Houblog

KPRC-2 led off the 6 p.m. broadcast with a story that Alvarado herself is now under investigation. Apparently, one of those four employees did sing. . . . and the song is “we performed non-city work for Ms. Alvarado.” The DA’s office is being fairly tight-lipped about what and when, and exactly what employee is making the allegations.

However they did mention that they’d found some “peculiar” papers among the thousands seized last week, including a list of what all the council member’s favorite gifts to recieve were.

Gee, I suppose that could be for Christmas shopping, but wouldn’t that be among her personal papers, then?

Edit: Their story is up on the website now; I added the link above.

District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal told KPRC Local 2 that there are questions about whether Alvarado asked her employees to perform tasks unrelated to city business. The exact nature of the jobs was not disclosed, but it could be illegal if the tasks were carried out while the employees were on the clock for the city.

Oddly, they do not repeat the part about the gift list in the article

As noted over on Blog Houston, yet another unelected panel is being set up to govern an aspect of our life in the big city. I did a little Googling on the names of the board members, and thought I’d share what I found about the cocktail party circuit. As of posting, this search is not complete; a few members are still absent. I will work on it some more this evening (by which time, they’ll all be officially appointed.)

(Ok, I’m done updating for tonight. 10:30)
(Oops, I lied. Added a bit more analysis & more links.)

Edit: Most interesting website I found while doing this search: Would you call these people skyscraper groupies?

Please excuse the lack of formatting, especially the links, but I don’t have time to clean it up right now–work calls. I certainly don’t warrent this information to be complete or correct; it’s just what I found online, with a few observations.

Charles D. Reedstrom, CAPP
Parking industry mover and shaker. Yes, there is such a thing as a parking industry.
Strategic Revenue Systems Manager, Carter & Burgess, Inc.
Board of Advisors, International Parking Institute

Gerald Torres
Former State Representative (D), part of the Anglo-Hispanic power core that has dominated Houston politics for the last decade.
“Friend of Bill White�
Board Member, Lawndale Art Center
Supports Ana Hernandez for SR 143
Employed by Reliant Energy
Manager Legislative Affairs, Greater Houston Partnership

Mary Jo McFadden
Donated trees to a Precinct 3 park.
No other mention found

Marcus L. Davis
Two different white pages listings come up without the middle initial, both on Briar Forest. One is near Kirkwood, one is near Hwy 6. Might be the Marcus Davis mentioned in this newsletter from Prairie View A&M. I’d bet that it is, and he’s also the recipiant of this Leadership Endowment award. He’s probably not on this team despite the name.

M. Marvin Katz
Big time lawyer
Longtime and well-connected attorney (partner) with Mayer, Brown, Rowe, and Maw. Specialties: Real Estate; Estate Planning; Probate; Corporate. Handled this large commercial purchase:
Sponsorship Vice Chair, Urban Land Institute (Houston District Executive Council)
Former chair of the Houston Planning Commission, now member ex officio

Michelle Colvard
Women’s wheelchair athlete and Chair, City of Houston Commission on Disabilities

Joe R. Martin
Lives on Riptide in zip 77072.
Edit: commenter Royko from BlogHouston provides this link to Martin’s internet service business.
Also owns M Bar & El Centro Restaurant. Chair of DEDA (see Robert Eury, below.)

Andrew F. Icken
Texas Medical Center, possibly hotel industry executive?
Board member, Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau
Listed as Executive Vice President, Texas Medical Center, and board member of the Rice Design Alliance.
Board of Directors, Houston Minority Business Council (page only available in Google cache now—membership listing removed from HMBC website)
Houston Architecture Info Forum, 2004 panelist

Evalyn Laing Krudy
Chair, Boulavard Oaks Civic Association
University Place Superneighborhood board member, and authored this report on neighborhood tree pruning in the BOCA newsletter. Their newsletter looks so much more professional than the photocopies we get in the mail. Oh that’s right, I don’t live in an exclusive superneighborhood. Silly me.
Placed 26th in the female 40-49 category for the Lake 5K Run on 4/30/05.
Member Old Braeswood Kirby Taskforce, 2003, formed to successfully lobbied for retention of the esplanades on Kirby near Braeswood. It’s a very peaceful neighborhood. And she keeps an eye on the construction (see page 5). I’m trying to think of the last time a government explained a construction project in my neighborhood. In such detail. . . . still trying. . . .
Involved in this 2001 candidate forum (contact person).

