Sunday, September 6, 2026

The POMA Model: Is Zilker Park Next?

 By Diana Prechter, Austin parks advocate

This is the third piece in a series on how Austin is handing the operation of its public parks to private nonprofits. The first two looked at The Trail Conservancy and Town Lake Metropolitan Park. This one looks ahead — to the next wave of these deals, and to the park that may be the biggest prize of all: Zilker.

The City has already named who's next

On October 16, 2024, PARD Director Angela Means put it in writing. In a memo to the Parks Board directing an audit of the City's park-nonprofit agreements, she wrote: "In collaboration with the City's Law Department, PARD continues to draft and negotiate partnership agreements. Agreements in development include the Zilker Botanical Garden Conservancy, Fruitful Commons, and the Austin Parks Foundation." So the City is, by its own account, drafting a POMA-style agreement with the Austin Parks Foundation (APF).

Why APF is a different kind of park nonprofit

Most park conservancies are donor-funded. The Central Park Conservancy — the nation's largest — draws about 64% of its revenue from contributions and only about 17% from earned or event income (fiscal year ending June 2025), and its contributions have run between 57% and 81% every year since 2021. APF's revenue mix is nearly the reverse. In 2024, roughly 76% of APF's revenue — about $9.3 million of $12.3 million — came from a single commercial event, the Austin City Limits (ACL) Music Festival, with only about 21% from donations. (Both figures come straight from the organizations' IRS 990s.) APF is, in practice, a festival-revenue operation that also does park philanthropy — the opposite of the donation-funded model the public usually pictures when it hears "parks foundation."

That matters because the POMA model rewards exactly this. The template contractually pushes the partner to maximize commercial revenue from public parkland. A nonprofit whose budget already runs on a giant commercial festival is uniquely built to do that — and uniquely dependent on being allowed to.

The Zilker connection

Zilker is a 351-acre metropolitan park — large, iconic, and long overdue for a park-wide plan. The City tried to make one: the Zilker Park Vision Plan. It was halted in August 2023 (the interim City Manager suspended it after Mayor Watson and several Council members opposed it) and never came to a vote. A major public objection at the time was the fear that a nonprofit/conservancy model would prioritize commercial interests and mega-donors over the broader community and the rest of the park system.

Meanwhile, APF already dominates the commercial life of Zilker Park. ACL — the festival that funds three-quarters of APF's budget — is held in Zilker, now under a 15-year City contract. APF also operates the Zilker Eagle train. And there is a direct organizational link between APF and the community nonprofit forming around Zilker's future: Colin Wallis, the CEO of the Austin Parks Foundation, sits on the board of Zilker 351, the nonprofit created to shape the park's next chapter.

The reasonable inference — and the honest caveat

Put those pieces together — a planned APF partnership agreement, APF's existing commercial hold on Zilker (it runs both ACL and the Zilker Eagle train there), APF's own CEO on the Zilker 351 board, and a 351-acre park that still has no adopted plan — and it is a reasonable concern that APF's anticipated POMA could designate Zilker as the acreage it operates, maintains, and commercializes. 

There's a fiscal motive, too: Zilker's maintenance cost the Parks Department about $2.6 million in FY25, and a POMA would move that expense off its books. To be clear, this is an inference, not a signed contract — Zilker 351 says it "has not yet established a partnership agreement" and that the Parks Department "will continue to manage, operate, and oversee Zilker Park," and no POMA assigning Zilker to APF has been made public. But every one of these pieces is on the public record, and residents deserve a clear answer about whether Zilker is headed toward such a contract before any deal is finalized.

Why it should concern the public

The worry is the same one that stopped the Zilker Park Vision Plan in 2023, now arriving through a different door. If Austin hands O&M and commercial rights over its most-used park to a nonprofit that already earns most of its money by commercializing that same park, the incentives all point one way: more revenue-generating activity on public land, decisions about the park's future made by a private board rather than an accountable public body, and festival and concession dollars flowing to a nonprofit's priorities instead of the City's General Fund and the park system as a whole. 

In Chicago, festival revenue from Lollapalooza is paid to the elected Chicago Park District; in Minneapolis, an elected Park Board runs operations while its foundation only fundraises. Austin is on a path to route that money -- and that authority -- through a private nonprofit instead. The public should get to weigh that trade-off — in the open, and before the contract is signed.

Sources

All figures come from the City's own records and the organizations' public filings:

Diana Prechter is an Austin parks advocate who researches City of Austin park-partnership agreements through public records.

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The POMA Model: Is Zilker Park Next?

  By Diana Prechter, Austin parks advocate This is the third piece in a series on how Austin is handing the operation of its public parks to...