Houblog

No, not lesbian. We knew that.

She’s a conservative?

Methinks the LA Times doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about. Someone who has silently financed Bill White’s spending agenda is not a conservative, fiscal, or otherwise. Conservatives keep government spending restricted to the necessities, and do not waste time with worthless amenities such as sports stadiums, useless/expensive/dangerous trams, and wind energy schemes that only benefit friends. Nor do they spend a million dollars on consultants just to cover their political butts for the next run. That’s been the last six years, and the controller has fiddled while Rome burned. We will now discover if this was political pragmatism or agreement with the Democratic machine that Bill White has built.

We’ll be watching to see just how “conservative” this new mayor is.

As in, iceberg dead ahead!

Lemer/Farb/Roberts assessment of City of Houston Finances (22 October 2009)

Bob Lemer has become known as a bit of a “disaster monger”, and has been about as welcome as a global warming skeptic at a Greenpeace convention. Unfortunately, he’s also correct, and he’s not pulling his punches.

The City of Houston is financially broke and it appears that the mayor who takes office in January 2010 may have to captain the City through bankruptcy procedures.

Well if that ain’t telling it like it is.

Ok, here is my non-accountant read on it: Yes, if we honestly ‘fess up to what the (out of date and UNaudited) books say, we are flat broke. As in, we have a negative net value. That’s not the same thing as bankruptcy though, and while he confuses the point deliberately, I think he’s doing it in good faith. Bob and his co-signers, Aubrey M. Farb and Tom Roberts, are trying desperately to turn the Titanic before we hit the iceberg.

I recommend the full read above, but if Accountant Math makes your head hurt, you may want to skim at least the first half. If that’s too hard for you, I have highlights for the really attention-impaired, presented somewhat out of order, below the fold.

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I haven’t got the time to blog this properly, but head over to Texas Watchdog this morning for a look at what almost certainly prompted Vacar’s sudden “retirement.”

This is outstanding investigative reporting, the likes of which has been abandoned by the Houston Chronicle, which now relies on bloggers to cover the news while it keeps us informed of, well see for yourself.

Of course considering that the Chronicle’s loss (in staff) has been TW’s gain lately, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

It’s a truism that big news that the city government doesn’t want you to hear will always break late on a Friday afternoon. Once again, it’s been proven.

Richard Vacar, who led the Houston Airport System for more than 11 years through several multi-billion-dollar expansion projects, abruptly left the post today, according to an announcement from Mayor Bill White’s office.

It was unclear whether Vacar was fired or left voluntarily. The announcement from the mayor’s office said he had retired.

Hey, he retired so fast, his own staff didn’t know. That happens all the time, right? Seriously, he was definitely shown the door, and the mayor obviously didn’t care if it hit him in the butt on the way out. Special inside knowledge? Nah, just the total abrogation of protocol.

Rorschach suggested that it might be the news leak over the new runway while the Lege is still in session, considering eminent domain bills. I don’t think I buy it.

This has all the hallmarks of MBW in full-blown rage mode. Now Vacar may have wanted the extra runway, and we know he’s the tool of Yellow Cab and the entire airline industry. (Or should I have stopped at “tool”?) But unless there’s a hell of a lot more to this.. as in “Bill, get us this runway and we’ll make damn sure you’re the next jr.Senator from Texas,” I just don’t see White going bonkers over this. In fact, I don’t see him even trying to make that deal unless he thinks such an obvious screw of the public (and our already broken budget) would look good right before he runs for office.

So did he catch Vacar eating babies for breakfast, or what?

Is the real problem that someone has proof that Vacar is as corrupt as we’ve always felt he was?

And is it just me, or is the Chron burying this story under swine flu and knee surgery infections at Methodist hospital?

Carolyn Feibel reports at the Chronicle’s Politics blog, that the city quietly added $60 million to its debt obligation last Friday, in order to pay its obligations on HPD pensions. Amazingly, this was reported as if it were good news.

The city refinanced a portion of its pension obligation - $400 million of it, to be exact. Previously, the city had issued a $300 million promissory note to the Municipal Employees Pension System in 2004, using the Hilton Americas-Houston as collateral. That lowered the unfunded liability left over from the Brown administration. On paper, that is. But the White administration deferred both payments and interest, so the eventual obligation grew to $341 million.

