Why it matters<\/strong><\/p>\nThe city is on track to enter FY 2026-27 with a budget deficit between $227 million and $253 million, Jones said during the presentation. As of the end of December, Houston\u2019s shortfall increased by $52 million due to less revenues and more expenditures than initially accounted for, he said.<\/p>\n
The combined overtime projection for the current fiscal year is less than FY 2024-25, which totaled more than $71 million. However, the report indicates the city has under-budgeted for overtime in the three departments almost every year for the past 11 years.<\/p>\n
District C council member Abbie Kamin said the next budget must better reflect the realities of the departments and account for weather-related disasters, which have historically caused spikes in overtime hours.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to start projecting for the expectation of disasters,\u201d Kamin said during the Feb. 3 meeting. \u201cWhat we see is we try to keep a healthy fund balance, but we know we\u2019re going to be taking from that because of overtime [and] if we know, we need to say so.\u201d<\/p>\n
Diving deeper<\/strong><\/p>\nLeaders from each of the three departments also delivered presentations to the committee members with data reflecting staff head counts, attrition trends and the most common causes of overtime.<\/p>\n
Head counts for the fire and police departments increased compared to last fiscal year, per the presentations, but staffing within the solid waste department dipped by approximately 60 employees. However, Larius Hassen, director of Houston Solid Waste Management, told committee members he\u2019s confident about the number of applications received for vacancies.<\/p>\n
Assistant Police Chief Thomas Hardin said a majority of HPD\u2019s overtime is spent on operations and Houston\u2019s airports, with additional costs during natural disasters and protests. Similarly, Fire Chief Thomas Mu\u00f1oz said the department relies on overtime to maintain daily minimum staffing levels as well as support special events and disaster response.<\/p>\n
As for Solid Waste Management, Hassen said garbage collection during holidays and Saturday catch-up contributes to the department\u2019s overtime spending.<\/p>\n
Dubowski said city staff will look for potential line-item savings within each of the departments, which she expects to be less likely for Solid Waste Management.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a new trend for the Solid Waste Department to need additional resources to support their operations,\u201d Dubowski said.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s next?<\/strong><\/p>\nAccording to the presentation, the city\u2019s Audit Division plans to complete three audits for the fire, police and civilian departments to ensure accurate and appropriate use of overtime.<\/p>\n
Jones said the city-wide civilian audit is expected to wrap up in March and the police department audit will be completed in May, followed by a look at the fire department\u2019s payroll.<\/p>\n
The BFA Committee is scheduled to start workshopping the FY 2026-27 budget at the beginning of May, with budget adoption in June.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Houston is on track to exceed its budgeted overtime spending by more than $54 million by the end…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":564330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5130],"tags":[3232,58647,20009,246177,4345,16300,246176,5429,31466,16795,358,3187],"class_list":["post-564329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-budget","tag-controller","tag-deficit","tag-fiscal-year-2026","tag-houston","tag-houston-fire-department","tag-houston-overtime","tag-houston-police-department","tag-solid-waste-management","tag-spending","tag-texas","tag-tx"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116009234893975556","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/564330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}