During a special meeting Tuesday, the Brownsville City Commission conducted public hearings on the proposed $153.4 million city budget and ad valorem tax rate for Fiscal Year 2020.
Finance Director Lupe Granado told The Rider his department is recommending that the city keep the existing tax rate of .700613 cents per $100 valuation. The rate has been in place since Fiscal Year 2012 and is being recommended after they determined the revenue to be generated from the effective, current and rollback tax rates.
Asked why he is recommending the current tax rate, Granado replied, “This is in order for us to balance our budget. We could always go up to the rollback rate of .71 cents. … The rollback rate, that’s the maximum rate that the city could actually adopt, but … one of our mandates was not to increase property tax rate.”
As for the city’s budget, the proposal for Fiscal Year 2020 is $153.4 million, including $109.1 million in the General Fund.
Revenue for General Fund expenses is generated from:
–property taxes
–sales taxes
–fees, services and licenses
–Brownsville Public Utilities Board cash and utilities
–fines, contributions and interest
–transfers from the Bridge Fund
–transfers from the Landfill Fund
After city requests, expenditures will exceed revenues by $4.3 million, consisting of $3 million for street maintenance and $1.3 million in drainage maintenance.
Asked to explain the $4.3 million, Granado replied: “We identified a gap, gap meaning … the funding that we have and the uses of it and what we actually need to maintain streets. We identified an annual maintenance gap of about $3 million for street maintenance and for drainage, maintaining our drainage. Again, we had our needs compared to our actual revenues, actual resources. We had a gap of about $1.3 million. That was just to show that … the city does still have continuing needs that we’re not able to fund specifically in the target areas, the streets and drainage.”
Pastor Brad Burkes of Embassy of the Spirit church spoke against tax rate, saying that even if the city keeps the current tax rate, property owners will pay more because valuations increased “by more than 5%, almost 6%.”
“So, the rate of inflation for 2018 was only 2.44% and in recent months, it’s been between 1.5 and 1.9%,” Burkes said. “So, we’re getting quite an increase if we just keep the regular, the rate we’ve had for quite a few years.”
City Manager Noel Bernal said Burkes was correct and that was how the calculations worked. He added, however, that the appraisals for the past year came primarily from industrial and commercial properties.
“For years, the city has had undervalued, an undervalued tax base,” Bernal said. “So, what happened was that the appraisal district was audited and they were found to have been undervaluing commercial and industrial properties, which means that a lot of pressure was being put on rooftops to cover the cost of service and infrastructure so that peak you saw in the assessment, that came primarily from industrial/commercial. How much revenue was not realized over the past five years? Plus, that could have been generated to fund our facilities, our fleet, our streets, our drainage.”
In other business, the commission:
–appointed Carlos Navado to the Ethics Commission;
–adopted a leasing option for fleet replacement and authorized master equity lease and maintenance agreements with Enterprise Fleet Management;
–and awarded a $61,875 contract for architectural/engineering services to GMS Architects for the Brownsville Children’s Museum roofing and existing HVAC systems project. The museum’s roof has leaked since before it opened in 2005, according to a presentation from Felipe Peña, the museum’s executive director.
Absent from the meeting were Mayor Trey Mendez and Districts 1 and 3 Commissioners Nurith Galonsky and Joel Munguia.
