Published
Harris County commissioners voted 3-1 on September 17 to set the county’s 2027 property tax rate at 67 cents per $100 of taxable value, up from 62 cents, an increase the county puts at 7.6 percent. In a second vote the court adopted a $3.1 billion budget for the fiscal year that begins October 1, this one 3-2. The county’s Office of Management and Budget puts the added cost to the average homeowner at about $198 this year.
The figure is the combined rate for four taxing entities the court sets: Harris County, the Harris County Flood Control District, Harris Health and the Port of Houston Authority. Houston Public Media reported it is one of the highest combined rates the county has adopted in twenty years. The increase closes a shortfall the county put at more than $180 million.
Commissioners Lesley Briones, Rodney Ellis and Adrian Garcia voted yes. At a press conference afterward they attributed the shortfall to federal funding cuts that left the county covering services out of local money, and to health care costs the county absorbed rather than pass to its employees. “I’ve been one of the folks, one of the voices very sensitive about trying to balance the budget on the backs of those hard working employees that stayed here,” Ellis told Houston Public Media the day before the vote.
Commissioner Tom Ramsey, the only Republican on the court, cast the lone no vote and said the increase lands on people already struggling to keep their homes. “Our number one issue over the last six months has been affordability,” he said, according to Texas Scorecard, which reported his position that more than $500 million of the budget is not required by statute.
County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who had opposed the increase at the court’s September 8 meeting, walked out of the room before the tax vote, and voted against the budget. “We can’t just keep kicking the can down the road, that’s what we’re voting for,” she said, calling her exit symbolic. Afterward she told reporters the county had missed its chance to rework the budget. “I want people to know that this tax rate and this budget do not substitute for a sustainable fiscal plan,” she said.
Four officials, four positions, one bill. What they disagree about is whose fault the bill is.
The costs the county names were set above it, and not all in the same place. Lawyers for defendants who cannot afford one is a Texas mandate: the Legislature’s Fair Defense Act of 2001 requires every one of the 254 counties to provide them, and county officials have complained for years that the state covers a small fraction of what it costs. Health care is the county’s own employees, whose rising costs the court chose to absorb rather than pass along. The federal funding cuts are the commissioners’ characterization of why local money is covering services it did not cover before. Ramsey disputes the size of the bill all of it adds up to.
Harris County did not write any of those rules. It also does not decide how far it may raise a levy without asking voters first, because the Legislature set that limit in Austin. What the county does is send the bill.
A Harris County homeowner who objects to the 67 cents has one address for the complaint, and it is the five people who sat in that room. The Legislature that wrote the mandate and the federal government that funds or does not fund it are not on any Harris County ballot.
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