Great story, and an even better illustration of a couple of points I’ve been making for quite some time.
Just weeks after flash flooding killed more than 100 people in Kerr County, many of the first responders who served on the front lines of the crisis for the City of Kerrville got another gut punch: They learned that health insurance premiums for their families could be going up as much as $5,000 a year.
The ensuing outrage was palpable, from widely circulated videos on social media to online petitions. “You are looking at a mass exodus of first responders,” one firefighter wrote on the Kerrville mayor’s Facebook page.
City officials say they have no choice but to raise premiums and warn that they may need to find more cuts, including in public safety services. Kerr County leaders, along with fire and emergency officials across the state who responded to the July 4 tragedy, are anticipating similar problems.
Though the floods themselves are estimated to have caused billions of dollars in economic and property damage, they are not the reason for the financial squeeze. The culprit is actually the Republican-led Texas Legislature’s yearslong war on local property taxes that began in 2019, according to interviews with more than a dozen local officials across the state.
That’s when lawmakers passed a law that forced most local jurisdictions to seek voter approval if they aim to collect a certain amount more in property taxes than they did the previous year – even if, in many cases, the tax rate may have actually decreased or stayed the same. As a result, many local governments have had to cut spending, even as costs for things like health insurance have increased.
“They’re after us,” said Kerrville Council Member Kent McKinney in an interview, referring to state lawmakers. During a recent council meeting, he urged attendees to “get a hold of the legislators,” repeatedly referring to the city’s financial situation as a “sinking ship.”
It was a striking admission coming from a disaster-ravaged community that Gov. Greg Abbott had promised “limitless” resources after this summer’s devastating floods. And it’s not just Kerrville and Kerr County that are feeling the pinch. Texas doesn’t have its own large dedicated firefighting service and instead relies on local communities across the state to lend their first responders out during big disasters.
Dozens of those localities stepped up to help out during the recent Kerr County floods and last year’s wildfires in the Texas Panhandle. They might have to rethink doing so in the future if their funding gets squeezed any further, said Stephen Watson, the fire chief in Parker County, just west of Fort Worth.
“The state legislators would rather go spend all their time regulating local government versus doing the job of state governments,” Watson said in an interview, adding that he deployed a handful of firefighters to Kerrville for several weeks but also needs to hire about 16 more people to be at an adequate staffing level.
“You come here and you try to legislate against major tragedies,” said Watson. “Who is on the forefront of every single one of those disasters? Your first responders. So why cut our legs off?”
Lawmakers in support of the changes say they’re providing much-needed relief to ordinary Texans with steep property tax bills, and limiting unnecessary spending by local governments. They claim their aim is not to “cap” tax increases, as critics allege, but simply to give citizens more of a say on the matter by requiring elections if the increase reaches a certain threshold.
“Whatever the government takes in, it generally spends,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican and tax attorney who has been the Legislature’s leading champion for property tax relief. “So long term, if you slow the growth of government, you generally slow the growth of tax bills.”
But many local officials insist that emergency services are suffering as a result. “Every city, every county can probably find a little bit of waste somewhere,” McKinney said. “It’s fine to have a little bit of encouragement to wring all that out that you can. But at some point, streets and police protection … start to suffer.”
There’s more and it’s a gift link, you know what to do. The points I have been making, in brief:
1. Artificial revenue caps, in particular those that are based on arbitrary factors like “inflation” and population growth, are stupid, arbitrary, and harmful. This is a great illustration of how, but the general point is that local governments need the flexibility to be able to respond to their own needs. The voters are there to issue corrections when the leaders make bad decisions. They don’t need the telling them how to go about their business. The simple fact is that local governments have a lot of costs that can’t be easily cut and which are not in their control, such as health insurance costs for their employees. Forcing them to make cuts when it doesn’t make sense to make cuts leads to bad outcomes.
Now, the city of Kerrville and Kerr County are hardly blameless in all this. They like their low taxes there, which is one reason why they had never invested the money in flood warning systems. Indeed, some residents there raised a ruckus about accepting federal COVID stimulus funds in 2021 because it came from the Biden administration. There’s plenty here to kick around. My point is, they’re in a bad position now because of this stupid, arbitrary revenue cap, which the current Legislature just made even stricter. Other cities face similar problems. This is the fault of the Republicans in charge of state government.
2. All of the above is one reason why I have advocated for Democrats to work on building grassroots communities in Texas’ many smaller and medium-sized cities, with the pitch that we big city types have a lot more in common with them than they might think, and we’re all dealing with unfunded mandates and meddling interference in our business by out of touch legislative and executive Republicans, who are doing the bidding of a handful of big money donors at our expense. It may be that the worst of the anti-urban laws they’ve passed only affect the Houstons and Dallases and Austins of the state, but they view us as all the same and it’s only going to get worse for them. We’re dealing with their failures on top of our own problems, and they blame us when the voters get mad about the things we have to do in response. We need to be working together on fixing the problem.
They say you have to meet voters where they are. This is where Kerrville and places like it are now. Maybe a lot of them won’t be receptive to anything a big city Democrat might have to say, but I bet some of them would be. You have to start somewhere.