Now, city fathers are questioning whether the jobs lost in 2001 will ever come back.

Dell, the biggest high-tech employer in central Texas, cut a quarter of its assembly jobs in Austin last year and now is moving support functions, such as call centers and help lines, to India.

In 1998, Advanced Micro Devices and Motorola announced an agreement to co-develop logic and flash memory technology. The next step, many assumed, would be a 300-mm "partner" fab near the ones Motorola and AMD operate in Austin.

But AMD chose Taiwan-based foundry UMC as its 300-mm joint-venture partner, and Singapore, with government-financed incentives of half a billion dollars or more, got the AMD-UMC plum. Austin had offered incentives in the $85 million range, limited in part by a Texas state law that does not allow school districts to waive the bulk of educational taxes as part of an incentive package.

That property tax law sometimes puts Texas at a disadvantage at home as well as abroad. New York, for example, offered large subsidies to IBM to build its 300-mm fab in Fishkill.

And unless Washington scales back its policy of subsidizing U.S. farm products (a 1996 promise to cut agricultural subsidies has evaporated), Uncle Sam doesn't have much negotiating leverage concerning chip fab subsidies in Singapore-or Dresden, Germany, where DuPont Photomasks recently decided to build a mask development center, shifting a portion of the workers from a similar center in Texas.

The move was one of dozens of lessvisible job hits to have pummeled the city. In another, Austin-based Cirrus Logic is staffing up in China, where several new DVD companies are located.

Chip design is a bright spot, but many promising Austin chip startups are cash-starved. Fourteen high-tech companies raised $112 million in the first quarter, compared with $382 million in the first quarter of 2001, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Several venture capital firms have closed or scaled back their funding operations. Austin Ventures now is the lone major source of VC funding.

Austin's music scene is still lively. But for, say, a process engineer working at Motorola, where is the job that will teach 300-mm manufacturing skills? Not here.

Unless people wake up, there won't be another job boom in Austin for quite some time.

Route feedback to dlammers@cmp.com.