Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner agreed to a 7 percent pay increase for police officers just weeks before a Houston referendum vote to determine whether firefighters deserve comparable pay for similar ranks.
Turner announced some of the details of the pay raise at Wednesday's city council meeting.
The two-year agreement with police will cost the city $52 million and goes into effect July 1, 2019.
Turner has skipped few opportunities to tell the public that the fire referendum vote, appearing on ballots in November as Proposition B, amounts to a 25 percent pay increase for firefighters and would cost $98 million. The HPFFA refutes that number but hasn't provided its own analysis to ABC13.
"If it passes, it's going to be ugly," Turner told reporters after the meeting. "There are no good outcomes."