City Plan Commission - Regular Meeting

Good evening. We're going to get started and try to get everybody out of here on time. Hi, my name is Macy Hill and I have the honor to represent District 7. We appreciate you taking time out of your Wednesday evening to spend it with us and talk about all the fun topics of the budget for 2027 fiscal year. I'm going to turn it over to our city manager, Jay Chapa. And I know we have lots of city staff here, so y'all please ask questions along the way. We want to make sure we get all of your questions answered and feel like y'all have satisfied, you know, gone through the budget and have satisfied answers before you leave tonight. So, Jay, thanks.

Well, good evening. Thank you all for being here. I'm really just going to turn it over to the person that's really going to go through the slides. But I did want to mention, so this is the city manager's proposed budget. Under state law, ultimately the city has to adopt a balanced budget. And one of the jobs of the city manager and staff is to provide the city council with a proposed budget that they then begin their budget deliberations off of. And so you'll see as you go through here, some of the impacts that we've had from the TAD valuations going down overall and their new format of valuing every other year, although they skipped two years. I had a quick conversation at a reception with Ross Perot. I thought this would be kind of a funny and interesting a note, Ross Perot Jr. and I saw each other and he said, and it was with the Wistrom announcement, and he said, man, Fort Worth is blowing and going. You guys got stuff going on everywhere. Y'all just, it must be awesome. And I said, well, we're looking at about a $75 million budget shortfall. And his face was like, how does that, how does that work? That's what he told me. And I said, I explained, well, it's, They're not appraising like they used to. And so he was confused. You could tell he was confused and he changed the subject. But, yeah, but so, you know, getting through this budget process has been difficult. And as a city manager, one of my goals overall was to try to ensure that The services to citizens weren't impacted completely where we thought that would begin having a lot of complaints from the citizens. We want to make sure that police and fire specifically, but emergency response also stayed up with growth so that we can, those are the loudest screams, and of course they're rightly so. And then finally, try to ensure that we don't do things that going to put our taxpayers way out of whack everybody else in the in the region in the area right try to keep make sure that Fort Worth can still compete overall so hopefully we did that I'm going to turn it over Simmons she is leads the budget group she's our chief transfer and she's going to go through the slides and as was mentioned ask questions Because she's going to jump from fund to fund to fund.

Thank you. All right. Good evening, everyone. Christiane Simmons. I'm the director. It's my pleasure to be here with you tonight. I know you will forgive me if I just did this yesterday.

