As Fort Worth recovers from COVID, more of a partnership needed from state, mayor says
The economic effect of the novel coronavirus pandemic will leave Fort Worth with a long economic recovery and an estimated $60 million reduction in the city’s general fund over the next three years, Mayor Betsy Price said Monday.
“Fort Worth has been hard hit,” Price said during the “Follow the Leaders” panel at The Texas Tribune Festival.
As the city moves forward, it will need “more of a partnership” with the state, Price said. Local officials have at times clashed with state leaders over setting guidelines for reopening and who has the authority to enforce them.
“It’s been a bit of a struggle,” Price said. “It’s always a struggle to try to get your state officials to understand that we represent the same people they do, but we’re the closest to them. We see them every day.”
Price joined the mayors of Texas’ largest cities, including Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and El Paso, to discuss the coronavirus outbreak, the economic recovery and their response to the civil rights movement decrying police brutality that has swept the nation and their cities.
Fort Worth’s sales tax revenue has come back up “dramatically and in interesting areas,” Price said, with the city now estimated to face a $20 million cut this year. That’s lower than initial estimates at the start of the pandemic, but Price warned that the impact will still be felt for years to come with property tax revenue likely down for three to four years as business vacancies and a shrinking workforce recover.
With a slew of concerts, sporting events and conventions canceled due to the pandemic, it remains to be seen when the city’s public events fund — which relies on the hotel occupancy tax and sales tax — will bounce back.
“Dickies Arena, our new arena, is in good shape. But I’m afraid next year it will be a little different story,” Price said. “Although, it is coming back.”
About half of the more than 70 events facilities workers who were furloughed in May are back on the job, Price said. And the 300 open positions with the city are still on pause.
“It’s hard to say for the next couple of years, but I’m optimistic this year we won’t lay people off,” Price said.
Fort Worth isn’t alone in facing a reduced budget. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said the city closed a $162 million shortfall, with San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg pinning the city’s losses at over $100 million for the 2021 budget. In Austin, the city is looking at being out between $60 million and $80 million, Mayor Steve Adler said, while Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said “tens of millions” and El Paso Mayor Dee Margo said the city faced a $24 million reduction.
And some of those losses, like longtime restaurants, will be harder to bring back — if at all.
“Part of the economic impact is the losses that will never come back, where we’re having injuries done to our child care infrastructure that I’m not sure how we pick up on the backside of this,” Adler said.
After requiring Texans to stay home through April unless participating in essential activities, Gov. Greg Abbott set an aggressive reopening plan, allowing business to open their doors and increase their capacity in phases. It wasn’t until late June that Abbott paused further reopenings, and then ordered bars to shut down as the state reached record levels of the virus’ spread.
Adler and Nirenberg said the state reopened too quickly.
Nirenberg pointed to the state not meeting guidelines set by public health experts, such as a two-week decline in cases and the positivity rate, and embarking on new phases of reopenings before their impacts could be fully understood.
“When Texas took over the reopening timelines, we said we’re going to do the best we can, but that was no longer our ability to control the state’s reopening at that point,” Nirenberg said.
While Price said she felt the decisions to reopen were based on facts, she noted that considerations had to be made to keep the local economy afloat.
“But it also came down to a little bit of philosophical — we get to decide how do you keep our economy from being totally crippled, keep people in jobs, try to keep some of our businesses surviving,” Price said. “And I think locally most of us have done a pretty good job with that.”
The issue of whether the state or local officials could set the standards for reopening became a point of contention over the course of the pandemic, and Price said it was an extension of the recurring local control issue that cities have faced from the state.
“This is a local control issue and it really needs to be more of a partnership. And we’ve had good partnership at some levels. Other times we’ve been overruled on it,” Price said.
Since enacting what was essentially a statewide stay-at-home order in late March, Abbott’s subsequent executive orders have superseded local ones. After the urging of Texas mayors, including Price and Arlington Mayor Jeff Williams, for enforcement of face masks, Abbott issued a statewide mask mandate in July.
The issue of local control resurfaced on a different topic last month, when Abbott and state leaders joined Price in Fort Worth to announce that next session lawmakers will propose legislation that would freeze a city’s property tax revenue if it defunds its police department.
The announcement came just a week after the Austin City Council unanimously voted to redirect roughly $150 million from the city’s police department — with about $20 million to be immediately removed, according to the Austin-American Statesman.
At last month’s press conference, Price vowed not to cut funding to the Fort Worth Police Department to tackle issues related to public safety. The city has seen demonstrations and protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody in May, and for many protesters in Fort Worth, Atatiana Jefferson’s name was also on their lips. Jefferson was fatally shot by a white Fort Worth officer in her home in October.
Price, a Republican, pushed back on the characterization that Democratic-run cities have been overrun by mobs. Price said the city has been working on race-related issues for years, and pointed to steps the city has recently taken like hiring a chief diversity officer and police monitor.
“I think, despite what’s going on at the national level of things ... the political rhetoric will die down,” Price said. “We’re still on the front lines trying to solve these issues for our citizens, from poverty to education to dealing with the police, and I think that’s why we’re nonpartisan. We’ve got to serve everybody.”
This story was originally published September 1, 2020 at 1:41 PM.
