City of Seguin’s budget grows in size

Seguin, TX, USA / Seguin Today
Darren Dunn

(Seguin) — Growth in the city of Seguin is also causing the city’s budget to grow.

The proposed 2024-25 fiscal year general fund budget calls for the city to spend just over $54 million dollars next year. That compares to the $50.3 million that was adopted for general fund expenditures at this time last year. The general fund includes those things that are normally funded by property taxes, like parks and public safety services.

City Manager Steve Parker says staff looked at the city’s growing needs for service, and has worked to come up with a budget that will meet those demands while also being responsible to local taxpayers.

“I think this team works really well together to make recommendations knowing that they might have to give up something this year in order to get something next year but I’m very proud of the way that we have addressed as many needs as we could with this budget especially when we have such a fast growing community with a lot of aging infrastructure and so these are just things that we need to keep up with public safety, fire stations, police force, public works. We keeping adding more and more citizens — 3,000-5,000 people a  year come to Seguin and so we are just trying to make sure that we do our best to analyze and come up with recommendations,” said Parker.

Parker says this budget tries to also look for ways to provide more services that improve the lives of the people who live, work and play here.

“I notice there is a lot of things in this budget that are related to quality of life and parks improvements that the city has never really had a chance to do before –improvements at Manuel Castillo, lighting at the new pachanga basketball court — those types of things. A public improvement district north of I-H 10 which would be a new regional wide park. We are working on this agreement with a developer for a master planned community that would be part of that which we would be able to do a lot of those things and add a major park to our community with very little tax impact so a lot of stuff going on in our community and this is just our way of keeping up with that,” said Parker.

The vast majority of the budget is devoted to covering the city’s personnel costs. Parker says they are investing in their employees by making sure that they are offering a competitive wage for each job.

“When we are looking at all of the other communities in the region, they are very very similar to what we are recommending. Some even going more but I think some of those are really on the side of trying to play catch up with some of these other communities because it is difficult to hire people to go out and shovel asphalt when you can go to Buc-ee’s and make $19 an hour and so those are all the challenges that we face but we think we’ve done a good job of addressing these issues but we are definitely open for any communications or questions that you might have,” said Parker.

The council held its first budget workshop during a special meeting last week, and again briefly discussed the budget during this week’s regular council meeting held on Tuesday night.

The budget would be funded using a proposed tax rate 51.25 cents per $100 of property valuation. That’s identical to the current tax rate for the city of Seguin. While the actual tax rate would remain the same, it is still technically a tax increase. That’s because the proposed rate is 1.8 cents more than the no new revenue tax rate, previously known as the effective tax rate. That’s the rate the city would need to set to generate the same amount of tax revenue as the previous year. But the growth and increasing demands for service is one of the reasons why the city is seeking the additional revenue to cover expenses in next year’s budget.

A public hearing on the budget and tax rate is set for Tuesday, September 3.

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