City Plan Commission - Regular Meeting

Nope, you can put it over there.

All right, we're going to go ahead and get started.

I appreciate you guys coming tonight. I want to begin with something simple. This is your money and this is your budget. Fort Worth is facing a difficult budget year. Our city continues to grow, but the revenue available to provide services is not keeping pace with the demands that growth is placing on our community. District 10 is not an accounting exercise. We feel it every day. and traffic and congestion at our railroad crossings, and infrastructure that is struggling to keep pace, and the growing demand for police, fire, EMS, and basic city services. I believe we must protect these essential services and public safety. But I also believe council has an obligation to challenge assumptions, scrutinize spending, and make sure every dollar is producing measurable value. And as Fort Worth grows, growth must pay for growth before we continue placing additional costs on residents who are already here. this budget is still proposed tonight is about making it better i want to hear what you believe we must protect where we can improve and where we need to look harder for savings because the question is not simply how much we're spending the question is what are our residents getting in return with that hand off to jess

So good evening, y'all. Thank you, Councilmember Jamison, for hosting this today. So Jay Chapa, our city manager, was not able to be here tonight, so I'm getting to fill in for him. I'm Jess McCackren, one of our five assistant city managers. And we are so glad that you are spending your evening with us to engage in the budget process. You are going to get a wealth of information from Christiane Simmons, our director of the Fort Worth Lab, who will go through all the details and answer all the questions that you may have. And please do ask them along the way if you think of something when we have a slide up. Feel free to stop us right then and ask your question. That way we all keep track of it. There is a lot of work that went into preparing this budget. And I know I'm talking to this side because we know all of y'all. But there is a ton of work that went into this budget. Our department started working on this months and months ago. And how we get to putting together a budget is we work with our city council to identify what are their priorities for the community. They define those priorities based on the input of you, our residents and our businesses that are here. Based on those priorities and our projected revenues and all of our service needs that we have with the city, we then build the budget that we present to the city council. In a city manager form of government, the city manager and staff are the ones that are responsible for putting that budget together to present to the city council, and the city council make the final decision on what they want to approve. The city of Fort Worth has a lot of different lines of business, and so we have a lot of different funds that comprise the total operating budget of the city. I think our operating budget this year is just over $3 billion that Christiane's gonna cover. And there's, again, a lot of different lines of business. So there's everything from our general fund, which provides for our standard services, police, fire, libraries, roads, parks, et cetera. We also have the aviation fund, the golf fund, water and wastewater fund, all those different things. And so you'll see all of those details in here. There is a ton of work that went into this. This year we had some very significant budget challenges that we faced. We started with a projected deficit of, I think, nearly $50 million, $49 million, and unfortunately the news got worse from there. So Christiane's going to talk more about just what caused that gap in our budget this year and how we worked really hard to solve that. And essentially it goes, really the predominant driving factor of that is that the Tarrant Appraisal District changed their appraisal process to only reappraising residential properties every two years. The plan has worked as they intended and we were expecting that. What we were not expecting is a reduction in values because not only were the values frozen, but there were a record number of protests that have happened every year, including this year. And so while we permitted and built a lot of new value into the base this year, we also lost a lot of value due to all of those protests. So Kristi Ann will talk a lot more about that. Again, as we go through, feel free to let us know where your questions are. We are recording this in live broadcasting, and we've been averaging about 200 people watching per broadcast. So when you have a question, we are gonna ask you to speak into the microphone. That way anybody watching can also hear the question and hear the answer, and everything will make sense for them. So once again, thank you so much for being here, and I'm going to turn it over to Christiane Simmons, director of the lab.

