San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Council freshmen chafe at city budget process
City Council budget-approval sessions tend to be predictable and dull.
Council members inevitably praise city staff for all their hard work and express pride over the new budget, which they describe as a righteous document.
This year was different.
The council has four new members and three of them — Jalen McKee-Rodriguez, Teri Castillo and Mario Bravo — are insurgents elevated to the dais by progressives, with the understanding that their mission is to disrupt complacency, shake up the protocol, challenge old assumptions and afflict the comfortable.
At both Wednesday’s final budgetary work session and Thursday’s budget-approval session, the three freshmen were in their full glory.
McKee-Rodriguez, a former high-school math teacher, employed his arithmetic skills to argue against the proposed $15 million increase in the city’s police budget, a hike of more than 3 percent.
The East Side councilman pointed out that if the city increased its police funding by 3 percent annually over the next decade, in 10 years we’d be facing a police budget $172 million bigger than where it currently stands.
Given that a recent state law all but negated the possibility of big cities reducing their police budgets, even small annual increases essentially become locked in and irreversible.
McKee-Rodriguez introduced a budget amendment that would have trimmed $5.7 million from the proposed police budget increase, with the thought that the funding could be used to give residents property tax relief.
It was a small gesture, an attempt to repurpose less than half of 1 percent of San Antonio’s general-fund budget. But its bigger purpose was to break the chain of municipal rote thinking when it comes to police funding.
McKee-Rodriguez’s amendment failed by an 8-3 vote. Unsurprisingly, the three votes of support came from McKee-Rodriguez, Bravo and Castillo.
For his part, Bravo fired off an array of amendment proposals at the end of the budget process: $10 million for homelessness and mental health; $200,000 to study the effectiveness of past housing investments; $200,000 to study management practices at CPS Energy; $500,000 for outreach to people not taking advantage of homestead-exemption eligibility; $2.45 million in bond assistance for small contractors (based on an idea from McKee-Rodriguez) and the use of Solid Waste Management funds on a deconstruction program for demolished buildings (based on a concept championed by Castillo).
Bravo faced criticism from some of his colleagues, who suggested he was throwing out too many unvetted ideas at the last minute and using the budget process for policy matters that should be introduced in council committees.
None of his proposals made it in the budget, but he planted seeds and got commitments from three council committee chairs to take up his suggestions.
“It was messy,” Bravo said of his effort. “But it was fruitful.”
Bravo, McKee-Rodriguez and Castillo were rebelling against the accepted idea that freshman council members should be observers rather than participants in their first budget cycle.
All three took office in midJune. A month was lost during the council’s annual July sabbatical. Then, in mid-August, City Manager Erik Walsh introduced the proposed budget. In mid-September, the council had to vote.
For Bravo, this dynamic meant getting up to speed on fiscal nuances while putting a staff together and answering the backlog of 2,000 emails waiting for him when he assumed office.
“There’s definitely structural challenges to being able to get any projects funded when you’re first elected, because of the timeline,” Bravo said.
There’s little time for genuine discussion or negotiation about budget priorities. New council members are left to scramble for crumbs.
“The senior council members will tell me, ‘That’s just the way it is. Don’t be upset. It happened to me too,’ ” Bravo said. “I’m like, ‘You get that it’s a problem, and you haven’t done anything to fix the process.’ ”
Bravo extended his critique to the way council members routinely approve contracts and board appointments without knowing anything about the details. His bigger point seemed to be that it does no good to call council members policymakers if they’re confined to a structure that discourages policymaking.
He voiced his opposition to the process by abstaining on the final budget vote.
“The way the process is, instead of saving some things for the final allocations, you end up with more of a business-as-usual budget,” Bravo said. “When you have a council where there’s no real coalitions to get to six votes, you’re just going to get whatever the staff proposal was.”
These three freshmen will lose some battles. But they’ll make plenty of noise along the way.