City staff and council member presented the proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget to residents amid a challenging revenue environment caused by Tarrant Appraisal District's biennial reappraisal plan and historic mid-year value losses. The $3.32 billion operating budget (up 7.5% from FY26) and $1.03 billion capital plan were discussed, with a focus on the $1.15 billion general fund. The city manager announced a proposed 3.2 cent tax rate increase (from 67 to 70.2 cents per $100 valuation) to partially close a $78 million revenue gap, while public comments heavily advocated against service cuts and urged higher investment in libraries, parks, and community programs.
Hello. Good evening, everybody. Thank you so much for coming out to our uh twenty twenty-seven budget meeting. I appreciate you being here. Uh it's more important this year than any year that I've been on city council to have public engagement in our budget process because it is such a tough budget year. And council is really wrestling with what we cut and what we keep to uh thread that needle of providing you the level of service you deserve while also minimizing any potential uh rate increases to their tax bill. So uh know that we are still wrestling with this budget, so if there's something in it you see tonight that you have concerns about or questions, now's your opportunity to voice that to us because um we are still in the process of molding this budget. Uh again, thank you all so much for coming out. We really are depending on the feedback we get this year, more so than ever to make sure we're providing that adequate budget um for the city and we give you what you want in this tough year. And so with that, um the man who's made it all happen, Mr. Jay Choppa. Thank you. Uh thank you, councilwoman. Good evening, thank you all for being here. Uh really appreciate you all taking the time out of your day uh uh to come to this meeting. And we've had years in the past where we have these meetings we have like 25 staffers and like two people show up, so it's really good to see a a good crowd. Um I'm gonna turn it over here in a minute to Christian Simmons, uh our street uh chief str strategy officer. She's over our what we call the Fort Worth Lab. It's a lab of data and numbers and all that cut they had no budget and data analytics, all those type of things. Um and she'll run through a presentation, but I wanted to start off by just a little introduction as was mentioned this is a toughest year in uh from a budget perspective for the city in uh in probably about 13 or 14 years. Um I was here when we had to deal with the downturn of the economy due to 2008 and the whole mortgage issues and those kind of things, and those are pretty pretty tough budget years as well. Um this year it's not as drastic and I think we've come up with a hopefully you'll see uh with a happy median on what's being proposed. What you're gonna see tonight is the proposed budget to the city council from the city manager and of course my staff that's involved. Um it is we have to balance the budget in Texas. We can't do the deficit budgets that they do at the Fed level, right? So local government we have to come up with a balanced budget. So you'll see that all of the budgets are balanced. The city is basically a conglomerate of a whole lot of different businesses. People uh especially when we're talking about the general fund, people look at the issue with the general fund and uh they see that and they say, well, why can't why can't you take some of that other money and move it and pay for police or pay for fire or pay for uh community centers and it's because you can't. Uh it's it's legal issues. So the aviation, for instance, their revenues have to stay with aviation, golf, their revenues stay with golf, the water department utility, water stays that revenue stays with you th those utilities. We don't have any issues really in those areas. Uh the general funds where we have um the issues and it's really tied to a property tax values or property values overall. Um with that in mind, I'm gonna turn it over to Christy Ann. She does a great job of of kind of breaking it down, going through the whole process. The majority of the discussion's on the general fund because that's usually what folks want to talk about. But as you go along, if you have a question as she's going through the slides, raise your hand, we'll bring you a mic so you can ask your question. This is being live streamed and it's also being recorded so that anybody can go back and look at it. Uh this is the fourth fourth of our 10 public meetings. We're having one in each district. And so if you if you uh uh miss it, you can come back, you can tell folks that you know that couldn't make one, they can look go online and look at any of those uh as well. So I'm gonna turn over to Christian and thank you again for being here. Thank you. Oh, I don't need that. I'm used to going because I'm so short. And that's why I can't stand behind the podium either. I can't be back there. You can't even see me. I'll be like this talking to you. But I know, yeah.