The Chron has a story about how Mayor Whitmire’s first year has gone, and I’ll get to that shortly, but first I want to look at this story, about his efforts to get help from the state government for the city. You may recall that was a key component of his platform, and it turns out that even his fifty years of relationship building has its limits with the leadership we have now.
Mayor John Whitmire
Throughout his first year in office, Mayor John Whitmire has consistently mentioned one solution for addressing the city’s financial struggles – turning to his connections in Austin.
But those connections might not come to fruition the way the former state senator has long promised.
In a recent interview with the Houston Chronicle, Whitmire admitted that where he thought he’d find congeniality among his former peers at the legislature, he’s instead found resistance when it comes to boosting the city’s revenue.
The city’s critics say Houston “doesn’t need that kind of money,” Whitmire said.
“Nobody works as hard as we do,” Whitmire said. “The people saying that, they don’t even stop to consider we got a tougher revenue cap than any big city. We’re growing rapidly. We are the life growth of the state of Texas. How Houston goes is how the state goes.”
The opposition may come as a surprise to some, especially given Whitmire’s 52 years as a state lawmaker. But experts say the phenomenon isn’t necessarily unique to Whitmire.
Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said it’s a difficult time to ask state leaders for money, despite Texas’ healthy surplus. The state doesn’t often view more progressive cities like Houston as being able to govern themselves, he added.
“That’s a conundrum that the mayor is going to face, no matter who the mayor is,” Rottinghaus said.
Nancy Sims, who also lectures on politics at the University of Houston, said the resistance comes down to the conservative views in the legislature.
“They don’t like the urban areas because they do tend to be more Democratic, and it’s true of every major city in the state,” Sims said.
As concerns about Houston’s financial future grow, Rottinghaus warns Whitmire will have to start painting a clearer picture sooner rather than later.
“The vagueness about the relationships and money has to come to fruition before too long,” Rottinghaus said. “The city’s financial woes will become more pressing and the voters become more impatient.”
The look-back story is here, and I’ll agree he’s gotten some stuff done while also being dealt a challenging hand. He’s made some of those challenges more complicated for himself, with the massive firefighter deal for which there’s no articulated plan to pay being #1 on that list, but what he must face would legitimately bedevil anyone.
But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about Whitmire’s promises and plans to use his half-century in state government to help fix some of the city’s problems, which as noted above has turned out to be not as easy as perhaps he thought it might be. In fact, I’ve already talked about it, over a year ago when the Chron endorsed him for Mayor. I’m going to take the liberty of quoting myself here:
Senator John Whitmire, with his fifty years in the Capitol and personal relationships with anyone who ever was anyone in Austin, is confident that that experience and those personal relationships with the various power brokers and other People Of Influence will be to Houston’s benefit as Mayor. And again, if we had a non-malevolent state government, I would not only agree with that, I’d tout it as a unique strength that Whitmire has. It should be a strength. As recently as when Mayor Turner took office, I for one would have seen it as a strength. Mayor Turner, with a similar level of experience and personal relationships, was the right person at the right time to push pension reform through, and it was a huge win for the city. I’d like to think we could have something like that for our next set of challenges going forward.
The problem is that many of those challenges are the result of the state putting its boot on our neck. Even before the “Death Star” bill, there’s been an inexorable march towards taking away the ability of cities to govern themselves. Republicans in the Legislature and their seething primary voters, including those who live in these cities, see us as a decadent force that needs to be dominated. They’re not interested in nice bipartisan solutions to thorny problems; quite the reverse. I don’t doubt that John Whitmire could get Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick and Dade Phelan and whoever else on the phone and tell them what Houston’s needs are (and aren’t) and ask them to help us out. What I do doubt is that they will see any reason or incentive to do their part.
The larger concern there is that a Mayor Whitmire would see his experience and connections and overvalue them, on the understandable but (in my view) mistaken idea that they mean something to the people on the other end of those connections. I fear that he could get strung along by his colleagues, in the way that President Obama got strung along in the first debt ceiling fight by the “moderate” Republicans in Congress, and in doing so foreclose other avenues to address issues. I fear that given the chance to improve the city’s political standing by working to vote out particular members of state government, Whitmire will value his connections above that possibility and thus contribute to leaving us in a position of subservience that much longer. Yes, of course there’s a risk in campaigning against someone who has a good chance of winning. You can’t avoid risk in politics. I’m just saying that the risk of not going for it tends to be downplayed in ways that it shouldn’t be.
There’s an analog here to the value of then-State Rep. Sarah Davis, the mostly moderate (certainly by modern GOP standards) Republican from HD134, whose presence in the Lege and on various committees was supposed to be a tempering factor against the majority’s baser and more troglodytic instincts. If you thought she was effective in that role, it made sense to support her re-elections even against strong Democratic opponents. If you didn’t – if you thought the real way to moderate our government was to have at least one part of it be under Democratic control – then it made sense to support her Democratic opponents, as hers was a rare swing seat. You know where I stood on that, and I maintain that I was correct.
I stand by everything I wrote then. One thing I didn’t mention then was that every two years, the number of people in Austin who have a personal connection to former Senator Whitmire declines – there was quite a bit of turnover this past cycle, you may recall – so whatever influence he had at the start of his Mayoral administration, it will only go down from there.
I don’t want to underestimate the Mayor. I’m sure he and his team have a list of things they want to ask the Legislature for, and they may get a lot of it. We’ll know in six months how that went. If it’s a big success, great! That will be excellent for Houston and he should keep at it. If not, I would like to gently suggest that this was as good as it will get, and it’s time to change horses and start pushing in chips on electing more legislators – and maybe some statewide officials – who don’t actively hate us. Call me crazy, but I think you can get more done working with people who already value you than you can with people that you have to convince of your value. I freely admit that’s a risky strategy, but a longshot is still better than a no-win bet. Sometimes the path of least resistance is also the path of least reward. Just something to think about.
Heavy trash has been sitting on the curbs for months in Sharpstown and other areas. Whitmire has been a failure. From October to October, there are twenty more police officers this year than last year. They spend millions and get twenty more police officers. I guess the police don’t love him as much as he claims because they are still leaving for whatever reasons.
His first year was a failure, as there was still money in the bank. Let us see how he does this coming year. I suspect it will be as bad or worse. He is already begging for money from the state, and he continues to criticize Turner for using money from the federal government to balance the budget.
Manny, on this we agree.
See ! There is hope !
I wish to God that Democrats would quit worshipping bipartisanship and compromise and actually back people who stand for something other than their own enormous egos (and for the billionaires backing them).
The only bipartisanship conservatives have ever been interested in is the kind where they get everything and the other side gets nothing beyond, “You get to continue to have a country/state/city.”
If you think One Term Whitmire’s first year of giveaways was bad, all while he sets the city’s course on bankruptcy, it was only a short time ago he told the cops he wanted to bring back their deferred retirement program. That was the one covered here so often over the past 20 years where cops would retire as millionaires and cost the city billions of dollars.
The last pension fix cost the city a great deal of money we’ll be paying it off for decades and anything the cops get, the fire guys will want restored as well though their pension haircut came much later. This was covered in the Houston Chronicle under the heading: “Whitmire wants to restore past police pension program. Experts worry it will only drive up costs” in November. The experts quoted in the story suggest forcing the cops to retire later, hinting at 65, which they will never approve. A related article claims a large percentage of HPD can retire at will right now, over half the force, but this approach seems shortsighted and far too expensive.
Which useful idiot city council members will Whitmire use to push for a high trash collection fee? We will find out this summer. I know which council members voted in the largest water rate increases in Houston’s history, over $600 million in water/sewage income.