Rebuild Houston (drainage fee) funds to pay for hike/bike trails

Texas Watchdog:

It was passed by Houston voters as a tax to address the city’s decrepit drainage system and Third World streets. But $857,000 of the new Proposition 1 fund --- which Mayor Annise Parker pitched as a "lock box that can only be spent for street and drainage improvements" --- is slated for hike and bike trails.

The money will pay for "design, acquisition and construction" of trails as part of an overall plan to provide "an alternate route of travel for bicyclists and/or hikers away from street traffic," according to the city's latest capital improvement plan.

Shown the budget item, a chief proponent of Proposition 1 was baffled.

“The money was not supposed to go for hike and bike trails,” said Bob Jones, part of the successful Renew Houston effort. “This is not the intention for the money that we voted on.”

Wait a second; it's all a mistake. Specifically a too-vaguely-named accounting journal entry.

The fund, also known as Rebuild Houston, draws from four sources: drainage fees on property owners, developer impact fees, property taxes, and government grants.

[...]

The city's Public Works department acknowledged the hike-and-bike program is to receive Rebuild Houston money -- but not via the drainage tax component. The entire Rebuild Houston program is pegged by city charter for "Houston's drainage and streets."

The trails program "will not receive any funding from the drainage fee component," Roberto Medina, senior staff analyst at the department, said via e-mail, adding assurances from a planning person who heads hike and bike trail plans.

"Yes, it is listed as (Dedicated Drainage and Street Renewal) funding, but there are four components to that fund," Medina said. "We are well aware that it is not a clear way of identifying how a project is going to get funded, and it would have been nice for it to be more specific."

Yes, that would have been nice. Meanwhile ...

(Mayor Annise) Parker declined through a spokeswoman to comment.

Uh-oh. What about other supporters of Proposition 1/Renew Houston/Rebuild Houston?

Texas Watchdog contacted several supporters of Prop 1 to weigh in on this story. Jack P. Miller, president of RG Miller Engineers, and Christina Lindsay, executive director of the Houston Council of Engineering Companies, did not return calls. A person answering the phone at the home of Jeff Ross, of Pate Engineers, hung up on this reporter.

The Rebuild Houston Oversight Committee, which includes Ross, meets at 10 a.m. every fourth Tuesday in the Mayor’s Conference Room at City Hall.

Now I mostly take everything Texas Watchdog says with a shaker-full of salt, because they lean too far to the right for my taste. Just take a look at their headlines today, or any other day for that matter. But that doesn't mean a blind hog can't occasionally find a truffle.

What this looks like at first blush is -- at the very least -- yet another black eye for the mayor. But does Councilman Steven Costello earn any blame for the wording of the charter amendment establishing the fund with an exploitable loophole in it? (And if you do think he's at fault, keep in mind he has two three challengers in his re-election bid, and one of them is a real progressive.)

What about the rest of council? And the city's legal team -- led by City Attorney David Feldman -- who are supposed to do the due diligence on matters like these? Feldman certainly has been no stranger to controversy of late.

Or is it we the voters, who believed what they told us -- well, some of us believed; some did not -- who are at fault? Can you accept Medina's contention that it's all just an accounting mashup?

Who do you believe? Or more to the point: who do you want to believe?

Rally for Responsible Energy Sat. October 15

Members of Occupy Houston will rally in silent protest at Energy Day on Saturday October 15, 2011.

Energy Day is sponsored the big oil companies responsible for the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and for building the Keystone XL pipeline, a potential environmental disaster running from Alberta, Canada right into our backyard. Valero and other oil refining companies are seeking a tax refund to the tune of $135 million to cover the cost of hydro-treating equipment to reduce the extensive pollution resulting from the refining of the tar sands oil transported by the pipeline.

This refund is coming from our property taxes. Money meant for schools may go to large oil companies to cover these costs! We need to educate festival goers that there are serious threats to our planet, local tax money wasted, and a serious corruption chain behind big oil.

We will march the perimeter of the festival in white shirts and red bandannas or $1 bills over our mouths. Why do we cover our mouths? Why are we silent? Because the 99% of the citizens in this country do not have a voice in this country! Why do we wear white? It’s the opposite of black, the color of oil, and a symbol of the corruption and collusion rampant in the big energy industry.

Meet at 12:00 noon on Saturday, October 15, 2011 at lower Tranquility Park. Show up in your white shirts, bandannas, and bring a $1 bill. After we gather ourselves, get organized, and settled, we march at 12:30pm one block south to Hermann Square Plaza, right outside City Hall. It’s all-right if you don’t show up in a white shirt. We’ll have you covered.

This rally comes as Secretary Clinton, despite all evidence to the contrary, claims she has "no reason to believe" that the review process of Keystone XL has been biased in favor of approval.

Let's be clear: stopping Keystone XL -- in the face of thousands of protests and the direst of warnings about its environmental impact -- is a lost cause. And that is exactly why the fight must continue. Read the comments at the links to the stories here and here, and in the link to the announcement of this protest, and keep in mind the words of Mohandas Ghandi:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Be aware also that Metro's light rail is not operating this weekend due to construction of overhead crosswalks in the Texas Medical Center. that ...

METRORail will operate its normal schedule this weekend. The previously scheduled rail interruption for Friday-Sunday, Oct. 14-16, has been canceled.