Now, the city has refinanced that old obligation, and paid off the $341 million owed to the municipal pension fund. The old obligation would have cost 8.5 percent interest if the city had stuck with it. The new bond issued Wednesday is worth $400 million, with a 6.29 percent interest rate. The extra millions will be used to pump cash into the police pension, as well.

This article is pitched as good news, but what it really says is that the Cits just borrowed an additional $59 million to finance the police pension fund and $41 million just to pay the deferred interest on the previous $300 million debt. The last sentence of the quote makes it obvious that the first sentence is misleading. Worse, the math doesn’t add up. Here’s what happened, if we cut out all the smoke and mirrors.

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There’s been some confusion over a request by Ed Wulfe to swap some land and a public road in the Galleria area for his Boulevard Place project. After looking at the maps and reading the proposed ordinance carefully, I wanted to post to set the record straight. This is not S. Post Oak BLVD that’s being handed over to Ed, it’s S. Post Oak LANE. I’ve always been annoyed at the confusion engendered by the developers who want to make money by giving everyone a “Post Oak” address, and this is part and land-parcel of the effect. Although, the actual deal is almost as bad as if it were Post Oak Blvd.

Post Oak Lane is about one block to the west, and dead ends into Ed Wulfe’s Boulevard Place development. It doesn’t go anywhere. Skylark is a half-block further west, and also dead ends. Ambassador Way runs east-west, about a half-block west from S. Post Oak Blvd, and either dead ends or meets McCue’s northern end (maps differ).

The net effect of the land swaps is to either extend Ambassador Way, and/or move it a bit southward, to meet up with an extended SPO Lane. The latter will be itself curved west into line with Skylark, and Skylark’s southern end will be chopped off and twisted to meet SPO Lane from the west. The combined streets will apparently connect to the northern end of McCue, thus relieving congestion on S. Post Oak Blvd, which is only one block east, and providing customers of Mr. Wulfe’s development a less-trafficed access from the rear. Note that spillover traffic coming from the north is currently forced over to Sage or Chimney Rock.

How long until the residents of Chevy Chase (which meets McCue from the west in this area) want their street blocked off is anyone’s guess. My money’s on “when the construction starts, unless they’re reading this.” FYI I’m not sure if the Centre at Post Oak is a Wulfe development, but if it is, this will allow him to assemble a mega-block approximately the size of the current Galleria.

What kept me digging through this until I understood it was the lengthy discussion of the past history of this project — apparently the deal had been through previous incarnations in 2004 and 2006. The 2004 deal involved Ed getting to cut the streets in question off, and having to construct barriers and. Then the deal was renegotiated in 2006:

…City Council authorized the abandonment and sale of a portion of South Post Oak Lane, a portion of Skylark Lane, four turnaround street easements, two 10-foot-wide utility easements, and a 10-foot-wide prescriptive water line easement in exchange for the conveyance to the City of right of way for the realignment and the construction of South Post Oak Lane and Skylark Lane to City standards at no cost to the City…

Now Ed’s back again, with yet another re-negotiation of the deal. The new ordinance reads:

…an ordinance authorizing the abandonment and sale of a portion of South Post Oak Lane, a portion of Skylark Lane, two 10-foot-wide utility easements, and a 10-foot-wide prescriptive water line easement in exchange for a consideration of $1,500.00 plus the conveyance to the city of right-of-way for South Post Oak Lane and Ambassador Way…

Notice what’s missing? Ed Wulfe no longer has to construct the streets to handle the additional traffic caused by his development!

.

Boy, talk about some rules for some folks (Ashby high-rise developers) and other rules for Ed Wulfe! Not only does he not have to spring for a traffic study (it’s not a multi-family high rise, after all), he doesn’t even have to build the streets — we get to do that for him at taxpayer expense!

But don’t worry… BLVD Place, a development the size of the Galleria, will be conveniently near a rail station, and that nice park we also got to pay for (screw the owners)!

Huh, a complete disregard for the effects on vehicle traffic, and land development coincidentally near the rail alignment. Y’know, has anyone ever actually seen Metro chairman (and also coincidentally, land developer) David S. Wolff and land developer Ed Wulfe in the same place at the same time? I’m just askin’…..

Ed Wulfe

David Wolff

City Controller Annice Parker finally gets involved in the debate.