We're rich in microphones. Okay, great. Thank you, Jess, and thank you. I want to echo Jess's thanks to you for being here on what is still a very hot weeknight, even though we're in September now, to hear talk about the budget. So I love that you're interested in the budget, and if you've engaged with the bond program or perhaps the community surveys that we do or the budget priority surveys. We are just so thankful that you take the time to do that. We want to hear from you. And like the council member mentioned, this budget is, we are getting close to wrapping it up, but still absolutely a work in progress. And I know that he is very interested in hearing your voice and feedback through this presentation. Let me try not to stand in front of the screen. Not that I'm that tall. Okay, so every budget has kind of themes that emerge. I've worked on a couple of these now. And in fiscal year 27, Jess did a good job mentioning this, the primary theme is that the city's growth in population is not necessarily translating to growth in property tax values and revenue. And I know that here in your district, you are acutely aware of the growth going on in the city. And so this may be very frustrating to you. And I understand that. It is primarily due to the activities at Tarrant Appraisal District, which Jess mentioned. So I'll recap again. They, a couple of years ago, adopted a residential reappraisal plan. It's like a mouthful. whereby they're only reappraising residential property every other year. So we've been in a freeze for two years because they kind of like took a break in the first year when they adopted it. And then last year was the first like freeze year. And now we'll have a reappraisal coming up into the next budget year. And so we did know about that. We obviously know the activities of our largest appraisal district. About 92% of our taxable values come from that district. Although we have Denton, of course, Wise, and Parker, so we sit in four. But we were following and projecting based on TAD's activities. And so in April, when we began to meet with council, we did project a $49 million gap between revenues and expenditures. The city has to provide a balanced budget. That's state law. So I think Jay usually mentions like in the federal government, they don't have to have a balance and they can sort of like have debt and borrow against all that. And in the city, we cannot do that. We have to submit a balanced budget. So that was our projected gap at the time that we began to work to close in the general fund. The news did get worse as we went along, and in July we get our certified values from all appraisal districts, including Tarrant, and we really had, we only projected about 2% growth, which as you can imagine is conservative, and we came in less than 1% growth, so .89% growth in property values. For context, we added about $2 billion in new growth to the tax rolls this year, and the activities at Tarrant with the residential reappraisals wiped out $1.8 billion of that growth. That's very counterintuitive to what you see around versus what we're showing you in the property tax rate. I'll show you a graph in just a second that will help. Through the budget process, we were really working to equitably reduce service levels where we could, invest in the things that are very important to residents and city council, and look at fees and rates, not as a first step, but really as a last step. This is just a quick graphic. We added this about, I think, halfway. This is number 10 of 10 of these meetings, and I think we added this around meeting four or five because a couple of residents still were like, I just don't understand why we're in this pickle that we're in with Tarrant Appraisal District. This is a taxable value of a home in Collin County on top in yellow, Dallas County, and then Tarrant's on the bottom over the last few fiscal years. You can see while we're all growing, the taxable value looks different in each of these counties. And so in Tarrant, which is our primary county, you can see it's fairly, like it's growing and then it's flat and then this year it's actually falling. So the average taxable home value from Tarrant Appraisal District this year fell from the current year. So when you apply the tax rate to falling values, you get less revenue. So I'll go through some numbers. We are gonna spend some time with the general fund, but I'm gonna start big picture with the operating budget. $3.3 billion, just mentioned that figure. And it's made up of all of these different operating funds, so not just the general fund. The general fund is the biggest of our operating funds. It's about a third of our budget. And that's the primary operating fund for the city. So think about funding police and fire, parks and libraries, transportation, code, a lot of those services you think of as core city services. growing about 4.5% from current year to next. The next sort of biggest category of operating funds are the enterprise funds. Those are funds that operate more like a business, so they're not paid for by taxes, but rather rates and fees. So the biggest one of these is water, so the best example is the water department's funded by rate payers that pay their water bill, right? And there are various other enterprise funds that we'll talk about. And then the third big category of the operating budget is special revenue funds. So these are funds that have a restricted use and a dedicated revenue source. So a good example of this is CCPD. So the Crime Control and Prevention District, it's dedicated revenue source is the half cent sales tax that voters have approved latest in 2020 to dedicate to crime control and prevention. And that's the only thing you can use those funds on. So any expense in CCPD has to have a clear nexus or connection to crime control and prevention. And again, there are various special revenue funds that we'll talk about. But those are kind of the big three. So you can see the growth kind of varies across the different types of funds. This is just a quick snapshot on process, and of course we did a deeper dive of this with council, and you are more than welcome to go and listen to any of those. I'll QR code you at the end if you'd like to go look at more detail. But if it was all snapshotted at one time, the biggest gap we faced was $94 million. So I mentioned 49 in the beginning, and then as we go through budget development, there are contractual obligations that we have to fund along the way that grow that gap. And then there are cuts we're making that reduce that gap. And so it's a, you know, kind of like a linear process, but this is just snapshotting it as if it all happened at one time. So the city doesn't turn to, you know, fees and rate and tax rate increases as a default, not at all, but rather we think first about efficiencies and expenditure reductions. And so in April, when we delivered that gap news to council, at the same time, we were passing out delivering target budgets to departments. So my department is the Fort Worth Lab. We do budget and data and performance. And so with our budget hat on, we deliver budgets to departments and say, here's your bucket that you can work within. And when we delivered that target, it was 1% reduced from the current year. So it was an initial belt tightening that happened, which is a great practice, of course, to do at any given time in the budget cycle, not just when you're facing a gap, but In a 3.3 or even a $1.1 billion budget, you can imagine that we always need to be looking to make sure that we don't have pockets of inefficiency and waste. So we garnered about $7.8 million from that 1% target reduction exercise. At the same time we did that, we also required general fund departments to turn in another 3% in reductions, and that garnered us about $14.5 million in savings. So certain parts of police and fire were excluded from that exercise because we were not going to reduce police officers and firefighters, for instance. But all of our other general fund departments were required to turn in 3% reductions. And you'll see that we took some of those reductions as part of balancing the budget. When we got our sort of worse news from the appraisal districts, we turned toward deeper reductions in order to close that bigger gap. And so you'll see some examples of what those reductions were. A couple that come to mind, freezing vacant positions and eliminating vacant positions. Also reducing the pay increases that general employees get. So not police and fire, but general employees typically get a 4% merit increase on average. Sometimes it's less, sometimes it's more, but averaging about 4% a year. That's in lieu of any kind of across the board or COLA. They don't get that. It's just a merit-based increase. We took that down to a 3% implemented in the middle of the year, so 1.5% raises for general employees. That includes transportation personnel, parks and library personnel, code inspectors, et cetera. So that was part of our recommended budget. So those are some examples of those deeper cuts. We always, along the way, look at revenue and fees. And so the city charges a number of fees and rates, not just the ones that you see on a regular basis, but all kinds of little niche fees, depending on which department you're interacting with at any given time. And so we did have some revenue increases in the general fund, which we'll talk about. And finally, we were still facing a $37 million gap based on that TAD activity and our property tax values being so much lower than expected. And so that's when the city manager took the recommended budget to council with a recommended tax rate increase of 3.2 cents. So current year's tax rate is 70, wow, 67 cents per $100 valuation. And this would take it to 70.2 cents for fiscal year 27. So that was, at the time of the recommended budget, the recommended tax rate. If you've engaged much in budget discussions or bond discussions, you may be familiar with this chart that breaks out the tax rate. So 70.2 cents, all of the growth, if you can see the yellow highlight, goes to operations. So kind of the top branch there, operations and maintenance. Operations, 48.2%. That is the funding engine for the general fund. So police and fire salaries and benefits, all those departments I keep mentioning, transportation, code, parks, libraries. And then in Fort Worth, we actually further break out into, we have a little piece that goes to capital. It's called PAYGO or pay as you go. And that is seven and a quarter cents for cash funding capital maintenance. So rather than doing things like street repairs and like park equipment replacement and those kinds of things through debt, we do them with cash through that PAYGO tax rate. So you'll hear me say PAYGO or PAYGO tax rate, and it's that seven and a quarter cents. So we did not want to decrease that. We also did not, could not decrease the debt portion of the tax rate, which is the 14.75 at the bottom. That supports our past and future bond programs and future debt