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Fort Worth council hears staff outline roughly $49 million budget gap, proposes early public survey
Summary
City staff told the Fort Worth City Council in a budget work session that the general-fund shortfall is roughly $49 million and outlined target reductions (1% and 3%), major cost drivers including public safety and health insurance, and plans for an early Connect Fort Worth survey to capture resident priorities before the August recommended budget.
Mayor Parker called the Fort Worth City Council to order and opened a budget-focused work session where staff said the city is starting the fiscal year planning facing a substantial shortfall.
Christy Lemon, assistant director at the Fort Worth Lab, said staff is projecting "we're almost $50,000,000 in terms of a gap" in the general fund and that the city has added recurring costs — including a $7,000,000 placeholder to implement a pay study and a planned increase in the EMS subsidy from about $20,000,000 to roughly $26,000,000 — that widen the shortfall. Lemon said the health fund also has been provisionally adjusted with a 40% higher employer contribution plugged in for early development.
The gap is driven by expenses growing faster than revenues, Lemon said, and staff presented how they build department target budgets: start with the prior-year adopted budget, remove one-time costs, include prior commitments (such as new facilities' operating costs), and layer in cost allocations and salary and benefit increases. She said the base target growth is about $52,000,000, a 1% target reduction across departments would yield about $7,800,000, a 3% reduction package is about $14,000,000, and after those measures the remaining shortfall is roughly $27,000,000.
Brady Kirk, who presented the revenue picture, illustrated the funding mix with an analogy and said most general-fund revenue is not easily changed: "of all of our general fund revenue, which is over 1,100,000,000 now in the FY26 adopted budget, 92% of that pretty much comes from general sources and things that we don't have too much control over." He warned that public safety commitments use up the operating portion of the property-tax revenue early in the funding sequence, noting that operating property-tax revenue (about 52.25 cents of a 67¢ rate) is largely consumed by police, fire and related commitments.
Several councilmembers asked staff to provide more detailed, department-level line-item information about proposed reductions so elected officials can see what service or functions would be affected. One councilmember urged a spreadsheet showing what each department proposes to cut. Jay Chapa said staff will present an overall summary with the recommended budget because individual proposals are still changing.
A councilmember raised concern about across-the-board cuts — "we're asking the fire department to do that" — given that EMS needs and equipment replacements are ongoing; staff clarified that EMS subsidy funding sits in a separate (non-departmental) fund and that the preliminary estimate includes fully funding the subsidy. Chapa and others cautioned that civil-service pay exclusions and contractual obligations limit how much public-safety budgets can be trimmed under the 3% scenario.
Christiane proposed launching an earlier-than-usual public-engagement survey via Connect Fort Worth to gauge residents' priorities and reactions to tradeoffs (for example, what a 1% versus 3% reduction would mean for services) and suggested presenting preliminary survey data to the council in mid-June to inform budget decisions. Councilmembers supported early outreach and discussed using pop-up events, integrating prompts into summer program registration and engaging neighborhood leaders and HOAs to increase participation.
Lemon listed upcoming budget work sessions: a health-fund discussion next week, preliminary values and sales-tax data on May 19 with street maintenance, a possible June 2 meeting on classification and compensation topics, and a June 16 session on rates and fees, followed by the City Manager's recommended budget presentation in August and a target adoption in mid‑September.
The council will continue to weigh revenue assumptions and cost-reduction options over the summer; Mayor Parker closed the open session and the council convened in executive session to get legal advice and deliberate on real property, economic development negotiations and security matters as authorized by sections of the Texas Government Code.
