Houston Area Leadership Vacuum: The rise of the Houston LockStep Political Media

When reading the following I want you to keep something in mind: Luxury Apartments and Condominiums.

Houston, it seems, is no longer an affordable place to live. OK sure, housing prices are still relatively low but, in order to raise Houston's cost of living, there is a coordinated effort to fiddle with transportation costs to lower Houston's rating and continue the assault against the single-family vehicle. In fact, it could be argued that you, driving your car to and from work, the grocery store, to your children's recitals, classes, school, etc. have become public enemy number one in Houston's fight against affordability creep.

The car, either within the city or without, has never been sexy when viewed through the spectrum of new urbanist thinking. This is, in large part, because you, in your car, present an obstacle to those who want to be in theirs with less traffic on the roads. It's been known for a long time that the idea of public transportation has strong support but ridership percentages (compared to the whole of the commuting population) are relatively low. The reason for this? People like the idea of buses and trains when other people are riding them and they're driving by (or, in some cases, being driven by) in their cars on wide open roads.

We also know that everyone wants there to be affordable housing, provided it's located far away from their own neighborhood. The convenient answer to this, provided to us by think-tanks and the unproductive class, is "affordable housing located next to transit centers".  This is, presumably, the best of both worlds. You give the poor and gormless ready access to trains and buses which prevents them from mingling with their more enlightened brethren who like to ride their bikes at parks, visit sidewalk cafes and generally live life as they imagine the Europeans do. (except that, the Europeans really don't). This ensures that the older, more expensive, inner-city neighborhoods with their McMansions and refurbished bungalows maintain their 'character and charm' without being subjected to the blight that is brought on by an influx of those less sophisticated and fortunate. It also ensures that the roadways are only populated by two types of people. Either those with luxury sedans who have 500 plus horsepower to travel at 30 MPH or those who drive more modest vehicles from the sticks to work the service jobs that the luxury set requires.

Of course, there's a flaw in all of this thinking and it lies in the italicized words at the top of this post.

Because, you see, what's being built around the transit centers is not affordable housing. Increasingly, in Houston, it's luxury apartments that are being built. The reason for this is due to the relatively high valuation of land requiring high-rents to be sustainable. You're not going to receive a ROI high enough to please your investors if you're building affordable housing inside Loop 610.

It's no accident then that Houston's public transportation network was not designed to bring people from the outlying areas to job centers, as most good public transportation systems do. Instead, the entire purpose of the system is to move relatively affluent residents from their residences and businesses to their places of recreation. During the rare times that the Metrorail builds out to low-income areas (the Near East side for example) the long-term hope is gentrification and an increase in collectible rents will "bring up" blighted, aging neighborhoods. Historic preservation is the sole provenance of the well-to-do. The poor don't have that luxury and, in many cases, would prefer a nice grocery store over a 40-year-old school house that's falling in on itself.

Put it this way: Parks, curbside coffee-ships, wine & tapas bars and five-star restaurants catering to the foodborg and their fellow travelers are not designed for the poor. They're catering specifically to a more elevated class (in their minds) and would recoil in horror if a family of five came in to celebrate a 20 year anniversary. You don't see parents feeding a baby Cheerios from a Ziploc baggie at Pass & Provisions.

Houston's elite and ruling class have long looked to cities such as New York, Chicago, Portland and San Francisco with envious eyes. Cities that are given more run in the national and global media as centers of culture and urbanism. At heart, what we're currently witnessing are successes at attempting to copy those cities. In many cases, the very people who are grousing that Houston needs to copy those cities are the same who came to Houston because it had jobs where the others did not. Trying to explain that to a New Urbanist can cause a paradigm to shift without a clutch, so tread carefully.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong, or faulty, in what the New Urbanists would like to see. It is a different vision of Houston than many people had when they arrived, and a different Houston than what attracted them in the first place, but it's a valid point of view on what the city should be. While I, and others, disagree with the goal that doesn't mean that it's adherents are fundamentally wrong. It would be nice if they argued about it honestly however. Missing from any of these arguments is the fact that Houston's relatively cheap housing has allowed people to spend more on other priorities (including nicer cars) or to move outside of the city center to outlying areas where drives are longer, but lot sizes and square footage bigger, schools better and the infrastructure actually works. These are choices that people make, not something that they are, in many cases "forced" to do. In fact, for all of the talk about 'Houston' growing, it's really the Houston extended metro area that's growing, while the city itself sees population numbers that are flat, or slightly declining.

