City OKS budget with increase in funds for police.
Activists had urged less; city officials trimmed more than $120M from plan as revenues fell
Despite calls from activists to spend less on police, City Council members unanimously passed a $2.9 billion budget Thursday that includes a boost in funding for the San Antonio Police Department.
In drawing up the budget, city leaders were confronted with the nation’s two major crises this year: the coronavirus pandemic and outrage over police brutality, particularly toward people of color. Officials grappled with the blow to the city’s coffers dealt by the pandemic’s economic fallout as well as calls from protesters to re-evaluate how much the city spends on policing.
City budget writers made more than $120 million in cuts as revenue from retail and restaurant sales as well as hotel room bookings, conventions and flights in and out of San Antonio International Airport dried up.
“This has not been a normal nor an easy fiscal year,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said. “It’s been a year that’s been fraught with anger, division, tension, anxiety, disease.”
Organizers and residents had pushed city leaders to spend less on SAPD and more on social services during protests spurred by the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis.
Those calls intensified this week after police shot and killed Darrell Zemault Sr., a Black man, while arresting him on two family violence warrants Tuesday. Police say Zemault fought with them and grabbed an officer’s gun.
To activists’ chagrin, council members went forward with an
$8 million boost in police spending, bringing SAPD’S total budget to $487 million for the 2020-21 fiscal year. The jump is smaller than in recent years, but it’s still an increase.
One after another, more than a dozen residents called in to the council’s virtual meeting Thursday morning to decry the increase and to blast council members for what they saw as inaction.
“We’re here because we literally can’t take it anymore,” activist Moureen Kaki told council members. “We’re here talking to you because there’s another way. We’re here because we love our communities and because we have the imagination and the hope that our communities can be more than arenas for police to live out their combat fantasies.”
Only one person spoke in defense of the Police Department.
City leaders including Nirenberg and City Manager Erik Walsh have been hesitant to quickly make sweeping cuts in Police Department funding.
For one, they have pointed out that the city’s contract with the San Antonio Police Officers Association, the union that represents the city’s officers, ties their hands when it comes to determining the city’s police budget. More than threequarters of the city’s police spending — about $387 million — is mandated by the contract, which determines wages and benefits as well as spending on costs such as uniforms, vehicles and ammunition.
The contract is set to expire in October 2021. Negotiations between the city and union on a new contract are slated to begin in January.
In the meantime, activists have pointed to the remaining $100 million in spending that doesn’t fall under the contract, which covers costs such as the city’s 911 communications center, fuel and police records. But Nirenberg shot down cutting those funds, saying it’s “not as easy as it might seem.”
Also looming in the background is a threat from Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s top Republicans to punish cities that cut police spending in any way. Abbott vowed last week to push proposals during the Legislature’s upcoming session to freeze cities’ property tax revenue and annexation powers if they make cuts to police budgets.
The governor also threatened Austin officials that the state would take control of the Austin Police Department after City Council members there cut and reallocated $150 million from their police budget.
But Abbott seemed satisfied with the San Antonio council’s move Thursday.
“I applaud San Antonio for passing a budget that boosts police spending rather than cutting law enforcement spending like some other cities,” Abbott tweeted Thursday evening. “Having well-trained law enforcement is essential to safe communities.”
Activists found some sympathy on the council. District 9 Councilman John Courage, who worked as a military police officer when he was in the Air Force, said he understands the challenges police officers face when out on patrol, “but that certainly doesn’t justify any deaths of people.”
“There have got to be other ways of doing our job as a city and for the police to do their job to protect the people in this community other than having people die at the hands of police officers,” Courage said.
Two other council members — Manny Peláez and Shirley Gonzales — noted that the city has for years boosted the number of officers on the force because that’s what constituents have demanded.
“I can’t ignore those voices,” Peláez said. “And just because they don’t show up to City Council and holler at us and because they’re not marching in the street doesn’t mean that I don’t listen to them.”
But Gonzales admitted that hasn’t necessarily led to a drop in crime.
“We have enough information to show that we need to continue to redirect those resources,” Gonzales said.
‘Start of conversation’
Nirenberg acknowledged that activists didn’t get everything they sought, but he said the budget does make investments in housing and health, as well as other areas where they wanted more funding. Activists have found those amounts dissatisfying.
The mayor sees the budget passed Thursday as the “beginning of a much longer conversation” about the role of police in San Antonio and the size of the city’s financial commitment to the department.
“In order to live up to the recognition that Black lives matter, San Antonio must not be an exception,” Nirenberg said.
The budget passed Thursday does make some changes to the police budget. The city will put all its violence prevention programs under one roof at the Metropolitan Health District and will move 20 civilian employees who work with domestic violence victims from SAPD to Metro Health. It also will assign 25 officers to focus on domestic violence prevention and intervention.
San Antonio plans to apply for the Justice Department’s Community-oriented Policing grant to hire more officers tasked with building relationships within the community and to help come up with innovative ways to fight crime.
The city is cutting police overtime by $3.4 million, which it can do because of an incoming cadet class.
The plan also will pump $1 million in new spending on homelessness and mental health outreach, often handled by police.
City leaders haven’t taken police reform off the table. For the next several months, Walsh plans to embark on a process to evaluate what residents expect from the Police Department as well as to examine issues of police accountability and discipline.
Walsh plans to bring a reform package to council members in April.
“We understand the importance of it, and we will be diligent and work hard to continue to review and make sure we are putting ourselves and the community and the Police Department in the best possible position,” Walsh said. The pandemic has wrought havoc on the city’s budget as it deals with an expected $127 million loss in revenue, mostly from depleting sales and hotel occupancy taxes. The budget will be $4.4 million lower than last year.
No layoffs, raises
Layoffs for the city’s civilian employees are off the table, but it’s possible that they will have to take unpaid furlough days next year. Civilians won’t get pay raises under the proposed budget, though they will be paying lower health insurance premiums to make up for that.
The city’s uniform employees still are slated to get pay increases because of their union contracts: 5 percent for police officers and 2 percent for firefighters plus a 1 percent bonus.
The city is cutting $8 million from its annual street maintenance budget, which will sit at $102 million.
Metro Health is getting about $3 million more than it did last year, bringing that budget to $45.8 million. Of that, the city is kicking in $20.3 million, roughly 30 percent more than it did last year. State and federal grants pay for the rest.
That amount doesn’t include an additional $19 million in city money and federal grants that council members approved to keep the city’s pandemic response funded until early summer.
The council also pumped $24.1 million into the city’s primary housing assistance program, which helps residents with rent and mortgage payments and household costs such as utilities and groceries. But they also placed stricter limits on who could receive assistance from the program and how much, changes intended to extend the life of the program into December, given that additional federal stimulus is unlikely.