Priorities Indeed!

Mayor Pothole continues to claim that the City of Houston is well prepared for a terrorist attack, and always refers to his career as a public safety officer as evidence that the city is in good hands.

The reality is that Mayor Pothole's management of the city in this area is marked by the same weaknesses as his disastrous management of public works, the budget, etc.

The Chron reports on the latest example of city leadership's ineptitude, in the area of regional emergency communications. It turns out in the event of a regional emergency, Houston would be handicapped by a communications system that, under load, would be largely incompatible with that of the larger region.

Interestingly, Hans Marticiuc brings up a familiar theme:

The city is facing a $59 million shortfall this year and cannot scrape together enough to fund basic police services, said Hans Marticiuc, spokesman for the Houston Police Officers Union.

"At some point, the city is going to have to set priorities like public safety and basic services, and the frill stuff will just have to go away," Marticiuc said.

Funny, Orlando Sanchez criticized the Pothole Administration's inability to prioritize in the last mayoral campaign. But that didn't seem so important to folks like Marticiuc at the time (perhaps because police officers, unlike firefighters, received some nice incentives to shut up and support the mayor then).

Whoever the next mayor turns out to be, he or she is going to have a difficult time cleaning up all of Pothole's messes.

[Posted at 10:04 CST on 03/21/03] [Link]