You hold your nose.
Turner for Mayor. HoustonChronicle.com ($$$)
(In keeping with the Chronicle's desire for their editorials to be lightly read I'll only lightly quote here and encourage you, if possible, to go and read the entire thing)
We thought that there wasn't such a thing as a Democratic or Republican pothole, but Sylvester Turner has proved us wrong. In a race that's supposed to be about the issues - pensions, public safety and, yes, potholes - Turner has gone full negative. His campaign is spending enormous amounts of money to hammer his opponent Bill King on matters that range from small to minute. Policies have been misrepresented. History has been distorted. A boat's name has become a topic of speculation.
But still, the Chronicle raises the Turner banner, and provides a key insight as to why further down the way....
We've also yet to see a solid proposal that sets Houston on a fiscally sustainable path without raising the revenue cap, which restricts property tax collection combined rates of inflation and population growth. Moody's Investors Service specifically pointed to the trifecta of rising pension obligations, spiking debt payments and the city's revenue cap as threats to Houston's financial well-being. Turner wants to address all three of those issues. King instead continues to falsely equate lifting the revenue cap with a tax hike.
In effect what the Chronicle is suggesting here is that yes, Sylvester Turner is turning out to be a politician's politician. He's running a mean-spirited, negative campaign designed to divide rather than unite, the latter theme which Turner is keen to call for in his public speeches. (A member of the local media, on Twitter, quoted Turner in his 'victory' speech in the general election saying "Before you can fix a pothole, you have to love one another") but he's willing to bust the spending cap and continue to promote the type of trinket governance that we like, so you should vote for him anyway.
Oddly enough, these misgivings about Turner by the Editorial Board are not new.
Sylvester Turner for Mayor (Oct 12, 2015)
We can only guess what political machinations led the city's three key public unions to endorse Turner before meeting with every other candidate. And time has obscured the scandals that bogged down Turner during his last two mayoral campaigns. Despite all the baggage that comes with a long-time legislator, Turner still stands as the candidate best suited for City Hall.
So, you have a candidate whose potentially going to be scandal-ridden, who has a past history of scandals and who, apparently, thinks that love (and massive tax increases) are going to fill potholes.
Pretty much all that's needed for the Editorial Board to endorse these days.
It is worth noting that about the only thing negative the Chronicle can find to say about King is that he's both potentially not as connected as Turner (read: less chance for scandal*) and he doesn't want to tax and spend the City to death. For the Chronicle Editorial Board, failure to support tax increases is now viewed as the worst of all possible sins, even greater than surfing porn sites and escort services on the company dime. (there is evidence that the sites he was surfing were of an illegal nature to boot, and that he visited them often.)
Can you imagine the resources for local watchdog reporting that would be freed up if the entire editorial/opinion section of the Chronicle was outsourced and replaced with staffing on the news desks?
We might actually get some meaningful stuff on the Port Authority.
Instead, we get this, which is just another point of evidence in the forensic analysis of the paper's decline in both circulation and on-line page views.
*I say "less chance" because it's silly to say that any candidate has no potential for scandal, the entire political patronage system is rife with problems, as Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review does a good job outlining here.
