The report shows<\/a> that for now at least, the county is operationally stable, but according to former County Judge Ed Emmett, it also exposes some major spending problems. He pointed out that programs created during the COVID-19 era that were originally funded by federal dollars have been continued despite the fact that those federal dollars have been cut off.<\/p>\n\u201cThose dollars are now shut off. Any programs that were created using federal dollars probably need to go away. There\u2019s just not money for it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Both Emmett and the Baker Institute study pointed out the fact that Harris County\u2019s biggest source of revenue, property taxes, has also been severely limited. That means that despite spending continuing to rise, the county has not been able to increase revenue in any meaningful way.<\/p>\n
Emmett believes that how the county, the municipalities in it, and the state all share revenue and responsibility will also have to be looked at. \u201cSomehow, the city, the county, and the state have got to come together and talk about how to restructure governments down here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He warned that if that doesn\u2019t happen, the county won\u2019t continue to be financially viable long-term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Harris County is once again headed into a budget cycle and is facing some major deficits. According to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373926,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57,66,223,27],"class_list":["post-373925","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\/373925","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=373925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373925\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}