At the municipal level, the process is deeply flawed. Part of this is due to public apathy and a large portion is due to the fact that most people don't receive much helpful information in regards to municipal elections from a media that is more interested in page-clicks and Nielson ratings than fulfilling it's public responsibility. Kevin D. Williamson of National Review Online did a pretty good job of outlining the issue here where he also posited that HER Ordinance is a symptom of the larger problems.
Mr. Williamson also pointed out a big problem, in Houston, as it relates to out-going Mayor Annise Parker:
With its bathroom ordinance, Houston takes leave of it's municipal senses. Kevin D. Williamson, NRO.com
Instead of a competent city-builder who is also gay, Houston got a culture warrior whose parting gift to the city is a deeply stupid fight over “HERO” — the Houston Equal-Rights Ordinance — which among other things would create a new body of local civil-rights law (the lawyers cheer with one voice) covering transgender/transsexual people in the matter of public accommodations, meaning public toilets and the like. This wasn’t preceded by some crisis in the matter of toilet accommodations for men in dresses, but the issue is critically important to some people: Namely, to people who are in their affluence and comfort able to maintain a state of graceful blindness to the actual nuts-and-bolts problems facing Houston.
It is fair to consider HER Ordinance to be Parker's parting gift to the damaged political system she has helped to foster in her 20ish years of public political activity as a member of City Council, an ineffective City Controller and eye-off-the-ball Mayor. Parker ran as a pragmatist, a "get things done" Democrat whose identity as a member of the GLBT community was personal, but not reflective of her political proclivities. She said many times, in her first run for Mayor, that she was not running "as a gay activist". Houston took her at her word.
In her final term, absent the looming threat of the ballot box, Parker has reversed course and put back on her GLBT Activist hat, in direct contrast to her previous public persona. It has also been revealed that she is somewhat of a blind emperor, clueless as to her lack of apparel in regards to the wonkish policy issues she claimed to champion.
For example, while Houston is receiving much national attention for HER Ordinance it's going almost unnoticed that 2 Million gallons of raw sewage inundated parts of the city during the last round of storms. This is a much bigger problem, in the minds of those paying attention, than anything brought up under HER Ordinance and the question should be why a Mayor, who ran on a platform of common-sense fiscal management, has pushed more pressing issues to the back-burner in order to force a referendum on an issue that is (in her words) "personal".
A more important question, for Houston's future, is how the city is going to deal with some of the pressing financial, structural and infrastructure issues that it is currently facing. Those questions are going to be answered in the Mayoral race, the Controller's race and the races for various positions on City Council.
How Houston eventually decides to vote on HER Ordinance is a temporary problem, one that can be addressed by either trying again, this time bringing in all interested parties to craft an ordinance with input from all (and not just copy and pasting partially from San Antonio's ordinance) or tweaking what is there to reflect the many concerns over the existing ordinance.
How Houston decides to attack its fiscal challenge, either through repealing the pillow-soft, voter-imposed revenue cap and raising taxes, issuing bonds to cover needed infrastructure repair and replacement, reducing expenses and "belt-tightening", a combination of all of the above and dealing with pension reform are going to be the overriding, important questions that will be (in part) answered today. How those questions are answered could be the difference between a long, slow descent into a Detroit-like erosion or a vaulting of Houston into the national spotlight as it, along with the world, transition bumpily into the new economy that is going to come whether local leaders and businesses like it or not.
The core of this election is Houston's future as a city were business gets done and wealth is created, not it's transition into a progressive Houtopian dreamland where sewage courses through the streets and bayous during rainstorms and lawyers capitalize on navigating businesses through a Minotaur's maze of a newly created municipal legal morass.
