Monthly Archives: April 2007

Oh Really?

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It’s not a good week for the City of Houston. Matt Stiles at the Chronicle had a post I missed yesterday about all the lost water meters in the city of Houston. For years I’ve been hearing this number is “about 12,000.” No one ever said “exactly 12,xxx,” and now the Department is telling the Houston Chronicle that it will cost about $750 if they want that number.

The department said it would take 24 hours (and 55 minutes, no less) of programming and cost $755.31 to prepare the list. No wonder these things are lost!

Ok, I’ll take that piece of crap answer at face value and ask another question: Why doesn’t the city know this number already? Was there no time in the last four years that twenty-four hours and fifty-five minutes couldn’t be squeezed out to create this report? How much revenue is being lost because of this?

Given that the city has supposedly hired a contractor to do the job for it, I wonder what the bid process was like?

“We’d like you to find about 12,000 meters.”
“About 12,000?”
“Yes, roughly.”
“Could you be more exact?”
“Not really.”
“Okaaaaaaaay then. I’ll bid about a million dollars to do it.”
“WHAT? About a million??”
“Yes, roughly.”

I suddenly begin to see why some people at PW&E are starting to look a little green around the gills. I’m sensing some backsliding here, and an unwillingness to face up to the ugly reality staring the department in the face: these meters are “lost” because of years of understaffing and neglect.

Last year, I wrote:

Worse, it’s perfectly obvious that no one wants to know much about the misses, like why they happen, what kind of calls they were, or anything else about them for that matter. That’s a tactic that looks VERY familar to me, since I spent nearly 15 years under a management that engaged in it constantly. If you don’t have the information, you can honestly answer that you don’t have it. (The Assistant Director that told me that is no longer with the city. Thankfully.) The other half of the trick is to define your categories of information that you do keep in such a way as to be meaningless. Essentially, the numbers give a false picture because they’re measuring the wrong thing. Then bad budget and policy decisions get made with the wrong numbers, which means that even more “re-tooling” is necessary to keep the numbers looking good, and the next thing you know, you’re facing a disaster. My department is a multi-year recovery from that, driven in part by Mayor White’s performance initiatives, and partly by the changes in managment after the Great Retirement Slaughter of 2004. And some of the bad decisions made won’t be recovered from at all because they were capital expenditures and now we’re stuck with the results of such a poor decision-making process.

You should read that article, you really should. It makes it completely unnecessary for me to address this piece of absurdity–I’ve already said it all.

G-ddammit.

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Well, fuck.

I don’t know what the final tally is going to be, nor the reason for such senseless slaughter. But the odds are, if one, just ONE of the victims had been armed, it would have been stopped. Hell, if you armed the entire classroom, the casualties from “friendly fire” if everyone opened up would have been far less than what we have here.

Cold of me? Ask yourself, in the end, which is worse — you take one in the back or fifteen more people die? Get back to me when you can come up with a counter that isn’t a variation of “you can’t say that’s how many would die!”

I’d take my chances with overzealous classmates; at least I know the idiot who might shoot me in the back is trying to save lives. Althought I’d guess that in reality, only about one in ten would actually attempt to return fire right away. Most people in our society don’t have what it takes to go from zero to ‘protect the tribe’ instantly.

Update: there’s at least one report that he chained the doors shut to keep people from escaping. Nobody noticed him doing that? Nice. Oh, and it’s already been noted that not only is Va. Tech a “gun free zone,” but a bill in the state legislature to revoke that status and allow students to carry, failed last year.

Update 2:

Steven notes:

I’ve been informed that some reports are now referring to him as “Oriental” rather than “Asian”. Which probably means that the M-word isn’t involved. We’re back to the “lovelorn loser who snapped” theory as being the most likely, based on highly inadequate information.

Very inadequate, and very questionable, the way the media operates. I’m thinking of the fact that, classically, Orient included the Middle East, hence “Orient Express.”

CNN sez:

Flinchum said at a Monday night news conference that they had a preliminary identification of the shooter at Norris Hall but were not releasing it.

With every major news agency tripping over themselves to get any shred of news about this story, if we don’t get a name or a picture tomorrow, my BS detectors are going to start twitching.

There’s been several references to him trying to shoot his girlfriend, so we’re probably all jumping at shadows, but I really, really don’t trust the media on this one. Rumors get reported as facts, and they’ve shown a willingness to overlook ethnicity when it suits them. There’s even hints being dropped that it was actually 2 separate unrelated incidents — which I’m sure the University would like to be true.

