I have a lot going on in my personal life right now (I think I’ve said that before, haven’t I?) and unfortunately, my normal mode of dealing with stress is to either get very irritible, or bury myself in leisure activities. Doing anything that resembles work becomes harder and harder, whereas computer games and anime mean I don’t have to think; worry, or just plain be neurotic. There’s times when I wish I could just be stupid, like all the folks that voted to remove the revenue cap from the City of Houston, because the mayor said he needed more money to offer increased services

So what do we get? A new “tax” and and a promise to reduce services. I’ve got to agree with the commenter JP over at the Chron’s CityWatch blog:

Nothing says term limits has created a de facto single 6-year term more than a mayor feeling comfortable enough to propose a new tax in one of the interim election years.

This is a subject I’ve pointed out before. All I have to say is that if Houstonians don’t wake up and smell the coffee, when a mayor is willing to propose extra fees and reduced services eight months before an election, then the voters will allow this city to become a model in just another ten to fifteen years.

If, that is, you consider 1970’s Detroit or New York City to be models.

Well, today I”ll skip pontificating on that subject of bad government and just skip straight to bad governance. What we have here, is a whole series of bad ideas. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to write the full-length novel that I normally do, so I’m going to try an experiment and break this up over several nights. Tonight, I’ll look at the initial political reactions, and some of the background. Hopefully, I can maintain the momentum over the next several nights to finish this off, as well as cover each specific area in detail without having to backtrack much.

Also unfortunate is that not only did the Chronicle’s original article disappear off the website’s front page before Tuesday was done, but the far better article that joined it this afternoon isn’t linked at all. Nor is it lower down under “Houston and Texas.” Until it came out, coverage has been awfully light on details of how the fee would be implemented. Which may not be the fault of either Matt or the Chronicle–I’d sure want to keep the details awfully mum if I were spinning this plan. I hope that the web article is going to appear prominently in some form in tomorrow’s newspaper. Hopefully, with even more detail.

The charge will be $3.50 cents per month, added to the water bill. This is to pay for heavy trash pickup and recycling. Despite this addition of an estimated $19 million in tax revenue, the heavy trash pickup will be reduced, to either once every three months, or once every six months, depending on which version you hear. Now before we go any further, I want to nuke the incipient protest: “it’s not a tax, it’s a fee!” Folks, a fee is something you only pay if you use the service. a tax is something the government mandates you pay whether you get service or not. Do you pay a car rental fee or a hotel room rental fee to enter any of these new sports venues we have? No. They are rightly called taxes, because you may get to look at those pretty white elephants from the outside, but you don’t get to go to the games unless you pony up the entrance fee.

So plain and simple, this is a garbage tax. Recycleables and heavy trash today, household trash tomorrow. Once the camel gets its nose into the tent… well, it’s much easier to raise fees once they are imposed. After all, utility rates go up in Houston every year now. The Mayor and Council did away with all the necessity of actually calculating how much money it takes to run the system and setting rates accordingly–now they just raise the rates every year, no matter what. I’m sure the same principle could be applied to garbage, no problem.

Commisar Toni Lawrence is all for sending citizens to the re-education camps if they oppose the fee; obviously those in opposition are just uneducated:

“You just have to educate, and people understand.”

Ooooookay. Break out the waterboards, boys, we’ve got some edicatin’ to do! At least Michael Berry seems to understand the show:

“All I hear is less service, higher cost,” he said. “It’s very hard for me to justify that that’s not true.”

However, the real humdinger has to go to Mayor White himself:

“This is the beginning of a conversation about where we’re going with solid waste in the future,” Mayor Bill White told council members at the start of a two-hour special meeting on the topic. He said after the meeting that he agreed with many of the task force’s ideas, though he wouldn’t endorse the amount of the proposed fee, which he said needs more discussion and assurances that it “wouldn’t be a burden on families… I want feedback from the council and members of the public,” White said.

There’s so much BS in those three sentences, the futures market for cow patties dropped by 50% in heavy trading today. First off, this isn’t “the beginning of a conversation,” this is the beginning of Mayor White’s sales pitch and spin plan. If he wanted a conversation, he’d have floated the idea months ago, when work obviously had to begin. Instead, we don’t hear a peep about it until the mayor calls a special meeting to lay an already completed plan out, together with research that indicates this has been underway for a while — almost certainly since before the voters’ lifting of the revenue cap last year. Hey, Houston, you’re getting what you voted for: More taxes! Congratulations, proof that democracy works.

For the mayor who imposed a “tax-and-confiscate” scheme on poor people unfortunate enough to suffer a freeway breakdown, and scheduled increases in the water and sewer rates on the poorest people barely able to pay their minimum bills, to shed crocodile tears and piously declare a desire for assurances that it won’t be a burden to boost their minimum monthly charge by over a third is to insult the intelligence of his supporters. Oh wait, they don’t care. They voted for him because he promised to run Houston like a business. And he is–after all, a business is in business to make all the money it can, and provide for its stockholders. If you see the developers, social engineers, and a coterie of wealthy lawyers and business-people as the stockholders of Houston, he’s doing a fine job of that.

I’m sure he wants feedback. I doubt he has any intention of paying attention to it, but I’m sure he wants it, so he can make a pretense of having listened to the people before making his magnanimous and just decision to reduce the fee to a mere $2 a month instead of $3.50. After all, that will be much more affordable for someone “on a fixed income.” (You know why they call it a “fixed” income? Because you’re always broke on it.)

And just remember, Houston has a strong-mayor form of government. In reality, the council is little more than a rubber stamp, especially with the large number of Democrats that the mayor can count on backing him. No council has permanently defeated a mayoral proposal more than once or twice per term–if that. On the rare occasion something looks iffy, it will usually get withdrawn and re-worked–or the recalcitrant council members worked on. I think Mayor Brown once got defeated once on a substantive issue. Once. And White got defeated only a few weeks ago…for about 20 minutes.

Well, I’ve said enough about the politicians and politics of the deal tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll start in on why the mechanics of the matter are awful and even more unfair than it looks at first glance.