The Nueces County Hospital District formally presented its proposed fiscal year 2025–26 budget to the Commissioners Court during a Sept. 10 public hearing and said its board recommends adopting the no-new-revenue tax rate. "The board has approved it on August 26," the district representative said, describing the recommendation as consistent with recent practice.
The district representative said the budget includes about $14.5 million for county health-care expenses, naming public health support, emergency medical services, jail health contract payments and support for an emergency medicine residency program. He also told commissioners the district’s reserves total roughly $120 million across its two major funds, but cautioned that reserves were being drawn down compared with prior years and that the district would either need to reduce expenditures or revisit its tax rate if reserves fell further.
Why it matters: the hospital district is a major local health funder. Its recommended tax decision affects local taxpayers and how the district supports county health programs and hospital systems.
Commissioners voted to approve the hospital district’s budget and to set the district’s maintenance-and-operations tax rate at the district’s no-new-revenue rate of 0.089495 per $100 valuation. The court also adopted an order that keeps existing homestead and senior/disabled exemptions in place and disallows early-payment discounts for the district levy.
Public comment included questions about how the district can and cannot use restricted funds; the district representative reiterated legal limits on spending some restricted dollar pools, saying the district’s statutory duties require one-to-one care expenditures for individuals and that some prevention activities could not be funded from certain indigent-care revenue streams.
The court read the statutory notices and orders required by state property-tax law before taking the votes.