Yes, with the new tunnel twice as long as originally planned for, the $7.1B estimate for Project Connect has now grown to $10B. But when Project Connect was originally approved by voters, it was based on this $7.1B budget estimate. It was to be funded by property tax increases and a large amount of federal grants to be expected to cover 45% of this cost. The federal grants had not yet been acquired, just expected to be allocated somewhere to the project down the line.
The COA tax rate for homeowners jumped by 20%. Wording is key here because entire bills didn’t go up 20%, just the COA tax rate which jumped 8.75 cents from 44.6 cents to 53.35 cents per $100 (~20% hike in that portion of the property tax bill).
Opponents of Project Connect highlighted the fact that nearly half of the budget was dependent on federal grants that had not yet been guaranteed to be approved by federal government. The 20% increase in the COA property tax rate was a huge issue as well.
Advocates of Project Connect criticized the 20% figure as misleading Austin citizens about the size of their tax bill increase. The approval of Project Connect would only increase property taxes by just a few hundred dollars, not 20% of the entire bill. But the reality is that the property tax RATE for COA did, in fact, increase by nearly 20%, but it only makes up a portion of the property tax bill.