City Council approves FY 2025 budget, adopts tax rate

The Galveston City Council on Thursday approved the budget for fiscal year 2025, beginning October 1, and adopted a tax rate of $0.40885 per $100 property valuation. This is the same tax rate as fiscal year 2024. City Council voted 5-2 to approve the budget and tax rate.

The City is in good financial shape and has set programming goals that ensure ongoing service and infrastructure improvements throughout the island. This is due to strong management controls, sound financial planning, and strict adherence to a set of policies and principles that serve cities well.

The budget represents the city's priorities, including investments in capital infrastructure, pay increases for employees, public safety, and public works (streets, traffic, water sewer and drainage.) At the request of City Council, the budget includes a 5 percent cost of living adjustment (COLA) for all civilian employees.

The budget also includes pay increases for police and fire as stipulated by the collective bargaining agreements with those entities. Police officers' salaries and pensions have been improved substantially in recent years. Since 2016, funding for police department salaries have increased 31.41 percent, from $8.99 million to $11.81 million (when adjusting for the increase in the number of positions.) For the same period the contribution to the police pension fund has almost tripled from $1.1 million to $3.0 million. Also, since FY 2016, pay for firefighters has increased 67.92 percent from $5.51 million to $9.25 million, and the contribution to the firefighters' pension fund has also more than doubled, increasing 145.9 percent from $0.98 million to $2.41 million.

In coordination with the fiscal year 2025 budget, the City Council approved sanitation and sewer rate increases, which will begin October 1, 2024. Both sanitation and water and sewer are enterprise funds, meaning they are funded fully by customer service fees and not by property tax revenue.

For residential sanitation service, the trash rate for one cart will increase from $24.97 to $29.49 per unit per month. For sewer, base rates will remain unchanged; however, the volumetric rate will increase from $3.42 per 100 cubic feet to $4.22 for residents and from $3.42 per 100 cubic feet to $5.10 for commercial customers. These rate increases were necessary to offset the rising costs of providing these services. Water rates remain unchanged

The budget process included numerous public meetings and discussions beginning in the spring and continuing until the adoption in September. Many thanks to the Galveston City Council and the City of Galveston's finance department for their efforts to develop a sound and prudent municipal budget. The City's finance department will present a budget amendment in October detailing where the reductions will be made in the budget to adjust for a lower adopted tax rate.