capacity for infrastructure. So I mentioned the budget's a work in progress. So lots of things have happened since August 11th, which is when Jay presented the budget to council. And part of that is that a majority of council was concerned about service level impacts, even with the budget we delivered where we tried to strike a good balance. And so they did ask to restore a few items or what it would cost to restore a few items. So one you might be familiar with is there's a PetSmart Alliance location. And in our original budget, we were getting rid of that location and pushing those animals to our city shelters. We communicated this would affect the live release rate and some service levels around animal adoptions, but it was perhaps a palatable budget balancing strategy. The majority of council did not agree that that was a palatable option, and we have heard at many community meetings that people would be opposed to that. So right now, it seems like the majority of council would like to restore that piece back into the budget. There were also a couple of departments listed here, those five bulleted departments that had, I mentioned freezing vacant positions, and when I say freezing I mean they stay on our books but we don't fund them and we don't hire them. So we're not getting rid of them in hopes of a better year, right? for next year, we're not going to fund those positions and we're gonna see how departments operate without them. There were a couple of those positions that departments were more concerned about than others as far as like forward facing service level impacts. So for example, in Parks and Recreation, that includes parks maintenance workers, recreation assistants and community center staff. And while we were trying to avoid any kinds of closures of community centers, for instance, council was still very concerned about the programmatic impact of freezing those positions. Libraries, another example, library assistance and pages that help with reshelving and those kinds of things in the library's They were not a fan of reducing or freezing those positions. In development services, we talk all the time about growth, paying for growth, and part of that is wonderful customer service in the development services department. They were not happy about that reduction. So we went to these five departments and kind of said, if you could restore any of your positions that we've taken away or frozen, what would those positions be? And these are the figures that they came back with. So six for code, seven for development, and so on. And then the third thing that council asked the impact of putting back in was the general employee pay. So I mentioned that we'd reduced it to a 1.5% raise for next year. They wanted to see what would it cost to put that back at its historical level of a 4% raise for general employees. The cost of restoring all of those items to the budget was about $4 million, which is another third of a penny on the tax rate. So that would cause a tax rate of 70.56 cents instead of 70.2 cents as originally proposed in order to restore these items. And so we're in the process of seeing what the majority of council thinks about that difference in tax rate as compared to the service level impacts that it would provide. And this is just work in progress still, process still going, showing that we propose the tax rate and then council has recommendations and then we continue to evolve from there. So the city council has five adopted strategic priorities that we like to tie conversations to, including budget investments, and so I'm going to go over just highlights per council priority. The first is community safety. So this is by and large the biggest priority in the general fund budget, and that's reflective of council priorities as well as every time we do a survey, what residents say is most important, police and fire and emergency response. And so we knew that we were not going to do decreases with police and fire and emergency management and communications. There is one shift that occurs within the budget that I like to explain so that people aren't confused about the service level. Fire has a HOPE team, which is Homeless Outreach Prevention and Education. They've been doing that work for a couple of years with four dedicated firefighters. So these are firefighters who are trained to suppress fires. So they're typically would be like in a fire station, riding out on a fire truck to respond to a fire emergency. But in this case, these four firefighters were doing the HOPE work full-time, so working with the homeless full-time as far as outreach and prevention. We recommended to shift that, actually fire first recommended it and we agreed to shift those personnel back into fire stations and instead continue the homeless work with the mobile integrated health team, which came over to the city as part of the MedStar transition. So still continuing the level of service with the homeless, but returning those four firefighters and continuing to work on the EMS side. This produces a budget savings because whenever you have firefighters who aren't doing fire suppression full time, you have to backfill those positions on overtime. So by making that shift, it is a budget savings while still maintaining the service level. We are adding funds for fire overtime, which is almost always contractually obligated based on those same constant staffing requirements that I just mentioned, as well as fire fleet. And so perhaps like you, we see vehicle repair and maintenance and fuel costs going up across the city. It's kind of a theme. But fire just happens to have some of our more expensive vehicles to maintain, and they did need additional budget in order to actually be able to hold them accountable for their budget. They need the right level of funding. And so we made that change for fiscal year 27. On the police side, we continuously look at police staffing as the city grows to ensure that we're maintaining service levels like response times and how proactive police are able to be as they're out in the neighborhoods and patrolling. And so we recommended adding 76 patrol officers to police in order to maintain service levels and response times. These folks actually won't hit the general fund in fiscal year 27 because they have to come through, they have to be recruited and come through police academy. Those costs actually happen in CCPD. But by adding them now to the authorized strength of the police department, that allows them to begin to do that recruiting and training of those officers. So perhaps instead of having like two academy classes, now they might have, you know, four or five academy classes spread out in order to meet that higher level of staffing. The budget also transitions 30 officer positions in patrol to corporal positions, which is the next rank up. This is for a couple of reasons. It provides consistency in their field training, and it also creates a promotional path in patrol that doesn't exist today. So right now in patrol, in police, if you want to promote, you actually have to leave patrol in most instances and go be a detective or a specialized unit corporal. And sometimes people just don't make it back to patrol very quickly or they get a taste of the good life outside of patrol and they do not go back to patrol. And so the chief felt really passionately that some officers really love patrol and we'd love for them to be able to stay and promote within that function and provide longevity and a good promotional spectrum for them. And so this accomplishes both of those goals. Finally, Axon 911, that is a pilot that's been run this year in emergency management and communications. It is assistive call-taking technology, so when you call the non-emergency line of the city, it helps to triage your call to the right place. So, it gets you to the right place faster. It also translates into like over 150 languages, which I just learned yesterday, which is very cool. And we've seen some really great workload metrics out of that pilot this year. So, this budget recommends funding that full time. As you can imagine, those call takers and dispatch jobs are very demanding. This will enable us maybe not to cut those positions, but not to have to add them in the future and have like more sustainable levels of maybe those people aren't working so much overtime and that kind of thing because these triage systems are taking some of that burden. So infrastructure, I mentioned that we did not want to reduce our investment in PAYGO cash-funded capital maintenance. However, what we have to do in the budget by keeping the tax rate static is take a small reduction in that amount. So remember, I talked about taxable values falling. So if you keep the tax rate for PAYGO the same, you're applying it to that lower base, so you're actually, you know, the budget's falling a bit. So PAYGO's about $85 million, so this $2.8 million reduction is not like a crazy reduction. It certainly still sustains service levels, but it is a small service reduction, and it's really concentrated in neighborhood services, and I'll tell you why when we get to PAYGO, but it's what I want to say is it's not in streets and it's not in parks, for instance. It's really concentrated in one spot. The budget also authorizes the pavement management fee, which won't start hitting water bills until late in fiscal year 28. But this is, it used to be called the street maintenance fee. So if you've been kind of around and hearing about things for a couple of years, the street maintenance fee is now kind of, it's been rebranded as it gets a little closer to being implemented. And that's primarily to reflect that it's not just about reactive maintenance, but really about kind of total life cycle planning for pavement across the city. So more proactively managing that planning And then water, the water utility Wallace City Department is really a regional utility growing at a rapid pace as is the city. And so this budget continues the water capital program including cast iron replacement as well as the Mary's Creek facility. So community investment, again, our big focus here, because it's not public safety, so some of our reductions really come from here, but we really wanted to reduce the biggest, most painful service level impacts and avoid widespread closures of any libraries and community centers, and this budget does that. You can see my strike through there on Alliance PetSmart Adoption Center, because again, we don't think that that reduction will stick in the final budget. We do have a couple of neighborhood services and code reductions. One is the priority repair program, which is a neighborhood services program aimed at helping people stay in their homes through minor repairs that they might not have funding for. This is a 3% reduction of that program. So remember I talked about departments went through like 1% and 3% exercises. This was a 3% reduction that neighborhood services that we did take to balance the budget. I know it doesn't look like much, but