Whitmire’s budget passes

On to the next thing.

Mayor John Whitmire

The City Council approved Mayor John Whitmire’s nearly $7 billion budget on Wednesday after months of strenuous efforts to cut costs and streamline services as officials contended with the largest deficit in Houston’s history.

The nearly eight-hour, high-tension meeting included a protest from members of storm recovery nonprofit Northeast Action Collective that ended with the clearing of the council chambers by City Hall security officers.

Whitmire’s budget passed with a near-unanimous vote, with only Council Members Edward Pollard, Abbie Kamin and Tiffany D. Thomas voting in opposition. Pollard voted no over his worries about the city continuously spending more than it was bringing in, and Kamin voted no due to her concerns about the budget inadequately accounting for disaster response.

“Mayor, it’s not personal,” Kamin said. “I respect you. There’s a lot of hard work that has been put into this by city staff, and I hope that your administration will not seek retribution against the district and our residents.”

[…]

All 22 city departments were asked to reorganize and consolidate as they formed their respective budgets. Other efforts to save costs included implementing a hiring freeze and offering eligible employees an opportunity to retire.

More than 3,000 employees ended up retiring May 1. Houston’s Public Works Department saw the most cuts at 342 exits.

Among the largest contributors to this last year’s budget deficit was a denied Texas Supreme Court ruling that required the city to follow local law and spend hundreds of millions more on streets and drainage every year.

In an effort to stave off immediate financial impacts that would have added to the city’s deficit, Whitmire’s team negotiated an agreement with plaintiffs to phase in payments to the drainage fund over the next four years.

That settlement agreement came with pushback from advocacy groups, who argued that the city didn’t seek enough community feedback and had violated the will of the voters by negotiating a closed-door deal. The payment agreement was ultimately approved by a judge days before the budget sailed through council.

Members of Northeast Action Collective showed up to the council chambers in droves Wednesday clad in yellow shirts and held up large signs reading “YOUR BUDGET IS A SCAM” and “NO TO THE BUDGET!”

The group has been advocating against the city’s budget and say it under funds critical services like drainage and over funds public safety.

Collective members were vocal about their thoughts about the budget throughout Wednesday’s meeting, fluttering green and red sheets of paper for budget ideas they liked and didn’t like. They also held a news conference ahead of the meeting’s start outside City Hall.

Tension came to a head when City Hall security cleared the council chamber after an outburst among the group’s members as council members presented their budget amendments.

Whitmire told the council Wednesday the city has no plans to press charges against the group’s members for disrupting the meeting.

The department with the largest cut was the Department of Neighborhoods, which will be operating with around half the budget it had last year at around $7.4 million.

See here, here, here, and here for some background. Houston Public Media adds some details.

Council members offered 71 amendments to the budget. Fourteen of them were approved, including hiring additional animal enforcement officers, extra funding for kennel cleaning at the city’s animal shelter, drainage and ditch improvements, and the creation of an investment fund to address health benefits and life insurance for retired city employees.

Facing a more than $200 million deficit this year, Whitmire’s administration slashed about $75 million in spending from the city’s $3 billion general fund.

[…]

The vast majority of the proposed amendments fell short. In the most narrow defeat, council members declined to lower their own budgets by 2%. The proposal from Flickinger failed in a 12-5 vote. In the most narrow success, council member Mary Nan Huffman’s proposal to cap certain travel expenses passed in a 9-8 vote.

Huffman also authored a successful amendment to allocate more than $3 million to address drainage concerns at the local level across the 11 city council districts.

At the end of the current fiscal year, there will be about $380 million in the fund balance, according to the mayor’s finance department. The controller’s office expects about $354 million. They project a deficit for next year of $107 million to $134 million, which could leave as little as $31 million in wiggle room above the required savings threshold.

“The budget is, of course, not structurally balanced,” City Controller Chris Hollins told city council at the start of the meeting. “It contains a projected shortfall of over $100 million to be covered by spending down the city savings account to near our reserve threshold.”

“(Hollins) stated that instead of cutting spending or identifying sustainable revenue, the proposal is to draw down from the fund balance. That’s not true,” responded finance director Melissa Dubowski. She pointed to efforts to reduce bloated spending on contracts with external vendors, as well as an estimated $30 million in general fund savings after more than 1,000 municipal workers accepted early retirement buyouts in April at an upfront cost of $11 million.

“We certainly are drawing from fund balance to close the remaining budgetary gap,” Dubowski said, “but what he failed to mention is that this proposed budget actually is a decrease from the previous year.”

If the baseline financial situation continues, the finance department projects a more than $460 million budget deficit by the end of the decade — an untenable trend that would exhaust the fund balance.

I’ve not seen a city budget come close to failing, so this one’s passage is no surprise. All I know for sure is that it won’t be any easier next year. We have needed to raise revenue for a long time, and if there’s one thing to say about where we are now, it’s that we’ve done the cuts and efficiencies and consolidations. If now is not the time to alter or remove the stupid revenue cap and add a garbage fee, when will it ever be? The Press and Emily Hinds have more.

Related Posts:

• Judge approves the Whitmire drainage settlement deal
• Storm recovery group challenges Whitmire’s drainage deal
• Mayor Whitmire unveils his first budget