Mayor John Whitmire
Houston officials on Wednesday authorized an eyebrow-raising deal allowing $30 million to be spent from the city’s stormwater fund to demolish blighted buildings.
Council Members Edward Pollard, Sallie Alcorn, Abbie Kamin, Tiffany D. Thomas, Mario Castillo, Julian Ramirez and Alejandra Salinas voted in opposition. Council Member Tarsha Jackson was absent.
The legality of the funding request has been questioned since the ask first appeared on a council agenda in December. The city’s $166.6 million stormwater fund is made up of drainage charges, combined utility charges and property and sales taxes, and is earmarked for projects that help improve Houston’s drainage and stormwater systems.
Whitmire and his team have said it’s necessary to use the funds to deal with the city’s ongoing problem with dangerous buildings, adding that the fund had been used for demolition before. The city’s dangerous buildings directly led to complications with stormwater and drainage since the lots are often the sites of illegal dumping, they say.
The $30 million allocation will help demolish 343 of the 2,300 dangerous buildings logged in the city’s system. The building must meet criteria to affirm that they impede the city’s stormwater system, officials say.
Controller Chris Hollins has argued that using the fund to demolish buildings is illegal.
During a tense financial report Wednesday, Hollins said this isn’t a general-purpose fund or a backstop for code enforcement.
“Crossing those boundaries is not creativity,” Hollins said. “It’s breaking the rules.”
Illegal dumping is happening regardless of whether a building was blighted or not, Hollins said. He told the council he had consulted with former mayors, former controllers and attorneys who affirmed the fund hadn’t been used this way previously and that this use didn’t pass the smell test.
“At moments like this, leadership requires someone to tell the truth, and the truth today is that this action is not allowed,” Hollins said.
City Attorney Arturo Michel said the move was legal. He said controller has not specified where city legal’s argument could be flawed and noted the line item in the stormwater fund to demolish buildings using the $30 million was in this year’s budget, which Hollins certified.
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Michel added Wednesday a court would find the fund usage legal, and that the term “maintenance” is unambiguous.
“We have here the factual underpinning that if you’re going to show that it can impede or block our stormwater system, I think it falls clearly within that definition,” Michel said. “I’m confident a court would uphold this.”
Well, we’re likely to find out, given the previous fight over how the Renew Houston funding source was used. That usage was also a stretch, and it was geared more towards transportation infrastructure. Which I generally supported, to be clear, on the grounds that I thought it was a worthwhile use of the money and I also think revenue caps are stupid and should be circumvented at any opportunity. I suppose the good news here is that based on that past history, it could be a decade or more before the bill for this, um, “creative” usage comes due.
I’m also an advocate for finding new revenue, which Whitmire has stubbornly refused to do before this action. Which I think is wrong-headed and long-term unhelpful, but that’s been his way. Good thing he’s so transparent about how the money is being spent.
Even though Whitmire has been a staunch advocate of transparency with the city’s spending, he said that residents wouldn’t care where the money came from to tear down buildings as long as the problem was being fixed.
“The public’s not going to question (it). They just want to get it done,” Whitmire said during the December council meeting when the item was introduced. “People I visit with are not going to ask you about which fund. They’re going to ask you, ‘did you demolish these dangerous buildings that are contributing to our drainage?’”
Well, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Or something like that. What do you think is the over/under on how long it takes someone to file a lawsuit over this?
UPDATE: Emily Hynds has more.
Went through this with Lanier. Always fun to watch the young residents of Houston get a civics lesson on the power that the city charter gives the mayor.
So much in common between those two – nominal Democrats as old as Methuselah who refuse to hire anyone who might disagree with them, a couple of freeway fetishists who are still annoyed that they can’t buy a new Pontiac Bonneville and can’t imagine why on earth anyone who’s not a poor wouldn’t want the exact same things that they do.