all these amounts add up as we try to balance the budget. That is a two and a half million dollar program with an additional two million dollars in grant funding, so 75,000 of four and a half million, not great, but not an elimination of the program by any means, a minor service level reduction. We're reducing the mobile tool shed program which is a code compliance program. This was another 3% reduction exercise. It's actually a 25% reduction in staffing because they have a team of four and they would repurpose one person back to code inspections. But again, not a service level, maybe a slight reduction but not an elimination of a program that we kind of just invested in in the last two years and are not ready to stop doing. The Neighborhood Improvement Program is tied to the PAYGO reduction so I want to pause on it for a minute. Every year for about 10 years the city has selected through a data-driven process a neighborhood to receive capital investment and it's not like big huge capital dollars but it's a now about $4 million delivered over three years, and every neighborhood and its needs are different. They have to meet certain, the data is like things like poverty and education level and like workforce, you know, those kinds of things. They're usually announced in the fall, and it's funded through PAYGO and neighborhood services. What we realized is while we were funding the whole $4 million up front in year one, the spend takes, you know, the full three years, and often the year one spend is not more than $750,000 or a million dollars Because that's a lot of planning activities with the neighborhood because like I said every neighborhood is different and it takes a minute to get everybody together and say you know we need sidewalks here and we might you know need more lighting here and make a plan. So instead of reducing the neighborhood improvement program or not doing a neighborhood this year rather we reduce the level of funding to reflect that year one planning activity and then we'll deliver you know the year two funding and year three funding appropriately. This might have the added benefit of lining up with TAD's reappraisal year, which we hope would be like a healthier year for our revenues. So when we kind of bump that funding up for a year or two, I'm hoping that that helps to smooth a little bit of that capital delivery funding. And then one add here is in code compliance, we did a pilot this year called NetForce, which stands for nuisance enforcement task force. And the city's tagline for this was kind of to become a nuisance to the nuisance properties. And there were three pilot properties. We saw really good results from sort of descending on these properties with a combination of code compliance, environmental, police and fire. And so we'd like to continue that program, so we'd add dedicated code officers for that. Let's see. Okay, economic development, I'm getting close to being done with the priorities. Economic development, the primary reduction here is reducing a transfer that the general fund makes on an annual basis to another fund that's called the Economic Development Initiatives Fund, or the EDIF. And this is the city's sort of hybrid answer to the fact that we don't have a dedicated source of funding for economic development, like business attraction and strategies. Some cities that we compete with have dedicated sales tax for this purpose, but we do not because we dedicate our sales tax to CCPD, for instance. And so the general fund transfers money when budget allows out to this other initiatives fund. But that fund does have a small balance in it, and it doesn't have a forward-facing immediate impact on the public. And so we opted to reduce that transfer by about 90% for fiscal year 27 as a balancing strategy. The budget does continue partnerships with our local chambers, including delivery of the small business development program. You may be familiar that we're transitioning management of the Will Rogers Memorial Complex, so that's reflected in this budget as well. And then finally, the city does have targeted neighborhood revitalization areas or corridors, and that we're adding a coordinator to help with project delivery and coordination across all of those areas that will be housed in economic development. This is my last one, responsible growth. It's kind of like a catch-all category, because a lot of things can fit within here, but we have a couple of highlights. The city will continue to replace our own vehicles and equipment, of course, but we've kind of shifted the strategy. We're not doing that in the operating budget anymore, but rather in tax notes, which are like seven-year notes similar to how you might buy a car. And so that helps relieve the operating portion of the general fund. But when you see property management's budget, it looks like it's going way down, and that's the reason why, because they're the housing department of vehicle and equipment replacement. The city's group health costs are going up. So we have had to increase our employer contributions for our own group health fund by about 40% in this budget. This is one of many cost containment strategies that we're using to try to get that fund in better shape. But when you see the department kind of break down and departments who are either flat or their budgets are reducing, that's actually already with that 40% health cost in their budget. We did not want to pass that cost on to employees, so the city is picking it up on the employer contribution side. The city continues to receive public information requests for a variety of information and data, and so this budget continues support for that function. It funds inflationary increases. We've talked about vehicle and maintenance when we talked about fire, but it's a theme across the city. Fee structures we'll talk a little bit more about. And then on the city hall facility and maintenance side, we did reduce kind of our own funding where we could on the parking and facility downtown. The general fund is 1.15 billion. We've said that a couple times, I think. So this is just like the nerdy finance table of the general fund financial summary. Revenue is on top, expenditures on bottom. You can see at the very bottom that we're reflecting the balanced budget as required. So we've talked a little bit about property tax. It's the biggest source of revenue in the general fund. So that's why things get a little squirrely when our when the underlying valuation changes, but 2.8 percent growth in property tax. Sales tax is our other big source, so those two together make up about 80 percent of the budget. Sales tax is growing about five percent, which is healthy growth. We saw some big rebound years after COVID, but those were not going to last forever. But five percent is still very healthy growth and does help offset some of that property tax issue. On the expense side, I'll show you departments, which might be a more helpful view, but the main story here is that salary and benefits make up about 70% of the general fund, and so much of that is police and fire. This is the department breakdown in table form. I also have this in graph form, which may be easier to absorb. But for those of you who like numbers and alphabetical order, then this is organized that way. So this is every general fund department showing various levels of growth and reduction. In a more traditional budget year, you might see everybody kind of growing between like 3% and like 5% or 6% on police and fire. But as you can see, our growth and reductions are kind of all over the place this year, reflecting that it was a more chaotic budget development year when it came to balancing the budget. And I will show you a graph here in a second. We get the question a lot. I've gotten it a couple of times, really, throughout the budget process from community meetings and via email. Why can you not close a $50 million gap in a $3.3 billion budget? And so this is our attempt at helping to explain one way of looking at it. On the left-hand side, you have the total operating budget for the city, $3.3 billion. The general fund is about a third of that. But these other funds are restricted to specific purposes, not by our rules, by various state and federal kinds of rules. And so the enterprise funds, for instance, you can't use water revenues to pay police and fire salaries. Those things are in separate containers. Aviation is another fund that I'll tell you in a minute, we were able to tap into some eligible costs in aviation to help relieve the general fund. But by and large, most of those funds on the left-hand side outside the general fund are very restricted. So in the middle, you have the general fund and how it breaks down. So $1.15 billion, about 57% being public safety funds. And so that lumps together police, fire, emergency management and communications, so like 911. And then that leaves you on the right hand side, which is every other general fund department in descending budget order there, 413 million. And that's where all of our reductions in the general fund have to come from when we're prioritizing public safety and meeting our contractual obligations for police and fire pay increases, which take up a lot of the budget. So we cut $52 million out of the general fund budget and it all came from that right hand side. So here's that graphic I mentioned about department growth or not growth across the general fund. So we've talked a little bit about the bottom three, but I'll go through the bottom three. Property management, that is almost all that shift in strategy about how we fund vehicles and equipment replacement. So it looks like an operating reduction and is an operating reduction, but shifts the burden of that onto tax notes, which we have with our available debt capacity. Economic development, that is all related to the one time, hopefully one time reduction in that transfer out to the initiatives fund. And then neighborhood services, that is again all related to the neighborhood improvement program and the way that we're funding year one at a lower rate to reflect what they're already naturally doing. The top three here, police, fire, and emergency management and communications. I know fire looks like a really big number, so I'll explain the big rocks there. Fire's budget, 52 million growth, 30 million of that is the subsidy to EMS. And so you might recall that in July of 2025, the city took on the EMS function by merging or acquiring MedStar. And that service is performing as hoped for and intended as far as patient outcomes and response times, but it is not self-supporting. And so the cost of continuing to support that service comes from the general fund as a subsidy into the EMS fund. The city would love to continue to generate new revenue strategies to make it more self-supporting, and we have work going on to that end, but right now there's still a subsidy from the general fund. So that's 30 of the 52 million. Another 10 and a half million is reserved for the placeholder for the