On Friday afternoon, after six months and numerous bargaining sessions, the City of San Antonio and the San Antonio Police Officers Association announced a tentative agreement for a new three-year police contract: a cumulative 16.5 percent raise in base pay and price tag of $102.2 million over the life of the deal.
The union initially asked for $155 million, while the city opened with $63 million. But after months of negotiations, they agreed on a figure of $102 million, roughly the halfway point between the initial proposals. City Manager Erik Walsh said this deal strikes a balance between paying the police a fair wage and keeping the city's finances in check. He's also happy that they were able to reach an agreement quickly, so the city staff can work with a set number when they propose the new budget on August 13. Union President Johnny Perez seems to agree, calling the deal "a fair compromise for both sides."
San Antonio has been down this road before. Back in 2013, City Manager Sheryl Sculley warned the city council that if things didn't change, the cost of public safety could end up consuming the entire general fund by 2031. She later put it more bluntly: left unrevised, the contracts would bankrupt the city. The warning didn't go over well. A year later, in the middle of the contract fight, police union president Mike Helle accused her of trying to make officers look like “a bunch of greedy bastards trying to break the city of San Antonio.'“ The fire union went on to run a charter campaign against her office, which ultimately led to a cap on the city manager's pay and tenure. Sculley announced her retirement within the month. Despite her departure, the financial reality she highlighted remains, and it's the backdrop against which Friday's deal was negotiated.
The constraints on police and fire negotiations were established long before this negotiation. Texas law forbids police and firefighters from striking and Chapter 174 of the Local Government Code gave the unions collective bargaining as the trade. Bargaining built the status quo, starting with the 1988 contract that, by Sculley’s later accounting, awarded uniformed employees premium-free family health care, a legal fund covering divorces and criminal defense, pre-funded retiree health care, and unlimited tuition for unrelated degrees. Every contract since has been an attempt to buy that 1988 deal back one piece at a time.
Refereeing every round of negotiations is the evergreen clause born of the original deal. The evergreen clause states that, if a contract expires with no successor, the old terms simply continue on, originally for up to ten years. Because of this, the union’s worst case is the status quo on terms it already accepted. The city’s worst case is the wait.
And the city actually argued this in court. In 2014 it sued both unions, calling the evergreen clause an unconstitutional debt hamstringing future city councils. The courts steered the city and the police union into mediation, and the subsequent settlement brought the evergreen clause from ten years down to eight, alongside changes to health benefits that saved more than $100 million. As such, if the new deal fails by September 30, the old contract’s terms hold for up to eight more years.
The structural reality, though, is that public safety expenditures continue to go up faster than revenue and there is not much that can be done because the union has no reason to volunteer its leverage.
Public safety now takes up about sixty-four percent of an ever-expanding $1.69 billion general fund, drifting toward the 66 percent ceiling the city’s own financial policies set for public safety spending. The city projects a $264 million budget gap through 2031, and even recently proposed property tax increases are not enough to get out of the hole. Walsh said it plainly in June: “our expenses are growing faster than our revenue.” This, of course, was eerily reminiscent of an email that Sculley sent council in February of 2014, warning that public safety costs were crowding out other core city services. Different decade, same script.
Mayor Jones framed it this way: if the city closes every single library, cuts out public health spending, and gives nothing for animal care, the city would still be $21 million short. Public safety was already projected to add $80 million in costs over the next two years before a single new officer is hired. So what Friday actually settled, underneath the raise, is how much of the budget will shrink to pay for it. Settling early means the budget can be written around a known cost, and that is better than the alternative, but the problem that predates everyone in the room was built by councils that left the invoices to their successors and is enforced by a clause that guarantees the union cannot lose by walking away.
And there seems to be no legally permitted relief mechanism. Since 2021, state law lets the governor’s office freeze the property tax revenue of any large city that cuts its police budget by labeling them a defunding municipality. Since 2019, a second state law caps how much property tax revenue the city can raise without an election at 3.5 percent a year, a ceiling San Antonio is already proposing to hit. Spending minimums enforced by Austin, revenue capped by Austin, cost structure locked by the evergreen clause: the only adjustable line left in the general fund is cutting other programs.
Public safety is one of the core, nonnegotiable services of a city, and you do have to pay for it. But within the constraints named above, public safety spending continues to relentlessly expand, and it would be foolish not to take note of that.
The city priced the 2022 police contract at $92.7 million across five years—this one is $102.2 million across three. On an annual basis, the cost of a police contract nearly doubled in one cycle. The firefighters’ 2024 deal carried raises totaling 21.3 percent. The police budget alone has grown almost $180 million since 2019, roughly 40 percent, inside a general fund whose revenue was projected to grow by less than one percent this year. The August 13 budget proposal will price Friday’s deal into that budget.
So the union did its job, it secured higher pay for the men and women in uniform. Council will weigh the deal against eight more years of the old one, the choice other councils have faced and ratified. Each budget will balance by taking a little more from the rest of the city. Sculley did the arithmetic years ago and the city ran her off for showing it, but the math hasn’t changed.