SAN ANTONIO – The San Antonio City Council isn’t ready to commit to adding more police officers — at least, not yet.
A trio of council members had pushed to get a non-binding resolution to support adding 65 officers in the Fiscal Year 2027 budget onto Thursday’s agenda.
But after apparently failing to sway their council colleagues on the early show of support, the group joined in the unanimous vote to push discussion of the issue to the first Public Safety Committee meeting in May.
One of the three council members, Councilman Marc Whyte (D10), told KSAT he wasn’t concerned.
“I believe that the data is clear. Everyone knows we need the officers, right? And so we just have to get it done,” Whyte said after the vote.
Other council members want the addition of new officers to be considered within a wider view of the budget.
“So there’s trade-offs when we decide to fund one thing over the other, and we just have to make sure we very well understand what those tradeoffs are if we move forward with continuing with more officers,” said Councilwoman Sukh Kaur (D1), the chairwoman of the Public Safety Committee.
Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) said council members might end up supporting the addition of “however many officers, but we’ll do it alongside a handful of other challenging decisions.”
“The reality is that we don’t know what our financial outlook is, but have a sense that it’s bleak,” he said. “We don’t know how many cuts we’ll have to make to Public Works, to Metro Health, to (Parks and Recreation), to libraries, Animal Care Services, our fire department, our housing programs, Code Enforcement, the nonprofits who provide essential and wraparound services to our community.”
“We don’t know if we’re going to have to raise property taxes alongside utility rates to afford any of this growth,” he said.
The city has been trying to follow a recommendation from a 2023 staffing analysis to add 360 patrol officers over a three- to five-year period. The idea is to give officers more time for proactive policing, like checking on regular trouble spots, traffic enforcement, or patrolling for car burglars, instead of running from call to call.
The city added 100 new patrol officers in FY 2024 and another 65 in FY 2025.
At one point, city staff planned to add 65 officers in FY 2026. However, in the face of a yawning budget deficit, council members only ended up adding 40.
That in itself was still more than what staff had suggested.
Whyte, Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito (D7), and Councilwoman Misty Spears (D9) were all part of unsuccessful pushes to raise that final number for FY 2026 and signed onto a memo to force Thursday’s resolution discussion.
Whyte said he “100%” agreed that the city needs to address the root causes of crime “but this is not an either/or.”
“We can address root causes of crime; we can fund various programs that will help us do that. But that does not alleviate the need to put officers on the street,” he said.
Councilman Ric Galvan (D6) pushed back against that idea during Thursday’s discussion.
“These are not one-time dollars that we can just throw out. They’re permanent dollars. They require revenue. They require permanent cuts to programs too if we don’t get any more revenue into it,” Galvan said. “And so it is either/or. It’s easy to say it’s not, but that’s just fiscally irresponsible to say that — and unrealistic.”
Council members are scheduled to consider a mid-year adjustment to the FY 2026 budget in early to mid-May.
They will discuss their goals for the FY 2027 budget on May 22, but they won’t pass a final spending plan until September.
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