fire's new contract. So if you've seen in the news, we're still negotiating with the Fire 440, which is like their bargaining unit, their union. And so we have a placeholder for where we think that contract will settle. And hopefully getting close to a resolution there. We also have regularly scheduled step increases both for police and fire. So every year of service you get stepped up on a salary schedule in police and fire. And then I mentioned we were adding funds to fire for overtime and fleet. So that's kind of what makes up that big bar. So it's maintaining service levels. It's not adding headcount. It's just a maintenance of service levels. Police, we do add a bit of headcount. I talked about the 76 patrol officers that we'll begin recruiting for. They also have one nuisance abatement officer as part of the net force initiative. But almost all of that $26 million in growth is related to their own labor contract, which we are actively within that four-year period now. On enterprise funds, these are those that operate kind of more like a business, as I mentioned, so not tax-funded, but rates and fees fund these. So biggest is water. They are seeing about 8.7% growth. That's not the growth in the water rate, that's just the growth in their budget for operating and capital cost. Solid waste, 14.85% growth. Solid waste continues the implementation of a plan that's been presented to council on a number of occasions about planned rate increases for contractual obligations with waste management, who is our residential trash vendor, or trash collection vendor, as well as long-term planning for replacement of the landfill, which will reach its end of life between 10 and 12 years from now. The stormwater utility, we have a table out in the lobby for stormwater if you're interested in visiting, but they are an enterprise fund. You pay that on your water bill, and they are also continuing a planned capital implementation plan for additional flood mitigation projects that are mid-size, as well as channel inspections and other things that contribute to the the life-saving work of flood prevention and mitigation. We also have three municipal airports which are self-supporting and municipal garages, lots, and meters that are housed within the municipal parking fund. We talk about these funds being restricted. We do try to be creative where we can. And one creative solution this year that helped to the tune of about $4.5 million, I think, is in airports. So it looks like their aviation budget is growing a lot. And that's actually because they are going to start transferring in revenue to the general fund to cover the cost of the two fire stations that are associated directly with those airports. So that's an eligible cost for aviation to pay and helps relieve some general fund cost. So that's one use of kind of trying to use their restricted funds in a way that is still like legal, right? But helps to relieve the general fund. All right, I'm getting close. Special revenue funds. The biggest of these, though this is, remember, dedicated revenue source, restricted use. CCPD is the biggest. The half cent sales tax is dedicated to crime control and prevention. So you can see their percent budget growth is about five, which matches, mirrors that sales tax growth. So they're funding some school resource officers. They're also taking on a couple of general fund costs, again, to help relieve the general fund. I think those have to do with bike unit officers, and they already have bike officers in CCPD, so it's an eligible use. Public events, their budget looks like it's falling. These are the culture and tourism funds. So their dedicated revenue source is HOT, or hotel occupancy tax. The restricted source or use is tourism-related activity. Their budget looks like it's reducing. That's because not just Will Rogers transitioning, but really the Fort Worth Convention Center and its expansion is taking some of its key spaces offline for fiscal year 27. And so as a result, there won't be as much revenue as far as conferences and hosting folks in the convention center. So it's like a temporary drop there in public events. I mentioned EMS, so EMS, our newest special revenue fund, so that fund's not just the fire piece of it, but also the medical director who kind of carries the licensures for the paramedics, some legal support and finance support for that function, growing about 16%, and that includes the subsidy from the general fund, so their $103 million there includes the $30 million in revenue they get from general fund's fire budget. Environmental protection is a fee that you see on your water bill. It's increasing, recommended to increase by one quarter next year, and I'll show you how all these fees stack up in a minute. But a very flat budget there. Environmental's the group that does illegal camp cleanup, some nuisance abatement, what else? Street sweepers, litter abatement, air and soil quality testing, those environmental functions. Golf, municipal golf, these are city golf courses. Again, I like to say it on this one especially, not taxpayer-funded, funded by the golfers. So the people who golf are self-supporting the golf courses. So they are seeing some increased demand, and so they're adding a maintenance worker and some food and beverage staff, but a self-supported, non-subsidized golf function there for the city. And then community tree planting, we have a little special revenue fund for community trees. And so that rounds out the special revenue funds growing about just under 3% as a group. When council adopts a budget, they also adopt a fee ordinance. And this is like all the fees that are charged across the city. So you could interact with a number of city departments in a number of ways and be charged a fee. It could be a fine, it could be a rental fee for like a community center room, or you're paying to participate in a program, all those kinds of things. So there are nine departments who recommend fee and changes. Changes and changes, that's not a word. Increasing, sometimes decreasing, but usually increasing. But primary drivers include things like looking at how well are we recovering our costs? Are there long-term capital expenses we need to be planning for? Again, council adopts a fee ordinance. When I show you the QR code at the end, if you really would love to dig into the fees themselves, there is a budget response, which is a written response to council that shows all of the detail of those fee changes. But the ones that most residents care about are the ones they see on the water bill, which is a combination of rates and fees. I'll go with the bottom section first. Across the different rates, stormwater, the two from water, solid waste, and environmental, the average monthly variance for the fiscal year 27 budget is about $7. And then on the top you see average home taxable value, so this is like a composite blend of all of Fort Worth, so may not be representative of your home taxable value, but is an average across the city, falling from $246,000 to $232,000, because again, that's the impact of the TAD plan. So with a 3.2 cent higher tax rate, that average taxpayer would pay about $16 less next year on their tax bill. And remember that has a homestead exemption applied, and that's also only the city's portion of the tax bill, because of course you pay school district and the county and maybe a special taxing district. But as far as the city's portion of the bill, on average you'd pay about $16 less for that value. This graphic kind of demonstrates another way to look at that, because sometimes it's counterintuitive of if the tax rate's increasing, then why would I pay less? And so again, this year's value and tax rate and your city portion of your bill versus next year's value, tax rate, and your city portion of the bill kind of shows that difference in scale. We also update the capital plan every time we update the budget, and so we keep a rolling five-year plan across all our departments who have capital delivery as part of their scope. And so next year's capital plan is about $1.03 billion, with the large majority of that being in the water department, with a planned capital delivery of $3.8 billion over the five years. Again, updated capital needs evolve annually, so we update that every year. And then this is the PAYGO portion of the tax rate, so the 7.25 cents and how it breaks out. Transportation and Public Works has the lion's share of PAYGO, 82%. And so they're growing a tiny little bit for fiscal year 27. Again, we left this portion of the tax rate static, which means we have a little less money to spend as values fall, but didn't take it from TPW. Park and Recreation, very flat, so falling like a tiny little bit. What's that, like $25,000 or something? Yeah, so the large majority of this decrease comes from neighborhood services, and that is, again, the neighborhood improvement program and changing it to reflect that year one spend. So total budget, 4.35 billion between operating and capital for fiscal year 27, slightly down from this year's budget on the capital side specifically. This is the community engagement schedule, which you clearly saw somewhere, so thank you for coming to this meeting. This is our last one, 10 of 10. We have livestreamed all of these, and so you are welcome to watch back any, or this one if you need a refresher on any of the information. We've had good questions all across the city, and every district is different in their questions and priorities, so it's very fun and interesting to hear from everybody all over the city and what their priorities are. We had a budget public hearing on Tuesday of this week whereby council took public comment on the budget and they're scheduled to adopt the tax rate and the budget on September 15th. And these are the QR codes that I promised, if you're a QR code person. On the left is Connect Fort Worth, which is the city's engagement site, like all things city engagement are there right now. Budget is kind of like the bell of the ball on Connect Fort Worth, but that won't be there for much longer. And you'll get to see all kinds of things, including the comprehensive plan, which they have boards out there if you haven't engaged in our 2050 plan, like long range planning efforts. On the right-hand side is the Fort Worth Labs budget page, which is all the budget information, including every work session we've done, all the written responses, this presentation, and links to live streams and things. And I have a staff member who is very good at keeping that very current. She's actually here. Hey, Rachel. She's very good at keeping that page very updated and organized. Oh, I'll leave it there in case you want to scan. But that concludes the, I tried to go fast, the briefing on the budget. And I know there are lots of staff here that can help answer questions. So thank you so much for your attention. I really appreciate you. And we will give you a mic if you have a question. I know it's awkward, but it's for the live stream. Any questions?