Steve Jobs was a conservative Republican.

And probably a full-blown TeaBagger as well. And I say that without bothering to research his political contributions.

A personal sidebar here: My first computer was a Macintosh, in November of '88; when I went from the Plainview Daily Herald to the Midland Reporter-Telegram it was sitting on the desk I inherited, the result of a vendor arrangement in exchange for some co-op advertising. The two geeks in what was later called IT did not have anything like it and were very envious. They were working on those old Tandy TRS-80's, typing in MS-DOS. They were also playing around with some local petroleum engineers and geologists on something called a 'bulletin board service'.

(The only computer science I had learned in college in the late '70's was FORTRAN, and we were punching Hollerith cards and turning in a stack for the dining-room sized mainframe to spend a few hours processing.)

By the time I left the newspaper business for good, in January '92, there were about ten Macs in the building, all with big monitors and the paper was paginating (composing pages online). I was giving tutorials to my manager, not to mention the rest of the advertising sales staff. The MRT, to its credit, was ahead of the industry curve with regard to electronic publishing. But I never worked on another Mac after that; I bought PCs for my home use (my first was a Gateway) because I had bought into the meme that there wasn't enough software to run on anything but PCs. And wasn't ever going to be.

I was never willing to pay Apple's premium -- when desktop systems eventually dropped in price from $2K and $3K to around $1000, Macs were still $1500 -- for something that I perceived was nothing more than an affinity brand. Even the persistent urban legend that Macs never get computer viruses didn't sway me. It's also why my first smartphone is an Android. I had originally purchased the jazziest Blackberry on the market four years earlier and could not figure out how to use it. It had the wheel on the side; I couldn't change the font to something I liked ... so I traded it back in on a Motorola RAZR -- which was also one of the trickest phones on the market at the time. But was just a phone, of course; no e-mail.

The news that Jobs was a supreme tyrant and an even more massive tightwad disappoints me greatly. His long refusal to acknowledge the child he had out of wedlock points to the darker nature of his character.

Now I get the marketing whiz part of him completely. He didn't just create an affinity brand like Tiffany, Rolex, Lexus, Neiman Marcus ... he created a culture around his products. Root word being cult.

I get that Steve Jobs was so much smarter than everybody else -- and that he fostered an environment of sophistication within his company that focused on making things as easy as possible for the end-user -- which was clearly demonstrated by the fact that it took Microsoft ten years to copy him (Windows). I totally get that his ego correspondingly dictated that he charge people more for his superior intellect (in product design, razzle-dazzle presentation, etc.) That part is absolutely praiseworthy in our capitalist system.

That he had no measurable record of charitable giving despite a personal fortune estimated to be $8 billion, I admit, shocked me. Steve Jobs was a TeaBagger in at least one respect: he had that classic "I got mine, now you go get yours" attitude. "You don't need/won't get any help from me. I did it all by myself." Herman Cain as recently as this past Thursday espoused this same philosophy with respect to his lack of participation in the civil rights movement.

I find that mentality -- "No handouts, you lazy bums!" -- to be as abhorrent as any other pestilence on the land.

Bill Gates suddenly went up several notches in my estimation by comparison. And that is a crying-ass shame. Because Gates and Microsoft represent the culture of American corporate domination translated into soul-killing mediocrity as much as do the oil and gas companies, the newspaper and automobile companies I worked for once upon a time, et cetera (slow-to-no innovation in new technologies despite massive profit margins being just one hallmark).  I'm sure you can think of other industries that fit this description.

But at least they've given some back to those less fortunate.

It's true what Robert Fulgham wrote: everything we need to know we learned in kindergarten. Steve Jobs was way smarter in business than most people who have ever walked the Earth, and without having finished college. He also apparently did not absorb much from K.

The Weekly Wet (!) Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is occupying your browser as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff took a look at demographic change in one of Houston's historic neighborhoods.

Harold Cook at Letters From Texas takes a look back at old friend Molly Ivins, when he reviews a new book just released about her. His conclusion: "if you ever spent evenings with Molly, reading the book will give you the gift of spending one more. Even better, if you never got to spend that evening with Molly, you're in luck - after reading the book, you'll feel just like you did."

Bay Area Houston has an interesting audio clip of Teabag darling Galveston County tax assessor/collector Cheryl Johnson.

Justice finally arrives for a man falsely convicted 25 yreas ago in Williamson County. WCNews at Eye On Williamson has the story: Michael Morton walks free after 25 years behind bars.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme observes that Texas Republicans hate the elderly, workers, children and women.

Occupy Houston, the solidarity march and protest which grew out of the continuing Occupy Wall Street action, was covered by PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

Neil at Texas Liberal also reported on the first day of Occupy Houston. It is great that something hopeful is finally taking place in our politics. The Occupy Wall Street movement gets the idea that the work of freedom and democracy is up to each of us.

At TexasKaos, Libby Shaw writes: "Poor Rick Perry thought he could easily preen, charm and tall-tale his way through the 2012 Republican presidential primary cycle. Unfortunately for the governor, he has not been outside of his impenetrable Texas GOP bubble much. Perry, in fact, spends so much time with his crony donors that he obviously has no clue what the other 99% of the population believes." Read more: Rick Perry: Razzle, Dazzle, Snap, Crackle and Flop.