The problem then is both that people have a choice and they're increasingly not making the ones that the unproductive class would prefer. There are trade-offs inherent in any choice, something that the utterly worthless Houston Area Study constantly fails to include in it's questions. The New Urbanists among us don't want to mention those, because they water down their arguments. Houston being a lot more nuanced than Houtopia.

I've stated before that the "battle" for the future of Houston is over and those who believe as I do, that the public transportation system should be focused on moving people into the city and then to various job centers, have lost badly. From Metrorail to bus reimagining, Houston's public transit system is now fully positioned to actuate the New Urbanist vision. Whether or not the argument has been an honest debate is irrelevant to our current position. We're running full-on, full speed to Houtopia and every out-of-context data point only serves to feed the popular narrative.

What we're seeing now is the second stage, a chance for further diminishing the role of the single-family automobile, and further separating 21st century Houston from the past that led to it's rise as the global city for energy. So-called "complete streets" seek to choke traffic flow to the point of impassability while benign sounding "traffic calming" measures are anything but. Whether or not this is a good or bad thing we might not ever know because the rise of the Houston Lock Step Political Media is going to ensure that only one view is given a voice. That the 'one chosen view' is biased, occasionally dishonest and, in most cases, dictatorial are just the eggs that inevitably get broken in the New Urbanist omelet.

If there was a mission statement it would read as follows:  "In Houston, you are free to choose any mode of transportation you want, as long as it is not a car."

Houston Area Leadership Vacuum: Ken Hoffman makes a good point, buries it, and readers miss it entirely.

Reading through Ken Hoffman's recent piece on HISD Graduation parking fees made me realize something......

NRG Parking Fee and Insult at HISD Graduations. Ken Hoffman, HoustonChronicle.com ($$$)

(The linked article is behind the Chron's increasingly expensive paywall. My quote here is very selective but please, if you can, go read the entire column)

This was a public-school graduation at a public facility. It wasn't professional entertainment, like a football game or a concert, where you expect to pay for parking.

The quoted piece, above, is the argument against the NRG complex charging the parking fee. Sure, Hoffman goes on to do what we all do, argue that many of the student's families attending the graduation might not be financially well off, but he needn't do that.  The argument against was in the quoted sentence above.

What Hoffman did, by making economic demographics the central figure of his piece is to politicize it needlessly.  Take the following response from the comments:

Well, I think life is too short to complain about a $12 parking and if you can't afford it, then you shouldn't be driving an uninsured car.

This is why, in the incredibly insipid world of anonymous online commentary, bringing a red herring into the argument such as demographics only serves to distort the argument for into something it is not.  By bringing in issues such as income inequality and demographics Hoffman all but ensured that his central point (this was a public event at a public-owned [albeit privately operated] facility) has been lost in a wave of anti-corporate, and anti-immigrant snark.

There are also a lot of commenters blaming NRG for this mess.  In fact, NRG only has the naming rights for the complex and had nothing to do with the decision to charge for parking.

If you want someone to blame, then look at the Harris County Sports Authority who neglected to carve out a 'public use' exception to the parking fee in the contract with the Texans and the Rodeo. Had Harris County the leadership to negotiate in this manner, issues of this type would not exist. Instead, it often feels like the lease to run the complex was nothing more than a giveaway on behalf of the County to Bob McNair*.