So I feel like my brain's a little scrambled. But thank you so much for coming out. This is sort of a continuation of our budget public. you participated in some of our early priority surveys and those kinds of things so we certainly appreciate the engagement at any stage of the process. Jay touched on some of these already but you know every budget year has sort of themes that emerge and this year certainly the theme has been this structural imbalance that we're seeing between the activities of our growth like our big growth in the city which we're all aware of and how that growth is not translating to growth in our property tax values which are our biggest source of revenue in the general talked a little bit about that. If you're all the drivers about TAD, I will tell you, we did a pretty deep dive with council on August 4th. If you'd like to just really hear all the detail about it is not just the TAD reappraisal plan, which you're probably familiar with by now. They adopted that in 2024 and decided we'll only reappraise. So the first year was a the first year with no reappraisal on residential property, and then we'll get reappraised the next year. So that's a whole kind of a new thing we've been having to forecast for. The other thing that kind of really threw us out of whack when we got our certified values is just the, I would call them like historic, unprecedented, staggering litigation in the mid-year and mid-year value loss. So kind of the erosion in values between April and July. So the success of protests and litigation is causing us to lose a lot of value too. And then so we go into the budget process knowing those things. We got pretty well through and closed most of what we knew to be our gap. And then at the end of July when we got our certified values from TAD, we really had a lot more work to do in a short amount of time. So we really tried to balance in a responsible way. Jay mentioned public safety. We always look at fee increases. We always look at the tax rate and try to balance that whole picture. And so you'll see the result of some of that today. And like he said, this is an evolving process. We make our recommendation. And then, of course, your council member is here for you to share your thoughts and feedback with. So our operating budget is $3.32 billion. That's like the whole operating budget. And we'll go through each piece. So here is like a boring finance table of what that looks like. The general fund is about a third of our operating funds, so it's our biggest. And you can see there this year's adopted budget compared to the recommended budget for next year. So the general fund growing about 4.6%. Now, across all the operating funds, we're growing about 7.5%, but that kind of includes enterprise growth. Special revenue is our third biggest category. That includes things like CCPD and EMS, which we'll talk about. But that's kind of the big budget picture there. So growing from $3.1 billion to $3.3 billion year over year. We walked through like a longer version of this with council yesterday, but wanted to just summarize on one slide sort of the gap closing story. And so kind of at the highest point of the budget process between what we knew was the gap between revenue and expenditures and also some of the things we knew we needed to add on the public safety side. Our gap at one point kind of ballooned to $94 million. And so this is like a very high level overview of if that had been static, like here's how it looked. So just from a process perspective, because we were assuming some TAD impacts, of course, we, in the first part of the budget process, asked departments to cut their budgets by 1%. So like we delivered them a target budget that was constrained by 1% already. That garnered us about $7.8 million in savings, so not nothing, and we should always be doing that as a practice, just really evaluating the base budget. And then we also asked departments in the general fund to submit an additional 3% in reductions. So that garnered us, of what we took, about $14.5 million more. Then we entered some deeper reductions that were like not so much department submitted, but that we, you know, the city management staff in conjunction with department heads were kind of looking at. And it was in that third bar, deeper reductions that we sort of thought we'd figured it out before our certified values came. We're like, okay, we're pretty well balanced. We had some strategies on the table for like alternate scenarios. But then again, when we got our certified values, our gap grew from about 49 million to almost 80. So we lost another 28 million in that value loss from April to July. So we had to continue those reductions and you'll see what some of those are We also increase revenue. We always do that as part of the budget So that's not necessarily the tax rate piece but departments looking at their own fees. We charge a number of fees You know the city's I think the budget response that we always do to kind of explain what they are is like many pages long like hundreds of pages long and for all kinds of things, you know, think about permits and municipal court like fines and room rental fees and just all the big business of a city. And so the main two items there in revenue increases, like the two big ticket items, are aviation covering some of the cost of fire where they are directly tied to fire stations at airports. So like the FAA allows our aviation department to cover the cost of those firefighters that are tied to the airports. Um, and then the other big one was a kind of across the board increase for development services, which they kind of continuously look at to make sure they're keeping up with, with their cost. And then finally, um, toward the end, you know, in the last couple of weeks we had to determine like, do we continue to make very deep cuts and really start to impact service levels at an, at a level that we're frankly all uncomfortable with? Uh, or do we recommend a tax rate increase? And so, um, as you heard from Jay, we've, we've recommended a tax rate increase to close the remaining gap. Can I show you that in like a couple of slides? Okay, yep. You're getting ahead of me. You're doing great. It's good. So current tax rate is 67 cents per $100 valuation. The tax rate increase recommended is 70.2 cents, so it's a 3.2 cent increase. And you may be familiar with this breakout, especially if you were involved in some of the bond public meetings. So we always kind of show this. The tax rate breaks out into two buckets. The first bucket is operations and maintenance. So that's the funding source for the general fund. So think about police, fire, parks, libraries, transportation, some of those very critical areas. city services, that's the funding source. In the city of Fort Worth, we further break that out into an operations rate and then a capital or PAYGO rate. That's cash funded capital maintenance rather than relying on debt for like maintenance items. And then the other portion of the tax rate is the debt rate. And so if you were involved in bond discussions, you'll remember that 14.75 is the part that we said we're not going to raise the debt rate for the 2026 bonds. You can see it's not raised. It is a static rate there. So all of our 3.2% growth goes to the operations portion of the rate for those primarily public safety increases. So I'm going to go through just highlights by council priorities. So you may be familiar with council's five strategic priorities. Here they are. And we'll go in really no particular order, but I think we just happen to start with safety here. So again, most of the ads of the budget are public safety related. There is one recommendation to eliminate the fire department's hope program. So that's homeless outreach and prevention and education. There are four sworn fire personnel that are dedicated to this program. They do this work full time, but because of fire's minimum staffing requirements, their fire suppression job, like putting out fires, has to be backfilled on overtime. And so the savings from this program would come from eliminating it would come from returning those four people to fire suppression activities and then perhaps finding another partner or something to do the homeless work. So that's the proposal that's on the table right now. We did get some questions about that yesterday at Council, so we'll be providing some additional budget sort of responses in our next work session on that. We also added funding to fire for overtime and fleet. So fire, again, has minimum staffing requirements. We always like to make sure that the budget is appropriately funded for those requirements so that we can actually hold both fire and police, frankly, accountable for overtime activities and make sure that we're holding them to a budget that makes sense. And then really across the budget we're seeing, and perhaps you too, you know, like fuels going up, right, and the cost of vehicle parts and maintenance. And so fire has more trouble absorbing those big costs than some other departments. So we added funding there. On the police side, adding 76 patrol officers, this is to keep up with the city's growth and continue to meet the good response time goals and also the proactivity goals. How proactive can our police officers be as they're patrolling from day to day? And so as the city grows, we have to continuously study the staffing levels of the police department. And then just kind of a good thing for police, we've also created corporal positions in this budget. This allows from an internal perspective for a police officer to get to stay in patrol for their whole career if that's what they want to do. Right now an officer has to leave patrol in order to promote to like a corporal or a detective. And so maybe they love patrol, but then they go into a specialized unit or something and they never get to migrate back or it's a long time before they migrate back. So this allows folks to stay in patrol as a promotional path. And also they take over some of the field training responsibilities that are right now done by officers on incentive pay. So I think those are probably good recommendations that Chief Garcia brought with him to Fort Worth. Finally, emergency management and communications did a pilot this year. That's like the 911 and emergency response group. And they are piloting this assistive technology that is like, think of like AI triage, but for non-emergencies. So it helps the call takers really focus on those emergency calls. And they've seen some really good like workload efficiency from using that program. So we're recommending funding that program since the pilot has been a success. On the infrastructure side, because we have, I showed you the pay-go rate, that portion of the tax rate that's 7.25 cents. We've left it at 7.25 cents, but again, because our values have fallen, the pay-go has fallen because it's static. And so our pay-go, which is our pay-as-you-go capital sort of cash-funded maintenance, has been reduced for fiscal year 27 by $2.8 million. That spans a variety of buckets, including streets, parks, maintenance, pavements. So it's primarily transportation and public works, but also parks, city facilities, a little bit of IT. This budget also authorizes a street maintenance fee. We've been talking about that for a couple of years now. It doesn't actually go into effect in fiscal year 27. It authorizes it to appear in the ordinance so that the departments can continue to work toward implementation of that fee. It won't come online until fiscal year 28. And really a lot of that has to do with the fact that water is updating their billing system or implementing a new billing system. And this fee will occur on the water bill. So they kind of have to like build it in this year as they do that system overhaul. And then finally, this budget continues water capital program. So as you know, the City of Fort Worth's Water Department is a regional utility with a lot of growth, and they have a number of capital programming going on, including the reclamation facility in Mary's Creek and the cast iron replacement program. Community investment, I would say this priority is one, and you'll see in a minute to your point, kind of a lot of the departments that are not public safety in the general fund are the departments that we kind of lump under community safety, I mean investment. And so our attempts here were just to minimize service level impact as much as we could and to avoid widespread or even permanent closure of community centers and libraries. If you've been to City News, you may see that there's a lot of cities that are sort of rotating closures and hours and trying to issues. So we were trying hard to avoid and this budget avoids widespread or permanent closures of those facilities. This budget currently recommends or the numbers are built around closing.

That is a $403,000 savings. So you see some of these programs have a big impact and maybe they're not really That is a code compliance 3% reduction.

It also reduces by 3% because, again, we did those like 3% reductions along the way. So that's a $2.5 million program right now funded out of the city's paychecks, and it would reduce it by $75,000. The mobile toolshed program was actually a pilot program last year, and we invested in the budget for it this year because it was going really well. We'll still continue, but we recommend reducing it by about a quarter. So that's right. Yesterday, I think it's a four-person team, and this repurposes one person. Yeah. And so it doesn't mean that the work won't get done. It just means that maybe when you call, it takes a little longer to respond. We're going to be providing information to council on all the bullets I just described for As you can imagine, and as I'm sure some of you are, things are concerning to council. And so we'll be providing some more of the associated with those reductions. We are implementing improvement program. And so we fund one neighborhood a year for a neighborhood improvement program that's basically presents on in the fall.

We don't want to totally reduce that program, but typically it's

activities that happened in that first year so rather than reducing the program altogether we just took the funding level down to reflect what the first year's new neighborhood is selected so that was four million dollars to one million dollars and then which is we did a successful pilot this year for a nuisance abatement we called it This budget adds dedicated personnel for continuing that program. We call it like being in its properties, and it's a multi-departmental effort, primarily led by code compliance, police, and others. Yep.

Within that neighborhood improvement program, if that's being reduced, what losses are you getting?

