CoSA Budget Season 2023: Sights and Sound(bite)s
This budget season, we attended all 9 budget townhalls, in addition to tuning into council budget work sessions, and perusing the budget itself. Below you’ll find our sights, news and notes from the last few weeks (all of which was available in near-real-time on our socials).
One thing we noticed after the first few townhalls, was that they were shorter than they were last year. These folks serve YOU! These kinds of meetings shouldn’t end until every constituent question has been asked and answered.
If it runs past officials’ bedtime, too bad. If the hours they put in during the day are too time-consuming, that may very well be an indication that the city government is too big, taxing citizens too much, and restricting us too much.
This is a salient point because it’s been rumored that hikes in council salary could be on a ballot initiative soon. They arguably shouldn’t have been raised almost a decade ago. Our policy director and editor Chris wrote as much a couple years ago.
Even before these meetings were shortened, we tried to defer to constituent questions. If we get the chance though, one in-particular comes to mind:
“We know inflation is caused by Uncle Sam, and that the county appraisal process is mostly a distraction. However, are you concerned … because you suppress the supply side by taxing savings/investment via property taxes (set to rise 7% with this budget), which then get spent in somewhat deadened form, (since they’re no longer backed by production) … that city contributes to artificially inflated prices that were caused by the lockdowns (NOT the pandemic)?
“Does this probability cross your mind before you say you’re trying to ‘buy your way into affordable housing’ with bond $s, as you did at the D6 budget townhall?”
Another bad idea the city is proposing is to give seniors a credit on their property taxes for their volunteering efforts. This may look appealing on its face, but last year, when the idea first surfaced, Chris took a stab at explaining the reasons why it’s not.
Briefly: carving up the code, and drawing people away from the labor force, dents wealth-creation, which obstructs our ability to volunteer in the first place; the rate at which property taxes have soared in recent years minimizes the positive effects of ANY exemptions; etc. Read more here.
“Why can’t we take the funds allocated for the $1M gym for the police and reallocate to actual needs?”
“The city is forgoing a lot of money if we don’t change the ordinance to apply the HOT (hotel occupancy tax) to short-term rentals.”
Setting aside the hot topics of STRs and police funding, how about we just cut spending altogether? The more waste (look up “government” in the dictionary …) we cut, the less the city will take from citizens.
Excessive taxation, whether levied against San Antonians, tourists, businesses, et al, runs directly counter to individual freedom. Don’t government more power.
“A $3.7B public institution is silencing a $500K community-based organization.”
First off, pulling $150K in taxpayer dollars from the likes of SA2020, is NOT silencing them. That’s an impressively unserious accusation. Executive Director Kiran Kaur Bains even admits that “we’ve known for a while” it might happen.
Then, Assistant City Manager Jeff Coyle asserts “this is all about us using our resources to the best of our ability.” The “best” of anyone’s ability here is stifled in the sclerotic enterprise of government. As we’ve said before, it lacks the basic incentives to be effective.
Third, how about sending these, and undoubtedly other “redundancies,” as Manny Pelaez refers to them, back to the benefactors? Since when has CoSA been concerned with “redundancies”??
Lastly, the councilman thinks it’s “unfair” to compare this to the more than half-million his mother’s group gets. Question: if they have a $12M budget, why the allocation of city/taxpayer funds in the first place? Just because?
None of these parties involved seem to care about who is FORCED to foot the bill. Businesses and private individuals can’t get away with such callous disregard. But if you have that kind of streak in you, and you just need to get it out of your system, there’s one place you can go …
Government.
Did you know …
In the proposed budget, Ready to Work gets $36M. Their dashboard lists 241 “participants placed in quality jobs.” AND, it has almost $100M in taxpayer dollars languishing in the bank.
By comparison, The Alamo Colleges District budgeted $427M and graduated 10K last year. That’s $149K/graduate vs. $43K/graduate.
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Did you know …
In the proposed budget, Pre-K 4 SA pays over $104K per position, whereas NEISD pays less than $60K?
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