MARFA — Marfa City Council members met Tuesday night for the first of two public hearings on the proposed tax rate and to hear Mayor Manny Baeza’s introduction of the 2024-25 fiscal year budget this week. All council members were present.
This year’s proposed tax rate is the voter approval rate, .328 per $100 taxable value, a 1.6% increase from last year’s tax rate. It will allow $77,500 in additional taxes to be raised, $11,580 of which will be raised from new property added to the tax rolls.
The property tax revenue will funnel approximately $605,660 into the city’s general fund. City Manager Mandy Roane said the average homestead tax would go up about $49.
There were no public comments on the new tax rate at the Tuesday hearing. The next hearing will be held Thursday, August 29, at 6 p.m. at the Casner Room at City Hall.
Mayor Baeza also presented the first draft of the 2024-25 budget — a balanced budget that council did not foresee making any major changes to — at the Tuesday meeting.
The city’s enterprise funds, utilities that generate revenue like water and natural gas, effectively cancel out the city’s expenditures for other services it offers like the library, senior center, police department and EMS.
This year’s budget is relatively simple due to the fact that many of the bigger ticket items — $2.9 million for streets, $400,000 for the construction of a new water well, $80,000 for repairs to the Marfa and Presidio County Museum — are holdovers from the prior year’s budget.
Many of the setbacks are attributed to delayed communication with engineering and construction services. “This is what happens living out here, you try to complete these projects, and it’s difficult,” Baeza said. “It’s hard to invest in something new if we have so much pending.”
Similar to last year, the city is budgeting for all part time and full time employees to receive a 3.5% cost of living raise, and several employees are receiving merit raises for earning higher certifications and taking on more responsibilities.
Professional services are up across the board, particularly in the administrative department, as the city continues to contract with outside attorneys and auditors. The administration department is anticipating spending $370,000 on contractors this year, money Roane argued is well spent.
“We’re contracting out a lot of things that we just don’t have the people to do,” Roane said. “We’ll continue to do that unless all of a sudden we come up with a CPA/attorney who has never wanted anything more in life than to be a CPA/attorney for the city for a very minimal salary. It’s expensive, but we’re getting quality work.”
The administrative budget also includes line items for building maintenance, approximately $50,600, to be spent on fire resistant cabinets and storage for city records, and for $50,000 worth of improvements to the EMS station, which needs to be better outfitted for 24-hour on-call staff, Roane said.
This year the Marfa Police Department is anticipating receiving $282,000 in grants from Operation Stonegarden, Operation Lonestar and the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. The department is also budgeting $30,000 for new body cameras, which they hope to have covered by a grant.
There will be no increase to natural gas rates this year.
Water/sewer and trash rates will increase per previous agreements. Water/sewer rates are increasing at a rate of 8% per year for the next few years to help pay for infrastructure improvements. The city had a water and wastewater rate study done in 2022 and had not raised rates since 2015 at that point.
The city is eventually planning on upgrading all water meters to new smart meters which do not have to be manually read and are more accurate. However, Roane said at the meeting the city is taking a phased approach to the project due to current need and the price of the smart meters — around $230 per piece, over twice as much as the old meters.
The city has recently replaced around 30 dead meters and plans to replace around 60 more, Roane said. While they are using normal readers for now, they plan to start installing smart meters, which can still be manually read, so more are in place when they switch to the smart system technology.
Roane and Baeza said they hope to have the new water well — a backup to existing wells — installed and completed before moving onto the smart meter project, hopefully later this year.
Last year, the city signed a new contract with solid waste company Republic Services, after it provided the lowest bid, which still involved a 39% increase in collection fees. The city is helping offset the higher cost by passing it off to customers with a 4.5% annual increase in residential and commercial garbage collection.
Roane and Baeza were optimistic that long-awaited street repairs could finally be accomplished this year with the right engineers in place. There is a total of $2.9 million budgeted for street repairs, which the city is paying for with a tax note. The city also received a Community Development Block grant that is helping tackle repairs.
Streets to be repaired include Russell, Mesa, Third, Gonzales and streets around the Marfa Housing Authority.
“These engineers are helping us out,” Baeza said. “I know it’s frustrating, because city government moves very slow, so we’ve been talking about streets for years, but these engineers seem well worth what we’re paying.”
The department undergoing the most change, by far, is the EMS department, which is under new management after the retirement of Bert Lagarde. “Every year there’s one department that just seems to need a lot of work,” Roane said. “It’s often when someone has departed and we see what is happening. This year it’s EMS.”
Roane and Interim EMS Director Jessie Peña discovered that “no transports,” or EMS calls that did not result in a trip to the hospital, were not being billed for. Peña back billed 87 no transports that had taken place in the past six months — which the department is supposed to charge $175 for. “He had left $15,225 on the table that I have now billed for,” Peña said.
Roane said in addition to losing out on no transport money, grant funds from the Texas J Regional Advisory Council (JRAC) were dependent upon what Marfa EMS is billing, not calls they are going out on.
The department is currently down two employees, Roane said, so extra money was budgeted to add personnel. There are also costly software upgrades that need to be done as well as building maintenance to the EMS bay including new doors, lighting, a new oven, painting and more.
Equipment maintenance is going up from $3,500 to $30,000, and vehicle maintenance is going up from $7,500 to $20,000. Roane said she would understand if the council had sticker shock, but when it comes to medical supplies and ambulances they need to ensure everything is properly maintained. Baeza agreed. “I’d rather know of the problem right now rather than [being] left in a bind. We’ve had many issues go unresolved, so I appreciate you bringing this to our attention,” Baeza said. “This is the right time to do it.”
To view a draft of the budget, visit cityofmarfa.com/administration/page/budget-reports