FROUSA.ORG

Activate Your Voice. Build Civic Power. Shape the Future.

SAN ANTONIO – What to cut?

It’s a thorny question the newly elected mayor and San Antonio City Council are grappling with as they face a ballooning budget deficit.

It’s also a question they largely avoided in their first budget discussion on Friday.

The $1.67 billion General Fund is the city’s checking account, covering services such as police, fire, parks, the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District, Animal Care Services, and regular street maintenance. However, two of its biggest sources of revenue, property and sales tax, are growing much more slowly than the cost of providing those services.

The city estimates that the 2026 fiscal year budget will have a $20.8 million deficit, which would explode to $151.8 million a year later.

City staff said that tapping its budget reserves, relying more heavily on money from CPS Energy, raising fees, or even maxing out the property tax rate wouldn’t fully get the city out of the hole.

“We are going to have to reduce expense, no matter what we do,” City Manager Erik Walsh told the council members.

Priorities

None of the council members supported raising the property tax rate, which, according to the rough scenarios laid out by staff, would mean the city would need to find approximately $109 million worth of cuts or savings.

However, while council members were quick to mention all the budget areas they wanted to prioritize for funding — whether it was infrastructure, public safety, Animal Care Services, or Metro Health — there were few specific suggestions of what could be put on the chopping block.

Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones asked staff to examine how delaying certain projects would impact the budget and whether some might be able to be funded through a bond instead — a suggestion echoed by Councilwoman Phyllis Viagran (D3).

Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2), who has long promoted throttling back the city’s spending on police, alluded to that possibility in his comments.

“There is no other department that grows at that rate, and we’ll keep doing what we’re doing, but acting like if we cut our Metro Health Department, libraries, homeless outreach, non-profits, or some other services that our most vulnerable residents rely on — if we cut those that we’re suddenly going to save our budget is very misguided and it’s not rooted in fact,” he said.

McKee-Rodriguez and Councilman Edward Mungia (D4) both suggested that homeless camp cleanups were an ineffective use of city money. Most of the funding for that, though, comes from another part of the budget meant for solid waste management.

“I look forward to working with this body, as well as with the staff, to understand how we are going to identify those trade-offs in line with what we all agreed to be important: funding the core missions — as we rightly define them … minimizing long-term risks, and then making sure that we’re minimizing any risk to our most vulnerable communities,” Jones said at the end of the three-hour budget session.

Although Jones and the 10 council members will have the final say on what is included or cut from the budget, it will be city staffers who create the first draft, which will be presented on Aug.14.

Police

One thing that has already been put on the back burner is a plan to hire hundreds of new police officers.

The city’s budget projections on Friday only included current service levels.

An outside staffing analysis conducted in 2023 found that 360 new San Antonio police officers would be needed over a three- to five-year period to give patrol officers more time for proactive policing.

Walsh, who used a slightly different figure of 365 officers on Friday, noted that 165 of those positions have already been added.

“It was to be able to change the amount of time that officers have for proactive (policing) to from 40% when we started to 60% after the 365,“ Walsh said. ”I don’t want you to think that we’re 200 officers short.”

Councilman Marc Whyte (D10), Councilwoman Misty Spears (D9), and Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito (D7) all wanted the budget to include at least 65 additional police officers.

It was not immediately clear how much that would cost.

Budget survey

The city also hired the ETC Institute to conduct a budget survey of nearly 1,200 residents of San Antonio.

After rating the importance of and need for individual services, the two scores were combined to create a priority investment rating.

Homeless services and homeless camp cleanups were the highest priorities, according to the survey results, followed by streets, affordable housing and Animal Care Services.

CLARIFICATION — In a broadcast of the version of this story, KSAT stated Jones referred back to the budget guiding principles when asked about what could be cut. Upon further review, she appeared instead to be referring to the size of any budget changes.

Read also: