Travis County Commssioners Court
April 13, 2004
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Item 30
Number 30 -- -- notice that the governor has called special session for Tuesday of next week.
>> judge, would you like us -- [ inaudible ]. What I put together yesterday were talking points that I thought would be appropriate, along with what you and I had received from the county auditor. And the calling of the session makes it more important for us to touch base with our coalition. Are there additional ones that we should add or ones that we should take from that list?
>> judge, on number 3, it says here inmates to tda, don't we mean tdj.
>> it should be tdc.
>> tdjc.
>> Texas department of corrections.
>> criminal justice.
>> tdc.
>> whatever. I thought they changed names. So that means tdc.
>> judge, is this a new one that you put out or are we looking at the backup from a few weeks ago?
>> actually, I put that together yesterday, but I put it together from rec recollections of stuff that i've read, conversations i've had over the past two weeks. And if my office is listening, I do not have my copy of the memo that we're about to discuss. Or susan's. Bring two copies of that. One for Commissioner Daugherty and one for melissa. Got yours?
>> i've got mine.
>> I should have said susan's and mine. Susan has a whole lot more details and what I tried to do was kind of outline the talking points that I thought the legislation could put together. If in fact a cap is imposed, would it not make sense to do the inflation factor plus growth, plus new growth. Population growth, plus new growth? Inflation factor, population and new growth. If there is a cap, then inflation factor of three percent, which seems to be part of everything i've read, plus new value, plus new growth in population.
>> judge, the three percent inflation factor, you're getting that from where?
>> that was in the governor's statement. And statements that I saw that were attributed to the governor, it says three percent plus population growth.
>> the three percent in his plan had referred to the cap on appraisals. His cap on property tax revenues would be inflation plus some growth factor, which he -- which the governor's staff has indicated has ranged between four and five percent over the last 12 years. So it's a little bit higher than that three percent. But of course, it could fluctuate if inflation is higher and growth is higher, it could be whatever it is, six percent, seven percent, five percent.
>> so capping the budget itself would be at what?
>> it would be your prior year -- whatever you spent the prior year or whatever your revenue was the prior year for property taxes, plus some percentage that is made up of inflation plus a growth factor, be it population, new growth. But that formula is not set in concrete. I think that's clearly up for us to propose, as I think you're doing. You're suggesting that perhaps as the population --
>> [ inaudible ]. I thought it was last year's budget, plus three percent, plus population growth. (indiscernible).
>> that's right.
>> so how do we determine the inflation factor here? How would we validate it?
>> I think that's to be determined. The inflation factor is going to vary probably from city to city and region to region in Texas. I believe that they took for discussion purposes we used the dallas area inflation factor that was published by the comptroller's office. There is an inflation factor that is published by the comptroller's office, but again I think the calculation of it, inflation or growth, is whatever we want to suggest. And if we can -- we have some basis for that.
>> one thing that's extraordinarily dangerous, there was a brand new report out last week talking about as we move through this decade related to what's going on with the census. This was in the houston chronicle. And I will get the e-mail to you all. And I took the graphic out of the houston chronicle as well. That is that related to population growth that of the large urban counties, harris and I want to say bexar were still on the list of some of the fastest growing counties in the state of Texas and the nation, and wilson was number one in the small county category. What was surprising to me is that the anomaly in all of this is Travis County. That we are actually losing population. We actually lost because of some of the things going on with our economy. But what was disturbing about the loss was that the loss was all in certain types of jobs, pulling in certain types of income. And so we want not only -- we lost not only in terms of population, but it meant that there were more wealthier folks who are leaving us and who was left behind, had more challenges that fall upon a county government. And so they were making a very big point about Travis County. And I apologize that I have not sent that to you all, but I will get it to you. It was in the houston chronicle last week. And that bodes poorly for us if they do something arbitrary if they make up for it based on population. That will help some, but not all urban counties. And we are already being noted as the exception related to lots of population and of the kind that is most wealthy and an infusion of more folks who are less wealthy and need county government's assistance.
