Sports venues win; taxing our city services lose
One of the things that frustrates me about Houston- and also makes me glad that I don't live there- is the horribly skewed sense of priorities displayed by City Hall. The city doesn't have the money to pave roads, fund clinics, or keep libraries open, but there is more than enough money to fund tax breaks for new sports arenas and the teams that occupy them.
Maybe City Hall could order signs to be put on all the locked clinic, library and fire station doors: "Closed on account of ball games."
....[C]ity department heads have answered Mayor Lee Brown's orders to slash budgets by proposing closure of a half-dozen fire stations for $7.5 million in annual savings; a couple of health clinics for $3.7 million; and eight branch libraries for $1.6 million.
Won't it be something if, by the time all the visitors come to see Houston host the Super Bowl next year, we don't have a single library or clinic left open? And our trash collection has been cut back to once a month if we don't pay extra. And so on and so on.
We'll have to try to keep the visitors confined to the big new city-financed hotel and remodeled convention center, and Metro's new little train and the new football field. Because the way things are going, the rest of the city may be in pretty rough shape by then.
Plenty of money for sports, not enough for basics. Total of those three proposed service cutbacks comes to $12.8 million.
Go back to the summer of 2000. Three short years ago. Brown aggravated some City Council members because he didn't get their formal approval before committing the city to cover $20 million of the cost of the basketball court being built for the Rockets. Council later voted to approve it anyway.
A few months after that, City Hall agreed to rebate city sales taxes at Reliant Stadium events. Cost of that was estimated to run at least $632,000 a year. It was part of the financing plan for the new football field. It is money that won't be going into the city's general fund.
What is even more amazing is that Houston taxpayers have accepted this state of affairs without so much as a peep. Is it that they don't know what city officials are doing with their tax dollars? Or do they just not care? If they don't know, it's only because they haven't been paying attention.
We could compile quite a list of examples of city spending on huge projects in recent years. Projects that were sold to us as investments in the future. Projects that ended up costing millions of bucks more than the prices originally quoted.
These things will more than pay for themselves, we were told. And they won't cost us anything in reduced services or increased taxes, we were told. Yet here we are looking at reductions in basic city services and facing hikes in a variety of city fees.
How many more clinics and libraries and fire stations will be closed before those investments start paying dividends? And if City Hall ever does see dividend checks, will whoever is in charge at the time re-open our shuttered clinics and libraries and fire stations? Or will they decide it's time to build another round of new and grander facilities for the professional teams?....
How about helping to keep open some libraries and clinics and fire stations?
Summer before last Mayor Brown said, "What I want to see the sports authority do, once they get beyond these major facilities, is to use their imagination, if there are resources available that will not cost the taxpayers more money. Why not now look into the community?"
Just a year ago, Brown wrote in the Chronicle's Outlook section that "Houston's downtown area has $3.3 billion in construction either recently completed or under way." He wrote glowingly of the convention center expansion and new hotel and said, "Our new baseball stadium is giving us worldwide publicity. We're building a new football stadium for the Houston Texans. And we've begun construction on a new professional basketball/hockey arena downtown that will create more than 2,000 jobs and generate $13 million per year in sales tax revenue."
Today we are talking about closing clinics and locking library doors.
Play ball.
Indeed. Your tax dollars at work- lining the pockets of rich folks who own professional sports teams. If you want to find a book, go to Barnes & Noble.
Money greases the wheels of politics in Houston, as much as you will find in any other city. What is particularly disturbing about this reality is the gap between the haves and the have nots, and the degree to which City Hall cravenly panders to the haves at the expense of the have nots. In the past five years, Houston has built or is in the process of building three brand-spanking-new state of the art sports arenas- Minute Maid Park (baseball), Reliant Stadium (football), and Your-Name-Here-For-The-Right-Amount-Of-ChaChing Arena (basketball). All of these impressive edifices were built with substantial public subsidies. The millions that went into the sports palaces are the same millions that are NOT going to parks, libraries, and clinics. Ah, well; poor people don't vote anyway, right?
Of course, Mayor Lee Brown was re-elected, so one could say that the voters of Houston have exactly the quality of corrupt representation that they deserve. Of course, now that Brown is a lame duck, where are the checks and balances? Who is going to hold him accountable for fleecing city coffers in order to line the pockets of rich benefactors? Apparently no one.
Sure, Houston has three beautiful new arenas, something that any city would and should be proud of, but at what cost? At the cost of not paving streets in the Fourth Ward? At the cost of closing public libraries? At the cost of closing clinics? How can a leader in good conscience stand by and allowed this abuse of public money to continue? If you're Lee Brown, it's apparently quite easy. When you've long since been bought and paid for, you're accountable only to those from whom the money flows.
