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September 20th, 2016:

Now let’s take on the revenue cap

Sep 20th, 2016
by Charles Kuffner.
16 comments

With the pension issue settled, this can be the next big item on Mayor Turner’s to-do list.

BagOfMoney

Mayor Sylvester Turner plans to ask city voters next fall to do away with a decade-old cap on city revenues, but for now he’s stuck with it.

So City Council on Wednesday will consider cutting Houston’s property tax rate for the third time in three years, saving taxpayers money but also straining city coffers at a time when rising pension and debt costs risk forcing widespread layoffs and service reductions next summer.

The rate proposed to be set – 58.642 cents per $100 of property value – is the lowest since 1987, and represents an 8.2 percent drop since the cap took effect.

“We’re a growing, dynamic, vibrant city and we have a lot of needs,” Turner said. “People want us to be cost efficient and fiscally prudent and we are demonstrating that, but people want more police out on the street – that costs money. They want more paramedics – that costs money. They want better streets, flooding, those things cost money. For us to be forced to lower our property rates … it doesn’t make good sense.”

[…]

If the cap had not come into force, Houston would have been able to collect a projected $220 million more in the current fiscal year and the two prior ones, officials estimate.

During the same time period, the owner of a $200,000 Houston home with a standard homestead exemption will have saved about $84 in taxes, compared with the cap never having taken effect.

“People really haven’t seen the benefits of that,” Turner said. “They’re not feeling that.”

That’s an awful lot of revenue to forego for some $28 a year in savings. The revenue cap has always been a bad idea, based on a bad theory of economics, and we’re lucky to have escaped its effects before now. With the pension reform plan in place, Mayor Turner will have the capital to go to the voters and ask them to fix this error. Good riddance when that happens.

Spending money to defend our terrible bail practices

Sep 20th, 2016
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Ugh.

HarrisCounty

About $170,000 in tax money has been paid to outside attorneys to defend Harris Country officials from a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging that the bail bond system discriminates against poor people, records show.

That’s more than the cost of a six-month pilot project that would have provided attorneys for indigent misdemeanor offenders at bond hearings – a proposed reform critics say could have helped the county avert being sued in the first place, according to interviews and documents obtained by the Chronicle through public information requests.

[…]

The rising legal fees are not unusually high for outside counsel on a complex lawsuit, officials said. And outside lawyers may be necessary since the individual county leaders being sued – including judges and the sheriff – have publicly disagreed about how to reform the system, said Robert Schuwerk, a legal ethicist and author who is a retired University of Houston law professor. But county officials should have discussed those fees in advance and should have known from the first that if they pushed to litigate instead of reach a compromise that costs would escalate, he said.

“We may have a division of interests – it may be that the judges are saying no expense is too high for another branch to pay – the judges are not having to come up with the legal fees, I assume,” Schuwerk said. Even though an outside firm might be needed, Schuwerk said the county attorney’s own staff might also have better insight into the players and knowledge of the court system needed to reach a less costly settlement.

Critics, like state Sen. Rodney Ellis, argue that the county attorney should have handled the case himself and the money could have been better spent fixing the broken bail system.

“It’s the height of hypocrisy to spend taxpayers’ money in such a wasteful way,” Ellis said. “The county attorney is very capable and can adequately represent the position of the county in this matter. There is a certain irony in judges wanting to have their own lawyers to represent them as they refuse to provide legal representation to people who are charged with a crime with our criminal justice system.”

See here, here, and here for the background. I don’t have a problem in general with outside counsel being hired to handle litigation involving government entities. The County Attorney’s office has only so many employees, and they all have other responsibilities that could be adversely affected by spending the time needed to handle a lawsuit like this. And yes, the Sheriff and the DA and the judges may all have differing interests in this case. But you know what would solve this problem once and for all, and at minimal cost? Settling the lawsuit, which by the way would have the ancillary effect of saving the county a bunch of money in jail costs, not to mention keeping a lot of non-criminals out of jail. I don’t care who represents the county as long as we get that done. The Press has more.

The city cab app

Sep 20th, 2016
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Meet Arro.

Houston’s fractured taxi market is headed toward a rare bit of unity, with a push by the city toward how people hail cabs in the 21st century.

