It's not a revenue problem, but a spending problem
Controller issues warning on mayor’s budget - Chris Moran, Chron Houston Politics
We thought all along that the Mayor and her Council passed a sham budget because of its *ahem* overly optimistic assumptions. We hope Mr. Green continues to speak up on these matters, because making the same mistakes again will prove costly.This fiscal year, for example, the city banked on taking in $40 million on real estate sales. The controller did not include that in his numbers, and he turned out to be closer to the mark than the administration.
The city now plans to draw down the reserve fund by $28.6 million to close the books on the fiscal year that ends this month to cover unrealized real estate sales.
But now that cushion is gone, so if Green is right again, the city can’t turn to reserves without risking its credit rating.
Cash-strapped Houston paying for past bonds, tax cuts - Chris Moran, Houston Chronicle
Actually, this headline is a poor one. The city is paying now not merely because of tax-rate cuts (tax revenues remained roughly the same, thanks to many years of significant appraisal creep), but because the last administration punted on really tough pension decisions, liked buying shiny trinkets, and wasn't interested in the sorts of spending cuts needed to put the city's financial house in better order (in fairness, the Brown Administration left many of those problems for Mr. White, who might have been a formidable statewide candidate if he had used his political capital to solve them).
Councilmember Sullivan gets it right in the story:
Houston has a spending problem, exacerbated by a pension bill that is coming due.Councilman Mike Sullivan, who was in office to approve the last two tax cuts, said they were the right thing to do.
The real culprit is increasing spending, not lowering taxes, he said.
"Government has grown. The city of Houston itself as a government has grown. More employees, more departments, more programs," he said.
During the White administration, the general fund budget increased by more than half a billion dollars a year - a 37 percent rise in six years.
Interestingly, this sort of assessment did not appear on the pages of the Houston Chronicle when Bill White was making his run for governor.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 06/06/11 09:15 PM | Print |
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