(still adding to this list!)
Robert Eury
Lives in the exclusive neighborhood between Kirby and Shephard, just north of Westheimer Any further north and you’re in River Oaks itself.
Executive committe member (sometimes listed as President and CEO) of Central Houston, Inc. Nice picture of him with Carol Alvarado at that link.
Steering Committee member of the Downtown Entertainment District Alliance (DEDA). Oh, and look who is the Honorary Chair: Carol Alvarado! And the actual chair is our good friend Joe R. Martin! Such small circles we move in. . .
Member, Houston Downtown Management District
Member, Board of Directors of the Houston Downtown Alliance. Oh, along with, who else? The Honorable Carol Alvarado, City of Houston council member. Oh, and there’s Joe Martin again. They need to watch this menage’a trois stuff, or folks are going to gossip.
He used to like Tom DeLay and Bob Carr.
There’s the “board member, Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau” listing. (He’s managed to solo this one, without Joe and Carol.)
Chairman of Blueprint Houston. Don’t forget, this April 6th, all hail the chair! Ask him when the cameras will be installed while you’re there.
Unsurprisingly, he was involved in the Main Street Square project.
Member, Board of Directors of the Buffalo Bayou Partnership. They’re the ones pushing the idea of turning Houston’s version of a flood plain into a park. (This page is a bit dated, it still shows John Vanden Bosch as the PW&E director.)
Was on this public policy panel. Unsurprisingly, pro rail.
Member, advisory group of Framework Houston, a project of the Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris County. “An initiative of the Public Art and Urban Design Program of the Cultural Arts Council of Houston/Harris County (CACHH), the Houston Framework offers the tools, identifies the demonstration projects, and outlines the administrative structure needed to provide Houston and Harris County with civic art and design that will enhance the local environment.” In other words, they’re reponsible for the crap that passes as art in modern parks. Is there any wonder people like to go to older parks where they put, you know, ART, instead of this stuff that makes you go “WTF? Artist on acid trip, mabye?”

Edit/Update: There are 15 members, but five were previously appointed, and I don’t have their names at the moment. Only nine can actually vote; the others are three”civic representatives” and one each representing the City, Metro, and Harris County. My (not at all expert) read on this list is that Katz, Martin, Eury, Icken, and Reedstrom are the heavyweights and almost certain to be voting members, while the remainders are “designated roleplayers:”

Torres — Possibly token Hispanic, possibly voting member.
McFadden — Housewife, a throwaway appointment to appease the peasants? Or possibly the Metro/County rep?
Davis — Token black entrepreneur.
Colvard — Token disabled person.
Krudy — Neighborhood busybody who can be counted on to work with the big boys.

Katz is chairman and Eury may be the city’s non-voting representative. The panel is heavily weighted with pro-rail technocrats, so we can generally count on whatever the Authority does to be unfriendly to personal vehicles. Anyone surprised?

Thought not.

Isiah Carey scores with pictures of two of the documents granting raises to the Fab Four. Check out the signature: “Florence Watkins for Carol Alvarado.” Carol’s initials appear to the right as “Director of Department from which transferred-” (page cuts off)

And approval initials are present for the Director of Personnel. The ones on the right surprised me though: Mayoral initals are required — but those aren’t Mayor White’s initials…. in fact, the initials are clearly the same as those in the Director’s blank. That is also the case on the other form. In fact, after reviwing the org charts for F&A (link is on city intranet, not public, but the divison chiefs are listed here), I can’t figure out who that is. It looks like “LMW” but I can’t tell for sure. LMM? LNM? Maybe the person in question left the city after those forms went through.

But the sixty-four-hundred penny questions is:

Is Ms. Alvarado not alone in delegating signature authority?

Update: it sure doesn’t look like Mayor White’s signature, which can be seen on page 2 at this link. Warning: this is a 341 page .pdf file. Don’t even think about trying to download it without broadband, and give it several minutes, even with it.

(edited for clarity at 12:50 pm 3/21)

Update: I think it’s Lonnie Vara, head of Human Resources.