Should the Texans have offered parking for free?  Certainly. But, absent a contractual obligation to do so they were well within their rights to charge full-rate, regardless of the nature of the event. If you want to blame anyone, point your ire directly at the Harris County Sports Authority.











































*On another, tangential, note: Has there been another public figure who has fallen so far, so fast in public perception than Bob McNair?  From savior of football in Houston to nothing more than a greedy, conniving, miser who's doddering management style is not only ruining the Texans, but embarrassing and financially damaging the City of Houston as well.

 

Houston's Summer Tradition: See, the Kinder Houston Area Survey can be applied to EVERYTHING!

I don't know why I continually read the ramblings of the New Mrs. White. I really don't.  Maybe it's because I'm waiting for the editorial to come along that admits this board has all been a joke and it's been on us. Maybe it's because I have an affinity for reading comedy.

I don't know why I've continued to read Mrs. White over the years, but I suspect that, above all, it's because they always seem to provide me with wonderful blog fodder. If Falkenberg hadn't been handed the insider-baseball Pulitzer of the year, the Chron Ed Board could make a strong case they are the perpetually uncrowned winner in the humor division.

One of Mrs. White's oldest tricks is salivating every time the Houston Area Survey is released and desperately looking for places to misapply it.  This year, the obvious target is the suburbs.  That's because the survey takers expanded the survey into the suburbs, asked a bunch of context-less questions and then published the responses as definitive.

That's enough for Mrs. White, who has now decided to apply this to just about every negative road bond outcome she can find, whether it makes sense to or not. But especially when it's in one of the counties newly covered by the survey and especially when she thinks the case can be made, tenuously, for rail.

But, that wasn't the case here. As a matter of fact, had the architects of the bond issue simply carved out the Woodland's Parkway expansion the bond would have passed just fine. A similar bond, defeated in 2008, was struck down because of a failure to list specific projects. Nowhere in the opposition to either of these bonds was a yearning for increases in public transit expenditures. No where.

Yes, it's true that the The Woodland's Express bus service is very popular. So popular, in fact, there's talk of bringing in MORE busses.  And while Mrs. White tries to offer this up as proof of case for her argument that the suburbs want no cars and all buses and trains, the truth is actually the opposite.

People like Park n' Rides because they allow them to keep their car, just not drive it all the way into work everyday.  This doesn't mean that there's going to be a flurry of votes for new expenditures for trains and dedicated bus lanes. You can try to spin it however you want, using whatever flawed study you want, and it still won't make it so.

Most (not all for sure) people like their cars, but hate their commute. What they hate even more are government agencies trying to spend a ton of taxpayer money with minimal accountability.  That's right, I'm looking at you Metro. It's also important to remember that, in opinion poll after opinion poll, people usually view public transit as things for other people to use. The real hope is that the rest of us take the (now mythical) train and bus while they continue scooting into work traffic-free allowing them to arrive before their latte gets cold.

Public transit then, loved by the Rice/Kinder Houston Area Survey, Mrs. White, and caffeine-addled selfish people everywhere.

There's an editorial for ya.

Houston's Summer Tradition: Lessons (not) learned from a poorly designed survey.

As Spring winds down and Houston begins it's long slog toward Summer's heat and humidity it's time to revisit the worst of political traditions, The Kinder Houston Area Survey.

It's a bright, sunny time when the unproductive class (and the Houston Chronicle) rely heavily on questions asked minus the vital context of trade-off. Where pluralities support light rail and dense, urban living without being asked what they're willing to give up in order to achieve Houtopia.

To whit:

Montgomery and Fort Bend Counties more similar than different study shows. Matthew Tresaugue, HoustonChronicle.com ($$$)

(You know the drill, fair use quote, go read the entire article if you can)

Separated by 50 miles of Houston sprawl, the two counties see bumper-to-bumper traffic as the region's biggest problem, ahead of crime and the local economy, the poll found. And despite the car-oriented cultures of both places, four in 10 people surveyed say they would prefer to live within walking distance of work, restaurants and shops.

