The San Antonio Police Department (SAPD) and San Antonio Fire Department (SAFD) proposed 2025 budgets total a combined $1.07 billion. More than one billion of those dollars would come straight from the city’s general fund, which is more than $50 million than the two departments received from the general fund in 2024.
SAPD
The police department has a proposed 2025 budget of $664 million. It plans to hire 65 new patrol officers at a cost of $6.3 million as part of an ongoing effort to add 360 new patrol officers in three to five years. SAPD added 100 officers in 2024.
The new patrol officers are part of a city goal for patrol officers to spend 60% of their time doing proactive policing and the other 40% responding to calls. Now, those figures are flipped.
During Tuesday’s budget presentation for SAPD, Police Chief William McManus pointed to several of the department’s 2024 crime metrics.
“From January to July of 2023 compared to the same period this year, we have a decrease of crime across the board, in all three — violent, property, and crimes against society,” McManus said. “[Arrests] decreased by 4% from June to May in [2023 and] 2024.”
SAPD’s emergency response time in 2024 was six minutes and 13 seconds, about a second slower than 2023. SAPD has a goal to maintain its six minute-13 second response time in 2025.
The department’s non-emergency response time was more than 20 minutes in 2024, and it aimed to shorten that time to just over 18 minutes next year.
SAPD’s proposed 2025 funding includes a pilot downtown camera project in collaboration with CENTRO that will install cameras across a few city blocks to serve as a “real-time monitoring crime tool.”
District 4 Councilmember Adriana Rocha Garcia welcomed the cameras given her own past experience downtown. “A long, long time ago I was mugged downtown at gunpoint," she explained, "and so, to me, that’s always been something that’s kind of like, 'why don’t we have cameras?' As people start feeling like they need some additional security … I’m so glad that we’re doing this finally.”
But other council members, including District 5’s Teri Castillo, were doubtful of the program. “Unfortunately, I too have been assaulted downtown," she said, "and I don’t think cameras would have prevented the crime from happening. A concern that I have with this piece is have we decided if we’re going to use [artificial intelligence] software and who’s going to set the metrics in which we’re going to be surveilling.”
City staff said artificial intelligence would be used, but that facial recognition would not.
District 2 Councilmember Jalen McKee-Rodriguez said that didn’t put his fears to rest. “Okay, but every time we say we’re not intending to go there, we get closer and closer to utilizing AI in every other step of policing — it keeps happening,” he said. “And so it’s only going to be a year, two, or three years until we are talking about facial recognition, so I’m going to relay that concern now.”
His main concerns with facial recognition software were the widespread issues that facial recognition often have when it comes to misidentifying darker skin tones.
SAPD is increasing the non-permitted false alarm fee to $250 for commercial and residential properties in an effort to reduce the amount of time officers spend on those calls. These calls are the result of residents and business owners installing alarms without a required permit that then trigger without a real reason.
More than 68,000 of these false alarms cost SAPD $13 million annually. The new fee is expected to bring in $1.9 million of additional revenue.
The department also reviewed the progress of the ongoing Violent Crime Reduction Strategy in partnership with UTSA. Phase 1 stretched from January 2023 to January 2024 and found a 36.9% decrease in average violent crime incidents compared to the previous year, a drop that was steeper than the overall drop in violent crime incidents that have been found across the country.
Phase 2 of the program began in June and is focused on a single apartment complex, including added surveillance, access to support services, and police presence. Phase 3, Focus Deterrence, will begin in 2025 and has a goal to “engage with identified violent offenders at high-risk of recidivism.”
SAFD
The fire department’s $409 million proposed 2025 budget is $25 million larger than this year’s budget, an increase which is largely the result of a 7% wage increase in a tentative agreement the city and the San Antonio Association of Professional Firefighters reached at the end of August.
The union’s members and the city council must each vote to approve the contract before it’s finalized.
Fire response times have steadily increased since 2019 when they were able to respond in an average of seven minutes and 56 seconds. In 2023, response time was up to eight minutes and 42 seconds, and the department aimed to maintain that response time in 2025.
Interim Fire Chief Christopher Monestier explained what’s behind the increasing response time.
“One of the biggest reasons is that we’re spending a lot more time on the front end for call processing, so the dispatchers are making sure that we have the appropriate unit responding to those incidents,” he said. “And then, of course, any increases in call volume, you should expect to see a little bit of a response time increase as well.”
In 2020 there were 207,000 calls for service, compared with the anticipated 259,000 in 2025.
The department is proposing to spend $1.4 million on 15 new positions to staff medical teams at the three busiest fire stations — Fire Stations 4, 19, and 44. These new positions would be active beginning in July 2025.
One portion of the department’s proposed budget that generated disagreement on the city council was the proposal to increase the EMS transport fee from $1,000 to $1,500. District 3 Councilmember Phyllis Viagran said that kind of increase was unacceptable for her residents.
“You’re not in-network for Blue Cross Blue Shield,” Viagran said. “I think we really need to think about this because here I am telling my residents we know that there’s a health crisis on the South Side, we know we don’t have enough medical beds, we need you to be preventative in care, we would like you to get Affordable Care Act, but yet [if] you have to take an EMS ride ever, you could be in for $1,500.”
The department projected that the increased fee would generate $5.17 million in additional revenue. Only 3% of the $25 million in revenue the fee currently generates annually comes from self paying — the rest comes from private and public insurance.
Monestier said the city’s current EMS transport fee is between $400 and $1,000 cheaper than the fees in Houston, Corpus Christi, and Dallas.
The fire department’s proposed 2025 budget also includes funding to move toward replacing five different fire stations. Three of those are expected to complete construction by the end of 2026, while the city is still seeking land for two others.
The San Antonio City Council has a few more weeks of budget briefings before it is scheduled to vote on the 2025 budget on Sept. 19. The 2025 budget will then begin on Oct. 1.
