Only two open district Council seats this cycle, and the open District G race has only two candidates.
Sandie Mullins Moger
Sandie Mullins Moger and Greg Travis, candidates for Houston City Council District G, have similar objectives in their bids to represent the district, saying they want to improve the city’s infrastructure, reduce spending and increase public safety.
Their differences lie in how each would go about decreasing the city’s debt if they were elected in the Nov. 3 election.
“We need to sit down and look at that budget and maybe purge the budget a little bit and say, ‘Hey, let’s not automatically reach out to the taxpayers,'” Moger said. “Let’s work with the money we’ve got and have a plan and a process to fix our infrastructure system.”
Travis has a more specific plan, proposing privatizing trash pickup, and perhaps the mowing of public grass, if it could save the city money.
Greg Travis
“Certain areas you’re not going to privatize – the fire department, police, water and sewers – nor should you,” Travis said. “But we have seven guys doing a sidewalk that’s only about 6 feet long. If you’re a private company, you wouldn’t have seven guys spend three days on a 6-foot sidewalk.”
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Both candidates identify as conservatives. Moger, 50, is a Houston Community College trustee; Travis, 52, is a lawyer who sought a council seat in 1999, missing a runoff by fewer than 100 votes.
Both candidates oppose the city’s embattled equal rights ordinance (known as HERO), saying it is bad for business.
My interview with Moger is here and with Travis is here. He has the Chron endorsement, she has the Hotze endorsement. They’re both competent and qualified, and I enjoyed meeting and talking with them, but stories like this remind me why I’m so glad to live in a part of town where nearly all of my district elected officials do a good job of representing my interests. I’m lucky to be someplace where my choices are not always between candidates I don’t agree with and maybe a few candidates that have no chance of winning. It’s a small consolation, since there are many things that could be improved in our processes for drawing the various district boundaries, and Lord knows my team is on the short end of the stick. But there it is.