Even without being busy lately, I’ve been remiss in keeping up with many of the great sites on my blogroll lately, which is how I let Tory Gattis get past me last Thursday with this gem of a post based on notes he took during “MBA Day� for Harris County. Most of the department heads were there, as were Radack and Eckles.
Tory had a lot of great information on the region and how we’re doing that he picked up from the meeting, but there were a few items I thought bore repeating. Some of their statements that had to deal with the City and Metro were facinating, and not always in a good way. By all means, I recommend that you head over there and read the rest of a very fascinating post, as I’m only excerpting the parts relevent to the city, and not the port, airport, or toll roads.
Judge Eckels says the new Westpark Tollway has blown right through its ridership projections, and already has congestion problems. He believes Metro is moving away from rail in that corridor…
Heh. Right, because they’re moving towards Richmond.
We have 756 at-grade railroad crossings in the region (county?), a number they want to dramatically reduce.
Metro, on the other hand….
The Harris County Hospital District is the 3rd-largest public health district in the nation. We have 800K uninsured and 400K underinsured in Harris County (out of about 3.5 million people).
Does that count illegals? Do we really have a clue how many are here? I want to know. It cost, what, $97 million to treat them last year, not to mention the costs to private hospitals and doctors who have to bill the rest of us more to make up for it?
They are significantly underfunded and looking for federal help (or even a local tax increase to bring us into parity with San Antonio and Dallas)
“Captain, Romulan Bird-of-Prey decloaking off the port bow!”
Ok, make that, “I really want to know how many illegals there are here.”
Steve Radack believes the HPD pension system is in disarray. He didn’t go into details, but he doesn’t seem to believe Mayor White has fully solved the city pension funding crisis.
Like one of his readers, I have to wonder if that was supposed to be the regular employee pension. I think I recall Matt Stiles writing that HPD’s pension also had some problems, but not to the scale ours is. White’s actions have postphoned the reckoning, but I thought it was to buy time for a permanent solution. Instead, from the way he’s squandered that time, it seems to be designed to dump it on his successor. And you wonder why I hate term limits? It’s a guarantee that no matter how badly you juggle anvils, as long as you can keep them in the air a little while, they will fall on someone else’s head. Let someone else ruin their political career by tackling the hard problems.
[Radek’s] also predicting a major crime wave this fall when the Katrina FEMA money runs out.
Oh. Joy. Excuse me while I go look at that million-dollar hike-and-bike trail again.
And finally:
I continue to stand by my earlier assertion that we’ve got a pretty good governance structure going in Houston and Harris County, and if it ain’t broke, we shouldn’t try to go and fix it (via a city-county consolidation, for instance).
I am in 100% complete and total agreement . . . with the last half of that sentence.