{"id":152081,"date":"2026-02-05T12:52:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-05T12:52:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/152081\/"},"modified":"2026-02-05T12:52:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T12:52:07","slug":"houston-continues-to-face-budget-issues-from-turner-era-newsradio-740-ktrh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/152081\/","title":{"rendered":"Houston Continues To Face Budget Issues From Turner Era | NewsRadio 740 KTRH"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Despite efforts to address budget issues and cut spending, Houston City Comptroller Chris Hollins is once again warning about major overages. He recently told the City Council that the city is on track to overspend by about $55 million on overtime, primarily for police officers and solid waste workers.<\/p>\n<p>While that is a slight improvement from last year\u2014when the city went $70 million over budget\u2014it\u2019s a painful reminder of the budget issues that have plagued the city since the tenure of former Mayor Sylvester Turner.<\/p>\n<p>Charles Blain, with <a href=\"https:\/\/urbanreforminstitute.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Urban Reform<\/a>, says those years of back-to-back poor planning are going to make addressing the issue difficult. \u201cWith the city under-budgeting for so long\u2014almost every year for 11 years\u2014you end up in this situation where you almost can\u2019t get out of it,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n<p>While many might look for one quick fix to solve the issue, Blain says the situation is a lot more complicated than that. \u201cIt has to really be looked at department to department,\u201d he said. \u201cEveryone\u2019s got their own contracts, and for one individual, overtime might be time and a half, and for another individual it might not be.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Blain also explained that the root of the overtime issue varies from department to department. In one department, it might be related to staff shortages; in another, it could be related to abuses of the overtime system.<\/p>\n<p>He says that at the end of the day, it\u2019s going to require elected officials who are more concerned about the stability of the city in 50\u201360 years than they are about their own terms in office to solve the issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite efforts to address budget issues and cut spending, Houston City Comptroller Chris Hollins is once again warning&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57,66,223,27],"class_list":["post-152081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-local","tag-news","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}