Bill Frazer
Next up on our list of candidates to succeed term limited City Controller Ronald Green is Bill Frazer, who is attempting to build on his respectable showing against Green in 2013. Here’s the 2013 interview I did with Frazer, and in that spirit I’m largely going to quote from what I wrote then. Frazer is a career accountant, having served as President of the Houston CPA Society, and has served on the Board of Directors of the Texas Society of CPAs for the past 20 years. He recently retired as Chief Financial Officer of CB Richard Ellis Capital Markets, and has been a board member of GEMSA Loan Services. Please note that during the interview, Frazer shows me a chart about Houston’s pension payments. A copy of that chart is here, for your reference. Here’s what we talked about:
You can see all of my interviews as well as finance reports and other information on candidates on my 2015 Election page.
The first thing he’d do would be to “form a committee” and then use outside auditors (how original…). Then he’d pull out the results of the previous long range financial task force, almost all of the recommendations focused strictly on cutting pension costs as the committee was designed, not TRUE long range financial planning or pulling back spending on non and lesser essential items. He goes into suggesting city council members don’t understand financial data now but he’d do better (without specifics of course).
“Houston is buried in $12.9 billion of debt. $3.3 billion of this debt is unfunded pension liabilities of which $1.8 billion is past due.”
That sounds horrible until you remember that most of that voter approved debt was for the enterprise funds that pay for whatever debt they incur, and that the yearly total city budget is over $5.1 billion. Bonded debt is long term and spread out over decades in most cases, the existing city debt load far better than many, many cities and easily sustainable without crazy people suggesting the city is bankrupt or close to it.