Yeah, so we'll still do a neighborhood. We're hoping that there's not much of a service level impact on that one because typically in year one of a neighborhood, the planning activities are about right size with the budget we're leaving in there. So we'll still plan to do a neighborhood a year. It's just that we're staggering the delivery, like the funding associated. So in year one, you might see into a million dollars worth of activity because there's a lot of work with the neighborhood they make plans they decide we need street lights here we need you know sidewalks here and so we've funded those kinds of activities and then in year two you would bump up the funding to depending on the plan to two or two and a half million and then typically in year three you see that funding fall again so it's just more of a spread out delivery rather than a front loading the cost and then just having it filter over the year does that make sense okay great On the economic development side, we typically do a transfer from the general fund to the economic development incentives fund. This allows us to kind of keep like cash on hand, if you will, for economic development deals. This is because the city doesn't have like a 4A or 4B sales tax like some other fund. cities that we compete with for business. And so we send our half cent sales tax to Crime Control and Prevention District, but other cities send some of that to Economic Development. So this is kind of the city's response to that. We've had this for a couple of years. There is a balance there, so we thought we could do a one-time reduction in that transfer. So we've reduced it by 90% in the budget as a balancing effort. And so it's typically 5 million in fiscal year 27. It's going to be half a million in hopes that perhaps we can bump that back up in future years, maybe when reappraisals happen. This budget does continue the partnership with local chambers for the small business development program, which we really ramped up this year. It also transitions management of the Will Rogers Memorial Complex. Some of you are aware that's transitioning to a qualified management agreement with a third party. And then we do add one position in economic development to support the project coordination and delivery in the neighborhoods that are targeted for revitalization. Last one, responsible growth. These are some of the like sausage making things I think, but some of them could be interesting to you. We've shifted funding from, we usually use the general fund to pay for equipment and vehicles that need to be replaced. We had some available capacity in our debt on the tax note side. So we've shifted that out of the general fund and into that available debt capacity. So that relieved the general fund by about four and a half million dollars. We have seen really high cost of health claims, particularly on the pharma side. And so we have a multi-tiered like intervention that's happening with group health. But one of the items is that we had to increase our employer contributions to that fund by 40% in order to help right-size that fund. We didn't want to put that burden on the employees, so their part's not changing, but we took the burden on. In the general fund, for example, that was about $14 million. an increase to those departments for health allocations. We continue to receive more and more open records requests as time goes by, and so we're continuing to provide support for those functions, those state required, very critical functions. That group moved in this budget from the city secretary's office to the communications and public engagement office. I mentioned vehicle and equipment inflationary increases. We always look at adjusting fee structures with our departments that charge fees and rates. And then on an internal side, we reduce some of the maintenance budget for like city hall and parking where we could. So we'll touch for a moment on general fund. I feel like we've talked about general fund a lot, but it's kind of the biggest deal. So on the revenue side, I feel like we've beat the property tax subject, but you can see our overall growth was just about 2.8% there. And I don't think we've mentioned this, but I don't have the detail here, but it's in the presentation from yesterday. Our overall value growth across all of our appraisal districts was just under 1%. It was 0.89%, which is kind of... just like crazy to think about if you think about the growth in Fort Worth, what you think the value growth might be. And so we'd estimated about, I think, like 2.1% or something, and we were still too aggressive with that 2.1%. But property tax is there. And then the other big portion that makes up 80%, property tax and sales tax make up 80% of the revenue budget. We are having a good sales tax year, and we expect the... the budget to continue to grow next year. So we have increased it by 5%. We just got sales tax numbers today that appear to have like a bit of a World Cup bump for the current year. So Arlington's nodding their head too. Yeah, World Cup. It's not just about soccer. It's about sales tax too. Yeah, so we've been waiting for that and hoping that it would help in the current year. And so anyway, but we're not budgeting off of any of that growth. That was kind of like a one-time bump happiness. But we do expect growth to continue. The sales tax in Fort Worth has grown at a huge rate over the last 10 years, almost double really from like 2016 to now. And so this is the one cent sales tax that covers the general fund. Again, CCPD is funded by another half cent sales tax, so their budget has also grown. So those are the big two in the general fund. And then on the expense side, we'll go over the department expenses, but you'll see salary and benefits is about 70% of the general fund, and of course a big portion of that is police and fire. So here's expenses by department, and I am going to show you a graphic in a minute that might help if you don't love the table, which I don't blame you. This is in alphabetical order, so it's a little hard to kind of see who's going up, who's going down. But you can see them here, really wide swings in who's growing and who's falling. But this, again, is $1.15 billion, 4.6% growth. And I'm going to skip ahead, but I'll go back if you need me to, to this graphic. Our communications friends created this graphic, and I think it's helpful. It kind of shows like the winnowing down of what's available to reduce from. So left-hand side. total operating budget 3.32 billion so that's not just the general fund but like all the funds right and most of those funds are restricted to specific purposes so for instance we're not going to use water which is an enterprise fund to close a general fund shortfall that's not not not okay um the middle so we then gonna pull that portion of the general fund pie to the middle General fund, 57% of general fund is public safety. So that's police and fire and also emergency management and communications that includes 911 dispatch. And then you see all the other departments. So now this is finally the answer to your question. So on the right hand side, you see all the other general fund departments totaling $413 million and their budgets recommended for next year. And this right hand side is where our reductions had to come from. So it's not $3.3 billion. It's not $1.157 billion. It's really $413 million. So the other 43% of the budget is where when you're prioritizing public safety and you're contractually obligated to pay police and fire salaries, this is kind of what you have left to deal with. Here's another way to look at it. Yes, I know, you're snickering. We just thought, you know, some people like a graphic, right? So from a dollar perspective, here's what the budget looks like in increases and decreases by general fund department. So I know fire looks crazy. Part of this is the EMS subsidy. So we took over EMS last year. And the subsidy from the general fund to EMS, because it's not totally self-supporting, it was $20 million and now it's 30. So we moved the $20 million that was existing, not in FIRE's budget. It was like kind of held in a separate non-departmental category. We moved it into FIRE's budget because they're really kind of responsible for how that subsidy grows or doesn't grow and the people that they add and that kind of thing. So we moved that. So that's $20 million. Then the subsidy grew by 10. So that's 30. We right-sized their overtime. That's $8 million more. We right-size their fleet. That's three more million. And then we have a placeholder there for the new labor contract based on the city's sort of estimate or latest proposal to the fire association. So that's what makes up that fire bar. Police's bar is also tied to raises that are contractually obligated pay in their labor agreement. Almost all. Plus those few additions that I talked about, like the corporals and like the actually the new officers don't really hit the budget until the following year. But those are included in their authorized strength in that number. We talked a little bit about emergency management and communications. That growth is some of that acts on pilot, but also the fact that they weren't really a department last year, so they didn't have health allocations, and they weren't paying for IT yet, and so their budget grew a bit. So those are those top three development services growing a bit because they've increased their fees. And then communications grew because of that PIR function moving into their department. And then some of the bottom, you'll see property management is at the very bottom. That's what, I just realized we didn't spell out property management. That's property management, PMD. 5.8 million, that is because they were the, they're the holders of the VRF, which is the vehicle and equipment replacement funding. I mentioned we moved that to debt, so it looks like a big reduction for them, that 4.5 million. And then economic development, that's because of that reduction in the transfer out to economic incentives that we talked about. Neighborhood services is the reduction in the neighborhood improvement program where we're phasing that delivery, kind of right-sizing year one. So that's the bottom three. Okay, that can, oh yes, hi.

and property management.

Yes.

So basically, you didn't reduce that.