Hindsight is 20/20, but I think we’re going to see some failures of nerve and common sense at Va.Tech come to light before it’s all said and done. Sadly, in the modern world, any large-school administrator that hasn’t devoted some thought to the “mad shooter” scenario is remiss; any administrator with a police department that hasn’t drawn up a plan is incompetent.

Trash the Fee, Part III

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In prior segments of this series, I’ve hinted that the new “heavy trash pickup fee” (which we should really be calling the “garbage service tax”) may be impossible to administer fairly. Today, I’ll discuss why, but be warned–there’s a lot of parenthetical comments coming because there are so many interrelated side issues, it’s not funny. Well that, and Office Depot had a sale on punctuation marks.

As with most such garbage programs, the proposal in Houston is to add a flat fee to “everyone’s” water bills, regardless of whether they actually use the heavy trash or recycling services. The problem is, that oft-quoted “30% of users” figure refers to garbage service users. It doesn’t refer to utility service users, and there is a difference between the two groups. It’s especially stark here in Houston, because we have gone on for so long with the two services completely separate. This isn’t just a financial issue; it’s built into the very infrastructure of both Departments, and even subtly, our ordinances. I’m not talking about things like authorization for the fee; I’m talking about problems with implementing it.

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What’s in a Water Bill?

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A while back, in the discussions over at blogHouston’s forums, we were having a discussion about the garbage tax, and I made a response to correct the mistaken impression of another reader that we were already paying for garbage with our water bills. While blogHouston has a much larger readership than Houblog (even when I’m writing here regularly), it occurs to me that it was too informative a piece of writing to remain buried in the forums where I feel certain not all readers go. So I have copied the response here below for anyone who may have missed it.

Before the Mayor effectively disconnected the cost / rate equation, the water bill had zilch to do with the solid waste. Now it has zilch to do with anything. The accounting is fairly technical, but the way it’s divided is simple: Solid Waste gets funded from tax revenue every year, whereas Public Utilities is funded from user revenue. The two funds don’t mix at that level. I’ll leave aside what happens when the Council loots any surplus, as happened under Brown. Such funds [go into the General Fund, and] are not directly transferred to any other Department, and there is no correlation between the amount of utility revenue and Solid Waste budget anyway.

What do I mean by disconnect? The way it was supposed to work is that every year, the department would examine the bond service, the cost of operating the system, the labor, and all the etceteras, to determine how much money needed to be raised on an annual basis. Multi-year projections, going forward, blah, blah, blah. However, owing to the asinine design of the department, only the capital costs, debt service, and operation of the Public Utilities Division got counted on the costs side. Guess what got left out? Billing. The costs of the Utility Customer Service Branch, if not all of Resource Management, got omitted from the equation. So, on the surface, COH was running a slight profit on utilities — in reality it was probably running a deficit! A Jefferson Wells audit calculated the per-account cost of administration and billing to be around $2.30 per month. This would mean about $1,000,000 per month, easy.

So in 2004, when the rates were finally increased after 11 years, the Financial Management section of Resource Management proposed a $2.35 fee to be added to the sewer bills of all customer accounts, in order to pay for those costs. At which point the infighting started — to put it bluntly, this would cause one section to be singled out publicly. It made zero sense anyway — if you’re going to split out administrative costs, then do it for the debt service, the treatment costs, the repair and maintenance costs, etc. Furthermore, why add the cost to the sewer? There’s thousands of accounts that have only water, with no sewer (industrial supply, sprinkler systems, fountains, etc.) Yet their administrative cost is virtually the same.

So what happened? Take a gander at this. Look at single and multi-family sewer rates. That’s the fee, reduced to $1.00, with three years of automatic increases added. And businesses don’t pay it. In fact, nobody pays it but homeowners and apartment complexes. If the definition of a compromise is, “a bad solution that pleases no one,” then I think this fits.

Since 2005, the rates automatically increase by the amount of inflation in the tri-county metro area. What this means is that the actual costs of running the department no longer matter. They can be be higher, they can be lower, they can be unchanged. But whatever the overall rate of inflation is according to the U.S. Dept. of Labor, that is how much the bills will increase. And now that I think of it, is this a violation of the city charter, since it doesn’t seem to fit the (non-technical/legal) description of an Enterprise Fund? And if it is a violation of the charter, will the Mayor break the rate structure as fast as he breaks some leases?