Yeah, I have all kinds of questions. But your property tax revenue collection was up 2.84%. So what were you anticipating the growth to be? Because that's an increase.

Yeah, I think our projection for growth was, our actual growth last year was 5.6%. So on existing values, we were hoping to grow two and we grew 0.89. So that 2.84% is a blend of current collections as well as delinquent collections that people pay in a later year. Yes.

What is the mobile tool shed program?

Great question. I can answer, or Brian can answer. Come here, Brian. They're tired of me. Brian is dynamic and interesting. Come here, go ahead.

I wouldn't say that, but how you doing, Code Compliance Director Brian Docherty? That is a program where you can check out tools for free to correct code violations. So our most prominent violation is high weeds and grass, and very often people just don't have the actual resources to do it. It's been very successful. It's lowered how many properties we have to mow, because that's what it turns into when they don't. They could receive citations. And then we have to use our funds to go mow the property, bill and lien, because they rarely pay it. This actually expands. It increases compliance without taking enforcement. Pretty good programs and free successful and the reduction is less impactful because that programs more dependent on the amount of inventory available versus the staff to administer it. So we did see where we could trim it down and it may have a little bit effective wait time but it's it's not too impactful so.

No problem.

Anybody else, questions? Staff, no questions from you, thank you. You guys have heard this too many times to have a question. Okay.

The road impact fee. Well, yeah, the road impact fee, the new fee that you're projecting was glossed over. I'm assuming you don't have a number in mind that you wanna, and is that money gonna go to the general fund or is it gonna go to specific districts? Because I'll speak freely here for myself, it takes me an hour to go four miles round trip at rush hour traffic. So the growth up here, is tremendous the roads are 15 years behind so if if you're adding this new fee to us how how's the city plan to divvy yeah that is a very good question um so there's multiple parts here i'm sorry

Oh, introduce myself. I'm Lane Zarate. I'm the Assistant Director for Transportation and Public Works. And I've been leading the pavement management fee initiative. Let me know if I don't address all parts of your question. So the idea behind this pavement management fee is that we need to be investing enough money to take care of the streets that we have to prevent more costly work needing to be done, keeping the good streets good, while the bond repairs the failed streets that are beyond maintenance. Up here in the north, yes, there's There's a lot of traffic and congestion, and I think that's been discussed a lot in the bond. And there are a lot of bond projects in the north. There's a lot of construction, a lot of headaches going on from that up here. But the question that, you know, if we think long term, payment management strategy. The question is, after we build these streets in the bond, how long will it take before driving on them is a frustration because they haven't been maintained. And how long after we build the streets up here and expand up here and all these things will those streets last before we have to then wait for another bond because they've deteriorated and haven't been maintained to wait for another bond for them to be reconstructed again. So the idea behind this fee is that we can use our money effectively to maintain the whole network and plan for the maintenance of the whole life cycle of the street. To do that properly, what we need is $66 million in addition to what we have. That's a lot, and we recognize that that's not an achievable one year increase, right? I can't expect my contractors to just go up by $60 million in one year. So this smaller supplemental fee is a approach to like our first year's increase, but it's gonna have significant impact we are keeping our existing funding source as well. Our existing funding source is in the general fund. This fee would be not in the general fund. It would supplement that general fund with additional fee dollars. And the benefits, what we're gonna do with the money, because we're gonna be bringing in probably about $27 million, we estimate, What we plan to do with that is, for the first time ever, have a proactive five-year cycle on our pavements where we go and we touch every good street with crack sealing or whatever it needs once every five years. Really keeping the good streets good. The other thing that we're gonna do is some of our streets that need more than just sealing and preservation, that actually need some heavier maintenance, we're gonna be able with that money to increase it by 50%, the amount of heavy maintenance that we're delivering. Another thing that comes out of this is that we won't be doing anything with this money on the streets that have already failed, that are waiting for bond funds. However, we will be able to have a positive impact on the streets that actually have failed and are waiting for bonds because while we are maintaining the streets that are good and fair, we can use the bond to more effectively reduce the backlog of bond needs, right? I probably said more than I, yeah. Oh, the fee for residents is $3 per single family household. Businesses, it varies depending upon the type of business that you have and the square footage of that business. Okay, did I hit everything?

really quick that there's a lot of information on the website lane has given several presentations to council we'd love to connect you with that so you can see a lot more of the detail i want to clarify one other thing so there are roadway impact fees that development pays when they develop that is separate and that goes to really the congestion that you're talking about the new pavement management fee is maintenance so it's not to be clear it's not going to help with the congestion piece two separate things that we're both still working on

La, la, la. Okay, good. Y'all heard me sing. Wow, that was embarrassing. Go ahead.

That's all right.

When you guys took over the EMS from MedStar, there was other cities that were incorporated with that? Yeah, member cities. Is Fort Worth collecting money from those other cities, or is it a free-for-all?

Yeah, good question. Yeah, Fort Worth is obviously the lion's share of the system at like 90% or something, but the other 10% is made up of those member cities. Are there 14 or 15? And we do bill their portion of the budget out to them annually and collect those funds. Am I saying that right? Or do you want to add anything, Chief Horton?

I'll just clarify. As she said, the EMS fund requires a subsidy. We don't take in all the revenues to cover that. So the gap in that total budget is shared amongst all the member cities. So we pay 90% of the gap of that revenue. That's where the $30 million subsidy comes from, from the City of Fort Worth. The other 10% comes from the other member cities. So we all just share in the gap of the funding but they do pay a portion of that based on it's their unit hour utilization their total loaded costs for the number of transports in their city it's all prorated and then we true it up at the following fiscal year to make sure it's done but it is a shared costing

Hi, I apologize if this question has already been covered, but I was late today. But I heard you talking about the budget as far as the roads and repairs and maintenance and stuff like that. But I'm the HOA president over here in Spring Ranch, and what I hear from most of our people is the concern about the infrastructure in itself. And the constant allowing developers to continue to develop with very poor infrastructure has become a safety issue. Did you guys cover that at all? And we would like to know, because the plan has changed like three times on what's going to be going on up here in North Fort Worth. And I'd like to be able to share that, if there's anything that you can give me to share with my folks.