You moved it somewhere else. Yeah, so... Yeah, so on the property management side, yes, we're still going to replace vehicles and equipment, but we're going to do that out of tax notes. So debt, just a different portion of the budget. On the economic development side, that is an actual reduction. We will not make a $5 million transfer to the Economic Development Incentives Fund. We will make a $500,000 transfer in hopes that perhaps we can bump that transfer back up again in future years. So it's kind of a mix to answer your question.

Mm-hmm.

Could you just clarify what you mean by that? Yeah. So primarily what I guess I should talk about that. So when we talk about right-sizing, what we don't want is for departments to be under budget on things they're contractually obligated to pay. So I think I use it in terms of FIRE. FIRE has specific minimum staffing requirements where they're always going to have a base budget in overtime that's non-discretionary. So if they're under budget for that, then they can't really manage their budget properly. So we can say, why are you over budget? And they'll just say, well, because you didn't budget us right. And so we're trying to take that argument off the table by appropriately budgeting, yeah, appropriately projecting, right, exactly.

Hmm?

for economic development for this year because last year it was 49.4 million.

Oh, you're thinking of with incentives too. So economic development's budget moved from 9.7 million in the current year to 5.3 million in fiscal year 27. They've reduced by 4.5 million primarily due to the lack of transfer. You may be adding the budget for economic incentives to your number. That's what it sounds like to me. Yes, that is the total number that was shown in the budget. Okay, yeah. That budget lives in non-departmental, and so it's not... It artificially inflates economic development's budget to put it there. It makes them look like a top five or six department. So the incentives budget is actually in the non-departmental line, and I think that number is very similar to last year, but I can pull the exact number for you.

Well, but it's still coming out of our taxes, because if you're not... the economic person or the entity that is getting those tax dollars reduced means we have to bear that burden.

So it's still our burden. Got it. Yes, the incentives budget is still there. Yep, I understand your point. Yes, ma'am.

What else is in non-departmental?

Do you want to talk about incentives first? Okay. He's good at the economic development talk.

On the economic development incentives, those are all tied to contracts that were made with companies that came to Fort Worth and met their requirements. So the taxes that are being paid out of that are coming out of taxes that they pay that didn't exist before they came here. So one of our base economic development ideas is that we try not to provide any incentives out of the general general taxes. If a company's coming, if they bring to the city $5 million in taxes, and we give them an incentive, because they're going to pick Arlington, for instance, instead of Fort Worth, we give them an incentive. Their incentive comes out of their $5 million in taxes. So they might get a million dollars back out of that $5 million. So we end up keeping four that we otherwise wouldn't have. So it is in the budget, but it's not being covered necessarily by everybody else. It's being covered by the taxes that they created. There is no agreement that has us paying more to taxes to them than they brought to the city.

We're not paying the taxes to them. They should be paying the taxes to us. And when you're, you know, postpone that.

They are paying the taxes. And then we're taking a portion of theirs and paying it back. And that was part of the deal to get them to come here and bring the thousand jobs and bring all the things that we wanted for our economy to grow. It's bigger than just the taxes.

Okay. I'm going to have you say your question into the mic.

Well, isn't most of what economic development does tax abatement? So that's them not giving us tax money. And so, yeah, the incentives is us giving them money.

No. So economic development, you use an incentive as a carrot to get the development here. No, they give us money. So we don't ever give a deal to any money to somebody unless they finish the project and they met whatever requirements they had for numbers of jobs, right? So company X is gonna come to Fort Worth, invest $500 million, hire 500 people, and we end up working an agreement that says we'll give you 25% of your taxes back, property taxes, if you meet those requirements. And so they are paying us, and we're taking a portion of that back, not from the rest of everybody else. And think about it from a broader perspective. All the people they hire are paying sales tax. So that's in that line. All the properties around them, because they invested, are now gone up in value. So that's in the top line. So it's all that economic activity around it that you're not seeing anywhere in here. That's why we do the deal. I would prefer that federal government would do away with all incentives by all governments, so we would all be on the same playing field. But unfortunately, that's not the market that we're in. And so when a company is looking to land in Arlington or Irving or Fort Worth, the council, over time, has policies that are, we want to be in that game, so we've created our policies to provide incentives.

All right, ready to move on? Okay, good questions. I'm gonna flip myself back over. Okay, I'm gonna touch quickly on enterprise funds. So these are another group of operating funds, but not the general fund. And so these operate more like businesses. So they provide a good or a service, and the rate payers or users pay for that. So they're kind of like self-supporting. The biggest of those is water. And so we talked about water. I feel like my mic got so much louder. Did it? Or is it just me? Okay, wow. Water and wastewater. Again, that's the regional water utility. And their budget's growing by about 8.7%. That's not how the rates are growing, but that's budget growth driven by operating and maintenance costs going up as well as their capital program. And I'll show you in a moment like sort of the taxpayer and bill all stacked up with proposed increases. Solid waste is self-explanatory. That's trash collection, for one, residential collection, dead animal pickup, drop-off stations, all those kinds of things. They're also doing some long-term planning with regard to the landfill and its replacement, as well as dealing with contractual increases from waste management, which is our trash vendor partner. Stormwater is the stormwater management program. They have a 5% rate increase in the budget. Their budget's growing a bit for flood mitigation projects as well as participation in partnership projects and channel inspections to prevent flooding. It's really like a public safety conversation. And then we have aviation and parking. So aviation runs Meacham and Spinks and Perot Field. They have a little bit of budget growth there. That's primarily due to them picking up the cost that I mentioned about the firefighters that are directly tied to the airports. And then parking is the downtown garages and meters around the city that are city-owned and surface lots. They're maintaining those and investing in technology as needed. And so they have some budget growth there, but they're also self-supporting through the revenues that those create. Yes. Oh, here comes the mic. Okay.

Is that correct?

Correct.

Okay, just making sure.

Yes, Fort Worth, there's two fire stations. He said the firefighters at the airport, those are Fort Worth Fire Department firefighters. The answer is yes. So there's fire stations, one and the other associated with the two airports. So the cost of those firefighters that are assigned there are allowed to be covered by aviation. So that was actually a good budget relief strategy because aviation had the room and it helped to relieve the general fund. On the special revenue side, biggest here is Crime Control and Prevention District. So they're primarily funded by the half cent sales tax that I mentioned. They have some other revenue too, for instance, reimbursement from the school districts for school resource officers. That's another revenue source there. But by and large, sales tax is what funds CCPD. They have a couple of positions that they're adding, including school resource officers to the budget to support Fort Worth ISD. Public events is a group of funds, and those are funded by culture and tourism, hotel, motel tax, and other revenues from the convention center. Their budget's actually decreasing due to Will Rogers, right, getting taken over by that third party. Also, the phase we're in on the convention center expansion takes some of the key spaces offline this year, so the revenues are a little different than in years where that's fully open and operational. EMS is our newest special revenue fund. They got funded last year. So their $104 billion, million, wow, not billion, don't say billion, million dollar budget includes that subsidy that I mentioned from Fort Worth Fire, General Fund Fire. So that's a $30 million subsidy. We are still looking at ways to increase the revenue into that operation in ways that make sense. We actually have a person that's dedicated solely to revenue strategy and billing and that kind of thing that just came on board. And so we're hoping to close that gap a bit more in the future. So they're growing by 16%. EMS also doesn't just include fire. They have an attorney supporting them, some HR personnel, some finance personnel. So some of those, yep.

