White warns about new spending

Mayor White has a few words for whoever will succeed him.

Houston mayoral candidates, read Mayor Bill White’s lips: No new spending.

White, who has shied away from endorsing or even offering tacit support to those vying to replace him, weighed in last week with surprising advice for voters: Beware of any promises of new spending in 2010 and 2011.

“Texas has not come out of the recession, and sales tax receipts are dropping,” White wrote in a post on his Facebook page Tuesday. “Be sure not to vote for our next mayor based on commitments of more spending in the next two years.”

White, who personally has given that advice to the candidates, said he did not know of specific campaign promises that went too far. The admonition, however, was born of experience, as hard fiscal times have defined the beginning and end of White’s time in office.

They almost certainly will define the next mayor’s first term. Challenges to the city treasury include declining tax revenues, mandatory salary and health benefits increases, pension liabilities that have grown amid the stock market crash and a potential contract showdown with the Houston Police Officers Union.

The story examines the platforms of the Mayoral candidates to see where they’re proposing things that will cost money and how they intend to pay for them. I’ll be running my interviews with Mayoral candidates in October, and can hear them talk about this subject and judge for yourself how well they do at addressing it. I asked incumbent district Council members about it as well, so listen for that in their interviews over the next two weeks.

What I’ll say from having done all of these interviews is that everyone has ideas about how to handle the current budget situation, and to find ways to pay for the things we want. They include the usual talk about “cutting waste” and “finding efficiencies”, sometimes with specifics, as well as ensuring that the city is receiving the funds it is due – fines, fees, federal dollars – and bringing new businesses to Houston. These are all fine things, and they all need to be done, but there’s a lot of vagueness in there – define “waste”, for instance – and even if you did all of them, it’s not clear how much ongoing revenue they would generate. In particular, I am not convinced that anyone I’ve spoken to has a clear answer to the question of how to pay for more police officers. Some come closer than others, and I’ll leave it to you to listen to the interviews and judge for yourself. But I’m skeptical.

The other point that I’ve brought up in the interviews is that we’ve cut the property tax rate multiple times over the past six years, and that costs money, too. I’d be willing to bet that rolling back any one of those tax cuts would make a significant dent in the revenue shortfall we now face, without costing people a lot of money. A one-penny increase to the tax rate would add $20 a year to the bill for someone with a $200,000 house, and I daresay it would raise a few million bucks, not just this year but every year. Yet no one wants to go there, though some are less reflexively opposed than others. I say it’s a matter of ensuring that we have the revenue we need to ensure we can pay for the things we want and need. I also recall that the justification for the tax cuts at the time was that times were good and we could afford it. Well, times aren’t so good any more, and we’re looking to make cuts everywhere because we suddenly can’t afford things we thought we could. I don’t understand why this isn’t at least a part of the conversation, but it isn’t. For now, anyway – I say it will need to be later. I just hope we’ll be ready to deal with it then, since we aren’t now.

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