The last few weeks have seen Mayor White’s latest brainstorm almost slip by unnoticed behind the controversy over supporting illegal immigration and using red-light cameras. Well, I was just going back through some old posts over at BlogHouston when I ran across this tidbit, quoted by Kevin from Jay Aiyer’s campaign blog last year:

Why have we not trained more new officers? Cost — it currently costs the city of Houston $2.8 million for a cadet class of 70. That number doubles when the overall cost of operations of the Police Academy is factored in. Fiscal reality makes any dramatic increase in training difficult under our current system.

Hm…. $1.5 mil for “35 to 40” traffic-light repairmen and guys out there with batons waving traffic around? Or $5.6 mil for 70 real police we can send on any type of call? I know which one I think is the better buy — especially since, if we aren’t using the Police Academy to train police, we’re still paying for that half of the expense and under-utilizing it to boot.

And while we’re at it, how is a traffic-light repairman a law-enforcer? And why do we suddenly need a bunch more of them? Maybe the Mayor’s little traffic-light synchronization project is a little harder to keep running than he thought?