What is under public advance? That's a big chunk. I'm not sure I understand that because I didn't know we had that many public where the public didn't have to pay.

Yeah, so I would love for anyone to respond to this. Will Rogers has been in that budget. The Fort Worth Convention Center is part of that budget. Go ahead.

So public events is the name of the department. And since the beginning of the world and the city's budget, that's what they titled this section of funds. But it's basically tied to the hotel occupancy tax. The hot tax is the main driver of the revenue here. There's also rental car taxes and fees at different events and those kind of things. So it's really the groups that are running and operating The Will Rogers Memorial Center and all the equestrian events and everything that happens there, the rental of all that is all the folks that are budgeted that do that and as well as the convention center. So our convention center operations and the revenues and the expenditures tied to that are all covered under that public events line.

So the public pays for all that. What about what happens? I mean, I thought that, you know, we rented it out for like the rodeo and, you know, all those other public events. Where is the income coming from?

That's the income. This is this number. The number is based on the revenues to be generated and the expenditures. So that's just not a negative number. That's their full budget. And it's a balanced budget of revenues and expenditures. So the rental incomes, like you mentioned, all the concessions that get sold there and those kind of things. Tickets, you know, they sell tickets at a concert. That's the revenue that comes in to make it $120 million budget.

Okay, so like for 2027, it's $120,891,000? Yes.

And it's a reduction of almost 9% because expansion is going to happen and a portion of the convention center is not going to be available to rent. So we're going to actually bring in $11 million less in dollars because of that.

So that's how much of our tax dollars is going?

There's no tax dollars. That is revenue. All of these do not have a single tax dollar in it. They're different funds. Yes. Special revenue is all different, no tax dollars.

Good distinction. I should have explained that at the beginning. No, you're good. See, you guys are my guinea pigs for remembering how to talk to the public just once a year. Okay, no, that's great. And just the reason we're using the mics is just because we're streaming. So it helps people who end up watching later. So that's why we make you awkwardly use the microphone. Okay, what have I not done? Environmental. Oh, yeah. Oh, sorry. Hi.

So for the emergency medical services, so MedStar was privatized before and it was folded into the city for Fort Worth EMS, correct?

Correct.

So how does the cost efficiency stack up before and after that?

I would love for someone to take that too, William. Oh, there's fire back there too. Anyone? Yep. Well... Oh, here's Jay. Look, here's Jay. Let Jay do it.

I'll let our city manager answer. So I wasn't with the city when we made that decision, so... No. I would say... I would say it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison, right? MedStar response times were in the 12- to 13-minute response. The citizens were going crazy about people dying or potentially dying because it was taking so long. The city took it over. We made it part of the fire department. The fire department is on, just when you compare how it was being run before, is gonna be more expensive, right? Are you paying for the Yugo or are you paying for the Cadillac? And so response times are now down to 840 back in June. Is that the last numbers I saw? So we're down to eight minutes. So it's improved by a third. And costs have gone up. And so you get what you pay for. One of the key things that we're doing and was mentioned is there's billing involved. You know, you bill insurances, you bill folks that use the services, all those kind of things. So it's how can we improve that revenue line as we go forward? So we never had this service before, so we have a lot of folks that are spending a lot of time learning, and we hired folks that had done it before. How can we improve that side of the line as we go forward to try to fill that gap? It's not exactly what you asked, but that's the reality of what we are. I think most people would say that the level of service we have now, it's worth it.

OK. Environmental. The Environmental Protection Special Revenue Fund, let's see, what would you most associate with that? It's street sweepers, litter abatement, so cleaning up homeless camps. What else? Environmental quality investigation, soil testing, all those kinds of environmental air and land things. Their budget is mostly totally flat. They're going to continue to try to enhance litter control and abatement within their existing resources, including enhancing the use of those street sweepers and the UPSPIRE crews that help to continue to clean up homeless encampments. municipal golf. We have the city golf courses, Meadowbrook, Rockwood, and Pecan Valley. And if you have just happened to randomly follow this budget for some years, you'll know that the general fund used to subsidize this fund. It does not do that anymore. So municipal golf is self-supporting from people who come play golf and come to to do events and eat food and all those kinds of things. So their budget's growing a bit. They're adding a maintenance worker and some additional like food and beverage attendance for those growing golf courses to question. So you said there's no

taxes on this is everything is kind of paying for itself in some way.

That's right.

All of it makes sense, except who's paying for the environmental protection? Where's the money coming for street sweepers and stuff like that?

Yeah. So first of all, let me clarify one thing. EMS has a subsidy from the general fund. So that that portion of the subsidy would be like taxes.

Okay, yeah, help and fill in the gap. Okay, yeah.

So that's the only one up there. You asked me about environmental that fee is a flat fee that appears on the water bill.

Gotcha. Yes. And then community tree planting. Where does that money come from?

Where's that money come from? Gas well revenues. Yeah. So when we drill on city owned land, part of that revenue funds, the little city tree farm, small but mighty special revenue fund. Okay. It's only decreasing because, yeah, not the trees. It's decreasing because remember how I told you we moved vehicles and equipment to be funded out of debt? That's a vehicle that used to be funded in that fund, and now it's going to tax notes. All right, so we'll move into fees. We do have some other funds, like internal service funds and stuff. Those are usually not the most interesting funds to talk about in a public presentation. If you would like to talk about IT or group health or something, we can do that. But right now, I thought you'd like to see fee changes, like the water bill portion that affects your cost. And so as part of the budget every year, we do have department study fees and rates. And so, again, like I said, as I said, we have a number of fees for a number of different reasons. Some are regulatory and set by state code. Some are set by us based on the market. Like an example is we just talked about golf. You know, golf will look at their fees, like what are we charging, what are our competitors charging, and they'll adjust as needed, that kind of thing. So we do a fee ordinance alongside the budget ordinance or the budget adoption every year. On the, this is a reminder of the tax rate, because you're about to see it again, 70.2 cents. Oh my gosh, there's so many things. Hold on, I'm going to skip ahead. So the average taxpayer, here's where we sit with the recommended budget. The average home taxable value, so again, this is not market value, so this is average home in Fort Worth, probably with a homestead exemption in play. Fiscal year 26, that value from primarily TAD is $246,500. It's falling, again, because values are falling. And so as a result of that, even when we increase the tax rate by 3.2 cents, your bill goes down a little bit. So that's actually what this graphic is meant to show. So there's fiscal year 26, current year, value times the tax rate, the tax bill there. Property value decreased for 27. The tax rate increased. And so your tax bill goes down by 1669. So that's kind of I hope this is a helpful graphic. Our communications friends made this one, too. And I think it does help because it's kind of like counterintuitive. Then the bottom portion of this bill, even though these are different functions, like property tax bill versus water bill, we still like to compare them, just like on one slide. So these are some of the fees we talked about. We talked about the stormwater enterprise fund, water, solid waste, and environmental. And so you'll see the annual variance in that kind of fourth column over third column of numbers. So that $85, that's the annual, and then it breaks down in the last column for what the monthly... Cost would be so for all of the services that we've talked about the average bill would go up 709 and that's just slightly offset by the average tax bill going down again kind of two separate mechanisms But as far as a total picture goes then the total resident charges would have a monthly variance of five dollars and seventy cents more There's my friend.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Well, okay, so The environmental fee came, it went, it's going up. So it's actually, you know, the other slide that you had, it's not really going down. It's just going up because it's just coming in from the water department. So you're going to get it from the water department. And so will the solid waste charges. We come over there. And then the street repair charges will also come from that, right? So you're really not, you know, as far as my money goes, it's still coming off my budget.

