Last week there were fired the first, quiet, shots in Mayor Parker's coming offensive against the City revenue cap approved by voters in 2004 and (although pillowy soft) the new sign for what ails the city amongst the increased expenditures crowd. Missing from the argument is that the "cap" places restrictions on revenue but fails do the same for spending. This omission by the local media is a big one. Secretarial journalists are good at regurgitating the truism that the cap might be met, but they're not so good at examining why hitting revenue ceilings might be a problem when there's no problem now meeting needs when revenue falls within limits.
Consider this: For the 2015 fiscal year budget Houston has not bumped into the cap. This means that revenues (exempting raises in enterprise funds which were excluded in Prop 1) have not yet risen at rates higher than what would be calculated based on population growth and inflation. In 2016 however, this is expected to change.
The short argument that's already been presented because of this (projected) change are dire warnings that Houston will need to, in some way, (maybe) reduce revenues to those levels prescribed by the cap. This would not mean that the budget would be "cut" only that the increase would be rolled back to the capped limits. It's the same lie that we saw almost daily in the state education funding debate, you know, the one where a reduction in increases morphed to a $4 Billion dollar "cut" in education funding.
The second piece of the cuts puzzle, the one that's not being reported, is that in order for the cap roll-back to be an issue budgeted expenditures must rise at a level that would exceed the revenue ceilings. In 2015 the City is operating under the cap structure just fine. We are being led to believe that this is going to change but there has been nothing outlining what those changing factors might possibly be. True, during the economic down-turn there were budgetary restraints. Those weren't caused by the cap however, they were caused by a sluggish economy. What we're seeing now is an unaccountable local government with no effective fiscal watchdog suggesting that a restriction not previously a concern is suddenly going to become one because......well just because. Because of this because the city will be looking at mass lay-offs, an even worse pot-hole situation and future Mayors being required to take their executive staff to lunch at McDonald's instead of pricey haunts in the Heights.
Yes, it's a harrowing thing to consider.
You can think about this in terms of a vacuum. The default setting of a vacuum is to suck up all debris in it's path leaving nothing hanging around. During the process of this sucking the vacuum bag gets bigger and bigger, expanding to a point that it needs to be emptied out. If a vacuum doesn't suck up all of this debris then we consider the vacuum to be faulty and look for a model that will do a better job sucking. Should there come a time that the vacuum is forced to return the debris through it's business end, the results are typically loud, dirty and viewed with much dismay.
The City of Houston government has, for several years now, operated in the same manner, expanding (as does a vacuum bag) to suck up all available revenue regardless of actual need. If, on the rare occasion, the vacuum is asked to regurgitate debris, the result is typically messy and comes with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Tax refunds, which are darlings of conservative politicians on the campaign trail but very, very rare, are to progressives the same as asking them to put their lips on the vacuum hose while it's in reverse mode. If you're wondering the biennial budget cycle is the equivalent of changing the bag. (Just to cap the analogy)
In many ways the fight that you're going to see over the revenue cap will be all about asking the vacuum to give back what it's sucked up. Currently city expenditures fit the revenue that's being collected in accordance with the cap. By casting the cap as potentially a creator of job cuts, the Parker administration is admitting that plans are in place for expenditures to rise at a level unauthorized by the cap as well. This would mean a foreseeable increase in city budgets beyond population growth and inflation. What this really means is that Mayor Parker is preparing to roll out several costly initiatives, or that the city is doing a horrific job in controlling costs. Either this or it means that the making of, and sticking to, budgets is not something they're all that interested in. It's much easier to just use the money up, whether you need it or not, than to exercise fiscal discipline.
There's no reason, other than expansive budgeting or poor cost control, that expenditures currently fitting under capped revenues would need to be cut due to the imposition of the latter in future years. A failure to be able to plan for this contingency suggests that the fiscal leadership of Mayor Parker and her staff is out to lunch (probably at great taxpayer expense) while the City decides who can use urinals, when they can use them and what companies with which iPhone apps can allow people to hitch a ride outside the auspices of Yellow Cab. One can't help but wonder when in the course of worrying about Phil from Duck Dynasty, weighing in on Johnny Manziel, closing down Houston streets to car traffic in support of the "things white people like" blog or settling in for awkward photo ops on bicycles did Parker come up with this idea?
One thing is for certain, the leadership and journalism vacuums within the Houston region (I'm looking at you Harris County and your Astrodome, traffic, etc.) are continuing to expand as fewer and fewer outlets provide real, non-secretarial reporting. Investigative journalism forces elected officials to justify their lack of action and chicken-little cries of doom. It is a hedge against the city gorging itself while real needs go unmet. Secretarial journalism searches for crumbs that fall off the table of the ruling class and hopes to keep their invitations intact for the next soiree. One wonders, if the vacuum bag of the city budget under Mayor Parker stretches past the breaking point, just how bad of a loud, cacophonous mess it will be? And, furthermore, will Houston's secretarial journalists even hear the noise as they pat themselves on the back for their Pulitzer nomination selfies?