I’d just like to add that, while searching for additional links to add to this post, I looked through the City Controller’s site, and noticed several curious things. Firstly, the Consolidated Annual Financial Report for FY 2006, which ended nine months ago on June 30th, is not on the website. The latest is 2005. Second, you’d think that if the site has multiple pages to explain about the Controller’s office, its function, and its history, it could find space for a page of basic information on the city budget, and how it is organized. Some quick facts, maybe even definitions of things like “Enterprise Fund” and so on. Why, schoolkids could use it for civics assignments (if they still have such a class, and it hasn’t been replaced with “How to Hate America” and “Western Civilization is Evil” lessons). Also, there’s been some very interesting audits released recently. Not that we’ve heard much about them in the press…

Trash the Fee, Part II

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Unsurprisingly, the Houston Chronicle came out today with an editorial in favor of the “Waste Reduction” fee. No one should be surprised by that; the Chronicle has never met a bit of social engineering it didn’t like. Needless to say, it heaped praise upon the idea’s friends.

Even so, council members including the conservative-leaning Toni Lawrence seemed to quickly grasp the fee’s role in keeping other city services free and accessible. It’s a promising sign that constituents also can put the fee in its proper context.

What "free and accessible" services are those pray tell? The understaffed police department and the fire department? One wonders how much longer those will remain free. Just what is this “context?” (And can you call a tilt that small a “lean?” I guess you can if you’re indulging in Chronicle Newspeak.) But the Orwellian re-definition of “free” and "service" doesnt’ stop there.

The other proposals also are fair — if far less controversial. The panel decided against including a “user fee” for weekly trash pickup. That makes Houston almost unique among major Texas cities, most of which attach that fee to homeowners’ water bills. Heavy trash pickup — a lumbering, wasteful process that dispatches trucks monthly to serve 30 percent of city households —

Stop. Right. There.

Could someone please explain to me how it is "fair" to charge ALL Houston households for a service that only supposedly 30% use? If this is a fee on heavy trash pickup, shouldn’t the fee be charged to people using the service? The mayor, his task force, and the Chronicle want to make it sound like these 30% of users are the problem, yet then they want to charge everyone that receives any city garbage service (provided they get a water bill, anyway), whether they produce heavy trash pickup or not. Could someone explain to me how this is not a universal garbage fee? The mayor’s answer seems to be (paraphrasing here): “Because it’s not labeled as such. We’re calling it a heavy trash reduction fee.”

Labels do not a reality make. I can paint myself in blackface and start singing "Mammy," but I bet calling myself the greatest black musician since B.B. King isn’t going to keep the NAACP off my lilly-white ass. Just ask Michael Richards. Unfortunately, the Houston Chronicle, the task force, Controller Annise Parker, Mayor Bill White, and “conservative-leaning” Toni Lawrence do not appear to be functioning in the same reality as the rest of us. To continue their propagandizing:

— would be reformed in two sensible ways. Gradually, over several years, scheduled pickups would drop to twice annually. Residents, however, could call in extra pickup requests for a small cost.

Ah, so we’re going to charge everyone we can, and then charge the real users too. Which really gives the show away about the $42 fee actually being a universal garbage service fee, not a heavy trash fee, doesn’t it? Only, since they’re not calling it a garbage fee, they can come back in a few years and impose something else with that name too, can’t they? If you think not, look at all the weird fees on your electric and phone bills. Now that’s the art of inventive fee charges raised to the professional level of the private sector. (And some folks wonder why I sneer at “privatization” of government functions. People, businesses have to pay a fair wage and make a profit. The city doesn’t have to do either.)

In the balance of “cost vs. service” lies the biggest problem with this plan, in two respects. In the first place, only a hardcore “social engineer” is going to be stupid enough to want to pay more to get less service. Maybe that “engineer” can afford it, but I’ll bet you a sixty-year-old grandmother with nothing but $819 a month in Social Security can’t. (That’s the poverty level for 1 person.) Hey, remember, according to some folks, 1 in five children in Houston live in poverty! Let’s burden their guardians with more fees. After all, those damn poverty-laden households generate tons and tons of heavy trash every year–they can buy one less pack of cigarettes a month, can’t they? Make them pay! What’s controversial about that?

