Houston City Council passes Mayor John Whitmire’s $7 billion budget after protest disrupts meeting

From Houston Public Media:

After an 8-hour meeting and extended disruption by protesters on Wednesday, Houston City Council approved a $7 billion budget for the next fiscal year, which starts in July.

“I’ve voted on many budgets in my career. It’s always easy to find fault,” said Mayor John Whitmire, a former longtime state lawmaker. “Anyone can be a critic and politicize a budget. So all I’m saying is I’m proud of the budget. We were told we couldn’t do it — we couldn’t balance it — by political critics. We ignored and went forward. We have a lot of work to do. This is a giant step, but we need to now talk to Houstonians going forward about what type of city they want to live in.”

Council members offered 71 amendments to the budget. Fourteen of them were approved, including hiring additional animal enforcement officers, extra funding for kennel cleaning at the city’s animal shelter, drainage and ditch improvements, and the creation of an investment fund to address health benefits and life insurance for retired city employees.

Facing a more than $200 million deficit this year, Whitmire’s administration slashed about $122 million in spending from the city’s $3 billion general fund.

Those cuts affected most departments aside from police, with the parks department facing more than $4 million in cuts, libraries losing nearly $2 million, the health department seeing $2 million less from the general fund as it also faces dramatically slashed federal funding, and the department of neighborhoods losing more than $7 million in cuts amid a consolidation of code enforcement with the public works department.

For the public, the most visible evidence of the cuts would have been overgrown grass and reduced ranger patrols at city parks and esplanades. In the face of more than $4 million in cuts, the department planned to cut back on mowing and patrols across the 40,000 acres of city-owned parks. Council member Fred Flickinger authored a successful amendment to use revenue from advertising on the city’s digital kiosks to “maintain current level of mowing services for esplanades and parks.”

As part of an $832 million, five-year contract approved by city council last month, the Houston Police Department — which already accounts for nearly $1.1 billion of the general fund — will receive an additional $67 million from the general fund next year.

The city’s separate enterprise funds contain more than $700 million for airport funding and nearly $4 billion for the water and sewer utility system.

Northeast Houston council member Tarsha Jackson’s proposals to allocate an additional $25 million for drainage improvements along with $20 million for ditch maintenance passed unanimously. In her amendment, she called the drainage funding “more than a contingency measure against disasters — it’s an issue of social equity and justice.”

The push came after the administration struck a deal to resolve a longstanding lawsuit concerning spending on streets and drainage, saving more than $180 million over the next year as the city gradually ramps up compliance with voter-mandated contributions to a special streets and drainage fund.

Before the meeting kicked off, advocacy groups Northeast Action Collective and West Street Recovery held a news conference to voice their opposition to the budget — especially the gradual ramp-up in the city’s contributions to the voter-approved streets and drainage fund over the next three years.

“What we are asking for is not extra, not more, not anything special — we are asking for what we are owed and what we deserve,” Northeast Action Collective co-founder Zoila Godínez said in Spanish. “My community has been fighting for years for functional infrastructure and truly democratic city governance. We have no more time to waste.”

Nearly six hours into the meeting, members of the group moved to the front of the council chambers and loudly expressed their opposition to the budget. They held a banner emblazoned “Houston says no to Mayor Whitmire’s undemocratic budget.” HPD eventually cleared the room, forcefully escorting a few demonstrators from the chambers.

Whitmire said he would not press criminal charges against anyone who disrupted the meeting. A spokesperson for Whitmire said one person was briefly detained, but no one was arrested.

According to a survey of about 1,200 residents by Rice University’s Kinder Institute, infrastructure is the top priority for Houstonians. About 86% of respondents said they want more infrastructure spending, compared to 58% who want more spending to address homelessness, 49% interested in boosted spending on solid waste management as well as neighborhood enforcement, and 46% who want more spending on the police department.

About 67% of respondents said they would support an increase in taxes and fees to fund essential city services.

The vast majority of the proposed amendments fell short. In the most narrow defeat, council members declined to lower their own budgets by 2%. The proposal from Flickinger failed in a 12-5 vote. In the most narrow success, council member Mary Nan Huffman’s proposal to cap certain travel expenses passed in a 9-8 vote.

Huffman also authored a successful amendment to allocate more than $3 million to address drainage concerns at the local level across the 11 city council districts.

At the end of the current fiscal year, there will be about $380 million in the fund balance, according to the mayor’s finance department. The controller’s office expects about $354 million. In May they projected a deficit for next year of $107 million to $134 million, which could leave as little as $31 million in wiggle room above the required savings threshold.

“The budget is, of course, not structurally balanced,” City Controller Chris Hollins told city council at the start of the meeting. “It contains a projected shortfall of over $100 million to be covered by spending down the city savings account to near our reserve threshold.”

After updates to the proposed budget and amendments by city council members, the administration now expects a deficit closer to $70 million.

“(Hollins) stated that instead of cutting spending or identifying sustainable revenue, the proposal is to draw down from the fund balance. That’s not true,” responded finance director Melissa Dubowski. She pointed to efforts to reduce bloated spending on contracts with external vendors, as well as an estimated $30 million in general fund savings after more than 1,000 municipal workers accepted early retirement buyouts in April at an upfront cost of $11 million.

“We certainly are drawing from fund balance to close the remaining budgetary gap,” Dubowski said, “but what he failed to mention is that this proposed budget actually is a decrease from the previous year.”

If the baseline financial situation continues, the finance department projects a more than $460 million budget deficit by the end of the decade — an untenable trend that would exhaust the fund balance.

Throughout 2024, Whitmire described the city as “broke.” Despite his praise for the budget on Wednesday, he said, “We’re still broke.” Whitmire has begun foreshadowing a proposal to seek additional revenue from Houstonians, potentially through a property tax hike, and he again said the administration will ask Houstonians “what type of city they want to live in.”

The amended budget was approved in a 14-3 vote, with council members Tiffany Thomas, Edward Pollard and Abbie Kamin voting no. Thomas and Kamin spoke out against cuts to city departments. Pollard expressed concerns about the budget’s deficit spending, which he said “satisfies today but leaves us in peril tomorrow.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated Friday, June 6, 2025, with new projections for the city’s budget deficit.

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