CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The City of Corpus Christi is facing a $25 million shortfall in tax revenues this year. That's causing City Manager Peter Zanoni to look at finding ways to save money in all areas.
"If you don't have money coming in you have to cut spending so we'll be looking at each of our departments," Zanoni said. "We put in place a hiring, not a freeze, but a hiring review process where to fill any position there's a process where we critically review, can we or should we fill this position or should we hold it vacant so we can have salary savings."
The city manager said he's also looking at other cost saving measures involving travel expenses, the Downtown Management District and the Regional EDC Office.
The city is losing $13.1 million because of homestead exemption tax breaks. Another $12 million was lost because it did away with the $5 a month street user fee.
"I'm not ever going to have second thoughts on giving money back to our taxpayers," Councilman Mike Pusley said. "I think that's was the appropriate thing to do. It's not going to kill us, it's not going to kill the city and if you look at $25 million compared to a $1.5 billion budget, it's not really that big of a deal."
3NEWS has also learned that the city manager has told each department to reduce its budget by five percent for the coming year.
Councilman Everett Roy told 3NEWS his thoughts on cost saving.
"For example parks, maybe we just need to slow down a little bit, but I haven't had the ability to look at the budget in its finite stage," Roy said.
The City is still working on the budget for the coming year. Zanoni said he doesn't foresee any new projects or initiatives being added right now.
No one 3NEWS spoke with mentioned anything about any job layoffs.
In 2020, City officials said it had a little over 3,600 employees. Today, that number has grown to over 4,000 with an addition of 449 city employees.
More than half were added to public works to help address the federal consent decree.