Super TIRZ will be City's largest Economic Development Zone. Katherine Driessen, HoustonChronicle.com($)
(You know the drill by now, pay-wall, very small quote, go read the entire piece if you can)
Amounting to something of a super TIRZ, the "Greater Houston Zone" spans more than 7,000 non-contiguous acres of two distinct areas: The business-heavy eastern tip of downtown's central business district and an infrastructure-deprived area to the south, near NRG Park, bounded roughly by Old Spanish Trail, Almeda Genoa, Highway 288 and Main Street.
In summary, this is a HUGE area from which the city derives a LOT of tax money.
And therein lies the problem. Now, with this passage, in a time of explosive growth within the City the tax revenues are "capped" at existing levels while any growth is going to be automatically shunted into "infrastructure improvements and projects and economic development projects" limited to the area itself.
What this means is that there are going to be LESS money in the future to pay-off Houston's ballooning pension obligations and debt, that there will be LESS money in the general fund to address infrastructure maintenance for the rest of the city. There will be LESS money to pay for staff, workers and all of the things that Mayor Parker has said we need and which makes it a requirement for Houston to either make (In Parker's view) either draconian cuts or pass a referendum which removes the revenue cap and allows for massive tax increases at the mayor's discretion.
To quote Ed Emmett, this is a "silly" plan given the financial restrictions under which the city currently finds itself.
A larger problem is that the leadership vacuum in Houston is all-encompassing and growing. Right now there are 3, maybe 4 Councilmembers who seem to have an understanding of how dire these things are going to be and that's it. The Mayor is fiddling while Houston burns money and her only strategy seems to be whining that this has been unfairly foisted on her despite evidence that she was a key architect in it's design.
In other words, this mess is a place. A place called Houston which is filled with many smart people, none of whom seem to choose careers in City government.
