are sometimes transposed, abbreviated or simply wrong.
How each contribution was classified
Classification runs in four passes. Every record stores which pass produced its label, the exact text that triggered it, and where applicable the source consulted, so any figure can be reduced back to what donors themselves disclosed.
| Pass | What it does | Share of dollars |
|---|
Real estate is recorded in three tiers so any reader can accept or reject each one: core real estate, the land use and development support industry, and an indirect but real nexus. A separate household layer, where a donor reporting no employer shares an address with a donor who did, is tracked but deliberately excluded from every published figure.
Fundraising over time
| Reporting period | Contributions | Total |
|---|
Geography in detail, by city and ZIP code
Every contribution, all 3,183 records
| Date | Donor | Amount | Employer as filed | Occupation as filed | City | ZIP | Industry | Flags | Source page |
|---|