that's correct yeah this is yeah yep i'm with you um i don't know if there's an environmental specific question there but you're right so that's that is true um these are the bills that occur like the charges that occur on the water bill so they drive the budgets that we just saw and so you're right this is the average taxpayers bill and how it changes questions go ahead i have a specific question for the environmental cody come back This is Dr. Cody Wittenberg. I like to say the doctor part, the director of environmental.

uh doc the annual water report uh cody's fine the annual water report for the city of fort worth has gotten kind of low on data over the last few years there's a lot of information regarding oh there's so many gallons going through water treatment that kind of stuff what's in the water that's actually noticeably missing from the water reports i love that and i appreciate that i'm actually going to turn it to chris harter who's our water director he'll take that one for you okay

So I will say that what we incorporate into the water quality report, an annual water quality report, is required by EPA. So all the required information has stayed in there. And since then, since we've been doing this, we've actually been adding information. So when you look at what's required by the EPA, we add quite a bit more into that water quality report. And on top of that, we also do an annual popular report. So that includes all of our budget information, it includes a lot of our performance metrics, and it also includes water quality. So not only is the water quality report on our website, but also our popular annual report is on the website as well. So we're trying to put as much information as we can to the public.

Okay, we're almost done. And then you can ask even more questions. This is, at the same time we build the operating budget, we also do the capital plan update. And so that's a five-year look forward. In fiscal year 27, the capital plan totals $1.03 billion. This is billion with a B dollars. So the large majority of that is Waters Capital Program. And then you'll see how they stack from there. Last year, public events had a really big number because it was the convention center, like debt year, the big expansion. So this year they've fallen back to what's a more normal amount. But this kind of totals are, you'll see in a minute operating plus capital. And so this is where that capital number comes from. And if you're interested in the capital detail, we produce a CIP capital improvement program book alongside with the budget book or a little, little handout there. So we're working on that now. Part of capital's story is PAYGO. So again, that's the seven and a quarter portion of the tax rate that is cash funded capital maintenance. The large majority of that goes to transportation and public works. So 82%. So that's streets and signals and maybe not signals. maintenance and sidewalks and pavement. Property management has some. That's city facilities maintenance, so their portion's going down. Neighborhood services going down. That's, again, that phased delivery of the neighborhood improvement program. That's their portion of PAYGO. IT has a chunk in PAYGO. And parks maintenance is there, almost flat, but only 4% of the whole PAYGO budget. And so again, because we've held that rate static, the amount has fallen because of falling value. So it's 88.4 this year, next year it'll be 85.7. Okay, so there's those totals. 4.49 billion this year between operating capital and the next year, 4.35 billion across the operating capital funds that we've talked about. you are at one of these meetings now. So you obviously got this info. Hooray. District 7 today. We have a little break and then we do a lot of them next week. So tell your friends or come to another meeting if you'd like. If you have, you know, folks who maybe can't leave but want to watch online, I'm hoping people are watching online now. All of the meetings will be live streamed and you can go back and watch them on the city's YouTube page. We have public hearings coming up on budget and the tax rate. And then city council is slated to adopt the budget on September 15th. Connect Fort Worth. This is just a plug for that page. It's kind of all things city engagement. So right now it features the budget heavily, as you can imagine. I think it also or maybe it's on our budget pages is like sort of the Fort Worth labs or city's budget page. You can see all of our early budget work sessions that we did with council, including all the videos, any budget responses of that we've written in response to council questions, the budget priority survey that we did through June, there's a dashboard there where you can sort by district and topic and all kinds of things to see what those results were. Those results were provided to council members in the summer too, just as like another data point for community priorities. So there's a lot of information here. And of course you're welcome to attend as many meetings as you'd like, including the ones at city hall, which are the like the council versions of the public hearings. Maybe I'll stay on that just in case anybody wants to scan. So that concludes the slides, hooray. But open to any more questions. We have lots of department heads here.

Hi. Yes. Thank you for all this information. It's been great. What I would like to see is I know you've actually proposed a tax rate all the way up to the voter approved rate plus the unused increment, I believe, all 77 cents.

Oh, yeah. So our proposed tax rate is 70.2. But yes, you're right about the voter approved rate plus increment being 70.

Right. Well, you set that as part of the discussion, it could move up to that. I personally would like to see that it move up to the voter approved rate plus the . The reason for that is because the state legislature is working to reduce all of our potentials of what we spend money on as well as passing unfunded mandates. One of the things you did not talk about in this is how much for business personal property cost.

I would imagine it's probably close.

The leader that proposed that Benton Court actually made the statement that we will make sure the school districts are made whole, but it is up to the authorities to raise their rates to make up for the fact that we're giving this exemption. So knowing that, to be taking away a lot of our tools.

If you don't use these next year, when they finally do, when Tad finally does to actually lower our tax rate, because we will, as already said publicly in a meeting, Values by values of homes.

