As city budget crisis looms, let’s consider cutting back our fast-growing street-repair fund

Cityscrapes is a column of opinion and analysis. 

The headlines right now are scary: “Cutting deep,” “Education nonprofit fights to keep city funding,” “San Antonio pitches 3.9% property tax increase as budget woes worsen.”  

San Antonio faces a shortfall in its general fund budget for the coming fiscal year — a deficit on the order of $158 million. What’s not clear is how City Council will deal with it. 

City staff has proposed a combination of cuts in services and spending, together with a “first-in-30-years” increase in the city property tax rate. Some council members appear absolutely opposed to a property tax increase, while others seem more determined to avoid cuts in library services and the number of city employees.

The immediate problem the city faces is a dip in property tax revenues, largely due to a decline in taxable property values. For years, the city could count on regular growth in housing demand and new homebuilding to push up base property values. But not now, and perhaps not for a few years. 

That means both our council members and our community must ask serious questions about priorities and how we got here. Unfortunately, that’s not easy when the council appears deeply divided and the mid-September budget deadline is almost here.

Yet there may be options other than those offered by city staff that can provide both a solution — if only for a couple of budget years — and a sense of how we got here.  

I’d like to suggest one example: pavement.

Let’s start with the fiscal year 2014 budget, done at a time when the city was coming out of a similar period of declining property tax revenues in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession.  

The adopted budget for fiscal 2014 included spending tied to the city’s rolling five-year Infrastructure Management Program covering streets, sidewalks, alleys and traffic signals. By far, the largest part of that spending was devoted to street maintenance, specifically the kind focused on resurfacing and rehabilitation. A total of $35.1 million was budgeted for the work. 

That street maintenance spending was different from the major street work included as part of the city’s five-year bond program. And as the city’s revenue situation improved, so too did the money for streets. The fiscal 2015 budget added $15 million to street maintenance — a 43% increase that elevated that year’s total to $50.6 million. Council subsequently cut back the increase to $6 million, leaving street funding at $41 million. 

Then came fiscal year 2016.

That budget included a $23 million boost for street maintenance, a whopping 56% increase, which brought the total to $64 million. The city’s overall Infrastructure Management Program budget hit $86.6 million, up from $53.7 million in 2014.  

And it didn’t stop there.

For fiscal year 2018, the street maintenance budget totaled $99 million — a 55% increase from the level of the previous two years. Then, for fiscal 2020, the streets allocation hit yet another high: $110.6 million for 1,214 individual projects.  

By June 2020, at an early point in the COVID-19 pandemic, the city was facing real fiscal uncertainty. A trial budget called for a reduction in the street maintenance budget of some $28 million. 

But the final adopted budget for fiscal 2021 returned the street-repair funding to $102 million, or “a reduction of only $8.0 million from the previous year and a continuation of the historic investments in infrastructure made in recent years.” The expectation was that the allocation for street repairs would remain around $100 million the following year.

However, with an improved budget outlook by May 2021, city budget staff recommended restoring the cut to street maintenance, and that brought the total for the fiscal 2022 budget back to $110 million. For the next year, fiscal 2023, the funding total came to $116 million, including $6 million from the 2022 bond program and an additional $10 million “one-time funding” from the federal government’s American Rescue Plan Act. 

With extra funding from the 2022 bond program, the fiscal 2024 budget allocated a total of $116 million to street maintenance. The temporary availability of bond funds even boosted the total to $122.4 million in fiscal 2026 and then $129.8 million in the city’s proposed budget for fiscal 2027.  

The upshot of all these numbers is that, over the years, spending for San Antonio’s streets has managed to grow and grow, with each new increase serving as the base for the next year’s expansion.

Now, it’s obvious that street resurfacing and reconstruction projects are popular with City Council. They provide visible, tangible evidence of the city investing in something we use every day. What’s more, council members can say they’re delivering for their constituents.  

And having seen my well-worn street repaved recently after more than 30 years, I won’t complain about spending on that upkeep.  

But in a budget season when there is far less money to go around, why can’t we manage a real reduction — if only for a year or two — in spending on streets? There is no magic number, nor is there any requirement for spending $100 million or more annually repairing worn-out roads as we face a budget crisis.  

At the least, throttling back our spending on streets would provide added time for a real discussion of public prioritiesand the justification for a property tax increase. And perhaps this example might encourage our elected officials to do a deeper dive on how spending has grown.

Heywood Sanders is a professor emeritus of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

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