But the second half of the problem is the real killer: Reducing the scheduled pickups will not reduce the amount of heavy trash produced in Houston. It will however, cause the amount of illegal dumping to skyrocket. We already ticket people for putting out heavy trash one day early. What is going to happen when someone has a load to be disposed of, and it’s three months until the next pickup? It’s going to get dumped in the nearest vacant lot or on a dead-end street. "But don’t worry," proponents say, "the fee will pay for extra enforcement!" So could someone explain how that squares with this?

The projected savings for Houston? $14 million a year.

How much of the savings is going to be eaten by the need for extra enforcement? And how much good will that extra enforcement be? My bet: zero. The only way to really nail a dumper is to catch them in the act. Is Chief Hurtt going to suggest cameras on every vacant lot next?

Let me ask this: Does anyone think it’s strange that the director of the Solid Waste Department picked now to retire? There appears to be no pressing family or medical reason for him to depart at this moment. And as the director of Solid Waste, Thomas “Buck” Buchanan is the natural point man for any proposal to change the ordinances, especially if Mayor Bill wanted to avoid being in the line of fire of a sure-to-be unpopular proposal. Chief Hurtt sure takes it on the chin for red-light cameras, doesn’t he? Go read Matt’s interview of the departing director. Notice how he sidesteps the question on the proposals, while still appearing to support the mayor.

In my opinion, the big news is not what all the noise is being made about. The code of ordinances that defines who is eligible for city solid waste services really hasn’t been modified for decades. . . .The real news is that the task force has devised a recommendation to modify the code of ordinances so that 10,000 or more customers that are not eligible for service will be receiving service from the city.

He sticks to the administrative side of the issue and says nothing about how the fee and related proposals will improve Houston’s handling of solid waste. People, refusing to talk about the “improvements” to recycling and solid waste pickup is a HUGE omission, one that this gentleman is too experienced to make by accident. I thought his absence from the front lines of the publicity for this proposal was odd, but it shouldn’t take anyone with a city employee’s experience in figuring out the city’s inner workings to realize that this means the state of Denmark is having problems with rottenness once again.

The way to reduce illegal dumping is to stop making it so difficult to dispose of garbage in the first place. (Granted, a lot of this is under the EPA’s control; which is why you can’t just drive your truck to the landfill anymore and toss stuff in. Who knows what would end up in there?) All this fee and service reduction is going to accomplish is to trash up our neighborhoods, while enabling the mayor to shift more money to useless bike trails. And I think Col. Buchanan knows that. But like a good soldier, he’s not going to publicly embarrass his commander; he’s going to let the commander pick someone in line with his philosophy.

I guess I’m not a good soldier.

Col. Buchanan makes a good point though; probably the only good part about this set of proposals is that it tries to bring some order to a chaotic area that hasn’t been examined in over 40 years. Simply put, the ordinances and codes that worked for a city of a half-million four decades ago do not work for the fourth-largest city in the U.S., especially given the changes in our society. There’s a lot of things that are creaking along, with the bureaucracy trying to patch over them, often being whipsawed by contradictory directives from successive administrations. Many city ordinances need to be given a comprehensive review and updated to cope with 21st century technologies and trends. (Public Works was also in the middle of such a project, but it has been “delayed” by the current proposals, and my gut feeling is it won’t get done this year due to the controversy.)

The task force also found a way to dampen escalating disputes about who is eligible for free trash pickup and not receiving it, and vice versa. City policy is clear: eligible residences must face a city street. But confusion has ballooned along with the densely-platted townhouse developments city-wide, in which some units face the street — and get trash pickup — and their inward-facing neighbors do not.

But, of course, those inward facing neighbors will still get charged $21 per semi-annual heavy trash pickup, won’t they? I can confidently say that as the projected revenue numbers stand right now, no one has made a count of which townhomes do not face the street, and subtracted them from the revenue. I’m not even sure if the proposal exempts non-served properties from the fees.

And that thought will lead us to part 3 of this series, in which I examine the biggest flaw in this entire scheme: administering it. I’m sure the water department is looking forward to having to keep track of which properties are eligible and which aren’t….

"Oh, don’t worry, that’s Solid Waste’s job."

"OK, so then you’re saying Solid Waste is going to keep track of all 440,000 Public Works utility account numbers and which properties they serve, so they can correctly say "charge these accounts, but not those."

"But! But! They do it in all the other cities, don’t they?"

"Not exactly…."

See you in a few days for part 3.

Trash the Fee?

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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.