ANALYSIS
The Texas Legislature passed a law in May that compelled the Austin City Council to fully restore the police budget that it had cut in 2020. The new law, HB 1900, establishes criteria for determining whether a city is a “defunding municipality” and imposes harsh penalties on any city hit with the designation.
Basically, HB 1900 puts a floor under police funding at the 2019 level. It allows a city to reduce its police budget only in proportion to an overall budget cut.
If a city cuts its police budget anyway, HB 1900 reduces the city’s maximum property tax rate and allows the state to withhold sales tax revenue and divert it to state law enforcement. It also triggers disannexation elections in any area annexed by the city in the past 30 years – huge parts of Austin, in other words.
Despite these severe consequences, depolicing activists urged the city to put up a fight, and the law department studied the possibility of challenging HB 1900 in court under a provision of the state constitution prohibiting “retroactive laws.”
But ultimately, Mayor Steve Adler and the council decided not to risk it. “We’ve lost,” Adler said on a podcast in May. When City Manager Spencer Cronk announced his draft budget in July, it was “fully compliant with HB 1900.”
The new city budget reverses structural changes made over the past year, including restoring the forensics lab and the 9-1-1 call center back to the Austin Police Department. These had been set up as standalone departments in FY 2020-21. It eliminates the $76.3 million Decouple and Reimagining funds, which represented police units stuck in a kind of budgetary limbo, slated for possible restructuring or elimination, but with no firm decisions yet made. And it increases salaries and other base costs.
All said and done, the new police budget comes in at $442.8 million, about $11 million more than the police budget adopted in 2019, the year before the “reimagining” process kicked off. Nominally, that’s an increase of 2.4%.
Inflation
Accounting for inflation, however, the APD budget adopted in August was about $18 million less than the APD budget adopted in 2019, according to calculations made using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI Inflation Calculator.
The equivalent 2019 budget today would be about $461 million, not $443 million. In real terms, the new police budget is about 4% less than it was before the 2020 budget cuts.
This represents a blind spot in HB 1900. The bill does not account for inflation.* It merely requires the city to keep the budget flat year to year, in nominal dollars.
CPI inflation has spiked in recent months and currently stands at 5.3%. In the meantime, the city’s contract with the police union requires annual salary increases. Pension costs and other base costs also continue to rise.
This dynamic creates wiggle room for the proponents of Austin’s ongoing Reimagining Public Safety process. It means that salaries and benefits for the existing workforce will eat up a larger and larger share of the budget over the coming years if spending remains flat – potentially allowing the city to comply with HB 1900 even as it further reduces police staffing levels or undertakes other structural changes.
Council Member Greg Casar alluded to this possibility in a recent interview, saying, “Pension costs and healthcare costs go up every year. When those go up next year, that will raise the police budget some, and since we’re not allowed to lower it but we are allowed to keep it the same, when we see police pension and healthcare costs go up some – and salaries – that creates the opportunity for us to actually pull the forensics lab out and keep the budget the same without violating the law.”
Department Budget Changes
Another potential workaround to HB 1900 concerns the details of the APD budget. HB 1900 is a blunt instrument that sets a floor on the city’s police budget but doesn’t dictate what the budget must be spent on. Therefore, the city could continue to “reimagine” the budget from within, finding unconventional ways to spend departmental dollars.
Notably, the FY22 budget did not restore 150 vacant officer positions cut last year, instead keeping the force level at 1,809. Cronk said in his July budget speech, “We will not abandon our commitment to reimagining public safety… my pledge is that we will move this important work forward, while complying with the state’s requirements.”
Proposition A
Many Austin Progressives consider the APD budget to be bloated and at least partly unnecessary. They would prefer to spend more money instead on EMS, fire, mental health responders, substance abuse treatment, and social welfare programs, which they contend will better address public safety threats in the long term.
Adler and nine other council have endorsed “No Way on A,” a campaign to defeat Proposition A, the police staffing initiative on the ballot in November. Proposition A would require the city to maintain at least two police officers per 1,000 residents.
The city would have to hire hundreds more officers to meet that goal. Additionally, Proposition A would enhance training requirements for the police force and provide salary incentives for language proficiency, the mentorship of cadets, and good conduct.
According to an analysis from the city’s finance department, Proposition A would cost the city an estimated of $54.3 million to $119.8 million annually. The “No Way on A” campaign has slammed the proposition as “dangerous and fiscally irresponsible.”
But “No Way on A” campaigners aren’t just concerned about the money. They also worry about the “ideological” significance of the ballot measure. If Proposition A were to pass, it would represent another major blow to the reimagining process. On its website, No Way on A writes, “Prop A is a total reversal of the ideological shift that Austin went through during and after the protests of summer 2020.”
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*HB 1900 does account for inflation once a “defunding” designation has already been made, for purposes of calculating whether to remove the designation if a city does eventually restore the funding. However, Austin was never labeled a “defunding” city under HB 1900, because it preemptively restored the funding it cut last year.
