City still dealing with Lee Brown's legacy
Kristen Mack notes that last week's city council decision to cut funding for SimDesk is another example of Mayor White's trying quietly to fix some of the problems created by the last administration.
The SimDesk program, of course, was the Brown Administration's grand idea to spend millions of dollars to enable Houstonians to go into the library, manipulate documents, and save the results on a central server using proprietary software. Hardly anyone ever used the service (since homeless people rarely have the need to crunch complicated Excel spreadsheets), and it's not clear why the proprietary solution was ever preferable to simply giving away floppy disks with a library card. Well, except for the fact that certain developers and city officials seem to have benefitted from the million+ dollar boondoggle.
Mack throws in this curious clause:
The maneuvers on SimDesk and the museum technically allow White to see the projects through, protecting Brown's legacy as the city's first African-American mayor, while not obligating the city to pay more money.
Brown was the city's first African-American mayor, but it's unclear as to why that was mentioned in this discussion of two examples of his fiscal irresponsibility. SimDesk really wasn't a racial issue, despite Mayor Brown's efforts to make it one.
I wonder if Mack is responsible for that clause, or an editor added it later.
Elsewhere in the column, Mack hints that Mayor White has actually worked to torpedo capital-improvements funding for the African-American museum. That may indeed be what he's done behind the scenes, but he certainly has been a public advocate of the project, and taxpayers would be wise to keep a close eye on it and Mayor White.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/01/04 08:52 PM | Print |
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