Things are tough all over

HISD faces a big deficit:

BagOfMoney

Houston ISD leaders are bracing for a projected $107 million budget shortfall that, in a worst-case scenario, could prompt the district to slash jobs.

During the school board meeting Thursday, however, officials pledged to try keep cuts away from schools.

“We get it,” Ken Huewitt, the district’s deputy superintendent and chief financial officer, told the board. “We’re in the business of teaching and learning.”

Huewitt said he told central office departments to consider not filling vacant positions and asked principals to weigh spending cuts up to $275 per student. His first-draft proposal also would save $10 million by dissolving the teacher bonus program, affecting payouts in January 2018. Money for next year already is in reserve.

He cautioned, however, that the district is still early in the planning process. The board is set to approve the budget in June. District officials typically present the severest financial outlook at the outset, without, for example, using savings to plug the gap.

The looming financial problem stems from the district expecting to reach, for the first time, the revenue level that requires property-wealthy school systems to send significant funding back to the state.

Lawmakers typically change the formula to avoid the so-called Robin Hood payback scenario for the Houston Independent School District and Dallas ISD, but that did not happen in the 2015 session, according to attorney David Thompson. The Legislature is not set to reconvene until January 2017 unless a special session is called.

Which there might be, depending on how the Supreme Court rules in the school finance case. If all goes well for HISD, they would be getting more money out of it. But you can’t count your chickens before they hatch, especially when you don’t know their timetable for hatching. The board has to make a budget, and they can’t make it based on assumptions about things that may happen at some unclear time.

And then there’s Houston.

As if nosediving sales tax revenues and a looming budget deficit were not enough, a swathe of successful lawsuits from business owners protesting their property values have handed Houston City Council another fiscal headache.

Mayor Sylvester Turner lamented what his finance director projects as a $16 million drop in property tax collections during the current budget year, which ends in June.

Granted, that’s not much in a more than $2 billion operating budget. But if all other trends hold, the news means there may be $16 million less on hand to close an already daunting $126 million budget gap for the new fiscal year that starts July 1.

Finance Director Kelly Dowe used new data from the Harris County Appraisal District to make the estimate. That data, said HCAD’s chief appraiser Sands Stiefer, was drawn from November and December, when many judges are trying to clear their dockets.

Turner at Wednesday’s council meeting lashed out at what he said is an “inherently unfair” system that rewards commercial property owners who hire lawyers to argue their properties are worth less than county officials contend.

That hands a higher share of the tax burden to individual homeowners who lack the same means to fight, the mayor said.

“They’re doing it each and every year. When they’re not successful at the appraisal districts, they go to court for relief,” Turner said. “The reality is, that $16 million is a real hit to the city’s budget.”

The hit is particularly harmful, Dowe said, because the city is operating under a cap on property tax collections that voters imposed a decade ago.

So this is the usual story, one part the rigged appraisal system and one part the stupid revenue cap, which does nothing but penalize the city for having strong economic growth, while exacerbating the problem in leaner times. The city has other issues it has to deal with, and the revenue cap is only part of the problem, but if you don’t recognize that it’s part of the problem, then you’re part of the problem, too.

And on that note, a song from the 80s that captures the theme of this post:

That’s John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, who clearly kept on playing after the 80s. Good for them.

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2 Responses to Things are tough all over

  1. I’ll be on KPFT 90.1fm radio station this Tuesday from 7-7:30pm talking about how a shared city-county public bank that allows local ISD’s to use it’s services can save taxpayers money.

    If we have a municipal public bank there will be no reason to have a stupid revenue cap, which no other US city has.

    Furthermore, a public bank reduces the need for TIRZ which are nothing more than corporate hand outs.

    http://joemcelligott.com/public-banking/

  2. Steve Houston says:

    I’ve seen the comment “nosediving sales tax revenues” in a few places but the response was stronger, pointing out that sales taxes were down a modest few percent, less than a million dollar difference out of over 50 million. By that standard, we might as well close the doors to the city because none of it was a surprise given oil prices and layoffs. I wonder where the public sector haters are now calling the oil companies they love so much as inefficient, poor planners, and fraught with waste given the incredible revenues they enjoyed all these years now filing for bankruptcy and needing to cut so many employees…

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