Would Fort Worth residents rather spend more of their taxes on police or transit?
At a time when Fort Worth voters are being asked to approve a sales tax for police, transit advocates are calling for the city to also increase funding for bus and rail services.
Voters on July 14 will be asked to reauthorize a half-cent sales tax charged to customers of Fort Worth businesses to pay for the city’s Crime Control and Prevention District, which provides about $80 million annually to the police department.
The police sales tax proposal — which if approved by voters would remain in place for 10 years — comes after several weeks of Fort Worth street protests in which the behavior of officers toward Black residents has been called into question. The police sales tax, which has been in place since 1995, supplements the roughly $200 million police also receive annually from the city’s general fund, which is supported by property taxes.
Officials at Trinity Metro, Fort Worth’s transit agency, stressed that they aren’t calling for voters to reject that police tax and instead spend that money on transit. However, they say the city is overdue to invest in buses and trains.
Transit supporters are asking for nearly $10 million in short-term improvements to the existing system, as well as unidentified additional funding for longer-term fixes, including a makeover of the Fort Worth area’s entire bus system.
Trinity Metro operates on a half-cent sales tax, which supporters say provides only enough funding for a bare-bones transit system that caters mostly to transit-dependent residents who can’t afford their own cars — rather than providing transportation choices for people of all incomes.
Many other Texas communities — including Dallas — charge their residents a full penny sales tax for transit, and are able to provide more thorough public transportation than what’s available in Fort Worth, Jeff Davis, Trinity Metro board chairman, said.
“Funding for the Police Department is pretty important, but the city has gotten what it paid for with a half-cent for transit,” Davis said in a phone interview. “When you have a half-cent to transit, you get a beefed-up police system, which is never a bad thing, but you do it at the expense of public transportation which most other cities in the state of Texas did not do.”
Davis said Fort Worth needs to come to terms with how a lack of public transportation has fueled the division between haves and have-nots in the community.
“It’s amazing what mobility will do to a community,” Davis said. “It lifts everybody up.”
“We have waited so long for this. It’s time.”
Fort Worth city leaders likely will debate the merits of increased transit funding this summer as they work through the process of creating a budget for the next fiscal year.
“The City Manager now has the request from Trinity Metro and will consider the request alongside others from City departments and other community partners,” David Cooke, Fort Worth’s city manager, said in an email. “The City Manager will present the recommended FY21 budget to Mayor and City Council in August.”
Trinity Metro is in the midst of a long-term plan to redesign its transit system, to make better use of resources and get more residents from their neighborhoods to their jobs.
In the short term, Trinity Metro will ask the Fort Worth City Council to provide an additional $9.97 million from the general fund for transit projects in 2021.
Those projects, which were described to Trinity Metro board members during an online meeting earlier this week, include:
▪ Increasing bus frequency along the McCart Avenue and Crosstown corridors, $3.1 million.
▪ Creating “ZIPZONE” programs that help residents get from transit centers to their final destinations in the southeast Fort Worth and Alliance areas, $2.6 million.
▪ Launching express bus service from the East Transfer Center to Alliance, $1.2 million.
▪ Creating an “Amazon route” to serve a north Fort Worth fulfillment center, $450,000.
▪ Make various improvements to sidewalks, signs, bus stops and transfer centers, $2.6 million.
Trinity Metro also is working with consultant Christof Spieler, a planning director at Huitt-Zollars, to redesign the entire bus system, to connect more neighborhoods and job centers in Tarrant County.