You did not miss that. I didn't really talk about that, but I'm happy to, do you want to cover it, Jess, or maybe somebody from transportation?

Yeah, if we have, there we go.

Oh, here comes Lauren. Okay.

Okay, so, sir, I'm Lauren Preer, Director for Transportation and Public Works. Nice to see you. We are working on kind of a comprehensive update for our council member that he can share with you Hopefully very soon. I want to say within the next week and really that's you know compiling all the projects between TPW water department as well as development in this area. It's a lot So we're we've got that kind of compiled and we're kind of going through with a you know the details and So I would imagine we could have that out to the public within the next week or two, just to give you a good idea of everything that's going on up here. What was your next question?

I think maybe the standard of the developers and, yeah.

So, some of the other cities have, when they got to the point to where we are now in North Fort Worth, they put a pause on development. And just curious, about how if that is a potential possibility until we get caught up because it's just getting more and more and more and more and more. It's like if you live here in North Fort Worth, if anybody that's on the council that has not driven up here between the hours of 6.30 in the morning until 9 o'clock, And from about two o'clock on, good luck if you don't get run over by a tractor trailer when there's a line a mile long on 287. And those are our high school kids that are driving, that are going back and forth. And it's a big concern, at least in the neighborhood that I represent, And that was brought up too, is why is Fort Worth continuing to approve and allow developers to continue to develop any piece of partial land that's out here when the infrastructure is not capable of handling it?

Yeah, and so the majority of that question is really a policy question for our whole council to answer. I will say that from a development perspective, so Jess had mentioned earlier that developers pay impact fees, right? And that is the impact of their development onto our roadway infrastructure. So right now they're at about, I think I heard 68% of the total need is what they are paying. So some of that is subsidized and that's where kind of the bond comes in to fill those gaps. And development's not linear, right? So that is also one way with which the bond is used to fill those gaps left by development.

So my question would be if we're going to continue to allow developers to come in and develop instead of charging bonds. So let's use Blue Mound for an example right here. Blue Mountain is still a two-lane road. You're putting 4,500 homes in there or something like that or more. Why can't we make the developer if it's going to impact those roads? Because I've been involved with some of the impact studies around here, and I think they probably could use a little updating.

And you're right.

And so why can't we get them to pay to put Blue Mound, a four-lane road with a turn lane? Why can't we force them to do that instead of these fees that they pay, which apparently aren't substantial enough? That's why we're having to do bonds and make the city pay for it, the community.

Yeah, I completely understand your perspective. And so those impact fees with which I mentioned, those are updated, I want to say, on a five-year cycle. And so that, I believe, is actually coming up this next year. to reassess those.

And then to add on to that just a little bit more. So there's impact fees. Developers do also have to pay their rough proportional share of the roadway that they're going to build. And so a lot of times those two things line up. When they are doing a development, they do a traffic impact analysis and that really helps us determine what they have to put in. but a lot of times it is the two-lane road or the two lanes of travel and then eventually you get both sides and they come together we can visit more for sure it's definitely something we recognize i'll tell you all my in-laws live out just past decatur and so i've been driving this 287 route for well over 20 years and it is insane to me how much it has changed um just in that time period so we we know it we're trying to work on it another thing that lauren didn't talk about but if she wants to highlight it or again offline And the city just adopted a new master transportation network, which we are incredibly proud of. And that is really an instrumental step that's also going to help us plan for the future for our roadway network. But a lot of the tools that will come with that will help us relief congestion as well in the meantime. So we have a lot of efforts underway that we're trying to help.

Thank you. And I was also late, so I apologize. But I was watching the live stream on my drive here, but I don't think I missed it. So you talked a lot about kind of the revenue strategy around the property tax increase. But can you speak to, I know I've heard, you know, city council say they have the goal of having, I think right now it's like 60-40, right? Like 60% of our revenue comes from like homeowner taxes versus business or housing. corporate, so can you talk about any revenue strategies that are being implemented around having kind of developers and businesses take on more of the share of funding what's happening in the city? That's one question and I have a second one.

Okay, yeah, so specifically on the property tax base, like the composition of the base being 60-40 and trying to shift the burden, Yeah, I'm happy to let anybody answer that question if they would like to talk about some of our strategies.

Well, a little bit. I mean, so in Texas, we can only adopt one tax rate that everybody pays. So the only way you shift that burden then is if we have more commercial development than your residential and we lift that base. So we have an economic development department that works closely with the Fourth Economic Development Partnership and a lot of our business is here to try to attract and recruit businesses to Texas. pick locations here in Fort Worth and establish their business and lead to it. The more businesses we have, the more that lifts that tax base up. So we're definitely working hard on that as well.

And then my second question was around just seeing that like kind of the line item of you described the fire one and the police one, but those kind of being the two that have grown, that's seen the most growth in kind of this budget cycle. And I know that when it comes to the police budget, we also have state policy that says that we can't decrease our police budget. So any money that gets put in there is kind of stuck there until... something major happens. And so what's the, how do you guys look specifically at that budget? Because once it's in there, it's stuck. Like, is there additional sort of criteria or filter that you're using to say, this meets some minimum thing that we're okay with this money permanently being in that budget? Because that one is so unique in that way compared to other things. And just seeing how much of other services, you know, got reduced this year. So just curious what the process is specifically around adding more dollars to that budget.

I mean, so like this budget year is a good question. And I know it's come up at some of our other meetings that the state law that doesn't allow us to, yeah, so for everyone's benefit, Texas state law does not allow us to, it came out of like the defund the police movement. And so they don't allow you to defund the police. So our general fund police budget cannot, be reduced. Our CCPD budget is not subject to that same rule. I don't think I'm looking at Thomas to confirm. And so that one is a little bit more fluid and we do have contractual increases in police. So like this year, it's very little out of head count, except for keeping up with growth, which is really just a maintenance of service levels. But because we try to budget by priority and because city council and resident priorities are all consistently fire, police and emergency management and communications, That is why you see the growth in police based on their contractual labor agreement agreed upon between the city of Fort Worth and their bargaining unit, and then headcount simply to maintain service levels. But I know that's like a point of sort of contention sometimes people think about, you know, why can't you reduce from police? And all of this $26 million growth aside from those couple of minor officer ads are maintaining service levels, keeping up with growth response times and proactivity ratios. Other questions? Anybody? Okay. Well, oh yeah.