(Emphasis mine)

Anyone surprised they said that?  Because who wouldn't want to live within walking distance of these things?  In a perfect world I'd like to live in the South of France and sip Chablis all day while watching beautiful sunsets with two ladies in bikinis by my side.

Of course, that would anger my wife, which would put a strain on my marriage and probably end up with me being divorced. So that would suck. I also would probably lose my job which would mean that I'd have to sneak into France, avoid their tough immigration and have to live in the shadows. Because of this I'd probably be broke so the Chablis that I would drink would be limited to mostly empty bottles that I lifted from café tables, and the two bikini-clad French ladies on my arm would probably only be figments of my imagination since I wouldn't have the Millions of Euros needed to support that lifestyle.

So, that's out then.

What Kinder doesn't (adequately) ask people in it's survey is similar, although not nearly as extreme. What would survey respondents be willing to give up to live the mythical lifestyle that Houston Tomorrow and other groups advocate?

For one, they'd have to give up their current employment which, as is the case with most large companies, is located in on of Houston's business centers. This would probably mean that they'd have to take a significant pay cut. Are they willing to do that?

They'd also probably have to pay 5-10 times more for a similar home if they lived in a walkable area. Dense, urban city living often carrying a high cost. In reality, they'd probably be looking at multi-family housing. I know right now you're thinking one of Houston's many luxury apartments would be pretty good right?  Well, they're not cheap, "luxury" not meaning actually luxurious but expensive. In most cases, including rent and maintenance fees, these will run 2-3 times current house payments in the suburbs.  This means that they're probably looking at a mid-to-lower level apartment complex, which carry negative connotations of high-crime and dodgy maintenance.  Would they be willing to give up their yards and pets to partake in this idyllic life-style?

Then we have the thorny issue of schools. A LOT of suburbanites move to said suburbs to ensure that little Tommy and Tammy attend better school districts. They do this because they all think that their offspring are going to become star athletes or lawyers, doctors etc. The ignores the reality that, in todays marketplace, they're probably going to end up as middle managers with ulcers and 2.4 children, a mortgage (in the suburbs) and a car payment that's slightly too high because that Acura CXV really looked nice in the showroom and 84 months is totally a reasonable amount to spend on a car.

But would they want to give all of this up if it meant they could pop down to the local Whole Foods, get an EZ credit decision to finance their weekly grocery bill and get back home before the Voice starts?

Again, this year, we will never know because the study never asked.

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.

In arguing for at-grade light rail, Mrs. White makes the case against at-grade light rail

The primary reason that old axioms have a shelf-life long enough to become old axioms is that, on some level, they contain nuggets of truth that are so big they cannot be ignored.  I'm reminded of one old axiom when reading today's Mrs. White editorial regarding the Danger Train and the boondoggle that's shaping up over the Harrisburg under er...overpass:  "The definition of insanity is continuing to perform the same actions while expecting differing results."

Mrs. White it seems, fully embraces the insanity that has become Houston Metro's fractured transit-backbone.*

Overpass obstinacy. Mrs. White, Chron.com

There is a certain irony to a light rail route that is lined with auto repair shops and tire stores, but that's what you will see along Metro's nearly completed East End line, which follows Harrisburg from downtown to the Magnolia Park Transit Center. It is a reminder that despite this mass transit investment, car is still king in Houston. With this automotive dominance, Metro and City Hall's refusal to work together to build an overpass for this line that accommodates not only rail, but also cars and pedestrians, seems both short-sighted and spiteful.

The argument of many anti-light rail (NOT anti public transit. There is a difference except in the minds of those who refuse to accept fact) advocates has always been that in a car-centric city such as Houston, taking away miles and miles of vehicular lanes to accommodate a glorified toy train that doesn't do anything to promote mobility is counterproductive to transit needs.

