Fort Worth Mayor, council members campaign for special police tax as opposition mounts
Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price and three councilmen have financially backed a Chamber of Commerce campaign to impose the police’s special sales tax for a decade.
City voters in the July 14 election are asked to commit a half cent sales tax, worth more than $80 million annually, to the Crime Control Prevention District, a special fund that pays for enhanced police patrols, equipment and a portion of school officers’ salaries, among other things. Typically the tax is renewed every five years, but the City Council this year decided to request its renewal for 10 years. The item is Proposition A, the only other item on Fort Worth ballots besides party runoffs.
Fort Worth is the largest city in Texas to devote extra sales tax money to policing, a move proponents say has kept crime low since the mid-1990s. Skeptics have called it a “police slush fund” and say the money would be better spent with community-based nonprofits or improving transportation.
Early voting ends Friday. More than 5,500 had already voted as of Thursday afternoon.
Price along with Councilmen Bryan Byrd, Jungus Jordan and Dennis Shingleton donated to a campaign committee dubbed Keep Fort Worth Neighborhoods Safe run by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. Their contributions, as well as a $5,000 donation from the Fort Worth firefighter’s union, total $13,500.
No campaign committee against the sales tax has filed with the city, but grassroots community groups and the Tarrant County Democratic party have come out against the renewal as a way to reform policing.
Jordan, the mayor pro tem, acknowledged that the city needs to make changes to policing, but said it has become dependent on the crime tax. If residents want neighborhood patrols or school officers, the sales tax is necessary without increasing the property tax, he said. Alternatively, he said, if more should be devoted to police oversight or nonprofits, the crime tax is an easy way to do that.
“Certainly CCPD is one source that could be used to change how we do things, but if you take it away, how do you train officers to de-escalate situations or hire mental health experts?” Jordan asked, wondering if the city would need to prioritize potholes and other issues over policing.
Pamela Young, an organizer with Fort Worth Futures, one of the coalitions campaigning against the tax, said those in opposition understand the funding will be eliminated. The money belongs in taxpayers’ pockets until the city can come to voters with a different plan, she said.
“Very little of this tax actually goes to mitigating crime and violence in our communities,” she said.
Fort Worth crime tax
Since 1995 Fort Worth has devoted a half cent of the sales tax to police initiatives.
The fund has steadily grown to more than three times its original size over the last 25 years. According to the state comptroller, the sales tax brought in a little more than $26.6 million in 1997. The city expects it to reach nearly $88 million this year, though the recession is likely to drop sales tax revenue. This revenue is in addition to more than $267 million the police department receives through the city’s general fund.
The sales tax now funds nearly 300 positions, largely in the Fort Worth Police Department, including 97 neighborhood patrol officers, 77 school officers and 50 special response team members. Sixteen are non-police positions, those who work with graffiti abatement and late-night programs. The largest portion of the special tax is devoted to equipment and vehicles for the police department — more than $32.5 million in 2020. That includes more than $10 million for the upkeep of high mileage vehicles and $3.6 million to cover jail costs. In 2017, more than $3.2 million was set aside to help purchase a police helicopter
About 6% of the tax goes to a group of nonprofits that work with at-risk children and provide social services.
Crime has fallen by 63% since the mid-90s, while the city’s population has grown by more than 90%.
Fort Worth Police Chief Ed Kraus told the Star-Telegram in June that the department is exploring shifting more money to community partners, but couldn’t provide specifics.
Price told the Star-Telegram’s Editorial Board she believes the tax is critical.
“If we don’t have this tax we don’t have the ability to take that roughly $80 million and shift a good bit of it into social services,” she said.
Byrd noted that the sales tax would be paid by nonresidents and residents alike and said he wanted to strike a balance between the policing some residents expected and demands from recent protests.
“Now is not the time to jerk the wheel,” Byrd said, so long as the city is open to “looking at sensical the adjustments all police departments are looking at right now.”
Shingleton did not immediately turn calls for comment.
Other council members are also supporting the tax, but not contributing to the campaign.
Councilman Cary Moon used his newsletter to encourage voters to support the tax.
“As a city, we need to continue to work to ensure equity in our policing and criminal justice system,” Moon wrote in the newsletter. “All FW residents and all neighborhoods need a community policing presence to ensure public safety for every person. Community policing requires dollars.”
On Facebook, Councilwoman Kelly Allen Gray encouraged her district to vote in the election with a post that noted which nonprofits receive funding through the tax.
Council members Carlos Flores and Gyna Bivens did not return messages inquiring about the election.
Councilwoman Ann Zadeh said that while she has encouraged voting, she traditionally does not tell constituents how to vote in bond or other non-council elections. Zadeh opposed the 10-year extension because she wants the city to explore using more of the sales tax for transportation the way other major Texas cities do.
“I have been concerned about that decade period where we could not have a conversation about other items that may need our attention in the future,” she said, adding that defeat of Prop A does not mean the tax goes away forever. “We can bring it back to voters or ask voters to support a different plan.”
Growing opposition
Though a single campaign against the tax has not formed an election committee, Tarrant County Democrats have urged voters to say no, with U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey as one of the more vocal opponents. Veasey has posted on his campaign website and social media, arguing the special police fund has run its course after 25 years.
In an interview with the Star-Telegram, Veasey said he “gladly” voted for the tax in 1995. At the time, gang-related crime had skyrocketed to a point where he recalled sticking a red jacket in his trunk when driving to Como because of widespread rumors people wearing the color would be shot at.
But the tax was billed as temporary and meant for community-based programs or specialized task forces, he said. Now it supplements the city budget, but with little oversight. Voters should consider what they want for Fort Worth’s future, not what worked in the past, he said, and argued it was a nonpartisan issue.
“Whether you’re Conservative that lives in Tanglewood or a Democrat that lives in Stop Six, you should be very concerned about the fact that we’re spending this money with very little transparency and very little citizen oversight,” Veasey said. “It was supposed to be for a short amount of time, and it’s mushroomed into potentially a 35 year tax.”
Daryl Davis, who ran against Jordan in 2019 for Fort Worth District 6, has been active on social media against the tax. In a 45-minute Facebook Live video posted when early voting started, he said that while some drop in the crime rate could be attributed to police funding, the crime tax was no longer needed.
“It’s important to know as we’re being asked to go to the ballot and renew this funding for not just five years but now the next 10 years, we’ve got to understand how drastic times have changed,” he said.
A group of grassroots organizations focused on social justice and police reform have come out against the tax, mostly through social media. United Fort Worth, Fort Worth Futures and the Tarrant County Coalition For Community Oversight, among others, have encourage followers to reject the tax.
The Fort Worth Futures campaign has been focused on re-imagining public safety as a combination of social issues, such as open space, mental health, care for the elderly and affordable housing opportunities.
“We basically need more funding to create a safety net for the people who continue to be criminalized for just trying to survive,” she said.
This story was originally published July 9, 2020 at 2:24 PM.
