CPS Energy · 14% of the bill, 31% of City Hall
The largest check is not the property tax.
The proposed General Fund is $1.76B. CPS Energy is booked at $548M — 31.1% — larger than property tax ($493M) and larger than sales tax ($424M)[3]. City and utility both confirmed: 14% of CPS gas and electric collections goes to the General Fund[32]. That is how San Antonio kept the rate frozen for decades. It is also the concentration risk.
FY27 book
31% of the General Fund. The homestead is 28%.
FY26 run-rate
Budgeted $504M. Off-system sales did the rest.
If the 14% vanished
Parks, Libraries, Senior, and Animal Care together are about $198 million. They cannot replace this check.
Where $1.76B of General Fund goes
FY2027 proposed. Public safety is 65%.
Where the General Fund comes from
CPS is larger than the property tax.
The mechanism
Fourteen cents of the utility bill.
San Antonio owns CPS. Ordinance and practice send about 14% of gross gas and electric revenue to the General Fund as a return / payment in lieu of taxes. Jones, on August 6: “That’s not a slush fund. Those are investments and things we pay for that contribute to the safety and health of our community.” She cited cops, and about $3.3M a year for 2,400 senior meals. Just in June, she said, the contribution was just shy of $38.0M[32].
Austin Energy transferred $115M to Austin’s general fund in FY2024[33]. San Antonio books more than four times that, as a 14% cut of gross gas and electric rather than a capped dollar transfer. Houston and Dallas collect franchise fees from private utilities. They do not run City Hall on a power cut. We are not Houston. That is the point.
Four things the 14% does to the math
The check moves with the weather
FY26 CPS is running about $559 million against a $504.4 million budget because of off-system sales. The FY27 book then assumes a drop to $547.8 million. A mild summer or a plant outage is a General Fund event, not a utility footnote.
Not every CPS customer gets a San Antonio cop
CPS serves the city and also Windcrest, Alamo Heights, Castle Hills, Balcones Heights, and unincorporated county. Those suburban bills still send 14% to San Antonio’s General Fund. KSAT put it plainly: not all customers benefit from the services that money buys.
Austin is not the only city the Governor is describing
On August 6 the City and CPS confirmed the 14% on camera because Abbott’s energy plan would make it illegal for city utilities to fund city budgets from power bills. He has tried similar bills before. In 2023, SB 1110 would have barred the transfer; staff said it threatened more than a quarter of general revenue. This is not an FY27 slider. It is why a 31% concentration is a structural risk, not a round-number comfort.
The unused lever is a floor, not a rate hike
If the FY26 off-system beat is real, booking $547.8 million and raising the homestead is a choice. A floor at $559 million is $11.2 million — not a retail electric increase if that source holds. If it vanishes, the 15% reserve is what that reserve is for.
Teaching arithmetic, not a filed bill
A $50 million CPS rate increase would send about $7 million (14%) to City Hall on the same ordinance. That is why a Council that will not raise the homestead still has an incentive to tolerate a utility increase. The unused lever in the machine is the opposite move: floor the FY27 payment at the FY26 run-rate of $559M instead of booking $548M and filling the gap from households. Weather risk remains. The two-year gap is $158M. The CPS beat this year was $54.6M.
Load the floor in the machine
Citizens don’t pay already sets CPS at $559M. That is $11.2 million of the household bill you do not have to send.