“My first concern is for the land acquisition. While there has been public speculation about the use of the land, the request for council action identifies no specific public purpose. That is backward public policy,” the controller stated. “The city is not in the land speculation business. Council should know for what purpose the land will be used.”

“TIRZ dollars are property taxes. This is a legitimate use of TIRZ monies, but to say there will be no public dollars, or tax dollars, used for this purchase is simply inaccurate,” she said.

“I am concerned about the use of public utility revenues to help make this deal possible. Our water and sewer customers should not be helping to subsidize a professional sports facility, no matter how much we want it,” the controller said.

Just so you know, your water and sewer rates will be going up 1.8% in April, whether or not this passes. And the Zoo Development Corporation will still get their service for free.

Edit: Hat tips to Off the Kuff and blogHouston.

I haven’t written much about the Bozonicle lately (well, truth is, I haven’t written much at all), but I caught something in the former “City Hall Blog” over there today. You know, the one that’s now about politics in city and county, instead of, you know, news. Since Matt’s been reined in, clearly I need to get back to doing my agenda summaries.

This article is about the Bar poll, asking local lawyers to rate the various candidates. Every race was on the questionnaire, but the only ones mentioned were the DA’s and County Judge. I can let that slide; both are the biggest news out there, thanks to Chucky’s seppuku, and someone’s (we won’t name names) exquisitely timed departure from the County Judge office. But note some odd inclusions and omissions in the article. Emphasis and comments in [brackets] are all mine.

Siegler was rated well qualified by 475 lawyers, compared to 380 for defense lawyer Jim Leitner, 296 for former Houston police chief C.O. Bradford, 291 for former judge Pat Lykos and 18 for police Capt. Doug Perry. [So Siegler got more top ratings than anyone else.]

These tea leaves can be read a number of ways, and we’ll mostly leave the decoding to you political junkies out there [but don't worry, we'll tell you exactly what we want you to know]. Here’s what we know [are gonna tell ya]: Siegler has been a prosecutor for 21 years and therefore is known by a ton of lawyers. (In addition to the 475 who rated her well qualified, 284 said she was qualified to be DA and 525 said she was not). [And since that's more than said she was qualified, you can ignore the earlier number, mmmkay?]

Leitner is a veteran defense lawyer and former prosecutor. Bradford is the only Democrat in the race; the other four are running in the March 4 Republican primary. Lykos is a former judge who hardly ever did well in the bar polls back when. Perry has not practiced criminal law. [So you know who we want you to vote for, right?]

Bacarisse was rated well qualified to be county judge, the government executive position, by 696 lawyers; incumbent Ed Emmett by 427. They’re in the Republican primary [Which isn't important, right?]. Democratic candidate David Mincberg got 408 well qualifieds; opponent Ahmad Hassan, just 26. [That's Mincberg, M-I-N-C-B-E-R-G. Don't forget it come general election time, we'll be endorsing him again, after doing our best to make sure the Republican who got the most positive votes overall is knocked out of the primary in favor of our transit cheerleader.]

So what are the raw numbers? Take a look. Out of 2,068 responses:
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The mayor announced in a voice mail to all employees today that an agreement has been reached with the pension system. Highlights: increased employee contributions, no loss of benefit for current employees, new plan for new hires beginning in 2008. I’m a little skeptical of that “no loss” part; I think the DROP plan is going away. I’ll know more once there’s an official press release and HMEPS informs us how they see it.

Lake Houston residents are still in an uproar over their fees for sewage service increasing by 10x in the recent Ch. 47 revisions. These residents are not allowed to have septic tanks/fields because they’re too close to Lake Houston. They have holding tanks from which their sewage was pumped at a nominal fee ($15). Collection of the fee was pretty haphazard if at all. Implementation of the charge has been pushed back to the beginning of August, and council may change it.

The council bowed to increasing anti-illegal sentiment and did not renew funding for a day labor hall popular with illegal aliens. It may soon close. There was no point in having a “hall” anyway, as everyone stood on the street for a couple of blocks around, waiting for trucks to pull over and someone to hire them.

Metro performs to standard, firing the train operator who followed orders to proceed onto the wrong track, and then phoned in to alert dispatchers and request orders.

A year after a major scandal broke in which city employees working in the mayor pro tem’s office gave themselves raises and bonuses, council members increase their budgets by 16%, partly to fund compensation for their staff.

