Houston Area Leadership Vacuum: The New Mrs. White rebuts her own argument without realizing it.

It's very rare these days to click on Chron.com and find actual 'news'.  Typically the former newspaper of record for Houston focuses on click-bait slide shows usually involving women in various stages of undress or Houston "lifestyle" stories that typically focus on things wealthy white folks like to do. It's not surprising then that, when they do attempt to venture into the serious, they quite often get it wrong. Increasingly, they don't even understand why they get it wrong.

Take today's editorial on the creatively named ad-hoc committee on city charter changes.

Charter Changes, The New Mrs. White, Chron.com

The committee voted unanimously on Thursday to leave in place the unnecessary and fiscally irresponsible revenue cap. Passed by voters in 2004, with some tweaks in 2006, the cap requires the city to limit growth in property tax revenue. There is no similar mechanism to limit declines in tax revenue. So while city services can take a sharp nosedive during an economic downturn, any recovery will remain stuck in the slow lane.

Council members have said that they're hesitant to remove the cap when cutting spending is still an option. But savings that seem plainly obvious are often politically difficult to achieve.

That cost savings are so difficult to implement is proof of case that the revenue caps are a needed and necessary check on government growth.  If even obvious savings can't be implemented then there has to be a mechanism in place to ensure that City Government is living (sort of) within its means.

Maybe it's because they're too busy looking at slide-shows of bikini's through the ages, or buildings that used to be in Houston but the New Mrs. White, and the rest of news room, seem to have little idea of the problems actually facing the city, or any idea how to deal with them.

The rest of the article is a rather tepid defense of Houston's 'strong mayor' system of governance, her only argument for keeping it is that "it's not broke".  What Mrs. White ignores is that the system IS breaking as Houston's financial outlook grows worse and worse as the Parker administration winds down.

In times like these, where the Mayor obviously is not up to the task of governing, having a system in place that would allow Council Members to have more input on the agenda would help. That the New Mrs. White cannot see this would be puzzling except that the Chronicle has abdicated the throne of media watchdog in Houston.

In short, there's very little reason to pay attention to the Chronicle on matters of Houston, State or Federal governance any longer. As such, there's very little reason to pay attention to them at all.

The quick fix here is to shutter the entire editorial department and redeploy the resources to actual hard news reporting. Unfortunately that won't be happening any time soon because the leadership seems hell-bent on turning Houston's last newspaper into some kind of watered down hybrid of Deadspin and TMZ. All of this while still claiming they have the insight to make reasoned political arguments regarding government.

They could not be more wrong.