The taxable value of homes is roughly at 85% of what market value is. That means homes across the board are going to go up 15% next year. Homes less than $100,000 are actually above market value right now, according to Tad. Homes worth a million dollars are actually only at 70%. So we're gonna see this large increase, which will drive our ability to process those downward. So I'd like to see us actually utilize this while we can. I'm not saying don't take a majority you already have. I think some of the cuts should, be re-implemented with this money, but a lot of this money should be used for one-time funding as we then see how this reappraisal happens, as we see what the Texas legislature does this next year. Some of the things they've been talking about, Governor Abbott has already stated they liked what Tad did, and they appraisals happen once every five years as opposed to every year. He has also stated, actually I believe it was Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick maybe we should look at senior freezes being lowered down from 65 years age, which would take an immense amount of properties and freeze their values for decades. So if we don't take advantage when we can and utilize these funds, it will be taken without our ability to do anything. If you're raising the tax rate, people that are... want the tax rate lower, which is understandable. If you don't lower, if you keep it the same, why didn't you lower the tax rate? Even if you raise it up to the no new rate, which officially is not a tax increase. they're still gonna say you raised my tax rates. So whether you raise it by one penny or you raise it by eight pennies, they're gonna be mad. So there's not a difference between those, but there's a huge difference in the services that you're being able to provide. There's a huge difference in being able to look at, I saw recently the silos over in the Southside area that they were initially looking at to being torn down. there's not money in the budget for that so now instead of continuing to kick that can down the road now it's just been scrapped altogether and there's never going to be the ability to tear those down so that's what i would like to see happen with these funds is actually go ahead use the unused increment it doesn't go to the voters to them voting on their council members thank you yeah you like to

There's one council member here that heard it. So how many of you all think that Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth has been good for the economy? Or Lockheed, no, it used to be Lockheed Martin before that, General Dynamics before that, Convair. So I guess how much in property taxes they paid over the last 75 years or even this last year? Zero. They're on federal property, so they don't pay taxes. So that's like the biggest tax abatement ever. But everybody in Fort Worth would say that's one of the biggest economic drivers in Fort Worth. So that's just a little tidbit that people, I had a conversation one time where the guy was yelling at me. And I asked him, where do you work? And he goes, Lockheed. And I said, great. I said, you know how much you guys pay toward taxes? Because the city was doing an incentive. And then he just was dumbfounded. But that's why those incentives, again, if nobody could give incentives, we wouldn't provide them. It's a race to the bottom, to a certain extent. But if you don't do it, then you're not in the game at all. And the company is about their bottom lines, right? And the site selectors is about the best deal they can get so that they can get hired again by the next company. So it's all those things. somewhere else, they'll just move on. TAYLOR BOETTICHER- Oh, not really, because has Lockheed ever left? I mean, it depends. But it depends how much it costs. Right? No, Dickie sold. The family sold it to. They just got out of the business.

Yes, ma'am.

Then the federal government would pay the taxes, which means we would still pay the taxes. The federal government does that. Because the federal government has the taxes that we get. Right. I'm just saying that in your...

But in every other case, if the city leases a building to a company... Yeah.

Yeah.

That company has to pay taxes based on their leasehold. That doesn't exist on federal property.

Federal property, yeah. But if there were taxes to be paid, it would come out of taxpayers.

Well, but we would get the other 285 million Americans to help.

Just want to thank you for all this hard work. My name is Melissa Scott. I serve on the Library Advisory Board. And so from my perspective, just the library enterprise, I know in progress and they've been working very hard to see places they could trim and ways they could of the gap you mentioned. person so I really appreciate all the work you did to just sort of bring us to a place where the city can meet the growth that we're experiencing which is exceptional across the board in the United States and I just want to say I appreciate you not cutting deeply the library budgets because we have a lot of we're in a new era of change we're to meet the growth in the city we're working hard to partner with all the other things that Fort Worth has to offer us arts community and our education enterprises and families and individuals in the city visits to date this year we're on track person in the city visited the library four times library that should just illustrate to you that some people so I appreciate you really protecting

We have an awesome staff. My staff is awesome. And the library does, I think every department basically did their share on trying to get there and work together. So we appreciate your words.

This is my only time to ask questions. Okay, so I'm in the private sector. I don't remember ever getting an 8.5% increase in my salary. It seems to me that for the fire department to get an 8.5% increase in salary if the city is scraping the budget, Unreasonable. I'm sorry. I've never ever in my life in the private sector received an 8.5% rate increase unless it was promotion. And I think that's an unreasonable rate.

Understood.

I'm Carol Peters with the West Meadowbrook Neighborhood Association. Yes, ma'am. And I am very appreciative of specific services like code compliance, which hasn't had a change in the number of staff in 10 years, and particularly the HOPE team, which works very hard in our community in the east side to keep homeless served in a humane way. So with this constant pressure, 57% of the budget going to specific entities, you cannot lower the budget, right? So 40% you have to rely on to cut or adjust, is that correct?

Yes, we're going to make better way to manage.

Is there not a better way to manage?

You know, so there's a reason, right, government doesn't run, everybody says run it like a business. Well, you can't, because I can't just increase the fees. It's got to go through a political process, and all of you all and other citizens show up, right, and give their opinion, and your elected officials then have to make the hard decisions at the end of the day of whether we accept recommended cuts that we're bringing forward or and or increase the property tax rate. On the general fund side, the only lever we have is the property tax rate. And so for years, I think Fort Worth, I'm biased because I've been here, the last time we raised the property tax rate, I was probably the only person here that worked for the city. That was my first year as a budget analyst. That was a 1995 budget. That's the last time we raised the property tax rate until now. Ever since I've been here, we've just gone down because the city was growing, values are going up, and I believe we were doing the right thing in being efficient, not just taking all the dollars, we were being efficient. But during that whole time, you could count on appraisals being done in a rational, state-mandated way. That changed three years ago. And that's where the position that we're in now. And so it's always been true that the citizens overall don't want us to reduce public safety, right? So that's just the, every time you do a survey, fire, police, EMS, and then you get the streets, and then you get the libraries and parks, and as you go down the road. Economic development's always the last one. That's why they had the biggest cut. But But from the perspective is the only way you could do it is either reduce costs, and the majority of the citizens don't want you to take it out of public safety, so it has to come out of that 43%, or increase the property tax rate, which I'm proposing a 3.2% increase, and again, that's the first one since 1995. Ever since then, it's gone this way because we could count on values going up as we continue to grow.

the budget, right?

I would have to eliminate... By law, isn't that right? You cannot... By law, we can't do it to the police department. You could do it to the fire department and EMS, but then you're just cutting your nose off to spite your face. Is that the saying? I never understood it, but...

To the point you were just made is that, yeah, it's state law that the police budget can never decrease unless the rest of the budget decreases by the same percentage. But by that logic, isn't it dangerous to give any extra dollar to the police because then that is forever money locked away that you can never touch unless state law changes?

Well, so that state law all came out of the rhetoric with defund the police, right? It was the reaction by the state legislature to that.

But that law accidentally made it dangerous to fund the police because then cities don't have the ability to spend the money wisely where they need it most.

I don't agree with you, but you can, if the city continues to grow and you stop funding police, at some point your crime rate's going to go up. Because you don't have response times, you don't have the ability to stay on top of things, the proactive policing, all the things that are part of that process.

There are lots of ways that you can fund public safety other than police. I agree with everything that he said. I think it is very important that we increase the property tax rate so that we have the flexibility to provide services for a growing city so that we keep it a place that people want to live in and also that we are addressing the needs of a growing city. If we're just, you know, staying right at that same amount, then it slowly starts to atrophy. And so I think it's important that we are addressing where things are needed most while still maintaining that flexibility in the budget in the long term.