>> judge, one of the things -- I brought those numbers so we could get a feel, and really chris' comments Thursday got me thinking about it. And really the assumption is -- in my opinion is that all growth in services are directly proportional to population increases. In other words, the only reason you would provide more services is if the population grew. And that all of our services track directly to that. The second assumption is that inflation costs are only directly related to the consumer price index. That those are the only reasons the actual price of a service -- so those are the volume in price variances. And that's just plain wrong reasoning. I looked at the combination for the past 10 years of the consumer price index for urban consumers and our population growth. And for 10 years Travis County would have been at 59.2%. So if you just took a flat, divide that by 10, which isn't exactly right, but that formula would have given us a 5.9% increase a year or 59% increase over 10 years. Let me give you some other statistics that are rather interesting. And that is that the medical expenses relating to housing juveniles during that 10-year period increased 428%. The employee hospitalization expenditures increased 262%. And that does not increase -- include the huge increase we had in '04, which really would have driven that up. I tried to do '94 to 2003 since we're using 2003 numbers trying to do something consistent. The indigent attorney expenditures went up 115%. Indigent care expenditures, 97%. Fuel expenditures 75%. And utilities 53.7. And I just pulled some. So the reality is that the consumer price index has not deflected the kind of cost drivers that drive the cost of our services. So the reality is that we would have had to dramatically cut back on those services if we were locked into that cap. It simply does not reflect the services that we have in terms of volume or cost. So I think those are serious flaws in this as well as -- judge, your point is well taken. When did we get it, who determines it? The other thing is that these numbers are historical. In other words, when you're preparing our budget for next year, you're figuring out what are we going to have next year? The cpi number is last year, because it's calculated -- there's a lag effect. So in essence what we have is the old population growth, the old cpi is going to be at least a year old, and then we're going to be forecasting that to the next year's budget. So the reality is my opinion is the cap is a disaster. It doesn't solve the school financing problem. And what it does is it creates -- and I don't think I?m exaggerating -- a crisis situation in the kind of programs that we administer, which is justice, corrections and rehabilitation, transportation and health. Those are our programs. And the trade-off here is that someone has decided if they understand this that these programs need to be cut. The one piece -- I gave you two more pieces of data. We'll e-mail them as well. But judge denton, he talked to that judge in oregon. He found a newspaper article and you can look at it yourself, and I gave chris and bob a copy, but we will e-mail them one as well. And that is that it starts out higher crime may be the result of oregon's cut back on court services as the state wrestles with a funding crisis. And they talk about droos a direct relationship, the courts starting furloughing and the crime rate increased. The kind of services that we render are going to be plain uncontrollable with that cap. That cap just plain won't work, for what it's worth. > I think, judge, with your permission, we'll invite susan to personally deliver the county's testimony at the appropriate time or at least one of the people to deliver our testimony when the legislative committees meet.
>> I?m glad to do that. I'll help in any way I can.
>> did we get a pretty good response from the Travis County delegation dealing with this?
>> any response? We had -- we've received a very open response. They're ready and looking forward to getting your feedback. So I think right now the next step is to go ahead and finalize this and set up meetings. We already had one set up Friday with representative baxter, if I can arrange the time, so we can do those over the next seven to 14 days. Of course, the session will start in those seven days.
>> okay. On the second page under supplies, I see supplies and I see services. Under supplies, those services we would -- (indiscernible) the other thing I mentioned is that the Commissioners court, like your budget is not set by the commission ers court, but by the district judges. The purchasing budget is set by the purchasing board. In addition to the man dats that they had. And what I say -- and I hope he doesn't do it too harshly, but in addition to shifting funding responsibility, there's also a shift of legal liability. And they don't take what you're doing in mental health, but if you have a mental health inmate and that person dies in your custody, then that's just a real good lawsuit. There's a an argument that you didn't do enough. And whatever you did do, didn't prevent the death. Kind of like the Williamson county case. It seems to me that the lawyer starts out with a rumtion that somebody -- with a presumption that somebody didn't do enough. And in some of the other areas it's the same thing. If you don't have one to 48, something happens to the inmate and the guard's not available, the prultion is that o.o. The presumption is that you caused that death. We're sitting ducks in that regard. So anyway, these are the points that I thought of. The other thing is sitting and talking with the delegation members, and I guess trying to impress upon them that for counties it's a real big deal. I start out by saying basically that 68 percent of our revenue comes from real property taxes. Any time you restrict that it's a big impact. And that 68 percent of the tax bill that Travis County residents received was from Travis County. And not shift responsibility to the other side, other entities, but that's a fact. And anyway, if we look at this, do we need members of the court to join in some of these trips?
>> it would be helpful. We can do it on our own, but we certainly would like to take you along if you can do it.
>> I think we ought to try that, each member of the court, so we can report back.
>> I?m happy to help.
>> would you like to just go ahead and set them up and then give you the dates and times and circulate it and find out who is available?
>> why don't you do that. We'll try to at least attend one or two of them. How many members -- we have about nine or 10, don't we?
>> you have eight you, including senators.
>> are you including representative krusee.
>> nine.
>> I would, considering a lot of this stuff could have huge impacts on transportation and he's chair of transportation.
>> and judge, there may be one or two state leaders that you might want to include on that list.
