Houston’s City Controller has put Mayor John Whitmire’s new budget proposal on blast, accusing the administration of making Houstonians close a looming $180 million budget deficit.
“This budget shifts costs onto working families. It hides the price tag of city services, and it puts Houston on a dangerous financial path,” Controller Chris Hollins said during a Tuesday news conference.
The reaction comes after Whitmire announced a new trash fee to convert solid waste services into a resident-paid utility as opposed to a city-funded amenity.
The trash fee comes in lieu of raising property taxes this year, a vow made by Whitmire, leaving the city with limited revenue options to plug the city’s budget hole.
“We’ve never really addressed the systemic, structural, financial, broken system of running the city of Houston,” Whitmire said as he announced the budget Tuesday morning.
The trash fee will start at $5 for the first two years. Whitmire refers to this as an administration fee, rather than a garbage fee, “we’re not going to do what I would call a genuine garbage fee until we improve services,” he asserted. Future councils would be expected to determine a rate that actually matches cost of service.
Until now, Houston has remained one of the only major metro cities with free residential trash pickup. Neighboring cities like Pasadena, for example, charge $34 for garbage pickup, League City charges $22 and Sugar Land charges $24.
However Hollins says this proposal is not grounded in fiscal reality.
Trash is covered by the city’s general fund. Under Whitmire’s proposal, more than $100 million in solid waste costs would be moved out of the general fund to instead be covered by the water and sewer fund, according to the controllers office. The $5 garbage fee is proposed to offset that shift.
But in reality, it’s only expected to bring in about $24 million in revenue. That yields a shortfall of roughly $80 million annually.
“We either are going to be investing less in our water system, or we’re going to be charging Houstonians more for that same water system. There’s no other way to cover hundreds of millions of dollars flowing out of the water system without making up for it,” Hollins said.
The Controller’s Office noted that they had only a few hours to review the budget in full, adding that further review and questioning will take place over the next few weeks.