Well, faked memos are popping up faster than anything short of a Rathergate special. Now Gordan Quan’s been, er, victimized.

The document with Quan’s initials is dated December 2005 and appears to request that his council office be charged the cost of a newsletter to commemorate the end of his six-year council term. The memo refers to Quan as mayor pro tem, a post he left more than two years prior. It also bears a scrawled “GQ” that is different than other memos with Quan’s initials that the Houston Chronicle has obtained since the pro tem bonuses were revealed Feb. 15.

“These initials are definitely not his,” said Lee, who ran the pro tem office, which handles some administrative duties for council members and their staffs, until fall 2004.

Quan was mayor pro tem — one year spending $50,000 less than his budget — until the end of 2003. He remained in his council office until the end of last year.

At the end of his council term, Quan said, he told pro tem employees he wanted to use surplus money from his council budget to pay for the cost of printing a final newsletter. After he had the work done, he said, pro tem employees rejected an invoice in January, saying it was too late for the transaction. So, Quan said he had to pay for the cost from his campaign funds.

But the pro tem office got credited as though it had paid for the $2,500 charge, according to budget documents previously obtained by the Chronicle. That and the disputed initials raise questions about where the money actually went, he said.

Some comments over at BlogHouston seem to indicate a bit of confusion over the time frame, which is partly the fault of the rushed writing; it makes it harder to pick out the important facts. But hey, that’s what the blogsphere is for. We don’t have the resources to do the legwork, but we’re hell on analysis.

(more…)

This was going to be an update to the prior Houston Emergency Center article, but frankly, it got too long, so I have split it into its own post. KHOU is also looking into the H.E.C.’s problems, and it looks a lot worse than a couple of isolated incidents. “A systematic failure of management philosophy and direction from the various governments responsible for supporting the 9-1-1 system,” would be a better description.

The 11 News Defenders have exposed possible trouble with emergency calls for help, discovering thousands of 911 callers might not be getting an answer.

When you need the help of 911, you need it right now, not later.

But that’s what we found, tens of thousands of cases in which emergency operators didn’t answer when they were supposed to.

What’s more, the city isn’t doing much about it.
(snip)
Since the emergency center opened, the 11 News Defenders discovered more than 81,000 calls took longer than 20 seconds to answer. But again, just how long or for what kind of emergency, the city doesn’t track.

11 News Defenders: “So in other words, year after year goes by, and tens of thousands of calls are over 20 seconds to answer, and nobody knows anything about them?” Cutler: “Correct.”
11 News Defenders: “And life goes on?”
Cutler: “Yes.”

Now, if it gets answered in 21 seconds or even 25 seconds, normally I’d say B.F.D. It goes in the “miss” column but it isn’t that big. Until I start to wonder why the goal is twenty seconds. How many rings is that?

(more…)

The Chronicle reports on the peculiar memo requesting authorization for bonuses, and Carol Alvarado’s memory lapse.

A memo dated last April from a city employee who has been fired for receiving unauthorized bonuses asked then-Mayor Pro Tem Carol Alvarado to approve $5,500 in extra pay.

A spokesman said Tuesday that Alvarado doesn’t remember such a memo. She has said she didn’t approve any of the monthly bonuses that totaled $143,000 over about a year for four employees in the Office of Mayor Pro Tem.

(snip)

If Hernandez did send the memo, it could support — at least in this instance — her contention that bonuses were properly documented, though the four employees eventually collected far more than the amount requested in the memo.

Conversely, it could fit with the conclusion of police investigators that pro tem employees enriched themselves through misconduct that included fabricating documents.

I really don’t get why the memo doesn’t match the bonuses, but let’s follow the logic out: If the bonus memo was supposed to be legitimate, then the bonuses granted should have matched. (Caveat: the next bonus granted didn’t match, but it was only two weeks later. –Edit: Uh no, it was six. – Since that’s the length of the pay period, any approval by Alvarado, even if immediate, could have been caught “between cycles” and the bonuses paid four weeks later; add F&A/Payroll processing time, and maybe six weeks would be right.)

