Catching Up
It's been a crazy week at work, what with a big industry-shaking acquisition and all, so I've neglected comment on a few local items during the week. If ya'll thought you were gonna get off THAT easy.... well, you should have known better.
Tom Bazan sent out an interesting email during the week, in which he reminded us that as part of the big campaign to win voter approval of light rail, METRO actually promised a 50% increase in bus service. Instead, METRO continues to cut bus service to try to balance its books. Hundreds of riders showed up to protest these changes at a recent METRO meeting [media criticism note: if Lucas Wall is going to post the per-rider subsidy for bus service, isn't he obliged to do the same for light rail service?]. Of course, we've pointed out for some time that such changes will be necessary to subsidize the light rail operation, and that poor people in Houston who rely on the bus will see their transportation options reduced in favor of the white-collar boondoogle known as the Main Street line.
Earlier in the week, City Council approved revisions to the municipal employees' pension plan that was the subject of great controversy earlier this year. The new agreement, hashed out by the Mayor's representatives and the pension board, reduces the city's unfunded liability of roughly $2 billion to approximately $850 million mainly by boosting the contributions of municipal workers. Ron Nissimov's article suggests that the remaining liability will be funded over the next thirty years, and that a re-mortgage of the city's Hilton America's Hotel could finance $300 million of that shortfall. Details seem notably lacking. Frankly, the size of the remaining liability still seems to be an issue, and one likely to come back around for some post-White Administration. There's another problem that still has not been addressed -- the unfairness of the Group C plan for city executives, including those very executives involved in negotiating these reduced benefits for rank-and-file workers who participate in the Group A and Group B plans. Interestingly the conservatives on Council seemed to be the only pols who wanted to tackle the issue up front. Mayor White promises to work on it later. We'll see.
Finally, Rich Connelly passes along a bit of political gossip that seems intended as a shot across the bow of Jordy Tollett:
When you get elected mayor of the country's fourth-largest city despite being charisma-free, you tend to be thankful to the guys who ran your ad campaign. And Houston Mayor Bill White certainly is.
So when those ad guys -- the company sports the precious name ttweak -- put together a pro-bono PR campaign to boost Houston's image, you would think most city bureaucrats would say it's just wonderful.
That's not, however, what Jordy Tollett did. Tollett, the head of the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau, has been giving a cold shoulder to ttweak's "Houston -- It's Worth It" campaign. He told the Houston Chronicle the campaign's point -- listing things like heat and traffic, then saying the city is still Worth It -- only highlights negative aspects of what he prefers to call Space City. He later refused to talk to a New York Times reporter for a story on it.
White is annoyed and is looking to oust Tollett, the rumor mill says.
Tollett has legendary survival skills -- he is to Houston mayoral administrations what cockroaches are to nuclear Armageddon -- but the mayor offered a noticeably tepid endorsement of him when given the chance to dispel the gossip at an August 25 meeting with the Houston Press.
Tollett is "colorful," the mayor said, not in a way that indicated he thought "colorful" was a key attribute for the job. "I want the [convention] bureau to book citywide conventions…and if they don't, there will be personnel changes. If they do, then that's results."
He expects at least ten such conventions a year. It's still too early to judge how the GHCVB (and Tollett) have leveraged the Super Bowl success and new convention center hotel, he said, but time is short.
"Within the next year we'll have a good sense of how our marketing is working," he said.
For a guy who ran as an accomplished businessman and political novice, Mayor White has shown that he can play political hardball when he thinks it necessary, and he's proven to be highly effective at moving his agenda. Tollett may have "legendary survival skills," but I'll be betting on our politically adept mayor if push comes to shove.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 09/04/04 11:01 | Houston | Technorati
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Comments
I would love to see that per-rider subsidy for light rail. It must be off the chart!
Posted by Anne @ 14:49 on 09/04/04
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