Bill King - Writer & Fellow At The Baker Institute Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Yeah, we're pretty must in here in Houston. Seven fifty
three is our time. Bill King joins us writer and
fellow at the Baker Institute. He wrote a story called
another City of Houston Fiscal Chicken comes home to roost?
Which chicken is this one bill?

Speaker 2 (00:15):
This is the drainage fee issue. The voters a couple
of times approved that the city would not borrow any
more money to do streets and drainage project and as
the existing debt was paid off, the savings from that
debt service reduction would go into new projects. And it

(00:40):
provided that a certain percentage of that, say that the
tax rate would go to this fund as that was
paid down. And what the Turner administration did was it
reinterpreted that to say it was an absolute amount, but
it was a relative amount based on what the tax
rate was. And the court said that's not what that's

(01:00):
not what the people said, and they're referendum right.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
Well. Mayor Turner was well known for his reinterpretations. Let
me just ask you about the budget deficit in general.
I've kind of been musing on the air, wondering on
the air if we were to have a doze committee
for the City of Houston. Do you think we could
find enough waste, fraud, and corruption in the City of
Houston if we identified all these things and to them,

(01:24):
we could actually pay for the deficit that we have.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Well, you know, Witmeyer is doing something fairly similar to that.
He had this efficiency report done by Ernston Young and
it was published last week and it's it's got a
whole lot of identifies a whole lot of management issues
in the city. Trying to quantify that is not you know,
that's still yet work to be done. But the Witmyer

(01:51):
administration thinks there's at least a couple hundred million dollars
there the budget as that thinks about three fifty right now,
So I think there's definitely part of the gap can
be closed. But Jimmy, look, the real problem here with
the city Houston is number one. In the nineteen seventies,
the city if you elected to give away half of

(02:11):
its sales tax revenue to Metro that's now a billion
dollars a year. If the city had that money back,
you'd be paving the streets in gold Instead, we have
a transit agency that's carrying twenty five percent fewer riders
than it did in nineteen ninety eight. So that money
is being wasted. So the city needs to stop spending

(02:33):
as much money on the metro as it is and
start spending money on streets, drainage, police officers, you know,
the basic services, because that program is just not worked.
The second problem is that we're now giving two hundred
million dollars a year to these so called tours is
the tax increment reinvestment zones, and they do things like

(02:54):
build bus lanes on Post Oak, which nobody rides, for
two hundred million dollars. So those two items by themselves
could more than close the budget gap. You did both
of those, and you do the sufficiency report that with
Meyer's doing, we should have plenty of money to at

(03:15):
least balance the budget.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
Much much better shape. They just have to have the
political world to do it. Always a pleasure, sir, thank you.
Writer and fellow with the Baker Institute, Bill King,