Bexar County Budget Priorities

It looks like it’s that time again! Budget time! And with that in mind, Bexar County has published their proposed budget for FY 2010-2011, and it should surprise no one that after obtaining a copy of it in advance of their upcoming meeting on it, I’ve found some stuff to criticize. Overall the budget looks pretty strong, and I must commend them on achieving a balanced budget (even if San Antonio wasn’t hit as hard by the economic recession, we were still hit) especially considering that our next state legislature is facing a $17 billion shortfall. Hopefully our state legal structure will prove more adept than California’s at this. So without further ado and in no particular order, I present to you my favorite fucked up things in the county budget.

1. $3,677,877 for the construction of a new Firing Range County Law Enforcement need somewhere to practice firing. I understand that, and more power to them. I hope they do practice so that they’re more likely to shoot a bad guy and less likely to shoot a bystander. But what I don’t understand is this; San Antonio has a LOT of firing ranges already. Why in the world would we build an entire new firing range for only those law enforcement when they could just as easily use the private sector ranges already strewn across the county? These ranges are certainly not filled to capacity during the day when these officers need to train during duty hours. And by doing so, we’d be throwing more money into our local economy. Keep in mind the estimated total cost for this project is $6,001,037.

A quick call to the Bexar County Sheriff’s office revealed that they have approximately 1,463 firearm qualified officers. For example, the local shooting range “Bullet Hole” charges $5 for an id and $8.50 for a day of shooting per person. So this would cost the county $7315 for the ids, after which in order to make up the cost of this shooting range, they’d have to have every officer shooting a year and a half continuously (~481 days). And all this is assuming that they paid full public price and didn’t negotiate a group rate for the increased business.

2. $163,059 to Catholic Charities Our county gives money away to outside organizations for charitable purposes. That’s alright, and in fact its more than a bit noble. But those organizations should adhere to our countries secular principles in the dispensation of tax dollars. Though Catholic Charities claims to serve anyone in the community, they have repeatedly refused to serve homosexual members of our community, and are prolific rejecters of those of other faiths from their core of volunteers. They have even stopped serving the adoption needs of an entire state when they were told that in the interest of equality they had to allow same-sex couples to adopt just like heterosexual couples in Massachusetts[1].

I understand that they should be able to believe what they want to and to even act upon those beliefs, just not with OUR collective tax dollars. What makes this particular one further egregious is that it isn’t even normal spending. It wasn’t in last year’s budget, so it’s an entirely new expense.

3. $240,000 for VIA Free Pass & Vanpool Transportation Benefits This particular item gives Bexar County Employees the ability to ride the bus system for free. Perhaps it’s just me, and I’ll freely admit I haven’t run the numbers on it, but given the low cost of riding the bus, and the low number of employees of the county, this cannot reasonably cost this much. Moreover, how many people actually use it?

4. $2,125,467 to address Jail Population Issues It’s no secret that across the country our jails are overflowing. County jails are by and large a repository for misdemeanor criminals, so why is it that our county jail peaked at 4703 inmates last year? Keep in mind that the jail only has 4320 beds. There are numerous contributing factors, but by and large the largest contributor is minor drug possession. Possession of even 2 oz or less of marijuana is punishable by up to 180 days in jail and a fine of $2,000 in Texas[2]. Furthermore in 2006 in Bexar County there were 7,896 arrests for possession of marijuana alone[3]. ALONE.

Keep in mind that we’re projected to spend $19,173,131 to try to stifle this problem, and we currently have to pay other counties to house the overflows. Here’s an answer (albeit one that’s out of the reach of our county government), Legalize it. Save millions of dollars across the country and free up millions of dollars in revenue from taxation. You could even put a nasty sales tax on it like we do on cigarettes to discourage it’s use, people will still buy em. Barring that, lets at least look at reducing penalties for extremely small possession.

All in all, it really isn’t a terrible budget, it’s balanced, which is more than a lot of people can say, but in a time where we’re trimming back everything to deal with the recession, are expenses like this really necessary?

[1]http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/03/11/catholic_charities_stuns_state_ends_adoptions/

[2]http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=4566

[3]http://whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/statelocal/tx/txsanant.pdf

All figures not explicitly cited were drawn from the propsed FY 2010-2011 Budget. A copy can be found here (since it’s not on their website yet).

Bexar County FY 2010-2011 Budget