Meet the neighbor of the Center Serving Persons with Mental Retardation:
Renee Davis, executive director of the center that teaches deaf children to speak without using sign language, said she has not been contacted by the city, but she worries that her facility could face the same scrutiny as the neighboring center for the mentally retarded.
Representatives of the center for the mentally retarded are in ongoing talks with the mayor’s office. The city had threatened to sell the 6 acres that the center leased because the directors would not agree to pay closer to market-value rent for the land near River Oaks.
Mayor Bill White said he hopes the meetings will produce a fair policy that the city also can apply to other nonprofits such as the Center for Hearing and Speech.
White said he wants to develop a uniform policy to reduce the risk of lawsuits against the city claiming the leases are not valid, which could disrupt the nonprofits’ operations.
Wanting to develop a uniform policy is a reasonable thing. I’m not sure where the fear of lawsuits is coming from – has this been mentioned before and I’ve missed it? Is there someone besides the city challenging the validity of 99-year leases? – but a uniform policy is still a reasonable thing. I think the city has proven its resolve on this matter.
Davis said her lease with the city sets $31,065 annual rent, which is waived if the nonprofit provides at least that much in services to the community.
Davis said her center provides more than $1 million a year in services to at least 1,000 hearing-impaired children. The center is staffed with teachers, audiologists and speech pathologists who help deaf children learn to communicate verbally.
“We believed that this was a partnership with the city,” Davis said. “They would lease the land to us and we would provide very difficult kinds of services that need professional expertise for deaf children, and the taxpayers did not have to bear the burden of providing those very specialized services.”
[…]
Bob Christy, the city’s real estate director, said the center for the retarded and the center for the deaf are the only two with 99-year leases although he said several other nonprofits have shorter-term, $1-a-year leases.
Have I mentioned that it’s time this mess got settled? Yes, I believe I have.
I’m not sure where the fear of lawsuits is coming from – has this been mentioned before and I’ve missed it? Is there someone besides the city challenging the validity of 99-year leases? – but a uniform policy is still a reasonable thing.
This compound sentence confuses me.
Are you saying (as the “still” implies) that a uniform policy is “a reasonable thing” even if it means that these contractual agreements that have not been a problem for a succession of mayors or for anyone else (save local developers who now want the land) and have achieved many good things for some of the weakest in our community suddenly will be broken (and please keep in mind these are legal AND moral promises made by both parties), and the weakest in our community can fend for themselves?
Because that’s really the issue at hand.
This has not been a problem for other administrations, but it suddenly is for this one. It seems to me it can be “settled” (as you put it) pretty easily if the administration just backs off.
No, Kevin, that’s not what I’m saying. Feel free to try again.
And it’s so nice to hear your sincere and heartfelt concern for “the weakest in our community”. Perhaps you could direct some of that concern towards Austin as well.
The Texas School for the Blind asked for $50.3 million of bond revenue to fix up its campus in Austin, but with the party-crashing new prisons needing $233.4 million, and only $282.6 million free, there wasn’t cash enough for the both of them. Close, but one million short. Decisions made inside the budget are all about lawmakers’ priorities, and when it came down to fixing up a school for blind children or building new prisons, guess who lost.
I have faith that you’ll even find a way to blame Mayor White or Metro for this.
I have faith that you’ll even find a way to blame Mayor White or Metro for this.
Another song comes to mind for your playlist: Charlie on the MTA:
http://wtsmith.com/songs/mta.html