To this end, Mrs. White continues in the next paragraph...

It usually doesn't make sense to prioritize roads in what should be a walkable, multi-modal corridor. Anyone who has tried to drive down Main Street knows that. 

The lack of logic in this statement, when combined with the talking points in the opening paragraph, is stunning.  First, as Mrs. White acknowledges, Houston is still (despite Critical Mass' arguments to the contrary) a car-based city. From that perspective it makes little sense to turn roads in one of the regions largest employment centers into no-car zones.

The fact is, downtown Houston is a driving mess these days.  Even now, when car/DangerTrain collisions have finally shown signs of diminishing, it's still tough to navigate and there are now roads that just end. For a city based on the concept of the car, this makes zero sense. It also raises the question as to why grade separation, argued for by DangerTrain critics but fought against by its supporters, is suddenly a "no-brainer" around Harrisburg but was considered necessary in one of the busiest traffic corridors within the City?

Additionally, you can add the Harrisburg overpass to another in the long list of promises to the community broken by Metro's insistence that the great-white whale be rammed down people's throats at all costs.

Despite these problems, an underpass has remained part of the conversation because it is what the community wanted, and what City Hall promised in 2010. Yet, further study has only demonstrated what City Hall and Metro already knew - an underpass is expensive and risky.

If City Hall and Metro both knew that an underpass was "expensive and risky" then one has to question why it was promised to the residents around Harrisburg in the first place?  Could it have been to garner support for a project on false pretense?

Houstonians were promised many things upon passing the MetroSolutions referendum, a 50% increase in bus service (when, in fact, bus service has decreased over time), a specific route plan (which Metro apparently never intended to follow) and now an underpass which neither Metro or the City ever intended to build.

Predictably Mrs. White, following the charge laid out long ago in her rail memo, is advocating a solution in line with Metro wishes but which still flies in the face of citizen wants. This should not surprise you because Mrs. White has not operated as a citizen's advocate for a very long time. Instead, she beats every institutional drum loudly and often. That the public occasionally gains a benefit is seen more as a happy accident rather than a sign of good governance.

At this risk of continuing to beat a dead horse, Mrs. White's advocacy for Metro's wishes is doing more to hurt the poor than any of the imagined ills of private business against which she rails frequently. At the least, the business community is employing people and providing end-of-a-gun funding for the things New Urbanists like.  At minimum, CM Rodriguez is attempting to keep the wishes of his constituents (customers) in mind. That's more that can be said for Metro and Mrs. White.

To Mrs. White, siding with the rank-and-file against the ruling class is something akin to City treason.  If she weren't such a staunch supporter of gun control I would suggest that the editorial calling for dissenters to be taken out behind George R. Brown and shot wouldn't be too long in coming.

With editorials such as this the only logical conclusion should be that Houston would be better off without this group of institutional shills and that the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board should be disbanded with the resources re-deployed to the news desks. Quasi-governmental factions of the Houston institution already employ many former journalists in their PR departments, let's let them earn their keep.














































*In honor of our Brazilian friends, I suggest we call the Light Rail system Neymar III

Houston Leadership Vacuum: Don't believe that the current administration holds no blame for the pension fund mess.

News today that the City of Houston is considering bringing a lawsuit against the firm that provided the analysis that lead to the 2001 changes in the HFD system by then Mayor Brown is just another case of Mayor Parker trying to wash her hands of the blame on an issue where she has had plenty of input.

City may sue firm over 2001 pension estimates. Mike Morris, HoustonChronicle.com ($)

What's amazing to me is that, in the linked story above, the reporter is continuing to run under the preferred (by the Parker administration) theory that Mayor Parker is dutifully working to bring herself up to speed on a situation with which she has little history.  You see the word "blindsided" thrown around a lot when referring to Parker's role in this.

In a recent story, Mike Morris again parroted the city line that Mayor Parker is an unwilling victim in all of this mess.

