How Houston Uses the TIRZ System to Benefit High Dollar Areas and Ignore Poorer Neighborhoods. Steve Jansen, Houston Press.
In 2007, the Southwest Houston TIRZ dolled up the intersection of Bellaire Boulevard and Fondren Road with a $4 million enhancement that included new brick sidewalks, enhanced lighting and concrete rings that housed street signs.
Every six months or so, a car would smash into the concrete, and the rubble would sit there for at least a year. The sidewalks also crumbled immediately, explains Bigham, because the developer hadn’t laid concrete beneath the brick pavers. “By 2012, it was an absolute embarrassment,” he says.
Because state law prohibits a TIRZ from spending any money on maintenance, that burden falls on the local management district. Bigham went to Hawes Hill Calderon, which heads the Southwest Houston TIRZ as well as the Greater Sharpstown Management District, and he says he couldn’t get an answer. When he took the issue to city officials, they, too, washed their hands of the problem.
“Nobody would take responsibility. If you’re going to collect a consulting fee every month, then do your job and take care of it. That’s the bottom line,” Bigham says about Hawes Hill Calderon.
It got to the point where the Sharpstown neighborhood association considered writing a check for the improvements, which Bigham says would cost a couple of thousand dollars. Eight years later, the intersection remains in shambles.
In the affluent Uptown and Westchase, -broken sidewalks are repaired because the management districts capture significant amounts of ad valorem tax revenue from high-dollar properties. It also helps to fix things that break when there’s an internal management team, rather than a group of outside consultants, at the ready to deal with problems, says Breeding of the Uptown Management District and the Uptown TIRZ.The quote above is just a small piece of a very long, well-written article by the Houston Press on TIRZ funding, operations and the fuzzy financial world in which they operate.
I've long argued that TIRZ funding has a negative effect on city services. The counter argument to this is that, without TIRZ expenditures, the City of Houston would be over the revenue cap and could not use the money regardless. This is undoubtedly true. However, the TIRZ system takes pressure off of elected officials to spend money wisely, because there's always an unaccountable bank of money outside of the budget proper for them to tap to provide trinkets to prospective voters.
Most of the "reforms" being tossed around by opponents of the current TIRZ system involve making changes that redirect the spending from more affluent areas, to poorer areas. All this is doing is redirecting the trinkets to people who some think need it more.
Solutions of this type amount to little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The band is still playing and the iceberg is still coming, faster than ever.
The real solution is to either vastly reform the TIRZ process in the Texas Legislature. If the Lege decided to take this up I have some suggestions:
- Shorter, more flexible sunset dates. - This would allow the TIRZ to be brought to an end once their mission ended.
- More narrowly defined objectives - Preventing the 'mission creep' that we're now seeing in highly developed areas where TIRZ officers are trying to keep their phony baloney jobs.
- Harder boundaries - Preventing the types of land-grabs that are outlined in the Press piece.
- More accountability - Including increased audit requirements and new, more robust, public disclosure rules.
- Term limits for appointments - because.
I'm not a fan of elected board members for TIRZ, nor will I ever be. I think appointments are fine but need to be reigned in with some stringent term limits.
What I would really prefer is for Houston to follow California's lead and eliminate TIRZ all-together. At some point Texas cities are going to have to take a long, hard look in the mirror to determine whether or not their pace of expenditure is sustainable in the long-term. TIRZ funding hides the real costs of running a city, and allow for the continued idea that spending monies on parks and one-bin recycling are the primary issues of our day.
I hope you will take the time and read the entire report. I also hope to see this come up in the Mayor's race soon. My guess is it will be cast aside as "junk food" by those who want more bike paths whatever the cost.
