Councilmember Carlos Soros (District 2) convened the meeting at approximately 6:15 p.m. on Monday, August 25, 2026, to present and discuss the City of Fort Worth's proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget. City Manager Jay Chapa and Christian Simmons, Director of the Fort Worth Lab, led the presentation. The meeting featured public questions on tax rates, spending priorities, and city services.
All right, we're a few minutes past six o'clock, so let's get started. Everyone's settled in. I think I see uh let's see one person signing in. Great. Thank you, everyone, for coming. It's hot out there. Oh here. You don't want camera. Come on. All right. Is this better? Yeah, I got the lights in front of me. Okay, how's that? Is that good, Paul? All right, perfect. All right. Well, thanks everyone for being here. I'm Carlos Soros, a district two city council member. And welcome to uh District 2's uh FY27 meeting on our city budget. This budget is a document that affects us all at the city level, at the resident level, and it determines really the course of action that the city's gonna take with the available amount of funding that we have. And each budget cycle is different. Certainly, this one is a more challenging budget than what we've experienced in years past, and much of that resides in the way TAD has done its tax appraisals. It's held uh most of the residential properties uh fixed to the 2024 values, and that affects us, especially when they alternate in taxing years and appraisal years. That's gonna have a bottom line impact on our general fund, which again supplies necessary funding to many of the services and departments that the city has. And we're gonna get into more detail on that. What have we done leading up to this meeting? What the city has done is it's taken concerted efforts to hear and get feedback from its residents. How many here have done uh the surveys that went out electronically and responded to those show of hands? A few of you, yes. We try to do that again. Um, you know, we've had uh input given at our neighborhood association meetings. Council members have taken that back and supplied it to Jay and his staff. And I know that Christiane Simmons, who's uh with our uh data and analytics department, you know, with uh Fort Worth Lab as we call it, they've collected this data and have uh reduced it for council members to discern what's important to you all. Not just important to us, but important to you all because ultimately this budget serves you. And there were really five categories that came out after we did this budget. Started out with you know, public safety police, and you know, was certainly at the top of that list, followed by fire and EMS. Uh then we had streets and mobility being the third, got a fourth category, which uh you know pertained to parks and recreation, and then the fifth category uh you know, we had uh libraries. Those are the services, those categories that were important to you. And Jay and his staff will delve a little more deeply into what we're you know talking about, what we're proposing in this budget, but we sincerely want your input. Uh Jay's taking a balanced approach. We're looking at not filling some uh outstanding positions that uh haven't been filled, and that's very important to know. We're not eliminating people, we're eliminating positions that haven't been filled. That's a cost saver in itself. He's also proposing uh 3.2 cent increase in our tax rate. We haven't had a tax rate increase in several years. It's been a policy that the city council has followed. But to be realistic, we cannot continue to deliver these services that you all expect and want from your city government unless we take a balanced approach. We have certainly visited our expenditures, cut back on those. Each department has submitted their own proposed cuts. So we're doing what we can to get a blended approach to get us to where we need to be because Jay and his staff need to submit a balanced budget, you know, under state statute.