The 14 council offices would see 16-percent increases in the next fiscal year, from $309,000 to $362,000. The overall budget for the council department, which no longer includes the famous Office of Mayor Pro Tem, is increasing by $566,000, or 13 percent. Councilman Ronald Green: “There are those of us who can justify the increase in our budget, because most of us are using every dime that’s there. Our team members are underpaid and overworked.”

Council voted against a halfway house that asked to be placed in a prohibited location.

Update: Text of a letter sent by Mayor White to all employees.

Representatives of the City of Houston and the Houston Municipal Employees Pension System have reached a tentative agreement on a plan to strengthen the pension system and continue to cut its unfunded liability.

Current employees will retain all of the benefits they have earned.

The municipal employees’ pension plan is healthier and more secure than it has been in years, as are the pension plans for Police and Fire. Since 2004, we have cut the unfunded liability in half. This agreement continues that type of real progress.

The agreement will mean no change in benefits for current City employees and will maintain the fiscal discipline in the newly adopted Fiscal Year 2008 budget. New hires who join the City workforce after January 2008 will have more options to choose from in how to structure their pensions.

The plan must be approved by the Pension System Board, which is scheduled to meet today, and the City Council.

Under the four-year agreement, the City would contribute $75 million to the system during FY ’08, which is already contained in the newly adopted budget. The City’s contribution would rise to $78.5 million in FY 2009, to $83.5 million in Fiscal 2010 and to $88.5 million in fiscal 2011.

Bill White,
Mayor

Update 2: Ok, so the radio is so badly jammed that the employee had to use her cell phone to call in and alert operators that she was on the wrong track. So it sounds like Metro either has poor radio discipline or needs to address communications bottlenecks which are placing riders at risk. It also needs to explain why the guy who waved the train through isn’t being disciplined also, for not insuring the switch was in the correct position.

“We didn’t make no steenking promise!”

The following bundle of joy from Bill “the Pill” White was in my mailbox this morning. Check the highlights I added:

The Chronicle’s May 14th headline that said that the city of Houston “can’t keep its promise to the pension fund” was simply untrue. This administration has increased the city’s contribution to the Municipal Pension Fund and made it more secure by reducing unfunded liabilities by about $1 billion.

Neither I nor anyone in my administration has ever stated that the city would pay the “statutory rate” for contributions to the Municipal Pension Fund.

In 2004, we defined annual contributions for three years and agreed to negotiate with the Municipal Pension System concerning our contribution thereafter. No other promise was made, and for years I have told all who would listen that the statutory rate is unrealistic.

The article’s sub-headline was also wrong in stating that I am citing “strained resources” as a reason for letting workers “contribute less, get fewer benefits.”

To give our work force more options, our chief pension executive has proposed to allow workers to contribute more or less, and obtain more or less pension, depending on their personal choices about retirement planning.

In March, our finance director stated that we would budget the same percentage of payroll as we did last year - this is not some breaking news. We have budgeted to pay 15.8 percent of municipal payroll into the pension fund, a higher contribution than the 14.5 percent rate which was the basis for enhanced pension benefits in 2001. The Municipal Pension Board has the obligation to bring benefits in line with the costs, which they advertised in 2001.

I assure municipal employees that our city’s contribution to the pension fund, including both cash contributions and the transfer of the Convention Center hotel, has increased pension security. We avoided massive layoffs or pay cuts to pay for the Pension Board’s 2001 mistake or outright fraud. We are fully and deeply committed to the security of the pension system.

We have not broken any promise. We look forward to working with the municipal pension board to keep the city’s contribution affordable and sustainable to make municipal pensions more secure, and to give employees more options.

Bill White,

Mayor

Translation: “We’re more or less going to fsck you over. Oh, and the pension board is a bunch of lying thieves! We never promised to obey the law!”

I don’t think I can improve much on my initial response to Kevin Whited when he asked what my thoughts were on this–but I’ll try:

“Unprintable. And besides which, I don’t think he’s got the reproductive equipment to do that with a pig anyway.”

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I don’t believe the pension is sustainable, and I have been expecting the other shoe to drop for three years now. I haven’t contributed into the pension because I don’t believe it will be there when I retire. His first attempt to fix the problem only delayed the reckoning, and while I supported the idea, I don’t support offloading the albatross of a convention center on the fund.

