Council endorses $7.8M boost in health and human services
Part of the increased outlay would go to citycounty health division.
Last week’s Austin City Council budget talks were likened to speed dating. This week, the council slowed things down, taking a long walk through the budget line by line and lingering over potential changes to the spending plan.
“We’re kind of like a moth dancing around a flame, getting closer and closer all the time,” Mayor Steve Adler remarked Tuesday.
The council’s first day of taking votes on adding, dropping and changing items in the proposed $3.5 billion city budget was scheduled to start at 9 a.m.
It wasn’t until after 2:15 p.m. that the council was in a position to begin those sorts of budget votes.
The council is scheduled to adopt the city budget Wednesday or Thursday. The budget would take effect Oct. 1.
On Tuesday, the council took the first steps toward significantly increasing health and human services funding at the urging of Council Member Delia Garza.
Though it’s not yet a done deal, the council voted to add $7.8 million onto its working budget for health and human services, $2.5 million of which would go toward the city-county health department, while the balance would pay for contracts with social
service providers.
One Voice Central Texas, a coalition of nonprofits, has showed up at council meetings and even held a press conference in recent weeks to ask for a $6.7 million bump to health and human services funding.
Nonprofits pointed to a vote by the previous council that called for closing a “funding gap” in that area and specified a method for doing so, which, if followed, would result in $3 million in funding for the city-county health department and $3.7 million for social service contracts in the next budget year.
The council also voted in favor of two of Council Member Kathie Tovo’s proposals: $100,000 in general fund dollars to move forward on a sobriety center, and $600,000 from the same pot for a program that provides housing and social services for those who are homeless.
But some on the council said they might want to revisit some of the added-on spending if it placed too great a strain on the general fund.
Staying within the estimated tax rate of 45.98 cents per $100 in taxable value — which would produce a $12 reduction on the median homeowner’s tax bill compared to this year — would have put the council about $1.9 million over available general fund revenue, Adler said.
That means there’s little room for the council to add ongoing expenses without trimming the budget elsewhere.
Council Member Don Zimmerman, backed by Council Member Ellen Troxclair, proposed early on in the day limiting any increases in city spending to inflation plus population growth. That would have meant roughly an $18 million cut to the proposed $906 million general fund budget, which is up from this past year’s $854 million general fund budget.
Zimmerman, Troxclair and Council Member Sheri Gallo were the only “yes” votes.
In the past, the council used the city manager’s proposed budget as a base document, meaning council members would use that budget as a starting point and vote on a litany of changes to the budget.
This year, council members initially had four documents to sift through: three spreadsheets from the mayor and one spreadsheet from city staff.
That meant the council, led by Adler, spent about the first two hours of the meeting in what the mayor acknowledged was a “tedious” exercise: finding and reconciling differences, line by line, between the mayor’s spreadsheets and the city staff document.
“Mr. Mayor, can we back up?” Zimmerman asked at one point. “I’m confused. Why did this happen? Why are we going through this exercise?”
Adler responded, in part, “I’m just trying to get us to one document.”
Adler said his spreadsheets reflected last-minute changes from council members, as well as the informal, straw poll votes council members took in budget lightning rounds last week.
Those votes were meant to roughly indicate where the council stood on budget proposals from council members.
Creating a single document taking all that into account required a lunch break, which lasted more than an hour and a half, so the mayor and city staff could put together a working budget of sorts that the council could then begin to amend.