Parker's 'good government' approach could cause budget pain. Mike Morris, HoustonChronicle.com ($)

(In the interest of respecting the Chron's pay-wall I'm just going to pull a quote from the story and suggest, if you can, that you go read it all)

"I'm trying to change the game. At some point, one of us has to say, 'We are going to change the rules because that's not going to continue to work,' " Parker said. "It means that we have a strain now and there's things we could be doing that we're not doing, but three mayors back did it to me. I'm not going to do it three mayors forward."

The emphasis in the above quote is mine.  Because the idea that this was "done" to Mayor Parker, and that she didn't have a hand in the issue, requires ignoring her own words and other matters which have long been part of the public record.

To whit:

Labor in the news. AFLCIO (May 19th, 2004)

Archiving a Houston Chronicle story:

City employees would work longer, pay more and get less under a new retirement package proposed Tuesday by Mayor Bill White to slash the $1.9 billion shortfall in Houston's main municipal pension fund.
White's proposal, which must be negotiated with the pension board, is much like the plan the city had in 2001 before more generous pension benefits went into effect. Those benefits have proved unaffordable.
White also proposes to add the city-owned Hilton Americas-Houston hotel to the pension fund's assets to generate more revenue.

City Controller Annise Parker said she has a lot of questions about such a deal.
"I'm not quite sure of the legality," she said. "If I were a pension board member and they offered this asset, I would demand control. I think it would be hard for the city to give that up."

City puts hotel deeper in debt to bolster bloated City pension system. Jenna Colley, Houston Business Journal

"A $300 million reduction in the pension's unfunded liability is a big chunk out of way without the city having to put any cash out," says Parker. "We don't actually transfer the title of the hotel." Under the deal, the city will give up its lien on the hotel to the pension system.
The pension system board will have no control over the actual hotel, which is managed and operated by Hilton Hotels Corp.
As part of the deal, the city will have to pay at least 8.5 percent or about $26 million annually in interest on the $300 million. Under the deal, however, the pension system has the option of brokering that note to third parties.  

At some point in this process, then Controller Parker's "concerns" went away and she became a staunch supporter of the Hotel asset plan.  She also supported borrowing to pay pension obligations before she threw her predecessors under the bus for it.

Here's how to fix the city's pension mess. Annise Parker, Chron.com (May 9, 2004)

In the short term, the city may need to issue pension obligation bonds. This amounts to taking on new debt to pay an existing debt. It is similar to taking out a home equity loan to meet your everyday expenses. It's not a good idea. However, given the city's current financial difficulties, its an idea that may have to be considered to get through the immediate crisis.

Emphasis mine.

Later on she used the hotel asset swap and touted her role in adding to the entire mess as campaign fodder.

InsideOut at City Hall: First Year. Annise Parker, Outsmart. (Jan 2005)

As the city’s chief financial officer, my office provided the mayor and council with assessments of Propositions 1 and 2 and the pension crisis. I also presented the council’s only written analysis of the complicated Hilton Americas hotel transfer, a critical component of the mayor’s pension proposal.
Still up in the air is my proposal to have the controller or a representative serve on the pension board. It’s a perfect fit with the controller’s responsibility as the city’s financial watchdog and a way to bring some independent oversight to the pension fund’s investing policies. There would be no conflict of interest because I have no vote at the council table.

In addition, she later turned on Mayor Bill White, with whom (in her own words) she worked "closely" with on the pension situation.

Houston paying now for past bonds, tax cuts. Taxrates.ee

The city of Houston's budget crisis that has resulted in 747 employees getting pink slips last month and likely will close pools and community centers did not happen overnight.

It has been brewing for the better part of a decade, the result of, among other things, spending more while taxing less, borrowing to pay bills, raiding its piggy bank and channeling ever more payroll dollars into funds for retirees. A public hearing on the coming year's budget is scheduled for June 14.

