Arlington, facing an $18 million budget shortfall because of a drop in sales tax and hotel occupancy tax revenue during the coronavirus pandemic, is making cuts and asking for additional federal money.
On Wednesday, Mayor Jeff Williams and more than 100 other Texas mayors sent a letter to the state’s congressional delegation requesting a bill to support municipal budgets.
Big revenue generators such as the University of Texas at Arlington, Six Flags Over Texas, the Dallas Cowboys and the Texas Rangers have shut down, which will hurt the city’s bottom line in the coming months, he said.
“We are not having any tourism and we’re not having any shopping, and our university, the University of Texas at Arlington is shut down,” Williams said at a City Council meeting Tuesday. “When you add all of those together, you’re looking at a pretty substantial shortfall being projected in our community.”
City manager Trey Yelverton detailed the budget cuts at the meeting.
During the first phase, Arlington will suspend a planned 2% across-the-board employee raise and information technology projects, freeze vehicle purchases and hiring for vacant positions, and delay the summer fire and police academies until at least October.
That could affect the number of officers on the police force, Jay Warren, director of communication and legislative affairs, said in an email.
Before furloughs and layoffs, the city will exhaust options such as suspending travel, training and the sick time sell-back program.
“We’ve been looking for smoke signals, if you will, from Austin and Washington, and we haven’t really seen any yet,” Yelverton said. “So until we get some feedback on some direct lifelines, we’re going to assume that we need to manage the situation our own.”
Williams said he initiated the mayors’ letter to present the budget needs of cities across the state.
It asks members of Congress to alter part of the CARES Act to give the cities more flexibility in how they spend aid money. Funds for individuals from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act started hitting Americans’ bank accounts this week.
Under the CARES Act, only cities with populations greater than 500,000 receive direct funding. Arlington is the seventh-largest city in Texas and has a population of over 398,000, according to 2018 U.S. Census Bureau estimates.
“We simply do not understand the population cutoff in the CARES Act,” the letter says. “Simply put, there is no magic force that will protect local governments under 500,000 population from revenue losses during this crisis.”
The funding the city did receive is to be used only for coronavirus-related expenses, which don’t come close to the millions in revenue the city could lose, Williams said.
So far, the city has spent about $150,000 on direct coronavirus expenses and costs related to public health efforts.
“All of our cities are facing a devastating collapse in revenue at the same time we are facing an exponential increase in demand for our services, especially on the public safety front, which accounts for the bulk of local government budgets,“ the letter says.
It was signed by 111 Texas mayors, including Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, Austin Mayor Steve Adler and San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg.
The city projects that revenue reductions will peak in April at 70% and taper off through the fall.
If federal or state funding is received, Williams said, it will support city services that budget cuts would harm.
“It’ll be going to try and support providing our services such as our fire department, our police department, maintaining our streets, picking up trash, our parks,” he said.
