What has the city been overspending on? Certainly not road maintenance.
Spending it on lots of graft.
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Austerity measures on the way?
That’s the price to play the game… it’s just a little “inefficiency” in the system. What goes around comes around.
I hate the game.
Will this cost the firefighters their pay raise?
If so, then Whitmire over promised and under delivered.
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Well of course Turner said for years the city couldn’t afford those raises.
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And everyone thought he was just playing personal politics. When you’re sitting on one side of the money flow it seems like a limitless spigot. Whitmire should have never promised anything regarding firefighters” raises. The average citizen is concerned with other things.
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Yeah…i think we are ultimately going to crumble due to our century long approach of constantly annexing new parts of our metro to increase the boundaries and square miles of our city.
You have to MAINTAIN every square mile of your city and our infrastructure is severely lacking.
We still have unpaved ditches a mile from downtown.
Plus our pro growth, pro population boom strategy is going to bite us in the A.
There’s a reason many “quality” small cities fight to slow growth and implement standards on how they grow and how their built environment looks.
Houston has NEVER done that
We could grow much more sustainably if we’d densify already. The whole “we have to construct and maintain highways to support suburbs an hour away” mentality is killing us, and will ultimately be the reason I move away from here.
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The inner loop is densifying, the only thing we’re getting is high residential prices and crazy traffic. Our sprawl is what keeps Houston affordable.
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I remember years ago taking a Pub Admin class at UH where the professor (former city official) said that Houston had annexed a 12 inch wide line all the way to Splendora to keep the city from being surrounded. Not sure if 12 inches is accurate or if he was telling the truth but I found it interesting.
It’s only affordable if you don’t count having to drop tens of thousands on a car and at least a hundred monthly each on insurance and gas for it to be able to get around.
So yes. Even inner loopers need cars.
Only because METRO sucks so bad.
That’s of course by design
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Don’t hate on roadside ditches!
Personally I consider roadside ditch drainage the best combination of detention storage, conveyance and water quality treatment. Nowadays if you’re designing them they call them “bioswales” or “rain gardens” but they’ve been effective for a long time. (They do require maintenance, need to be desired every decade or so… it takes just hours to clean out a block).
Velocity in a ditch is slow, so silt and attached pollutants settle out and are naturally broken down by vegetation in the ditch.
Ditches provide lots more storage per linear foot than typical enclosed storm sewer on a residential street, and MUCH cheaper to construct. All that storage and slow flow means that roadside ditches act as mini detention ponds in front of every house. Much better for the receiving bayous to have the runoff distributed over time than the big slug of water being passed quickly through storm sewers.
Also, unlike curb and gutter streets, the pavement is still passable most times during an extreme event. Ditches are full but pavement is dry. In curb and gutter street, once the storm sewer is full the streets are soon full as well.
Unfortunately roadside ditches are disappearing as single family lots are being subdivided into smaller lots, and streets are now essentially one continuous driveway…
/rant
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We have a bar ditch and love it
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I hate the players
Seems like the whitmire oked the firemen’s deal like his campaign promise said but right after it , he says the city is broke. He should have told them , we can’t afford it like Turner said unless of course, more fees or raise the cap which is a tax increase if they even can raise it without the legislature ok’ing it.
He planed to help the firemen then knew asap we couldn’t afford it so it’s a blunder by design.
Turner had been honest about the finances throughout his tenure and outside political money wanted to frame it like he was anti firefighters, police and first responders.
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