Mayor and Council excel at regulating, fail at implementing

Remember last fall when Mayor White, (temporarily not mayor pro tem) Carol Alvarado, and the rest of City Council beat their collective chest and passed an expanded (but with exemptions) smoking ban?

Yeah, well, it's almost time for the law to go into effect, and you'll be so surprised to learn that the city isn't ready to handle the exemptions:

At his family-run bar in downtown Houston, Mike Shapiro relies on a strong base of cigar smoking customers. So ever since the city passed the no-smoking ordinance, he's been trying to apply for the cigar bar exemption.

"I tried going down there to find out when I can apply, and all you get is a run-around," he said "They're not ready. Well, we're in the middle of July and they're still not ready."

Even though the ordinance passed last fall, the health department still hasn't come up with a permitting process.

"Is this a little late?" we asked Kathy Barton with the Houston Health Department.

"I'm a little disappointed this didn't happen quicker, but it is a small staff over there that works on such an operation," she said.

But no worries because the small staff has things under control:

Barton says staffers are working on a preliminary list of eight possible cigar bars they found from an article on the Internet, including Bossa, Downing Street and Crofts. But we found the list not very reliable. One of these so called cigar bars even isn't in operation. Paesanos shut down more than a year ago. It's now called Shadow Bar.

Or maybe not so under control. Meanwhile, Councilwoman Alvarado, who had this big idea in the first place, is on top of the situation:

"They need to get busy on that," said Houston Councilmember Carol Alvarado. "I had hoped they would have had that worked out."

Outstanding! Her management skills are still in top form, as we can see.

So let's recap: Mayor and Council enact a new ordinance, leaving all the pesky details to some overworked, understaffed city department. And no one bothers to check periodically on the process of ensuring a smooth implementation.

The problem is, Houston has a history of not being ready when new regulations go into effect.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: City Council suffers from Pass-a-Law Syndrome

Posted by Anne Linehan @ 07/12/07 09:41 PM | Houston Miscellany | Technorati | Sphere | Comments (5)

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