The City of San Antonio held a budget work session on August 19, 2025, from 2:00 PM to 5:19 PM, focusing on proposed fiscal year 2026 budgets for the Fire Department (SAFD), Police Department (SAPD), and Municipal Court. Mayor and Council reviewed staffing, response times, crime statistics, and initiatives.
Good afternoon. The time is now 2 p.m. on Tuesday, August 19th, 2025, and the City of San Antonio budget work session is called to order. Madam Clerk, please call the roll. Councilmember Corps. Councilmember Castillo Angiano. Councilmember Viagran. Here. Councilmember Mungia. Present. Councilmember Castillo. Here. Councilmember Galvan. Councilmember Adarete Gavito. Councilmember Mesa Gonzalez. Present. Councilmember Spears. Councilmember White. Here. Ma'am, we have a quorum. Great. Thank you, Madam Clerk. All right. So this meeting is to hear about budgets for the fire and police departments and the municipal court. I think it's appropriate as we talked about our priority budgets. The first the three things that we have to do our guiding principles, which is one, fund our no-fail missions, make sure that those have the those that are keeping us safe have the resources to do that, fire police, EMS. Make sure we are minimizing any impacts to our most vulnerable and make sure that any changes in our budget, we minimize any long-term risks in our approach. So Eric, are you ready to begin the staff presentations? Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. We'll start off with Chief Rostow transition to Chief McManus helping a portion of Chief McMahon's presentation will be Maria Vargas and Jesse Higgins from Metro Health. And then we'll round out with Judge Obledow and Fred Garcia from municipal courts. Chief. To start, next slide, please. I will be covering a few topics today. We will be reviewing the staffing, the resources, the equipment, some of our capabilities, and the proposed budget for next year, as well as the initiatives and capital projects. So I'd like to start off by introducing my new command staff, which consists of three deputy chiefs. There's also six assistant chiefs. Deputy Chief Christopher Monister oversees the administrative services division, and uh Deputy Chief Brandon Murray oversees emergency services and all of operations, which includes fire, EMS, as well as MIH. In the center, uh the picture is Deputy Chief Brian O'Neill, who oversees support services. He is also our emergency management coordinator overseeing the the city's uh emergency operations center. Together, this leadership team is actively engaged on a daily basis with every division of the department, and like me, they're committed to maintaining effective services and excellent customer service. So next we have the department overview, and as you'll see, we'll we have close to 1,900 uniformed employees supported by 129 civilian employees, and this slide provides a good snapshot of everything that makes our mission possible. The majority of our staff operates out of 54 fire stations, and we maintain our own fleet in a constant state of readiness, and we also have specialized teams such as the aircraft rescue and firefighting, the tech rescue team, the Hazmat response team, and the wildfire response team as well. Obviously, behind every response is a steady pipeline of well-trained men and women who are ready to step up and serve. So here we take a look at the cadet classes and the paramedic training classes for fiscal year 2025. We have two cadet classes that graduated for a combined total of 80 firefighters and two paramedic classes. Next in uh fiscal year 2026, we are projecting two cadet classes with a combined total of 97 firefighters graduating and one EMS class of 20. The current class is the 25 Alpha class, which has 45 cadets graduating in December.