Nor do I care for the mayor’s weasaling and calling the board thieves. (I have my own issues with them, but claiming fraud isn’t one of them.) Every move White makes is designed to drive the city employees deeper into the unions that are in his hip pocket, while allowing him to claim to operate the city “like a business.”

I’m not optomistic about the outcome of all this.

Update: HMEPS responds. (Full .pdf text here.)

HMEPS currently has a Meet and Confer Agreement with the City, which was signed in September 2004 and amended three times. The Agreement addresses several pension matters, including plan benefits and funding. The funding provisions regarding the City’s required contributions expire June 30, 2007. At that time, the City must make its required contributions as determined by actuarial valuation in accordance with the pension statute, Art. 6243h, Tex. Rev. Civ. Stats. Ann. HMEPS provided the City the actuarial valuation as of June 30, 2006, which requires contributions of 24.63% of payroll. This actuarially determined City contribution rate for FY2008 is less than the rate that was projected by the HMEPS actuary and provided to the City during the 2004 meet and confer process. In fact, the dollar amount of the City’s required contribution is over $5 million less than what was expected for the City to contribute beginning July 1, 2007. The contribution amount is also right in line with the estimates in the HMEPS actuarial valuation as of July 1, 2005. Both valuations are available on the HMEPS web site at www.hmeps.org/Publications.

In addition, over the past two and a half years, HMEPS has consistently advised Mayor White, the City Council Pension Review Committee and other City representatives about the need to focus on the City’s funding plan for HMEPS beginning July 1, 2007. HMEPS sent letters to Mayor White on December 5, 2006 and March 1, 2007, notifying the Mayor that HMEPS was willing and prepared to meet and confer regarding the City’s plans to fund the required contributions beginning July 1, 2007. HMEPS has not received a response from Mayor White, nor has a designated City representative met to negotiate these matters with HMEPS. We would like to know what steps the City has taken to prepare for the upcoming funding period, which the City knew about far in advance, and which was structured this way at the recommendation of Mayor White during the 2004 meet and confer negotiations.

We believe it is important to emphasize that HMEPS negotiated the Meet and Confer Agreement in good faith and has met its obligations under the Agreement….

Life just doesn’t play fair. I don’t have the TIME right now!

Mayor breaks pension promise. Is there another exodous coming? And can the city afford it?

Our contractors hire only top-quality pervs. Hey, I wanted to fire them for incompetence and theft (as in taking a paycheck and not doing their jobs), but this works too. \

Meet the new bosses. Same as the old bosses. Dammit, don’t blame me, I’m not the one electing these good ol’ boys. Or girls.

Thou shalt not have fun. Hey, why don’t we turn the Astrodome into the world’s largest topless bar? Well, er, topless bar with a top? Betcha we could get the funding for that.

It’s a taxi-payer revolt! Too bad the tax payers can’t be bothered to show up.

Update: “The third castle burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp!” Bear in mind that one of the first acts of the mayor was to make the architects designing buildings responsible for determining if they could pass code in the first place. Now the city doesn’t even inspect them afterwards either. Small wonder three people died in a fire because they couldn’t hear the alarms….

Update 2: Nobody likes a snitch. Not even the people who employ them. Especially not the people who employ them, rather.

Would it be too much to ask, for enough people to get pissed off to make a difference? History says, “yes.”

Like the general said, “Ask me for anything but time.”

In prior segments of this series, I’ve hinted that the new “heavy trash pickup fee” (which we should really be calling the “garbage service tax”) may be impossible to administer fairly. Today, I’ll discuss why, but be warned–there’s a lot of parenthetical comments coming because there are so many interrelated side issues, it’s not funny. Well that, and Office Depot had a sale on punctuation marks.

As with most such garbage programs, the proposal in Houston is to add a flat fee to “everyone’s” water bills, regardless of whether they actually use the heavy trash or recycling services. The problem is, that oft-quoted “30% of users” figure refers to garbage service users. It doesn’t refer to utility service users, and there is a difference between the two groups. It’s especially stark here in Houston, because we have gone on for so long with the two services completely separate. This isn’t just a financial issue; it’s built into the very infrastructure of both Departments, and even subtly, our ordinances. I’m not talking about things like authorization for the fee; I’m talking about problems with implementing it.