(more…)

Isiah Carey got Chuckie to speak up a little more clearly on what was behind the seizures. Alvarado’s odd campaign contributions have caught the DA’s eye:

He says he becamse “suspicious” when he viewed Alvardo’s campaign finance reports. He told the Insite she appears to be getting a lot of contributions for an unopposed city council race. He also says a significant number of Alvarado’s large contributions come from out of state donors.

It’s not like none of Outta-Town-Brown’s other appointees were on the take.

Joe Householder, spokesperson for Alvarado, says she has a $300,000 + political war chest because she did have an opponent last year. He also says like many other politicians Alvarado has a lot of supporters outside the city of Houston…

One wonders why a city politician would have out-of-town supporters to the tune of $300k. And of course, the racism card is being played. Gosh, that didn’t take long, did it?

Sources are now telling the Insite the only reason Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal is going after Carol Alvarado is because she’s Hispanic and a democrat. That source says Rosenthal has historically gone after minorities and democrats in Harris County. That person tells the Insite to just look back at former Houston police chief C.O. Bradford’s case.

Making matters even more confusing, a memo has surfaced, written by Rosita Hernandez to Carol Alvarado, requesting certain bonuses be paid to the employees in the pro tem’s office. However, the requested bonuses don’t match the ones actually recieved.

A memo dated last April from a city employee who has been fired for receiving unauthorized bonuses asked then-Mayor Pro Tem Carol Alvarado to approve $5,500 in extra pay.

A spokesman said Tuesday that Alvarado doesn’t remember such a memo. She has said she didn’t approve any of the monthly bonuses that totaled $143,000 over about a year for four employees in the Office of Mayor Pro Tem.

“She has no memory of seeing such a memo. There is no copy of such a memo in her files or any of her staff files,” said Joe Householder of Public Strategies Inc., Alvarado’s recently hired spokesman. “There’s no knowledge that this memo was ever sent or received.”

The memo, a copy of which was obtained by the Chronicle, came to light Tuesday, the same day prosecutors investigating the City Hall payroll-padding allegations took documents from the pro tem office.

In the memo, pro tem office manager Rosita Hernandez, who received more than $50,000 in bonuses that city officials say were improper, asks Alvarado to approve payments to her and three other fired employees.

Gotta love the Reagan defense. “She has no memory…” Sheesh.

How wide will this investigation go? No one knows, maybe not even Chuckie.

Investigators even returned a second time for more documents Tuesday afternoon, leading to what could be an investigation that lasts for months with no indication how many people will ultimately be affected

“We’re not leaving anyone out of the mix right now,” Rosenthal assured us.

Update: While everyone is effectively under investigation at this point, a specific name has surfaced: Orlando Sanchez.

Multiple sources told 11 News another subject of the investigation is former city council member and mayoral candidate Orlando Sanchez

Documents from his term were among those seized by the DA.

Berry, the acting mayor pro tem, is at least talking the talk:

Acting Mayor Pro Tem Michael Berry agrees. “There is either a perception of or a reality of corruption in government. And you can’t allow either one to fester. It creates a loss of confidence in your system and then you can’t govern properly. So if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about,” Berry said.

One curious question: Who is the Deep Throat of this investigation?

The investigation’s speed picked up Monday evening after a phone call to the DA from a person he said he trusts.

“It was his contention that there may be documents in the file cabinets in the mayor pro tem’s office that would disappear,” Rosenthal said.

Commenter Don_Mynack makes a very good point over at Blog Houston:

However, it is telling that the original 4 actually thought they could get away with this . . . . I mean, what kind of culture in that office must have been existed for those people to take that risk? A culture that routinely involved a lot of financial shenanigans is the only logical answer.

Update 2: Gordan Quan, former pro tem, comments.

“Anything like that would have been highly suspect,” said Quan Tuesday. “I would have questioned who is this person turning in this request.”

Four months after he left office, the one time mayor pro tem has been contacted by the Office of Inspector General about the goings-on while he was in office.

“As far as special expenses to an office that favors that over another office, we really didn’t see that,” said Quan.

(snip)

“We would immediately call the councilmembers and ask ‘We just want to verify. Did you authorize that? And if you did, we nee [sic] your signature on this’.”

Quan admits some expenses from council offices were reimbursed by the pro tem’s office. They were items like coffee and supplies. Nothing, he says, that would merit improper expenses. Nonetheless, he welcomes the investigation.

