From the Houston Chronicle: Houston mayoral questionnaire: Where candidates say they stand on the issues

A good way to look at the dominant issues in the current Houston mayoral election - at least according to the HC's editorial board - and where the candidates stand on them.

- Click here for the article. 

Here is a rundown of the issues. It provides a good at what a city does.  

- Crime and safety.
- Police hiring.
- Police response times.
- Police reform.
- Firefighters.
- Budget.
- Financial sustainability.
- Procurement and contracting.
- Tax Increment Reinvestment Zones.
- Bike lanes.
- Transportation expansion.
- Affordable housing.
- Permitting.
- Flood-control projects.
- Drainage.
- Solid Waste challenges.
- Garbage fees.
- Illegal dumping.
- Water and sewage rates.
- Leaky pipes.
- Street and drainage fees.

From the Houston Chronicle: Now the hard part Mayor Turner's first 100 days have been a sprint, but real challenges await.it

Some background for out look at the strong mayor form of government.

- Click here for the article.

Today marks Mayor Sylvester Turner's 100th day as mayor, and during his short stretch in office one thing has become perfectly clear: There are a lot fewer potholes on Houston streets.

Turner rushed from day one to fill the teeth-shatterers and suspension-killers that had become a hallmark of the daily commute and a chorus on the campaign.

Houston's new mayor also tore up potentially corrupt airport expansion contracts, saved curbside recycling, let a police chief retire and appointed an education czar and new leaders at Metro, the city attorney office and the Department of Neighborhoods.

We're still waiting for him to fill out the rest of his roster.

Beyond those mayoral duties that make headlines, there's a palpable change in tone at City Hall. Once icy relations between City Council and mayor have warmed, and could even be described as friendly. Fears that a partisan election season would seep into the daily work of running our city haven't come to fruition.

However, it is still too early to give anything but an incomplete on the mayoral report card - the real hurdles sit further down the line.

The city faces a $160 million budget gap that has to be closed by July 1 - Turner's 182nd day. He also needs to have a pension plan in hand before the next legislative session is gaveled in on his 375th day.

Tick-tock.

But even with those challenges months away, Turner still appears to be sprinting toward his goal. Council has been told to expect a preliminary budget plan by April 15 and a finished budget on May 10, with a vote on May 25.

The truncated timeline is supposed to send a sign of good faith to the credit rating agencies that recently downgraded Houston's debt. This rush also signals to voters that their elected officials are prioritizing the right issues.

As for that second big challenge - pensions - Turner has said that he'll have reform plans ready by the end of the year. That's an improvement on Mayor Annise Parker's strategy of going to Austin and unilaterally asking for local control. Parker was right when it came to identifying the problem of pension obligations growing faster than the city's ability to pay them, but sometimes it isn't enough merely to be right. Politics requires cooperation, as well.

From Governing: Why Democratic Governors and Republican Mayors Have Become Rare

Voters seem to prefer different parties for different things.

- Click here for the story.

Historically, gubernatorial elections have tended to be up for grabs between the parties. Statewide electorates are sufficiently eclectic to encourage candidates in both parties to run toward the center, expanding their bases. But the pattern of results is changing, and for an unexpected reason.

For obscure reasons, 36 states hold their gubernatorial contests during midterm cycles. This hasn’t seemed to matter much in the past. But in recent elections, the types of voters who cast ballots in midterm elections has diverged significantly from those that do in presidential cycles. Midterm electorates tend to be smaller, whiter, older and more Republican; presidential electorates tend to be larger, more demographically diverse, and more Democratic.

This pattern helped Republican gubernatorial candidates in 2010.

. . . the GOP is having an increasingly difficult time winning mayoral races in big cities. Of the nation’s most populous cities, only a few have Republican mayors. They include three city-county hybrids where suburban voters can play an outsized role (Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Fla.; and Miami), and a few Sun Belt cities (Albuquerque, N.M.; Fort Worth, Texas; Oklahoma City and San Diego). Gone, apparently, are the days when a Republican like Rudy Giuliani could be the mayor of New York or Richard Riordan could be the mayor of Los Angeles.

Here, as with the U.S. House, geography is destiny. Cities have been magnets for younger, more diverse populations that tend to be socially liberal. This makes the Republican Party, with its national image of social conservatism, a tough sell. Indeed, such mayors as Bill DeBlasio of New York, Ed Murray of Seattle and Bill Peduto of Pittsburgh have been pursuing agendas that are unapologetically progressive.

Does Houstons' city charter need to be revised?

This ran a month ago in the Houston Chronicle.

A couple members of Houston's city council think the current design of Houston's government makes governing the city too difficult and would like to see changes which modernize it. They would like to see a Charter Review Commission established to study possibilities. This seems to me a reaction to the limit on government placed when term limits were added a couple decades back as well as an attempt for the city council to assert more control of city government affairs. Perhaps they believe the mayor is too strong.

This is from an editorial written by the council members:

Over the past few years there has been a great deal of discussion among City Hall insiders about amending the city charter to change term limits for mayor, city controller and council members from two-year to four-year terms.

Two-year terms of office, combined with a six-year limit, hurt city government. The churn of frequent turnover disallows sufficient development of institutional knowledge and process know-how that are critical to effective policymaking. Changing the city charter to provide for two four-year terms for city-elected officials may reduce the number of city elections, but it won't make fundamental changes to the local governance process - including operations and the structure of city government - to address accountability and to meaningfully improve long-range infrastructure, financial, emergency and environmental planning in Houston.