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I have a lot going on in my personal life right now (I think I’ve said that before, haven’t I?) and unfortunately, my normal mode of dealing with stress is to either get very irritible, or bury myself in leisure activities. Doing anything that resembles work becomes harder and harder, whereas computer games and anime mean I don’t have to think; worry, or just plain be neurotic. There’s times when I wish I could just be stupid, like all the folks that voted to remove the revenue cap from the City of Houston, because the mayor said he needed more money to offer increased services

So what do we get? A new “tax” and and a promise to reduce services. I’ve got to agree with the commenter JP over at the Chron’s CityWatch blog:

Nothing says term limits has created a de facto single 6-year term more than a mayor feeling comfortable enough to propose a new tax in one of the interim election years.

This is a subject I’ve pointed out before. All I have to say is that if Houstonians don’t wake up and smell the coffee, when a mayor is willing to propose extra fees and reduced services eight months before an election, then the voters will allow this city to become a model in just another ten to fifteen years.

If, that is, you consider 1970’s Detroit or New York City to be models.

Well, today I”ll skip pontificating on that subject of bad government and just skip straight to bad governance. What we have here, is a whole series of bad ideas. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to write the full-length novel that I normally do, so I’m going to try an experiment and break this up over several nights. Tonight, I’ll look at the initial political reactions, and some of the background. Hopefully, I can maintain the momentum over the next several nights to finish this off, as well as cover each specific area in detail without having to backtrack much.

Also unfortunate is that not only did the Chronicle’s original article disappear off the website’s front page before Tuesday was done, but the far better article that joined it this afternoon isn’t linked at all. Nor is it lower down under “Houston and Texas.” Until it came out, coverage has been awfully light on details of how the fee would be implemented. Which may not be the fault of either Matt or the Chronicle–I’d sure want to keep the details awfully mum if I were spinning this plan. I hope that the web article is going to appear prominently in some form in tomorrow’s newspaper. Hopefully, with even more detail.

The charge will be $3.50 cents per month, added to the water bill. This is to pay for heavy trash pickup and recycling. Despite this addition of an estimated $19 million in tax revenue, the heavy trash pickup will be reduced, to either once every three months, or once every six months, depending on which version you hear. Now before we go any further, I want to nuke the incipient protest: “it’s not a tax, it’s a fee!” Folks, a fee is something you only pay if you use the service. a tax is something the government mandates you pay whether you get service or not. Do you pay a car rental fee or a hotel room rental fee to enter any of these new sports venues we have? No. They are rightly called taxes, because you may get to look at those pretty white elephants from the outside, but you don’t get to go to the games unless you pony up the entrance fee.

So plain and simple, this is a garbage tax. Recycleables and heavy trash today, household trash tomorrow. Once the camel gets its nose into the tent… well, it’s much easier to raise fees once they are imposed. After all, utility rates go up in Houston every year now. The Mayor and Council did away with all the necessity of actually calculating how much money it takes to run the system and setting rates accordingly–now they just raise the rates every year, no matter what. I’m sure the same principle could be applied to garbage, no problem.

Commisar Toni Lawrence is all for sending citizens to the re-education camps if they oppose the fee; obviously those in opposition are just uneducated:

“You just have to educate, and people understand.”

Ooooookay. Break out the waterboards, boys, we’ve got some edicatin’ to do! At least Michael Berry seems to understand the show:

“All I hear is less service, higher cost,” he said. “It’s very hard for me to justify that that’s not true.”

However, the real humdinger has to go to Mayor White himself:

“This is the beginning of a conversation about where we’re going with solid waste in the future,” Mayor Bill White told council members at the start of a two-hour special meeting on the topic. He said after the meeting that he agreed with many of the task force’s ideas, though he wouldn’t endorse the amount of the proposed fee, which he said needs more discussion and assurances that it “wouldn’t be a burden on families… I want feedback from the council and members of the public,” White said.

There’s so much BS in those three sentences, the futures market for cow patties dropped by 50% in heavy trading today. First off, this isn’t “the beginning of a conversation,” this is the beginning of Mayor White’s sales pitch and spin plan. If he wanted a conversation, he’d have floated the idea months ago, when work obviously had to begin. Instead, we don’t hear a peep about it until the mayor calls a special meeting to lay an already completed plan out, together with research that indicates this has been underway for a while — almost certainly since before the voters’ lifting of the revenue cap last year. Hey, Houston, you’re getting what you voted for: More taxes! Congratulations, proof that democracy works.

