What will City Council be prioritizing in 2024?
SAN ANGELO, Texas (Concho Valley Homepage) — The San Angelo City Council met for a strategic planning workshop on Friday, Jan. 26, to discuss the current issues the City is facing and determine what priorities the Council will focus on. So, what’s in store for 2024?
The Council originally recognized three “strategic priorities” as the most important topics to address in previous years and at the current time: infrastructure, public safety and economic development. The Council has attempted to tackle these topics and the issues present within them through several projects, such as road reconstruction projects, police and fire department pay increases and the Nasworthy sewer project.
While all three of these priorities were discussed in detail during the meeting, a new priority emerged among them — workers’ compensation.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure withheld its status as a top priority, with many members of the Council stating that repairing San Angelo’s roadways will remain a subject of particular interest. Some Council members stressed the importance of road repairs, citing the city’s street structure as a problem in maintaining public satisfaction and attracting newcomers to San Angelo.
“The one hit that San Angelo took was street structures,” Council Member Larry Miller said in reference to San Angelo’s appeal compared to other cities. “Folks that are coming in here to live, those that are looking for employment, companies that are talking about coming in — that was the one item that stood out like a sore thumb among everything else.”
On top of this, the Nasworthy sewer project and the projects underway at the San Angelo Regional Airport retained the Council’s attention. Housing was also discussed, with Mayor Brenda Gunter stating that affordable housing is key to incentivizing economic growth by catering to workforce needs.
“As we talk about workforce … and we talk about the quality of home and what goes into housing, we need to make sure what are market is telling us to do and how do we make sure that programs are there to help make that happen,” Gunter said.
Public Safety
Public safety kept its spot among the top three as well. The Council discussed its recent conversations of pay raises with the police and fire departments that resulted in an 85% pay increase for several positions, enough to bring them up to the pay received by the rest of the City’s staff, according to City Manager Daniel Valenzuela. These raises may still pose an issue to San Angelo, however, due to the budget strain caused by them as well as the future conversations expected between the public safety departments and the City.
“That’s still going to be a bone of contention, it really is a point of contention this year,” Valenzuela said. “‘How do we pay for that?’ That’s going to be a question that needs to be addressed. Public safety still is not where it has to be, and staff still isn’t where it has to be either.”
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Gunter seemed to agree with Valenzeula, acknowledging that the Council is far from finished dealing with police and fire department wages.
“The work is not over,” Gunter said. “We know that those are going to be big topics of conversation for us going forward. We’re not through with dealing with public safety as it relates to compensation.”
Economic Development
Economic development remained a priority for the City Council, with many Council members expressing concern about increased spending causing strain on the City’s budget. The police and fire departments’ pay increases once again resurfaced as an important part of the conversation, as the funds needed to enact them increased spending on public safety. This increase in spending caused a deficit in property tax dollars, forcing the City to dip into its sales tax dollars to meet it.
A proposed method for combating this increased cost was to change the planned 5% sales tax decrease to 3% and reallocate the money afforded by the change to fund public safety.
“That conversation we had for police and fire was a beginning conversation, it’s not the final conversation in terms of the need,” Gunter said. “We have to find a way to find the revenue to continue to fund public safety where we aren’t dipping $10 million into the sales tax number.”
Returning to infrastructure, Gunter and other Council members stressed the importance of the residential districts of San Angelo as a source for economic growth.
“We keep working toward more new commercial development to help fund the needs of this city, but the growth continues to be, dollar-wise, in residential,” Gunter said. “We have to keep that in focus as we look to help support the residential development in this city because that is our growth.”
Workers’ Compensation
Workers’ compensation would take the limelight several times throughout the workshop, eventually earning itself a spot as a fourth official top priority for the Council going into the coming years. Many Council members stated that vacancies, a lack of leadership and non-competitive pay have resulted in a faltering workforce that may struggle to meet the City’s needs, let alone address the top priorities discussed in the workshop.
“We’ve got some structural issues in our compensation plan that need to be addressed,” Council Member Tommy Hiebert said. “To me, having the best employees and the best-paid employees, in the long run, would save us money.”
Council Member Harry Thomas cited several positions within the City that have gone unfilled for years as evidence for this need to prioritize workers’ compensation, stating that inadequate pay has cost the City experienced workers.
“We have got to find a way to pay our employees and keep them,” Thomas said. “We’ve had particular positions open for a number of months and years simply because our pay structure was not up-to-date, we couldn’t pay those particular individuals the going rate. We’ve got to do that, from the top all the way to the bottom.”
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