But rather than limit ourselves to considering a term-limits charter change amendment, Houston needs a Charter Review Commission to review, update and propose recommendations to the voters to modernize our charter, the structure and operations of city government, with specific attention paid to the budget process.

. . . The commission's membership should be former city elected officials, academic and legal experts on Texas municipal governance, finance and infrastructure issues as well as local business leaders and entrepreneurs. No current elected city official or employee should be allowed to serve on the commission. The work of the commission should not be a political exercise.

Here are the specific questions they would like to see questions addressed by the commission:

- Should one council meeting per month be held in a city multi-service center in the evening, similar to how city Capital Improvement Process meetings are scheduled?

- Should all of Houston's 16 City Council seats go to single-member districts?

- Should the City of Houston consider a city manager form of government?

- Should the five at-large council members be elected to designated positions based on expertise in certain respective policy areas, such as position No. 1 budget and fiscal affairs, No. 2 public safety, No. 3 business development and international affairs, No. 4 transportation and general mobility, and No. 5 housing, land use and community development?

- Should the City Council nominate and elect the mayor pro tem, as this person would succeed the mayor if the person holding office were unable to serve out an unexpired term? If nominated and elected by council, should the mayor pro tem organize council committees by nominating committee members and chairs/vice chairs to be ratified by the full council?

- Should council members, or at least some designated number of council members, have authority to place items on the council agenda? Should all items approved by a council committee be automatically placed on the full council agenda within 30 days of having been voted out of committee?

- Should a budget calendar, with dates and times set for public discussion, be established earlier in the fiscal year?

- Should district council members have a council district service budget to be able to quickly address minor neighborhood issues?

- Should candidates for the City Council, mayor and city controller be required to attend a class or training session on Houston city government organized by a consortium of local universities as a condition for qualifying for the ballot, similar to the filing fee, signature or residency requirements?

If this happens, it will be very instructive to follow the process as it goes forward.

Now that Houston's mayor has been re-elected to a third term, what will she do?

Charles Kuffner weighs in here.

Here's a list of items she intends to take to city council, They are more controversial than items discussed earlier this year - the local agenda can be bland prior to elections. No need to stir the pot excessively. Now that the election is over these can be talked about again (perhaps this is an argument against 2 year terms).

- wage theft
- restrictions on payday and auto lenders
- regulations for food trucks
- nondiscrimination ordinance protecting gay and transgendered residents
- reduce chronic homelessness
- Bayou Greenways
- moving the crime lab from HPD to an independent lab
- develop a city-council inmate center and close two existing facilities
- obtain negotiating authority for city's firefighter pension system
- water conservation

Houston's mayoral debate

The six candidates for Houston's mayoral race met last night in a debate. The Chronicle reports that roads, city finances and public transportation were dominant themes.

From the Atlantic: Can Mayors Really Save the World?

For 2306 - where we recently looked at the nature of local governments and said a word or two about mayors.

The author of this article wonders if dysfunction on the national and state levels is empowering mayors, and city leaders in general to play a bigger role in setting and implementing public policies. He mentions a movement among members towards something called "glocalization" which provides local areas the opportunity to accept global standards, but adapt them to the needs of a specific community. The theory is based on the idea that the nation-state has failed.

"The federal government has basically sent the signal, 'We won’t be resolving any of this for the foreseeable future,'" says Bruce Katz, the director of the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program and co-author of The Metropolitan Revolution. "And that’s a somewhat similar story around the world." For that reason, glocalists say, we should stop expecting big, centralized governments to solve the world's problems and start looking to cities for innovative solutions.

Provocative point.

Here are some other useful bits from the article - many dovetail with points we have made in 2306:

Mayors are driven my different motives than state and national leaders and are better suited to solve problems:

"Mayors are, by definition, non-ideological problem-solvers. They’re pragmatists – they have to be," Barber says. If cities don't function smoothly, people’s trash won’t get picked up. Their sewers won’t work. Their kids won’t be able to go to school. Especially in the United States, where national leaders are locked into ideological camps and party-line negotiations, there seems to be a fundamental difference in what national and local leaders can actually accomplish.

Perhaps this is because local elections are non-partisan. Worth a discussion.

Cities are networks of interests based on trade (economic entities as we suggested:

. . . it’s also important to remember that cities are more than just councils and mayors. "Cities are not governments, unlike the federal and state governments. They’re networks," says Katz. As urban theorist Jane Jacobs wrote in her famed 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, "The economic foundation of cities is trade."

Urbanists often forget that part of Jacobs's work, Katz says. But what it means is that a lot of people and organizations, including hospitals, universities, companies, businesses, unions, and philanthropies, are investing money and thought in projects like creating jobs for 20-somethings and making sure buildings are sturdy enough to weather storms. This is what local innovation looks like: regular people finding work-arounds so that the stores they own or the homeless shelters they run can thrive.

Cities are more democratic than other levels of government and have a more tangible identity than a state or nation:

. . . local leaders understand what people want and need far better than national or international leaders ever could, glocalists say. "You pay taxes, and maybe serve in the military, and vote once in a while in the presidential election, and that’s the only relationship you have with the nation-state," Barber says. "Locally, you’re related to your workplace, your school, your church, your hospitals. … Our real connections with the political entity are local."

Put another way, glocalization is a fight to make democracy something people can touch and feel. Cities are made up of tangible things like streets and subways and storefronts, but nation-states are deeply theoretical entities — we have to use symbols like flags and food to understand what they mean. In the same way, glocalists might argue, national and international leaders are trapped in the realm of abstractions and ideas. By definition, they’re too removed from people and their problems to create effective policy.

Its an interesting - and light - read.