Ok, two points: First, parse those statements very carefully. Every single word of that could be true, and the whole thing still corrupt as hell.

Second, “items like coffee”? Huh??????? Council members and staffers get their coffee paid for? I don’t know about other city offices, but in this one, employees pay for their own coffee. We bought the coffeepots. We bought the mini-fridge to keep our lunches in. We buy the coffee. And that is not cheap! How can council offices be drinking so much coffee the pro tem’s office has to reimburse them?

The Bonusgate scandal has just taken a huge left turn, as Chuck Rosenthal grows a set. KHOU and KTRK have articles on the matter. (Update: and KPRC, with a lengthy tape also). From KTRK’s comes this gem:

On Tuesday morning, a truck full of boxes containing documents were removed from the mayor pro tem’s office. Rosenthal apparently got a tip on Monday night that if he didn’t remove the boxes by Tuesday, they would disappear.

“There have been allegations made over the years that that office has also been used by some city officials to use their budget to do some things that officials didn’t want to do on their own budget,” said Rosenthal.

(more…)

Back on March 6th, I had some questions about the number of employees that the city has on the payroll:

Update 2: Veddy interestink. This figure shows up further into the release:

But please remember that no organization with over 20,000 employees can eliminate all risk of violations of existing laws against self-dealing. Swift and severe actions such as those described by me today constitute the most significant deterrent to future misconduct.

Over 20,000? How does this fit with 12,588? Do we have 8,000 police and fire department employees?

Matt Stiles of the Chronicle follows up with the comment:

My payroll database shows there are 20,113 employees, including police and fire. This figure excludes the names of about aviation employees, who weren’t included in the database because of post-9/11 security concerns. There are about 1,500 employees in that department, though.

Now, the figure of 12,588 comes from this article about the fight between the two unions that want to represent the non-police, non-fire employees (see the Legal Department’s response pictured).

I should have realized the figures would be available in the budget. A cautious little birdie passed along these figures:

According to Police’s CAFR, there were 5,225 policemen on 7-1-04. According to Fire’s CAFR, there were 3,375 firemen on 7-1-02.

The CAFR is the Consolidated Annual Financial Report, a high-level overview of the budget. The 2005 version is available online. What this means is the rough number of 20,000 city employees total is accurate.

5,225 police (7-1-04)
3,375 fire (7-1-02)
12,588 other (1-4-06; non-police, non-fire)
21,188 Total

22,613 (Matt’s figure of 21,113+1,500)

20,000+ (Mayor’s total)

Things that make you go, “Hmmmmm.”

Did the Legal Department give the unions the correct figure? Is the difference due to changes in the police and fire department numbers? Was the mayor just being loose when he said “over 20,000″ or is it over 20k but less than 21k now? Does anyone besides me think it’s strange that we can find out how many policemen or firemen the city has, but not Aviation Department employees? Does anyone think it’s strange that it’s so difficult to find out how many employees the city has, period?

Maybe we need to ask the city how many people it hired, how many it fired (er, indefinately suspended), and how many retired in the last few years? Preferably on a month by month basis. . .

The humor comes from the Enron trial today. Over at Isiah’s blog, he reports that Fastow has a very deadpan sense of humor. Or else it’s entirely unintentional.

At one point Petrocelli called fastow a greedy man on Thursday in the cross examination and without cracking a smile Fastow responded, “Mr. Petrocelli, we’ve aleady established I was greedy on Wednesday.”

Jeeze, what was he the other six days of the week? Merely avaricious?

As for the farce, well, of course that’s supplied by Bonusgate. There’s a big fooraw over one of the file cabinets for the pro tem’s office turning up with a dent, like someone might have tried to break into it. Outside of the fact that file cabinets are nortoriously insecure even when locked, I think the real question is why wasn’t the cabinet actually in the pro tem’s office. Instead, it and others were in the break room, where any employee (and theoretically, anyone in the building) could get to them.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the City of Houston is not the only government district plagued with dishonest employees.

A former employee of the Galena Park Independent School District Education Foundation was indicted Tuesday by a Harris County Grand Jury on theft charges.