Mayor Annise Parker inherited a city that she said last year had been spending more than it had taken in "for years." Parker, who served as controller or councilwoman since the 1990s, has refused to second-guess her predecessor, Bill White.

However, she has distanced herself by highlighting that this year's budget would not use pension obligation bonds to meet the city's commitment to retirees — a signature feature of White's budgets. The city borrowed $245 million to pay pension benefits during the White years. The money spent, the city now has to pay $34 million in principal and interest in the coming fiscal year.

"One of the side-effects of term limits is mayors push bills down the line, and Parker happens to be at the point in the line where the bills are coming due," said Nancy Sims, a University of Houston adjunct professor of political science.

In a recent op-ed article in the Houston Chronicle, White wrote that the city would not have been able to obtain reductions in employee pension benefits without relying on some borrowing to make the pension funds more secure. He also cited a 2004 Chronicle op-ed piece by then-Controller Parker in which she wrote, "In the short term, the city may need to issue pension obligation bonds."

Clearly Mayor Parker's current assumption that she was "shocked" by the state of Houston's finances upon becoming Mayor ring hollow. It's very clear, through a reading of the public record, including Parker's own words, that she was intimately involved in putting the city in the current financial hole.

This is not to say that Parker's current plans lack merit, or that her refusal to continue covering the current pension debt with additional borrowing is not a good idea. Quite the contrary. It could be argued that cuts, as painful as they may be, NEED to be made and made immediately.

However, the ingestion of the public line by secretarial journalists runs counter to the fact-based public record that suggests the Mayor is has been a willing accomplice, during her time as City Controller, in making this situation.

The public record also suggests that Houston's leadership vacuum has been present for years. Despite all of the glowing press given to Mayor's Brown and White by the Houston Chronicle, this issue has been simmering below the surface, unnoticed and unreported, for years now. At least since 2001. That it's just now coming to light reveals a blind spot in local media that needs to be corrected.

Of course, the Chronicle will point out that they have been running a series of Bill King warnings on this issue but none of them have made it into their hard news reporting and currently, King has been taking part in the same revisionist history as he ramps up for what many believe is a planned run for the Mayoral office.

Houston's taxpayers deserve better than the shoddy fiscal management that's been provided by their elected officials and the secretarial reporting by their media outlets which have allowed these problems to fester under the surface for years now.

 

Houston Leadership Vacuum: So bad even Mrs. White takes notice.

Over the years on this blog it's been very easy to take the Chron Editorial board to task. Too often the editorial arm of the former newspaper of record in Houston has churned out knee-jerk, half-witted missives that typically call for solving things by rolling out a catapult and hurling large amounts of money at the problem.

Apparently, if the Chron's writing makes you angry, and you respond to them angrily, the catapult gets locked down.

HPD Needs Help, Mrs. White, Chron.com

Experience has demonstrated that money will not solve the problem. Over the last decade, HPD has seen its budget grow from $468 million to $722 million - not including the cost of the crime lab and neighborhood protection departments. In that time, HPD actually lost more than 100 officers. So where did the funds go? That is the question that City Hall needs to answer before it cuts another check to HPD's questionable management.

The rest of the editorial is a scathing indictment of both HPD Chief Charles McClelland as well as Mayor Annise Parker, neither of whom have shown any leadership on this issue.

Credit where credit is due. After the possibly Chron-nominated Pulitzer finalist Lisa Falkenberg borrowed the catapult from Mrs. White in a ridiculous example of apologia it is possible that it was just decided that too much was too much.

Either way, both the reporting and the resulting editorial is a fine, if rare, example of solid watchdog reporting of the type newspapers once mastered. It's nice to see the Chron-crew practicing some actual journalism instead of just dutifly taking marching orders from institutional sources, insulting readers or (amazingly) suggesting anyone (else) is in need of an editor.

There's still way to much secretarial journalism going on over on Texas Avenue, but at least there are signs of life under the new leadership.