The Houston Chronicle has an article discussing the HFD Life Safety Bureau. Seems they’ve been letting the city down, by wasting money, not doing key tasks in todays multi-threat world, and apparently, not doing much at all besides routine inspections. [edit: new article with details.]
This isn’t a surprise to me. I had the misfortune to twice deal with HFD. One of those two times was with this very bureau on a subject that it has jurisdiction over. I was not favorably impressed by the fact that the supervisor would not return my calls regarding a matter of interdepartmental cooperation to enhance fire protection and catch scofflaws.

The other time was over an issue that got somewhat political. My office did a report at that time, which combined information from several sources into an aggregate report produced monthly. HFD was requested to provide some information regarding one of their activities in front of City Council, as it pertained to an issue several citizens had brought up. (I’m being deliberately vague, because even though this was under the Lanier administration, I don’t want to encourage someone to go a’ hunting for me). Well, they dug out the report from my office and gave the figure from it, but the person repsonsible for giving it to the council looked at earlier and later versions of the report, and realized that the number didn’t make sense. The issue should have caused a major impact–in fact, the department was telling the council it had a major impact, yet our report was claiming it didn’t.

So they jumped on the phone to the director of my department, and the feces started locomoting down the gravity well, with yours truly at the bottom of it. So I had to start tracing the “chain of reports” back up the line to see where the number originated. You probably see it coming: it came from HFD itself. I hope I didn’t gloat too much when I called back with the name of the captain responsible for providing the figure. Obviously, they regarded the report as an imposition and not worth tracking, so they just sent in a fictional number every month!

And as far as I know, that number is still completely fictional.

However much I like to relate war stories from the old days, both of those incidents are far from the most interesting thing about the story. What I find intriguing is that the study which revealed this was done by City Controller Annise Parker’s office. That’s right, a study critical of the management of a department headed by a mayoral appointee came out of the Controller’s office. If you still don’t get it, let me jog your memory with a little blast from past: Outta-Town Brown in the same situation with Sylvia Garcia: “Controller: finances. Mayor: management.” While she challenged him at first, it appeared that the local Democratic party agreed and leaned on Sylvia to play ball with their not-so-fair-haired boy. Her reward was party support for a continued political career. Our reward as citizens, was five more years of Mayor Brown’s mismanagement and poor budgeting.

Personally, I can’t balance a checkbook, but I think if I had to balance the City’s, I could hire someone that could and give them their marching orders. In any case, it’s good to see once again that our current mayor is cut from different cloth. Sure, Fire Chief Phil Boriskie engages in some ass-covering and disputes parts of it study, but the fact that a mayoral appointee asked for it at all (presumably with his boss’s consent), speaks volumes about how the City is being run now, and was being run then. Roaches don’t like lights, nor the people who carry them.