For the mayor who imposed a “tax-and-confiscate” scheme on poor people unfortunate enough to suffer a freeway breakdown, and scheduled increases in the water and sewer rates on the poorest people barely able to pay their minimum bills, to shed crocodile tears and piously declare a desire for assurances that it won’t be a burden to boost their minimum monthly charge by over a third is to insult the intelligence of his supporters. Oh wait, they don’t care. They voted for him because he promised to run Houston like a business. And he is–after all, a business is in business to make all the money it can, and provide for its stockholders. If you see the developers, social engineers, and a coterie of wealthy lawyers and business-people as the stockholders of Houston, he’s doing a fine job of that.

I’m sure he wants feedback. I doubt he has any intention of paying attention to it, but I’m sure he wants it, so he can make a pretense of having listened to the people before making his magnanimous and just decision to reduce the fee to a mere $2 a month instead of $3.50. After all, that will be much more affordable for someone “on a fixed income.” (You know why they call it a “fixed” income? Because you’re always broke on it.)

And just remember, Houston has a strong-mayor form of government. In reality, the council is little more than a rubber stamp, especially with the large number of Democrats that the mayor can count on backing him. No council has permanently defeated a mayoral proposal more than once or twice per term–if that. On the rare occasion something looks iffy, it will usually get withdrawn and re-worked–or the recalcitrant council members worked on. I think Mayor Brown once got defeated once on a substantive issue. Once. And White got defeated only a few weeks ago…for about 20 minutes.

Well, I’ve said enough about the politicians and politics of the deal tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll start in on why the mechanics of the matter are awful and even more unfair than it looks at first glance.

Laurence Simon sums up in one simple sentence everything I find wrong about unions today, and why I have no desire to join HOPE, the combined AFL-CIO-SEIU union for Houston city employees:

A Union is not there to get its members all they can get. No, it’s there to represent the members to help them get what they rightly deserve.

The greed of Gayle Fallon, local teacher’s union prez is what prompted his latest rant.

Hat tip to Instapundit for the above quote and link to this story out of Cleveland. How long until we see the same things here?

Motorists prove red-light cameras don’t work:
[Dave Hatala] got a ticket in the mail saying he was speeding on Chester Avenue at East 71st Street. He was cited for going 48 mph in a 35 mph zone. The only problem is that Hatala insisted he never went that fast. “This was wrong, and I’m willing to fight that,” he said.

Along with his ticket, Hatala got pictures showing his van and another car that appeared to be going faster.

Hatala was lucky. He worked for a local TV station, which decided to look into it. Taking the pictures to a university math professor who proved that the ticket belonged to the other car. The judge dismissed the case, but Hatala was still out the lost time from work. Well, maybe he wasn’t, if the station determined it was part of an investigative report, but how many of us are going to be that lucky?

Bill and Sue Faber of Massillon said they haven’t been in Cleveland for six months, but the city sent them a ticket. “No way we could be in Cleveland,” Faber said.

“Do you have witnesses for that?” Pohlman asked.

“Yes, we do,” Faber said.

Yet Cleveland sent the ticket showing a car speeding, but the plate belongs to the Faber’s truck. [Channel 5 investigative reporter] Pohlman said you can’t read the license in the picture at all. He said it appears Cleveland guessed and sent the ticket anyway.

They guessed, and didn’t even bother to compare the description of the vehicle from the state record to what was on the pictures. This is innocent until proven guilty? Anyone want to bet the officer responsible for increasing city revenue reviewing the tapes didn’t even get a negative review?

We can only hope that the people in charge of the computers are less reality-impared than those in Savannah, Georgia, which let anybody check, not for descriptions of the vehicle, but sensitive personal data:

If you’ve been caught on a red light camera lately, you may have more bad news on the way. Your private information may have been seen by identity thieves all over the world. That’s what 8800 motorists who traveled through Savannah, Georgia learned last week. Identity thieves have had easy access to the sensitive personal information on motorists who tripped the city’s red light camera since last February.

A citizen noticed the problem when he searched for a name on Google and found the the photos, name, date of birth, address and sometimes Social Security Numbers of ticket recipients in the results.

Red light cameras capture more than just a photo of you and your car when you pass under their view. The information is cross indexed with even more private information contained in the state’s massive databases.

Just remember, Chief Hurtt says it can’t happen here! Maybe we need one of these for Texas. (Warning: link contains audio.)