The indictment charges that Renea Jones Taylor, the foundation’s senior project coordinator, wrote 67 checks to herself during a two-year period. The amount of the checks totaled more than $195,000.

She sure made the Bonusgate Four looke like pikers; they got $143,000 between them; this lady singlehandedly grabbed herself near $200k. The disturbing factor is that she resigned when the investigation began… in May. If the DA’s office took that long for a simple case of theft, the more complicated schemes of the Bonusgate four, and the wider investigation required, mean it should take even longer. While Bonusgate will be higher priority and be able to call on greater resources, if it is handled too quickly, we’ll know it wasn’t particularly thorough….

Various media sources have been reporting that the four employees from the Mayor pro tem’s office were fired. The official word came down today, and that is not the case. As I expected and predicted, they have only been suspended indefinately, without pay.

Excerpted:

The four city hall workers accused in the city hall scandal are now indefinitely suspended. Each met with the city’s chief administrative officer at city hall Tuesday and learned their fate this morning.

The mayor himself signed the letters recommending the indefinite suspension early Wednesday morning.

The employees have ten days to appeal their indefinite suspension. After that, they have 30 days to schedule a civil service hearing, which is standard procedure for city employees. They will be paid for today, but beginning tomorrow, it’s an unpaid suspension.

Again, as I have pointed out before, this is the city’s way of telling employees to get lost in such a way that they have no legal recourse to sue.

Indefinate suspensions are the “fired, but not quite fired� level. An employee on this status has no duties and receives no paycheck. There is no hope of being moved off such a status (technically rules exist to do so, but as a practical matter, it’s not going to happen. )

It’s really a crappy status, given that the person is still considered an employee in several key ways, including the right to work elsewhere (FYI: city employees must obtain permission to take a second job. The paperwork takes so long to process that most jobs beyond retail or minimum wage will be filled before all the signatures are obtained.) In short, if the employee wants to work for a living elsewhere and get a paycheck while stuck in limbo, permission is needed from a high pay grade manager, about Assistant Director level.

Needless to say, employees on indefinate suspension aren’t going to get that.

Of course, the employee in question could always voluntarily resign in order to take another job. Which is the point: to save the city the trouble of/challenge from a firing. You can’t sue for wrongful termination if you resign . . .

It’s not going to work to prevent a civil service appeal in this case because the stakes are too high. But that venue is still partly controlled by the city; anything the city’s lawyers challenge as “irrelevant” is likely to be thrown out. A court challenge is not so controllable, but the city will do its best to delay any such suit from coming to trial for years, until the employees are forced to drop it due to legal costs.

…of interest, if you’re not allowed to have any interest. I caught this report during breakfast, but since Kevin’s already on the job over at BlogHouston, you might as well head over there for the news and commentary!

Update:Isiah Carey has the official one-page summary report from the OIG. The summary report, mind you. The full report hasn’t been publicly released.

Edit: I want to clarify that the title is sarcasm. Apparently that didn’t survive the narrow bandwidth of text communication.

Yet another link in the bizarre Bonusgate scandal has surfaced.

Employees in the Office of Mayor Pro Tem were warned twice about budget overruns in the months leading up to the revelations about the payroll-padding scandal, the city’s top finance official said today.

“We had provided to the Mayor Pro Tem’s office some projections that they were likely to overspend their budget,” Finance and Administration Director Judy Gray Johnson told City Council’s fiscal affairs committee.

“I wish now we had been more clear on some of that.”

Her answer came in response to Councilman M.J. Khan, who questioned why someone at the city didn’t raise red flags about the spending.

Johnson, who has declined comment about the $143,000 in improper bonuses received by four employees in the office since late 2004, told the committee that her department sent them notices in November and January.

The first, she said, warned that the pro tem office was spending more than it had budgeted for salaries, and the second said the office was projected to overrun its overall $326,000 allotment.

This happened even though the office budget had increased by $66,000, about 25 percent, over the previous fiscal year.

Despite the warnings, the pro tem employees received more than $30,000 in bonuses during that three-month period, city payroll records show.

The inability of the Payroll office to put two and two together is just stunning. Not to mention the fact that apparently, none of these warnings were sent to the person ultimately responsible for the office: Carol Alvarado.

Or were they?

