Austin City Budget Calls For $11.3M Police Funding Cut

AUSTIN, TX — The Austin city manager on Monday presented his proposed municipal budget for fiscal year 2020-21, which includes an $11.3 million cut to Austin Police Department funding.

“Austin remains engulfed by a pandemic that has caused tragic loss across our community, upended our way of life, and triggered an unprecedentedly swift economic contraction. At the same time, the city is taking new steps to confront and end the long history of systemic injustices experienced by people of color by our public safety institutions,” City Manager Spencer Cronk said during his presentation. “This budget meets these crises head-on, building on work to combat COVID-19 and help our community recover from its effects, while accelerating the process of re-imagining our public safety system to ensure justice and equal treatment for all our residents.”

Cronk delivered his remarks via videoconference that can be viewed again on ATXN.TV. In presenting the budget, he laid out the highlights and key themes of his proposals for city tax and spending for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. This year’s proposed budget of $4.2 billion —the same size as last year’s iteration — adjusts to new fiscal constraints and community expectations, with focused investments in core programs and city infrastructure, Cronk explained.

The proposed $1.1 billion General Fund budget supports re-imagining public safety through a reallocation of police funding to health, housing and other critical social services. That part of the budget was informed by continuing civil unrest as critics call for law enforcment reform after recent high-profile police killings of civilians both locally and elsewhere.

The Capital Budget includes $1.2 billion in planned spending.

Proposed Budget - Snapshot

Proposed Budget - Re-imagining Public Safety

Proposed Budget - Taxpayer Impact Assessment

Proposed Budget - Full Document

Proposed Budget - City Manager's Message

During his presentation, Cronk identified tackling the coronavirus and re-imagining public safety as the two biggest priorities for the city in the year ahead.

On coronavirus

"It is nearly impossible to overstate the magnitude of the challenge that COVID-19 has presented, of the loss felt in our community, and of the strain it has placed on everyone’s resources,” Cronk said. The adverse fiscal effects of the virus is anticipated to leave the city more than $200 million, or nearly 5 percent, below budgeted projections by the end of the current fiscal year, Cronk said. At the same time the city faces “unprecedented demand for additional resources to respond to and emerge from this crisis,” he added.

The proposed budget leverages federal funding provided through the CARES Act to help support the $272-million framework for the city’s COVID-19 response, approved by city council in June. The framework includes planned expenditures of $106 million for emergency response, $63 million for medical and public health needs, and $103 million for economic support.

On Public Safety

“To ensure our community’s resilience requires us to confront the systemic and inequitable treatment that communities of color have experienced for generations, most visibly and tragically in the name of public safety," Cronk said. "The recent deaths of Mr. George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of a police officer and our own officer-involved shooting death of Mr. Michael Ramos have amplified the call for justice in our community in ways we cannot ignore," he added.

Ramos, an unarmed man, was fatally shot by police during a confrontation outside a South Austin apartment complex on April 24, galvanizing protesters. Condemnation grew after Floyd died on May 25 after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes as he said he was unable to breathe, culminating in protests largely centered on downtown Austin that continue to this day.

"The city has started down the path toward ending this injustice but we have further to go and we must stay the course to redefine public safety in Austin,” Cronk said.

The budget proposes reducing the Austin Police Department budget by $11.3 million, eliminating 100 vacant sworn Police positions from the base forecast and delaying cadet classes in the process. Funding is reallocated to alternative public safety strategies and public health services, including mental health first response and family violence programs. Additional funds are earmarked for the new Civil Rights Office, the Equity Office, and the Office of Police Oversight.

Other spending proposals

• $60.9 million to strengthen the City’s commitment to end homelessness in Austin through housing displacement prevention, crisis mitigation, and re-empowerment efforts.

• $735,000 to enhance the City’s open-data portal, increasing transparency for Austin residents.

• $1.5 million for improvements to the Asian American Resource Center, Carver Museum, and Mexican American Cultural Center.

• $423,000 and 6 new positions to fully implement the citywide curbside organic materials collection program.

• $14.7 million for sidewalk improvements and $2.3 million for pedestrian safety including hybrid beacons, audible crosswalk indicators, and more visible signs and markings.

• $5.1 million for crisis response and victim services.

Impact on taxpayers

• The proposed property tax rate is $0.4377 cents per $100 of taxable value, a slight reduction from the current rate of $0.4386. The rate is 3.5 percent above the effective Operations and Maintenance rate — the lowest such increase since fiscal year 2004-05

• A typical tax and rate payer would pay an additional 0.3 percent for tax, rates and fees combined — equivalent to $12.53 per year or $1.04 per month. This includes a bill reduction for the typical Austin Energy customer, a freeze in Austin Water rates, and an increase in Austin Resource Recovery charges to pay for the citywide implementation of curbside organic materials collection

The coming weeks will provide time for public input and budget work sessions. City council will have the opportunity to review and initiate amendments to the proposed budget before final adoption, which is scheduled for Aug. 12. For more information about the city's budget development process, click here.

