Man, I would hate to be a politician. Sometimes your own history, your own words, come back to bite you on the ass. The following is a draft article I wrote back in November of 2010 under the title “Frustrated, Floundering, and Flailing — Intro”, but never finished, and never posted. The irony, it is de-lish…

Well, anyone who remembers back to the beginning of this blog probably wonders what happened to the invective and analysis that went into my writing, not to mention the frequency. The answer is pretty simple: it was getting to the point where it was too dangerous to continue writing. Between the advancement of my own career, and the tips I was being provided anonymously by other (or ex-) city employees, I was starting to get into the deeper layers of the city – it’s one thing to take publicly available news and comment on it – to help connect the dots and fill in the blanks, as it were. It is something else entirely to dig beneath the surface and uncover things that Important People don’t want to see the light of day. And as my career has advanced, I was becoming privy to more and more things that I wasn’t sure if I should risk blogging about.

And I don’t just mean angering Mayors, Directors, and managers in the City of Houston Public Works with the information. I’m talking about politically powerful people like Andy Teas the Houston Apartment Association, or any of the Renew Houston backers. These are the kind of people who are accustomed to glowing articles in the “Newspaper of Record,” who may not take criticism lightly, and (most importantly) who cannot be reached by civil service rules. What are the chances that continued criticism of their influence in city matters might get under someone’s skin and result in a Mostyn lawsuit? If they’re smart, probably not that high, because even Mostyn found out that picking on bloggers can raise your profile in unwelcome ways. But if I really piss someone off, who knows? As for the repercussions… well, let’s just say that unlike some people I can think of, I don’t have a recognizable face and voice that will open doors, a rolodex full of contacts, and the money to go into real estate development in foreign countries – and such a lawsuit would not be defended by the city.

So, despite having some very strong convictions about rate changes, Renew Houston, the rebate program, red light cameras, and other matters involving the city’s infrastructure, I (mostly) stayed out of those issues, and when I did comment, I generally stuck to public knowledge. Essentially, I’ve been semi-retired for going on two years now, but left the blog up – it kept the spammers happy (Edit: until they managed to take the site down).

All of which is preparatory to making this point: if I’m breaking silence now, it is because the situation is reaching a critical point.

Everyone knows that the City of Houston’s Public Works and Engineering has had customer service problems involving its utility system for years. I’ve written on this going back five years now, although most of the early articles are trapped in an old database, and not visible to the public any longer. The situation has been allowed to linger for years, and has gotten worse over time. It’s often blamed on automation, on stupid managers, on lazy city employees, and on anything and everything except what’s actually causing it: bureaucracy, politics, and term limits. Yes, the first three have their roles to play, but the fundamental, root cause of the problems plaguing customer service, that is, rate-payer service come down to the latter trio.

Since I don’t have the patience to write huge articles, and people reading blog posts prefer something shorter than War and Peace for an afternoon’s light reading, I’m breaking this up into multiple parts. I’m still working out on how to carve up this very large subject, but it looks like it’s going to be in at least two more parts: one on how the three major causes interact and one on the specific problems facing PW&E.

http://www.texaswatchdog.org/2010/11/houston-mans-2500-water-bill-leads-to-weeks-of-confusion/1289322000.

Well, here we are, over four years later (that long???? Wow) and I guess it wasn’t so critical back then, was it, if we survived until now? I don’t even remember what the rest of the posts were going to be about. But Houston is in worse shape than ever after almost 18 years of “blue-city” management. We’ve dumped billions into the unending rat-hole of rail, played a shell game with city assets to hide the true cost of the soccer stadium, levied a whole new (fubared) tax on the city, and are no closer to fixing the pension mess than ever. I’ve been AWOL during the entire mess, and I still wonder, if I’d come out hard against the drainage fee, would it have been enough to move 2,000 votes from one column to the other? I doubt it; I never had more than 100 readers per day, but I’ve been quoted here and there, and maybe… But maybe not. So I faced a bunch of challenges at work, and decided to put the pen away so as to concentrate on my career, such as it was — and believe me, I was kept very busy, what with drainage and the billing modernization projects.

And now, things are worse than ever. It’s no longer a matter of bad management. Or I should say, just a matter of bad management. Now we’ve got the OIG investigating monkey business in PWE, a utility billing modernization plan that’s over budget and on course to miss its fourth deadline for deployment, yet another fee about to be charged to utility customers, and $25 million in utility overcharges to the same.

Buckle up folks. Ubu Roi’s back. The ride’s going to get bumpy…. and I don’t know where it’s going to lead any of us.