(more…)

Houston Strategies has an excellent post post summarizing Houston’s Third and Fourth Wards making the cover of Governing magazine. Or more specifically, the controversy surrounding the secretive actions of one TIRZ, and its implications for development. Its a far more in-depth treatment than I was able to give the subject two years ago.

Essentially, an anti-development activist (edit: State Rep. Garnet Coleman) has taken control of the Midtown TIRZ, and is using it –ostensibly to prevent development. However, because it refuses to list what it owns, no one outside the board is really sure exactly what is being done, or how well it is doing it.

From his fifth-floor office, Garnet Coleman can almost see the gleaming new urban lofts lapping at the edge of Houston’s Third Ward. Artists began moving into the poor, largely African-American neighborhood about a decade ago, converting historic but run-down shotgun shacks into cutting-edge art spaces. Now, in the next step of an increasingly familiar cycle, blocks of new townhouses are rising over the freeway, front yards turned toward the downtown skyline just a few miles away. Yuppies, empty nesters, childless couples — mainly white and Hispanic people with enough money to drop $250,000 — are starting to move in. And Coleman, an intense, chain-smoking power broker who represents the neighborhood in the Texas legislature, isn’t happy about it. “You can tell a neighborhood’s turning,� he says with dismay, “when you see them out at night walking their dogs.�

Coleman is determined to stop gentrification in Houston’s Third Ward before it gets out of hand. “I understand how this happens,� he says. “I understand how to stop it.� He’s also uniquely situated to do something about it. Coleman is an influential player in Houston’s local politics, owing partly to his House seat and partly to his family lineage. Coleman’s father, whose name adorns the office building he works in, was a prominent black physician, businessman, philanthropist and Houston civic leader.

Coleman is taking an unconventional and controversial approach to keeping the Third Ward affordable for longtime residents. Quietly, the board of a tax increment financing district that he partially controls has been buying up land in the Third Ward. Not only does Coleman want to keep the land away from developers. He also wants to saddle the property with restrictive deeds and covenants that would ensure that it could be used only for rental housing in perpetuity. “Quite frankly, this is personal,� Coleman says with grim determination. “We can give tax abatements out the wazoo for lofts and condominiums. The question is what are our values and whether or not we are willing to spend the same money on people who need a nice, affordable, clean place to live.�
(emphasis added)

I have to admit, I find it darkly humorous that affordable means it’s unsafe to walk your dog at night. But essentially, Coleman’s at least partially right. The developers will leave us saddled with hordes of cookie-cutter townhomes and loft units. (You don’t want to know how much trouble we have with their corner cutting in our department. Trust me.) Forget affording anything; those new warehouse lofts you can see from the elevated Hwy. 59 behind the convention center? They start around $300k.

It feels to me that the article is somewhat anti-Coleman.

The board of the Midtown TIRZ is divided between Coleman loyalists and appointees of Mayor White. The board has chosen to use almost all of its revenues — $10 million in the past five years — to purchase and then “bank� land in the Third Ward. “If you look at Midtown, that was all publicly induced — ain’t none of it affordable,� says Coleman. “Why can’t we do the same thing for people who need an affordable place to live?�

It’s a decidedly unorthodox arrangement, one whose very existence seems to be something of a secret. Coleman declines to say how much land the Midtown TIRZ has banked in the Third Ward.

Well, it’s a “secret” because our local rag is rarely worth the paper it’s printed on. I’ve noticed Matt Stiles asks questions, but the editors don’t seem to be interested in turning over any rocks. I have to agree that this is clearly not the intent of the TIRZ. But when you get down to it, what is a TIRZ but a state sponsored method to give selected individuals control over other people’s private property, without them being accountable in any way?

Think I’m kidding? Go back and read this early Houblog post. Add the Kelo decision to the claimed powers. Now turn Mr. Coleman loose with the power to take property to protect his vision.

Scary?

Now take the other 20 Houston TIRZ’s and turn their boards loose with this power to make profits for the local land owners, er, developers appointed to the boards. Oh excuse me. 21 TIRZ’s. Think you’re safe because you’re not in one? Too bad. They can expand themselves, at will, without any permission or oversight authority to deny them.

Remember that your property rights are something you have to fight for. And voting in the primaries is TODAY.

Get a move on.