A Dallas city councilmember is sounding the alarm over the city’s finances. In Wednesday’s Dallas Morning News, Dallas city councilmember Cara Mendelsohn expressed grave concern over the “city’s ever-increasing, unsustainable budget and its effects on residents.” She continued: “Our current $4.5 billion budget is the largest in history, and the city manager’s proposed budget for...
Dallas city councilmembers on Wednesday took up an agenda item to set a ceiling on the city’s proposed tax rate for fiscal year 2024. The actual tax rate will be formally debated and adopted at a future hearing (Sept. 20), thereby determining what the average Dallas homeowner will pay in city taxes. While discussing what...
Pearland ISD’s school board may soon ask voters to approve a major tax increase, potentially eroding some of the new property tax relief agreed upon by the 88th Texas Legislature before it even materializes. On Monday, the Houston Chronicle reported that trustees are considering seeking voter-approval for a permanent nine-cent tax rate increase that officials...
Earlier this week, we wrote about the great work that Tarrant County commissioners had accomplished through their FY ’24 budget framework (which cut spending, kept the tax rate to a minimum, and included a homestead exemption). And now, it appears more North Texas local governments are prepared to act in ways that benefit taxpayers. The...
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines the word ‘rapacious’ to mean: excessively grasping or covetous; ravenous. There may be no better word to describe the spenders on the Austin city council. On Tuesday, all but one councilmember (Mackenzie Kelly) voted to approve a massive $5.5 billion budget for fiscal year 2024, which is being billed as “the largest...
Texas cities are in an abusive relationship with the English language. As city officials draft their budgets for the upcoming fiscal year, you might think these public-facing documents are being filled with data points and explanations. But increasingly, they’re being filled with something else: woke-speak, the dialect of the progressive intelligentsia. Without fail, these municipal...
Tarrant County residents could soon be the envy of taxpayers across the state. Last week, the county commissioners’ court gave its initial approval to the FY 2024 budget, and there was much to applaud. Here’s more from Tarrant County Tim O’Hare: For those unfamiliar with the no-new-revenue (NNR) tax rate, it is “the tax rate...
A major fiscal crisis looms over the Bayou City. In just a few short years, experts expect that the city of Houston will have to wrestle with a “structural budget deficit of up to $300 million.” To close a budget hole of that size, officials will likely have to use some combination of tax hikes,...
U.S Congressman Greg Casar recently went on a food and “thirst strike” for eight hours, for which he was mocked relentlessly online. As many people rightly pointed out, most people go without food and water for this long every 24 hours; it’s called sleeping. Nevertheless, Casar fasted to make a point—that House Bill 2127, a...
In Austin, one team remains undefeated. Not the Longhorns—rather, city officials’ propensity to spend Other People’s Money as though it were a professional sport. And while it might make progressives on City Council temporarily feel good, their excesses come with a big price tag. In fact, the average Austin homeowner paid $9,219 in property taxes...
The city of Lubbock recently signaled that it may soon raise taxes, despite mounting economic and inflationary pressures on the family budget. On Tuesday, KCBD reported that: “The city is considering a property tax rate increase of nearly one-and-a-half cents…That means residents would [sic] bay an additional $110 in property taxes next year.” A tax...
La Joya ISD Superintendent Gisela Saenz resigned her position in the spring, after she supported a plan that would close two elementary schools and lay off 120 employees—this after LJISD used more than $20 million in public funds to buy an entire water park, including tube slides and a lazy river. The troubled school district—which...