City prepares for budget shortfall
Hart said that after meeting with both the Tarrant County and Dallas County appraisal districts, he projects revenue from residential property tax to be down 7 percent. This means a $2 million loss for the city. Projected commercial property tax losses would be between 10 and 20 percent, a $3 million to $4.2 million revenue drop for the city.
Hart did report some good news, sales tax revenue remains level. He went on to say most surrounding cities are seeing a loss of sales tax revenue.
City departments have already made expenditure cuts along with a hiring freeze that offsets the $2 million residential property tax loss Hart said. But, with the additional commercial tax revenue loss, Hart said the city would have to make significant cuts.
“It’s not pretty, there will be a number, that is a number of job reductions,” Hart said. “Some are occupied, not a large number, but there are some, there has to be.”
Hart has asked all city departments to prepare budgets with 2, 5, and 10 percent cuts. He said that some departments could live with 10 percent cuts, others such as the police and fire departments could not sustain such a deep cut.
“You would devastate those departments with that kind of cut,” he said. “They [police and fire] would not be at that level of cut.”
“The last thing you want to do is have to cut public safety,” Hart said. But in order to get the multi-million dollar budget cut needed, public safety departments would be affected since public safety is the majority of the general fund he said.
Hart said he hoped some of the projections are wrong and also several city staff members are working on programs that could help the budget. One program the police department is exploring is grant money that compensates police officer positions eliminated by budget cuts.
