Everyone in San Antonio Has an Opinion About the Budget. Now Everyone Has the Numbers.

On August 13, San Antonio's city staff presented a $4.4 billion proposed budget for fiscal year 2027, and inside it the first property tax rate increase the city has put on the table in 34 years. The rate would move from $0.54159 to $0.56288 per $100 of taxable value, a 3.9% increase, as one piece of a plan to close a projected $157.7 million two-year gap in the General Fund. City Council votes on Thursday, September 17, and the new fiscal year begins October 1.

Since the proposal landed, the city has been arguing with itself. Council declined, five votes to six, to send a $489 million arena contribution to a public vote. The mayor has floated winding down the Ready to Work program early, asked private business to pick up $6.5 million in city funding for fifteen nonprofits, and pressed to recover more of what the city spends on Fiesta. Neighborhood groups are asking why tax increment zones keep capturing property tax growth while the General Fund runs short. Homeowners are asking what the new rate means for their own bill.

None of that argument is a problem. A budget season is supposed to be an argument. The problem is what people have been arguing from.

The math was public. It was not readable.

Every number in this fight is a public record. The proposed budget, the five-year forecast, the tax rate history, the tax increment zone agreements: all of it is published, and almost none of it is usable by the people it belongs to. The official documents run to hundreds of pages of tables. Local news covers the headlines, because that is what news is for. Between the two there was nothing that let a homeowner punch in their taxable value and see what the proposal costs their house, or let a resident trace where each dollar of the General Fund actually goes.

When the numbers are that hard to reach, opinions get formed some other way: from a headline, from a neighbor, from whichever side of the dispute got to someone first. The data exists, but the argument runs on vibes.

So we built The Ledger

The Ledger is a free, bilingual, interactive look inside the FY2027 proposal, created by our founder and CEO Michael Pendleton and built in San Antonio by The AI Cowboys with AI, data science, and the city's own public documents. It lives at theaicowboys.com/satxledger, in English and Spanish, and every figure in it is cited to a primary source: city budget documents, the five-year forecast, state statute, and the local reporting that surfaced each number.

It is built around one idea: show the math, then get out of the way.

• My Bill. Enter your home's taxable value and see the exact dollar difference between the current rate and the proposed one, next to the city's own $2.95-a-month figure for the average home.
• The Dollar Grid. Of every $100 the General Fund spends, watch where each dollar lands. About 65 of them go to police and fire before anything else is funded.
• Walk a Day in the City. Seven screens that follow a pothole, a 911 call, and a closed senior lunch site to the budget lines behind them.
• The Tradeoff Machine. Four would-you-rather scenarios built from the real levers: raise the bill or recapture tax growth, and watch the year-three gap refuse to die either way.
• Solutions that don't bill the homestead. Seven scored alternatives, from tax increment recapture under Chapter 311 of the Texas Tax Code to a CPS Energy dividend floor, each with revenue estimates, legal analysis, and current status.
• The full forensic briefing. For the wonks: nine findings, a waterfall of the $157.7 million gap, department-by-department comparisons, and the five-year forecast that still shows a $38 million hole in year three and a $136 million hole in year five after the plan passes.

The Ledger is independent of City Hall. It does not tell you the rate increase is right, and it does not tell you it is wrong. It shows you that the plan closes the gap with $89.6 million in spending cuts, $30.4 million in new fees, 101 eliminated positions, and the rate change, and it lets you test what you would do instead.

How you present data is a civic decision

We build AI systems for a living, and the deeper lesson of this project is not technical. The same numbers behave differently depending on how they are presented. A $157.7 million gap in a PDF is an abstraction; the same gap as a waterfall chart next to your own tax bill is a decision you can hold an opinion about. A budget published only in English excludes a large share of the city that pays for it; the same budget with a Spanish toggle on every screen does not. A figure with no citation is an assertion; the same figure linked to the city's own forecast is a fact anyone can check.

That is what AI and data science should be doing in public life: not generating opinions, but collapsing the distance between a public record and the public. The technology matters only because it makes that collapse cheap enough that a San Antonio company can do it for its own city in budget season, while the argument is still live and the vote has not happened yet.

Have the argument. Bring the numbers.

We expect people to disagree about this budget after using The Ledger. Some will conclude the rate increase is the honest price of a structural gap; some will conclude the city should pull other levers first. Good. That is the argument San Antonio should be having, and it is a better argument when both sides are reading the same math.

The vote is September 17. Open The Ledger, run your own house through it, walk the tradeoffs, and then find your council district and say what you think. We built the machine so that whatever opinion you land on, it is genuinely yours.