Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, two commissioners present clashing outlooks on budget deficit | Houston Public Media

Ahead of discussions Thursday on potential departmental service cuts in an effort to reduce costs, elected Harris County officials gave dueling outlooks on the county’s mounting budget deficit.

The deficit for the county’s 2025-26 fiscal year was projected at $270 million earlier this year after commissioners voted to increase deputy wages, nearly doubling the budget shortfall. On Thursday, commissioners took up discussions on potential cost-saving measures.

Ahead of the budget discussions, commissioners Adrian Garcia and Lesley Briones held a joint news conference clashing with Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s own press briefing. Each discussed their own projections about the deficit.

Briones and Garcia said they found ways to bring the deficit down to around $150 million without the need to eliminate staff positions. Instead, their plan to balance the budget, which was echoed by county staffers later in the day, specifically targets around 1,300 vacant county positions across several departments, officials said.

Hidalgo meanwhile presented a grim outlook on the deficit and showed documents about a projection closer to $209 million. She said the county likely will be forced to make cuts to essential department services, challenging arguments that those costs could be balanced by simply finding efficiencies in the budget. Hidalgo at several points on Thursday took aim at Briones, Garcia and commissioner Tom Ramsey, a trio she labeled as the “GOP three.”

Speaking about the budget on Thursday morning, Briones said “some would like [people] to believe that the sky is falling.”

“There will be devastating cuts in this dystopian universe,” she said. “False. On the contrary, again because rolling up the sleeves and doing the hard work, we have identified key areas where we can continue delivering key priority core county services but doing it more effectively and efficiently.”

The dueling outlooks represent a clash between commissioners and Hidalgo in recent weeks. It also comes days after they voted to censure Hidalgo following a tense discussion about her proposed tax rate increase to fund child care programs. A chaotic commissioners court meeting last week prompted commissioners’ calls for order to be restored during continued eruptions. They also voted last week to amend the court’s rules on decorum.

Hidalgo made a motion on Thursday that specifically challenged commissioners’ own office budgets after she said the three were to blame for the growing deficit because they seemed in support of increasing law enforcement raises. The proposal died after failing to get a second vote.

In a post to X, she asked what the commissioners were willing to sacrifice from their own offices to make up for the county’s budget deficit.

“This deficit was preventable — we could have asked the voters what they wanted to see… but you deprived the people of Harris County of their votes,” Hidalgo said.

After voting to increase wages for sheriff’s and constable’s deputies in May — following Houston Police Department’s approved raises for its officers — commissioners on Thursday signaled that they would also support requested pay raises for Harris County’s eight elected constables to reach pay parity with HPD. Hidalgo said she was not planning to support those raises, which could potentially inflate the constables’ yearly pay to be higher than that of Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez.

Commissioners voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to direct the county office of management and budget to post notices for the pay increases for constables on the Sept. 18 budget hearing agenda. Hidalgo and Ellis opposed the motion.

In a press briefing on Wednesday, county budget staffers said they originally overshot on deficit estimates after the approval of boosted deputy wages earlier this year was expected to cost the county around $140 million. Budget director Daniel Ramos said they found other ways to save on costs, like reallocating American Rescue Plan Act funds.