If you look at what we're doing with police, it's all tied to contracts. And the corporals actually makes a lot of sense. I always wondered why, and I'm not a police officer and I'm not in my background, I was over at the police department for several years, why it was that patrol was generally almost all rookies, one to five-year folks, and then 15 to retirement folks. And it's because that middle area of mid-management going to become a sergeant, going to become a corporal, you had to go to a specialized unit. that progression did not exist in patrol. And so people would leave. They loved patrol while they were there, but then they got over there and swat or detect robbery, and they decided they liked that better and never went back. And then those that did come back. So there's always this gap. And I think Chief Garcia brought the idea forward is there's folks that want to stay in, but they want a progression. So the corporal, that's a million dollars overall. So I think all of the increases that we have in here We tried to be as practical and rational as possible.

Well, is it my understanding that the state law says you can't draw it from the police budget that's in the general fund, but we have the CCPD right now and that isn't tied to the same state law problem. So wouldn't we be able to keep the police budget in the general fund static and then pull from CCPD as needed, especially because CCPD comes from sales tax and sales tax to go up as growth happens.

CCPD is fully loaded. We mentioned the 77 new police officers. During the cadet class, that's paid by CCPD. Once they become full police officers, they're paid by general fund. So this next year, that's not part of the budget in the general fund. It's part of the CCPD. And then there's a lot of other equipment There's a lot of nonprofit dollars that come out of there that are provided for nonprofits that do public safety-related MPOs. Our neighborhood police officers come out of the CCPD. So the CCPD is basically fully loaded.

And I'm curious to hear you talk more about what he was saying about increasing the property tax rate with the situation with TAD, because it seems like now is an opportune moment to fix the situation in a very serious way, because it is a very serious problem.

Well, you can make that argument, right? At the end of the day, I could make that argument. I'm not the one that has to stand in front of the voters and tell them I raised the tax rate nine cents, right? That's the thing. That's one of the hurdles. I'm just saying the other part is that I have to justify. So we are raising the tax rate. And for me, from my perspective as a city manager, I have to justify the use of the dollars and why it makes sense. And so this is my recommendation on why it makes sense. Because hopefully we do get the bump of 15%. I don't think it's going to happen because I think everybody's going to protest their values and Tad's going to take all the protests back down to where it was. And so that's just, again, until we have no way to project where we're going because we don't have a history of it. And so now it's the process of working with the city council to see where we land overall.

I just wanted to bang the drum again for the fact that neighborhoods benefit from so many of these services that keep people out of jails. We cannot incarcerate or police our way out of homelessness or minor problems. I just have a real issue with the fact that so much of our budget is dedicated and committed to, and I love my police officers. They're helpful to all of us in our community. But there are many, many ways to address issues at the community level, neighborhood level, that do not involve police officers. And that is something that we really have to start thinking about because the CCPD is not guaranteed. It can go away.

Right. The 57% is more just the police. It's police, fire, EMS. So it's not all police. Just want to make sure everybody understands that.

I'm Kathy Neese-Brown, and I am the District 7 representative to the library board, and wanted to reiterate Melissa's comments and the fact that the library is really embarking on some pretty significant and aggressive community projects and partnerships, and just wanted to thank you all for the work that you've done in the budget. And you are an excellent presenter, by the way. For a finance person that knows the numbers off the top of your head, you did a great job.

I actually have a question about the budget in general. So I know that everybody, when they started going down on the home taxes because of the exemptions, we all kind of realized that the cities were going to come back to us. I mean, you know, that was a no-brainer. They depend on those taxes. We knew those taxes were going to go up the minute our home value started going down and you got less taxes. So I'm sure that the city kind of had that idea as well.

Not really. The exemptions are one thing. We could plan for the exemptions because you knew what was getting passed. It's the fact that Fort Worth added over $2 billion of new value on the ground from new development.

Okay.

But Tad took 1.7 something billion of existing residential properties down. Has nothing to do with exemptions. That's the piece that we didn't see.

So you're saying that the value, the appraisal district value went down in addition to the additional homeowners?

Exactly. That's the piece. The appraisal district changed their, and actually they're the only ones in the state that do it. Every other appraisal district still does it like it's done everywhere else. They changed how they do their work. And I'm not criticizing. I'm just saying it's a fact. And how they decided to make the decisions on that, that was the blind spot that we didn't have. Because they did it last year, too. They just didn't do it as aggressively. So even though they did it and we did lose some of the existing residential value, our overall value still went up 5.9%, almost 6%. And this year, we were expecting, we were being very conservative, because we saw something coming. And like I said, overall, we were projecting a little bit over 2%. And it came back at less than 1%. And then on top of that, because of the litigation that happens in the end process, We had to amend our tax collection rate. So you never calculate that you're going to get 100% of the taxes that you bill for. We've always used about 98.5%. And it's been pretty close. We had to drop that down to 95%. So that puts the actual revenues collected out of the same taxes even below. Even though we went 0.89 up, it actually brings it below what we had last year.

some of expenses, you know.

We did reduce 53 million.

Before your hand, you know, thinking future-wise, we may not be getting as much tax dollars from that. You could have reduced some expenses, you know, two years ago, last year, and then, you know.

Well, we didn't know that was coming. That's what I'm saying.

That's why I was asking.

Yes. Yeah, we did one in three. Last year, we reduced about $14 million in the budget overall. Yeah, the library folks are saying. Midori loaded the crowd with library board members.

Lots of library people. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

We missed the advocacy part on the website. Any more questions? Thank you all for coming out.

Can I say one thing? I don't have a question. I just wanted to reiterate the comments made by this gentleman about raising the rate. I have been on the Fort Worth City Council and have been the beneficiary of being able to lower the tax rate over the many, many years that you described. And I was not necessarily a fan of that because I saw... a city that was very bare bones with the staff that they have, departments working incredibly hard to deliver services, city staff working incredibly hard to deliver services for us since 2008 when we had the recession and never staffing back up to the level that a city of a million people need. So I for one and have heard from multiple other people that there are citizens out here that understand that the city needs more tax dollars to deliver the quality of life that we all insist upon on a daily basis. I know as a council member you hear constantly from people who want city services. And so there are those of us out here that understand an increase in the tax rate. And so want to put that on record that we're here to support that.

This gentleman had a question.

Quickly, I won't speak for my neighborhood association just as an individual homeowner. I'm happy to see my taxes go down and the valuation. And I just say that for those that want to pay more, perhaps you can put a voluntary for they think they're not paying enough and let it go with that. Understood.

Hi there. Thanks. My name's Dan. I live on Lake Worth, which... Most people don't know it is all City of Fort Worth property. And I didn't see anything in the presentation about the late marshals and their budget.

At this point, we're not changing that.

Okay. There's a room around for my neighbors.

So, as mentioned, we were trying to – when we got the – The new values of going way down, right, and trying to figure out what cuts would we have to get to to fill it all, or if we needed to fill it all with cuts. We asked the municipal court to look at what they could do or couldn't do, and that was one of the items. But I'm not recommending that. OK. Well, thank you all for coming out. Oh, Macy, do you want to close it out?