I don't know if maybe you started with this, but I know that the city of Fort Worth hasn't actually increased the tax rate in a couple decades, right? I don't know in the last one, right? Yeah, 30 years or so, yeah. So I guess, you know, I know that there's the layer of it has to present a balanced budget, and in that balance, trying to get to that balanced budget, could you say a little bit more about kind of the rate that you arrived at? Like, I know it was like a lot of math that happened, but just also the question of, you know, Did we do we did we do we need to do more to make up for the fact that for 30 years? We haven't and like the city's just growing really really fast And address some of these, you know kind of road and transit issues So yeah so how did that conversation if you could say more about the conversation between like this year's budget versus how the priorities for the next five years or the 2050 plan factor into what's being decided now and

I'll start with some comments and then anybody can add in. Yeah, so she's right. The city of Fort Worth hasn't increased its property tax rate in 31 years. And I would say that's mostly been a responsible growth, right? So as our tax base has increased and values have increased, we have continued to drop the tax rate. A couple of years ago, we dropped it by four cents. It was like quite a big decrease. I think this last year we did a quarter cent. So as we've seen the values grow and the sales tax grow, there's been sort of a direct correlation there trying to be fiscally responsible. We have heard feedback through the process, kind of a similar question of should we be doing a bigger rate. State law actually allows us to adopt a rate that's three and a half percent higher than current year values called the voter approved rate. And then every year that we adopt something that's under that rate, we actually bank something called increment, so it's unused increment. basically like by doing a good job and adopting a tax rate under where you could, you get to use that in a future year. So right now the city of Fort Worth could adopt a rate almost at 78 cents without an election. Now that was never the city manager's intention and we didn't start with any kind of backing into a tax rate increase, rather we went through expenditure reductions first And then contractually obligated pay increases and additions based on council priority around public safety. And then kind of came to the three cent tax rate based on what was left without continuing to reduce service levels in really important areas like parks, libraries, code, etc. It was kind of a happy accident that it ended up being still a reduction on the average taxable bill for next year. That really wasn't the goal to keep it flat or below, but it ended up being kind of a slight savings on the city's portion of the tax bill for next year. But that wasn't necessarily purposeful, but it ended up being a good thing. Did I miss anything?

I was going to add to that real quick. Yeah. So I heard you say kind of especially in relation to transportation. So I will say that with the existing street maintenance funds that we have, those are general fund and subject to fluctuation with property values. Whereas the street maintenance fee or the payment management fee, as we're rebranding it, um would not be subject to those external fluctuations with property values and so that is one one benefit another benefit of it is that it would be dedicated only for street maintenance and payment and management of those streets um so As Christiane so eloquently put it all, certain funds can't be used to offset shortfalls in other funds. It's preserved only for that. Having the fee also makes it more stable to fund street maintenance that we need to fund, but it also makes it dedicated and can't be reprioritized for anything else that's needed in the future.

First, I would like to say thank you to all the staff that has put so much work into doing this. I know how hard it is, so appreciate that. But I would also like to point out that the fact that the city has not increased its tax rate in 31 years is actually irrelevant. Because every year that I've lived in the city, which is almost 25 years, the budget has gone up. Most people's tax bills have gone up. So the tax rate itself is irrelevant. The only thing that's relevant is the no new revenue rate and where you put the tax rate in relation to that. This proposed budget is still $35 million more than the last year's budget. The city is still growing. I'm not sure that those kinds of budget growths are required or acceptable. And for Mr. Jameson, I'd like you to think long and hard about how you're going to vote for this tax rate and this budget. This Tarrant County... for four years in a row, has adopted a rate below the new revenue rate. They've added homestead exemptions. They've cut their budget $80 million in four years. It can be done, and I would love to see the city of Fort Worth and other cities do the same thing. That's not a question. It's a comment.

Thank you for the feedback. I know your council member heard your feedback. Yes, sir.

Yeah, I was gonna ask, I didn't remember seeing what the no new revenue rate was up there, if you put it, but I guess what I really wanna know is, and maybe I missed it, the overall public safety takes up a large portion of the increase. So separating that out, separate out public safety, the rest of the general fund, is there an up or down increase or decrease in this overall spending?

The general fund is up by 4.6%, so public safety up by about $80 million. The rest of the department's down by about $50 million. We cut almost $52 million out of the budget, which came from other general fund departments. But, yes, still seeing 4.6% growth on the general fund, concentrated in public safety, as you astutely mentioned there. Yes, very good observation. Yes, ma'am.

I just, it's kind of a two-part thing, kind of, to go along with what she was saying. Yeah, the tax rate hasn't gone up. However, the appraised property values have increased. And when you buy your home, you're responsible. You look at what your escrow is, your taxes are, you buy your home. I've seen people taxed out of their home because their appraised value has doubled. Well, it's only worth that if you sell it. And that's what they have to do. They have to sell it because they can't afford the taxes anymore. You move in, taxes are $6,000 a year. Now they're $13,000 a year. And that's one thing I think maybe could be... What you buy your home is, that's what your tax rate is set at because you're trying to be responsible and get what you can afford. And you shouldn't be taxed out of your home. That's just a suggestion. Yeah, and the second thing we hear all the time, a lot of our money up here in North Fort Worth that's growing super, super fast is going to downtown Fort Worth to Panther Island, I think it's called, what's it called? Yeah, and that's where, since it's growing so fast here, and all these new homes, which should be, you know, oh, we need more money, well, look at all these thousands of homes now that are paying taxes, bringing in more money, and I don't know whether it's true or not, but it's like, yeah, that's why our infrastructure's so bad, is because it's all going downtown to finish Panther Island.

So thank you so much for those comments. I want to add just a couple things. So the city of Fort Worth doesn't do the appraisals and we have no sway or influence in the appraised values but certainly understand the comment and that's of course why we're here with reduced values and why in order to maintain our service level at the level that's being requested we are having to propose an increase but we understand and appreciate that. um the appraisal districts follow the state laws that tell them how to appraise properties uh and so they have to do it by i think there's three different appraisal methods that they can use and so i think if you talk to them as well they can explain that better it's not my uh not my world either but certainly as a taxpayer you know we're we're all well versed in it and understand and the other thing i was going to say well i don't have the numbers or maybe dana can answer this better it's just about panther island because it's a great question

I thank you i'm Dana Bergdorf also an assistant city manager, so the city does not put any general fund money into panther island. So those dollars are coming through the federal government, the tarant regional water district, and then we get reimbursed through taxes that are generated by new development so it's not using any existing funds through the general fund.

All right. Any other questions? If not, I'll let the council member maybe close it out. Thank you all so much for your attention. And I know staff will stick around if you maybe had a question that you didn't want to ask or if you want to follow up on anything, we'd be happy to talk with you.

I appreciate you guys coming. I know there is a lot to talk about, a lot to take in. The council is working hard. The staff is working hard. We know this is an uncomfortable conversation. I live here. I deal with all of it as well. So we're going to continue to work. We have a couple more weeks to balance this and to get it to a point where we're ready to vote. But we want to hear from you. That was the whole purpose of this. It was for us to educate you and to listen. So reach out to us. If you don't have it, it's district10 at fortworthtexas.gov. Send us an email, reach out. Happy to talk even more. I did want to let you know we have another event coming up in November, November 5th. We're gonna have a town hall at the Speedway. The entire District 10 is invited. There's gonna be a lot of departments there and a lot of other organizations and it's an opportunity for us to get to know you and talk more about what's going on in the district and how hard we're working to make it better. We know there's a lot that needs to be done in District 10 and that's what we're working on. We can try. I'm sure we can try. All right.

Thank you guys.