Cop cuts may cost tax funds for cities
Austin move draws threat from Abbott, Patrick and Bonnen
Property tax revenue would be on the line for cities that choose to defund their police departments under a new legislative proposal pitched Tuesday by Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dennis Bonnen.
“Any city that defunds police departments will have its property tax revenue frozen at the current level,” Abbott said, flanked by the other two Republican members of the “Big Three” in Texas state government. “They will never be able to increase property tax revenue again if they defund police.”
The proposal comes after the city of Austin last week unanimously voted to cut at least $20 million from the city’s police budget and earmarked an additional $130 million to be reallocated to other areas. The Austin Police Department, with over 2,600 sworn law enforcement and support personnel, has had an annual budget of more than $400 million for the past two years.
Defunding police has been one of the primary demands of protesters who have taken to the streets in the weeks following the death of George Floyd, a 46-yearold Black man and former Houston resident who died after a white Minneapolis officer pinned his neck to the ground with a knee for more than eight minutes during an arrest. Activists have proposed using that funding on social services, such as mental health and housing assistance.
Austin criticized
The move by the Democratcontrolled Austin City Council was heavily criticized by Texas Republicans, including Abbott who in a statement last week said the city had abandoned its duty to provide public safety in favor of a political agenda.
“What they have done in Austin should never happen in any city in the state, and we’re going to pass legislation to be sure it never happens again,” Patrick said.
Austin City Council member Greg Casar said the council’s intent was to lessen the burden on police to handle social issues, such as homelessness, domestic violence and mental health, and spread it out to other departments with more bandwith.
“The message from the tens of thousands of Austinites who made their voices heard in this year’s budget process was clear:
We must decrease our over-reliance on police to handle all of our complex public safety challenges and instead reinvest in domestic violence shelters, mental health first responders, and more,” Casar said in a statement. “That’s what our City Council did — and it’s exactly the work we’re committed to continue.”
It’s unclear how the legislation will define defunding police; Abbott and Patrick did not respond to questions requesting clarification. In Austin’s case, the funds will stay within city coffers but will address different needs — some will be used to move civilian functions out of the police department and into other city departments and some will be redirected to alternative forms of public safety.
Bonnen told Hearst Newspapers that the proposed legislation is intended to target any kind of police budget reduction.
“All local governments that cut or shift funding from their police departments will be prohibited from raising property taxes,” Bonnen said in an email. “This proposal will disincentivize cities like Austin from compromising the safety of residents and stop them from using our law enforcement as a political prop.”
Activists in San Antonio and Houston had pushed for similar cuts to police budgets, with little success.
Cuts ‘hypocritical’
In San Antonio, the city council has proposed an $8 million increase to the police budget, but also moved some domestic violence prevention employees from the police department to the city health department, cut police overtime by about $3 million and added about $1 million in new spending on homelessness and mental health outreach.
Similarly, the Houston City Council in June voted to up its police budget by about $20 million, rejecting an effort to redirect $12 million to police reform efforts and other measures, such as giving the police oversight board investigative powers and offering no-interest loans to minority-owned businesses.
Nevertheless, the proposal sets the stage for a reprise of yet another clash between the Republican-majority legislature and Democratic-led cities over local control, a debate over how much intervention is appropriate for the state to have in city and county matters.
In 2019, Republicans passed priority legislation, Senate Bill 2, which requires many cities, counties and other taxing entities to hold an election if they want to raise 3.5 percent more property tax revenue than the previous year, despite heavy opposition from cities.
Austin Mayor Steve Adler in a news conference Tuesday said he disagrees with the notion that the city “defunded” its police. While Adler said it’s too soon to say how much support the proposal will have before the makeup of the 87th Legislature is known — Democrats are vying to gain control of the Texas House in the 2020 election — he hopes it does not come to pass.
“Any kind of cap that’s imposed from the state level on local communities is a problem,” Adler said. “I think it takes away fundamental and basic freedom rights from local communities to be able to decide what their priorities are.”
Casar characterized the proposal as hypocritical considering the Big Three’s recent ask that state agencies, including DPS, make a 5 percent cut to their budgets to make up for shortfalls caused by the pandemic and in the previous budget cycle, a 4percent cut to address the downturn in the oil and gas industry.
The 5 percent cuts proposed this year would strip more than $3.5 million from law enforcement operations within several state agencies, including the Department of Criminal Justice, the Office of the Attorney General and the Alcoholic Beverage Commission, according to budget documents obtained by Hearst Newspapers. The agencies assist local police departments in investigating cybercrimes, human trafficking, monitoring parolees and enforcing alcohol regulations, among other tasks.
Threat called ‘nonsensical’
Abbott, Patrick and Bonnen on Tuesday were joined by members of Tarrant County’s Republican delegation, including state Sens. Jane Nelson and Kelly Hancock. Abbott contrasted the city of Austin with Fort Worth, where voters recently approved keeping around a half-cent sales tax for another decade that will fund the city’s police department.
“I join those who are calling for funding for mental health and rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters,” said Nelson, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and formerly chaired the Health and Human Services Committee for 14 years. “We are, as a state, making huge investments in those items in our state budget and will continue to do that, but you don’t have to defund law enforcement to accomplish those objectives.”
State Rep. Trey Martinez-Fischer, D-San Antonio, who sits on the Ways and Means Committee, which decides tax policy for the state, called the proposal “nonsensical” through any other lens than a political one. Martinez-Fischer added that he finds it “most striking” that Republicans who rejected an amendment to SB2 last year that would have exempted police and fire budgets supported this proposal.
“There was attempt after attempt by Democrats to exclude any tax limitations on police and fire and every single one of the representatives that were grandstanding in Fort Worth voted against it,” he said. “It just takes a certain amount of hubris to come here and blame Democrats for not being with police and fire when these are the guys who voted against their budgets when were were asking them to hold them harmless.”