As the taxi and limo industry adjusts to new ways of doing business, under intense competition from firms like Uber, city officials plan to consolidate dispatching via a private smartphone app in an attempt to buoy travel options for visitors and residents.

Citing a need to better use the nearly 4,000 taxi and limo permits across roughly 9,000 drivers, city officials announced Monday that Arro, a company already combining dispatch in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Chicago, will develop a universal taxi app for Houston’s 146 taxi companies.

“We’re excited to bring the taxi industry, fully, into the digital age,” said Tina Paez, director of Houston’s Administration and Regulatory Affairs Department.

Cab and limo companies encouraged the city to develop something to even the playing field with Uber, which has dominated the ride market since arriving legally in Houston in November 2014.

“I think you will have people come to rely on faster cab service than they do now,” said Duane Kamins, owner of Lone Star Cab Company.

The app would mean all cabs could be hailed based on who’s closest, breaking the taxi reliance on downtown cab stands and airport trips that leads to bunching of vehicles and a lack of available rides in other neighborhoods. The app also provides an emergency scenario, should Uber – which opposes some of Houston’s regulations – bail right before thousands descend for the Super Bowl.

City Council is expected to discuss the app at its meeting next week.

Starting with consolidating taxi companies into a single online dispatch system, the app will eventually expand to include other features such as transit schedules, real-time traffic information and bike sharing information.

Council member Michael Kubosh, however, questioned at a Monday committee meeting why the city was entering into the app business – or even encouraging a vendor to jump in.

“If you want government intervention and you all are holding hands singing Kumbaya, I will vote for your government intervention,” Kubosh said.

No taxpayer money will be used to develop or advertise the app, though city staff will guide the process with Arro, and elected officials could devote time to promoting it.

I don’t see any problem with the city’s involvement, especially given the other features mentioned. Cabs remain a regulated utility, so there’s a pretty good argument to be made that the city should get make this kind of investment. The concerns CM Greg Travis raised about Arro’s app receiving mediocre user ratings are more worrisome, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s a good idea, and it brings independent cabbies into the fold as well. Let’s see what the beta version looks like and go from there.

Endorsement watch: A bit of a surprise

Sep 20th, 2016
by Charles Kuffner.
8 comments

The Chron endorses Ann Harris Bennett for Harris County Tax Assessor.

Ann Harris Bennett

Ann Harris Bennett

When Mike Sullivan first ran for Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector, he promised that he would: “Bring the office into the 21st century by embracing new technology.”

By Sullivan’s standard, we look forward to Apple releasing the Post Card 7, complete with four easy-to-handle sides and a convenient stamp location. Because if you want to register to vote in Harris County, or anywhere in the state of Texas, you have to do it by snail mail – and state legislators point to Sullivan as the reason why.

A majority of the state House had co-sponsored a bill to allow online voter registration during the last legislative session. However, testimony by Sullivan redirected the sure-fire bill into the garbage.

Whatever his other accomplishments in the office, whatever the deficits of his challenger, Sullivan’s failure to bring voter registration into the 21st century should disqualify him in the minds of voters. There is no excuse.

[…]

That is why we endorse Ann Harris Bennett for Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector. An experienced administrator with more than 14 years’ service as a district court coordinator, Bennett, 63, has long advocated for better registration and election processes. She also recognizes how our property tax system treats homeowners unfairly in contrast to commercial property owners.

I say this is a bit of a surprise for three reasons. One is that this means the Chron endorsed all Democrats for countywide offices. Given the dynamics of the other three such races, this was really the only one in which they might have endorsed the Republican and thus achieve some partisan balance, if that was a consideration. The Chronicle did not endorse Bennett in the primary, and they were not very complimentary to her at the time. Given those facts, and given that Mike Sullivan has been a considerable improvement over the two clowns that preceded him, I figured he would be an easy call for them. I did not expect them to put that much weight on the electronic voter registration issue. I’m glad they did, because this is easily my biggest point of disagreement with Sullivan. I fear that the moment may have passed for online voter registration – whatever consensus there was for it in 2015, I have a hard time imagining it being there in 2017. I hope I’m wrong, and for sure we should try again. Online voter registration would certainly be easier to make happen if the state’s biggest county officially supports it. Ann Harris Bennett is the one candidate who would offer that support.