>> I?m sorry, could you speak up a little bit?
>> we might, Commissioner, want to add one or two state leaders who are not a part of our delegations to that list as well.
>> susan, you might want to attend some of these that we deem to be real important.
>> whenever I can, just let me know. I think all of us need to do as much as we can. And I don't know, maybe we should write a letter to all the other elected officials, give them names and addresses and say do what you can, write a letter in Travis County. Some of them have relationships with some of these legislators. This isn't -- as I?m thinking about this, y'all's job is to set the tax rate, but the truth is this isn't y'all's problem, this is a problem for the services that are rendered to the people who live here. Your role in that is to set the tax rate. We've got people out here prosecutoring cases. Their work is going to be impacted by this. So they all ought to be as concerned as we are. They should. Because this impacts every program that Travis County renders to people who live in this county.
>> there are too many things that we just can't predict. We have no clue how many capital murder cases we're going to have to try. And I know the district attorney's office can probably give us a pretty good idea of what the yogurt shop trials cost us. And when they worth every penny? I think the victims of those crimes and their families would say yes, but it does have a price in terms of the justice system as far beyond just the stuff that goes on day in and day out.
>> I was going to write a letter to the judges. I don't mind writing one in the name of time or if one of you want to do it to all the elected officials saying please help out here, whatever you think.
>> earlier we were discussing and we can't even predict the jail overcrowding situation where we maybe have to contract out to take care of some of these persons that we need to have incarcerated. But you brought that point up. Do you know of any other county that may be experiences jail overcrowding problems? And if so -- I guess there's a lot of things that you just can't predict.
>> jail overcrowding is one of them true. I?m sorry, go ahead.
>> and, see, part of -- as you read more of these things and you talk about mandates and that and federal and state, what governments do -- and we can call them mandates and unfunded or whatever, is they set standards, and should. So there are standards for these things that we need to provide with. One of the things that has cost us money are the accounting standards. This has nothing to do with cost of living, it has nothing to do with the population growth. It had a change in standards that governments have to use in reporting. And so these are standards that government's set for others and for other governments. So yeah, I mean, other governments are having all of these kinds of problems. The reality is, though, counties are not broken. The last time I heard, there were 10 very small counties that were at their cap. The constitutional cap. They didn't have enough property to get the money that they needed to run those counties. This certainly doesn't help them. It doesn't hurt them, it doesn't help, doesn't do anything. But it hurts everyone else. So I don't see this solving anything. What we're doing is not involving schools and we're creating a problem in the areas that we render services.
>> pretty soon we'll have a robin hood for counties.
>> that's exactly right. That's exactly what will happen here. Yeah, we will.
>> cometioner, to answer your question, bexar county is probably the most noteworthy county that is having issues with jail standards right now, and what folks are not remembering or should recall is that when we brought our population down from the 2700 range, right now we're at 2300, plus or minus, depending on what day it is, that cost us money related to rocket dockets, related to the construction of a new courtroom, with us experimenting with 24 hour magistration. It did not cost us zero to be able to bring our numbers down. So to be able to save on the daily population, it required an investment of a tremendous amount of money and time and effort by everything involved in the criminal justice system. And still does to this day.
>> well, this quote from oregon is real interesting because it says the very first issue people have to face is public safety. That butter putney of the public centers office says it doesn't do any good to have schools open if it isn't safe. Oregon did this, they capped it, capped it too low, they shut down public safety. And crime went up. Y'all spent money because you did the responsible things on jails. There's another thing. You have to open the door and let them out. That doesn't cost anything in terms of dollars. But it has a disastrous effect on the community, and if you have no money, then that is what happens?
>> it's exactly what the state of Texas did in 1988 when the parole and probation -- all the parole system was completely broke and they were letting people out with less than a quarter of their sentence served.
>> anything further?
>> we need to try to get as many meetings in as we can between now and Monday.
>> well, we can -- we'll try to schedule as many as we can, but once they come back out, it would be easier to set those up. There will be a lull there for a couple of days. This isn't all going to happen.
>> the Travis County delegation.
>> yes. I guess when they get here is probably better than going in -- (indiscernible).
>> we'll take what we get and then I will circulate those times and dates by e-mail to y'all and to susan. And then susan, you will fill in the numbers on this?
>> give it to me, sure, i'll be glad to do that.
>> we'll work on this a little bit, judge, if that's all right. I think the argument that's being made about the cpi is very compelling and very helpful information which I have not heard before. And I especially appreciate this matter of fact tone that's reflected in here. I really think that this is the way to go. This is a smart way to make these points.
>> thank you.
Last Modified: Wednesday, April 13, 2004 12:32 PM