Amid slowing property value increases and declining revenues, Fort Worth is staying the course in its fiscal year 2025 budget. 

Fort Worth City Council members unanimously approved keeping the property tax rate flat for the next year, ensuring it remains below the no-new-revenue rate. Prioritizing a flat tax rate, which council members hope will translate to greater tax relief for residents, meant cutting funding to a neighborhood improvement program, eliminating vacant staff positions and increasing salary savings in a slim general fund budget. 

After the vote, Mayor Mattie Parker praised city staff for ‘“drafting what has been one of our best budgets in a really difficult year.”

“To my colleagues on council, you helped us find consensus on a budget very early on, and we should be proud of that,” Parker said. “Especially as you look across the country and there’s a lot of division, working with you has been a pleasure. We’ve done some big things in this budget with revenues down at the same time, which I know we’re all proud of.” 

The $1.057 billion general fund budget approved by council includes 8,196 total authorized positions. It is the last that David Cooke will oversee in his role as city manager after announcing plans to retire in February 2025. Throughout his 10-year tenure, council members have praised Cooke for his fiscal conservatism and skill at managing the city’s budget. 

Cooke threads needle on final budget as city manager

In his initial 2025 budget proposal to council members, Cooke wanted to raise the city’s tax rate for the first time since 1995. He proposed raising the rate to 67.73 cents per $100 of assessed value — up by .48 cents compared to last year.

At the end of August, the entire council issued a joint letter to Cooke, saying they would not support raising the tax rate. They requested that the city’s tax rate remain below the no-new-revenue rate and stay flat at 67.25 cents per $100 valuation.

“Our residents continue to voice growing concerns around their property tax burden and overall housing affordability,” the letter stated. “Given the economic uncertainty surrounding inflation and cost of living, we believe we must continue our over decade long effort at lowering the property tax rate while also providing superior services to our community.” 

The letter followed a June vote by City Council to increase senior tax exemptions by $20,000. Residents over 65 years old and those with disabilities in Fort Worth can apply for and claim a $60,000 property tax exemption from the city this year, up from the previous $40,000 cap. 

In the August letter, council members also requested that Cooke raise the minimum wage for city staff to $18 per hour — up from $15.45 per hour — and continue to prioritize public safety and street maintenance efforts. The request came after months of advocacy from local labor organizers and several council members, who pushed for a $20 per hour minimum wage.

That minimum wage increase will happen, but not until early next year. The city will first increase the minimum wage to $16.07 starting Oct. 1, then go through the process of handing out performance-based raises, Chief Transformation Officer Christianne Simmons told the Report. After that process is complete, the minimum wage will rise to $18 in February.

Cooke previously said his proposed tax rate increase, which would have fueled a $1.062 billion general fund budget, was necessary to cover an unexpected drop in property value growth, plus increases to police and fire, performance pay and the pay-as-you-go fund. It would also help finance the switch from MedStar to a fire-based EMS system. 

After council’s vote to adopt the budget, Cooke said this year’s budget process was one of the smoothest of the 11 budgets he’s worked on during his tenure with Fort Worth. 

“Part of what made it smooth, I think, was the consensus of the council on the property tax rate,” Cooke told the Report. “So that made it easier to balance the budget. Everybody was accepting and comfortable with the changes that were made to balance it.”

He added that meeting council members’ requests when they pushed back on his original proposal wasn’t difficult. 

“I’ve said this before, balancing a budget is not necessarily that hard,” Cooke said. “You’ve got to live with the choices and trade-offs that you make, and if the council’s comfortable with those choices and trade-offs, then that’s fine.”

Council pares back neighborhood improvement program

To meet council’s demand that the tax rate remain flat, the adopted budget cut funding for the Neighborhood Improvement Program in half. Cooke launched the program in 2017 with the goal of improving underserved neighborhoods’ vitality through capital improvements such as new or repaired sidewalks, streetlights and roads, local park updates and police cameras.

Council members across the dais have praised Cooke’s efforts to reinvest in neglected areas of the city, including Stop Six and Northside, through the program. 

Since its inception, the program has targeted a total of nine neighborhoods for improvement, with one neighborhood selected per year until 2023. That year, City Council approved the program’s expansion, increasing neighborhood participation from one per year to two per year. 

With the adopted 2025 budget, the program will revert to a one neighborhood per year strategy. 

District 2 council member Carlos Flores told the Report he was comfortable with reducing funding to the program in order to give Kacey Bess, who was named the city’s new neighborhood services director in August, time to settle into her role, assess her staff and department needs and catch up on the program’s spending. 

“We’re still funding the neighborhood improvement program, but to give them time to catch up, to get an assessment of what they need to do in-house in their department, we’ll scale back,” Flores said. “That’s not to say that’s there permanently to stay — we’re just doing it for the time being.” 

Despite City Council increasing funding to the program year over year, staff have struggled to spend funds in a timely manner, Cooke said in August. Staff are expected to spend the allocated funds for each neighborhood within a two-year time frame. 

“We are at a point where, I won’t say we’re challenged, but we’re challenged in our ability to spend that money at a faster pace,” Cooke told council members at an Aug. 27 budget work session. “We have to catch up on these other neighborhoods as we talk about what neighborhoods we add in the upcoming fiscal year.” 

Budget invests in street maintenance, EMS transition

While the 2025 budget is more conservative in its investments, the plan approved by council members does include funding for two big city priorities: improved street maintenance and a transition to a fire-based EMS system.

The budget includes about $10 million to repair cracks, potholes and other pressing street issues. The city has over 8,000 miles of street surface, and nearly 5,000 miles are in need of maintenance or reconstruction. Rapid growth and inflation have contributed to historical underfunding of street maintenance needs. 

Earlier this year, city staff proposed imposing a new fee on property owners to fund that maintenance, which would have increased residents’ city service bills by an average of $110 per year. The fee would have helped address a projected $66 million annual gap between the funding necessary for improvements to Fort Worth’s roads versus the amount of money on hand. 

After council pushback, staff tabled the proposal in May and said they would evaluate other funding options.

In addition to the street maintenance investments, the budget sets aside $3.5 million for its new EMS system starting in July 2025. The City Council made the historic decision in May this year to dissolve longtime EMS provider MedStar and switch to a fire-based EMS system. In that system, the fire department will house employees whose sole role is to respond to medical emergencies. 

District 9 council member Elizabeth Beck said this budget cycle was much harder than ones she’s participated in the past. In prior years, she said, the city’s revenues were up, allowing city leaders to make greater investments and big changes. This year, the council had to pare back.

“This is a lean year, so there was less to play with. It was really about holding what we had, and making sure that we got done what needed to get done,” Beck told the Report. “But what you saw was a council that was unified in the fact that we want to keep your tax rate as low as possible.”

Cecilia Lenzen and Emily Wolf are government accountability reporters for the Fort Worth Report. Contact them at cecilia.lenzen@fortworthreport.org and emily.wolf@fortworthreport.org.  

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