Civil justice groups react

Chas Moore, the founder of Austin Justice Coalition, the nonprofit and grassroots activist-led organization aimed at demanding criminal justice reform, expressed dismay at the level of police funding cuts. The Austin Justice Coalition is among the most high-profile groups calling for police reform in Austin, and has organized protests in the past.

“We are disappointed in Spencer Cronk’s budget, released today, which comes nowhere near the $100 million in cuts to the police budget that we think are appropriate,” Moore said in a prepared statement. “We have an opportunity right now to take this roadmap and make the change. But this budget, today, doesn’t free up enough of the money we need, and in fact it understates even council’s modest directive to cut empty positions.”

Kathy Mitchell of Just Liberty was similarly dismayed: “When I see a police officer standing at a fender-bender waiving traffic through, I can’t help but think that there are a lot of less costly ways to get that job done,” she said in a prepared statement. “Now we know that directing traffic around stalled cars and handling minor traffic accidents actually represents 21 percent of all officer call-response time.”

Added Sukyi McMahon, board chair of Austin Justice Coalition: “We estimate that the two-thirds of call response time that could be saved is roughly the equivalent of 180 officer. If we aggressively invest in alternatives right now, while the police academy is on hold and no new officers can be added anyway, then in the near term the city will see our existing officers more focused on solving crime while homelessness, mental illness, physical illness and trauma are addressed by professionals with specialized training in those areas.”

McMahon continued: “Proactive policing, one of the categories of noncriminal time is a broad term for activities officers decide to do on their own. It has historically been a police euphemism for stop and frisk type activities, and then morphed into new life as somehow related to community policing. Without definitions or metrics, it looks here like 'proactive policing' constitutes 17 percent of police time, a lot of it activities we probably don’t need. Like looking for “suspicious persons,” much of it likely driven by race and class-based fear.”

Mitchell decried what she categorized as Cronk's "minimalist" approach to police funding cutes: “Spencer Cronk had an opportunity to follow the letter of the resolution passed by city council and eliminate all the open positions. He chose instead to give a minimalist reading of council’s directive, which gives council very little to spend on alternatives to policing. We have a golden opportunity right now to shift a lot more money by sweeping all the empty positions. And that’s just the start. We must open up all APD operations for discussion, from traffic enforcement to the horse patrol to event security. Non-police violent crime prevention strategies should be a part of the puzzle. And we should take those big steps right now.”

Mayor, council member underwhelmed

Austin City Council Member Greg Casar — whose political platform is rooted in civil justice issues — also wasn't satisfied. He said the proposed police funding cuts don't go far enough in addressing issues of inequity experienced by communities of color.

"The city manager’s initial budget proposal takes a small step in the direction of reducing funding for police patrol and increasing funding for more comprehensive forms of community safety. But, it is far from enough," Casar said in a prepared statement. "The city’s initial proposal removes 100 police patrol positions from the budget, and $8.1 million has been allocated away from the police department and toward community priorities that will make us more safe and more just. Compared to recent history, this is a large amount.

"Two years in a row, I have proposed votes to reduce police patrol by a fraction of this amount, and both proposals have failed. The reallocation of 100 police positions toward community solutions for safety is only possible because the Movement for Black Lives has changed the political reality of our time. However, the city’s response must be stronger."

Casar said he stands in solidarity with community groups calling for more robust action as it relates to police reform: "I stand alongside the calls from local organizations and everyday activists demanding a $100 million reinvestment into our community’s safety from APD’s existing budget this year. I am committed to working towards that goal throughout this and all future budget processes. We must fix our family violence shelter shortage. We must have behavioral health professionals respond to mental health crises, rather than just police. We must invest in violence prevention, housing, and care. We must do better, and I will be working with the community to change this budget proposal."

Mayor Steve Adler seemed underwhelmed too, expressing his reaction to the budget in a four-part Twitter message: "I appreciate the manager’s work (and note that it calls for the lowest year to year increase in fees and taxes in nearly 20 years) and I’m not ready yet to sign off," he wrote on Twitter. "We need greater assurance that we’re leveraging this moment to create transformational change. Truly re-imagining policing will require us to first re-imagine budgeting. This budget may be a work in progress for the next so-many months and until we know where we’re heading."

Adler suggested he saw the move to defund some of the police budget as a very early step of a corrective process that has been long in coming: "This budget needs to be the start of undoing generations of institutional discrimination in all we do, including but not limited to policing, while prioritizing being both a safer and a more just city."

This article originally appeared on the Austin Patch