50 budget amendments pitched by council
Proposals include trimming spending and expanding police accountability measures
City Council members have authored more than four dozen amendments to Mayor Sylvester Turner’s proposed budget to trim spending, create new sources of revenue and expand police accountability measures.
Council members will take up the proposals Wednesday when they consider the mayor’s $5.1 billion budget plan, which is coming forward at an especially fraught moment. The city’s usual budget challenges have been aggravated by the economic crisis tied to COVID-19, while activists are gaining traction around the country in their calls to defund or scale back police departments after the death of Houston native
George Floyd.
Many of the 50 budget amendments are a direct response to those topics, including one from Councilwoman Amy Peck that would establish a group to audit all city departments and programs, then recommend whether they should be continued with certain changes, folded into another program or dissolved altogether.
The process would in some ways parallel the zero-based budgeting process used for Turner’s spending plan, which required department heads to analyze every function and justify each dollar spent rather than adding to existing budgets. Peck said Turner’s administration never showed council members the detailed results of
zero-based budgeting — and her so-called sunset review commission has a broader scope.
“With the sunset review, it's looking at every line item, but it goes past that,” she said. “It involves citizens and stakeholders and really gets into whether (the program is) serving the constituents, whether there are ways to consolidate, if there are technology advances to make. There could be some program within a department that's just not needed anymore.”
Other cost-cutting amendments include Councilwoman Sallie Alcorn’s proposal to study where Houston and Harris County can join forces instead of providing duplicate services, and a program suggested by Peck and Councilman Robert Gallegos that would allow city workers to voluntarily take unpaid time off. Councilman Greg Travis also proposed letting private firms compete with city departments for certain contracts, or studying whether it would save money to do so.
The proposed amendments mark one of the few instruments council members can use to directly impact the city budget under Houston’s strong-mayor government, which grants Turner power to introduce the annual budget to council and control the meeting agenda.
“The municipal government form that we have is really more of a corporate governance, where the mayor is the president and CEO and council serves as a board of directors," said Jay Aiyer, a public policy consultant and former chief of staff to mayor Lee P. Brown. “So, it really depends on how well they can work with the mayor to get a separate agenda through. But it's always the mayor's agenda.”
A number of council members have said they support the sunset review commission, Peck said, in
part because it would give them more power to weigh in on the budget process by putting commission recommendations up for a council vote. Peck likely will refer the item to committee, she said, so members can iron out a few final details.
“That council vote is a big part of it, because right now we just vote on the budget and that's it,” Peck said. “This would actually give us a little more say on the inner workings of what's going on.”
Turner opposed the vast majority of budget amendments during his first term — or sent them to committee and then declined to put them on council meeting agendas — though he has signaled his approval for a number of proposals this year. He supports the city-county services study and voluntary furlough program, along with proposals to give tax incentives to grocery stores in food deserts and businesses that build flood-resistant “green stormwater infrastructure.” And he supports Peck’s proposal to lease certain fire, police and trash collection vehicles instead of buying them, but he has said the sunset review commission should be reviewed by the council budget committee first.
The mayor has expressed opposition, meanwhile, to a sweeping police reform amendment introduced by Councilwoman Letitia Plummer that would eliminate nearly 200 vacant positions in the Houston Police Department. The funds saved by getting rid of the positions and a cadet class would go toward beefing up de-escalation training and the police oversight board, among other proposals sought by those pushing for police department reform around the country.
Turner repeatedly said during last year’s mayoral campaign that he wants to grow the police department by several hundred officers, and he rejected the idea of reducing the police department’s budget during an appearance on CNN last week.
With a budget of over $900 million that is devoted almost entirely to personnel, HPD is by far the city’s largest department and would have little room to cut spending without diminishing the police force. The police union previously negotiated a 3 percent pay bump from July 1 through the end of the year, accounting for much of the department’s proposed budget increase.
On Monday, five black Houston council members released a series of proposed HPD reforms that include many of the measures contained in Plummer’s plan, but without the spending cuts. The letter included every black member of council — Martha Castex-Tatum, Jerry Davis, Carolyn EvansShabazz, Edward Pollard and Tiffany Thomas — except Plummer.