re: Houston is broke.

Nothing in the article about slashing spending...

I’m probably fortunate to live a couple miles north of the Harris County border along with no attachment to City of Houston.

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Cut salaries of the thousands and thousands of govt workers before tax increases.

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I wish everyone here had an opportunity to look at the payroll in the Counties in Texas and Parishes in Louisiana.

I think many if not all folks would be shocked to see how much some of these government workers are making. I know for a fact over in Louisiana in a certain parish they are over staffed but claim they are understaffed, just issued COLA raises in multiple straight years and on top of that this particular parish issued a quarterly bonus to all employees who scored a certain rating on their performance review from the prior year.

Furthermore, if you want to see some real money spent and ask yourself where the benefit is, look at Libraries. No one thinks about them but they have employees and they are not underpaid in the least. Its probably the most fascinating area of spending I've seen.

Best part for these folks is they ride out their career with their 2.5% increase per year. After 30 years we get to pay them forever at their 5 highest salaried years.

If I remember the "Pension" situation correctly Houston was facing public worker tensions and offered both the Police and the Firefighters EITHER 1) pay raises now or 2)increases to their pensions.

Cops chose the second option.

Firefighters wanted more money now.. Then they threatened strikes until they got both via public referendum which read something along the lines of "Should we fund firefighter pensions" and every uninformed voter was like YES, of course.

Referendums need to be written in pro/con format. Stupid city of Houston also voted for an additional city tax on land owners for flood management, regardless of the fact they are ALREADY being taxed for flood management by the Harris County Flood Control District.. But of course when put to vote it was worded "should property owners pay a tax to help with flooding in Houston" right after Hurricane Harvey.

At least Sheila Jackson Lee isn't in charge of the purse strings. That was a near miss. I cannot imagine a Mayor SJL.

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Best part for these folks is they ride out their career with their 2.5% increase per year. After 30 years we get to pay them forever at their 5 highest salaried years.

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It sounds great. Why don't you get one of these jobs?

Whitmire the new Mayor had been the lawyer for the Dallas firefighters,, while never directly working for the Houston Union... a lot of his backing was the business community trying to settle this issue and start repairing much of the fiscal instability the Brown , White, Parker and Turner wrought


there isn't a comprehensive plan ,,AT ALL just an attempt to take the first LARGE bite

Kinder Institute is largely responsible for getting the parties to the table

as always the personalities are ,........ entertaining

its never the names you know , see on the news

City of Houston Property Tax Rate (Per $100 of assessed value)

2021 - 0.55083
2022 - 0.53364
2023 - 0.51919

Shameful that previous mayor didn't absorb some of the ~$830M Firefighter settlement bomb into budgeting.

I guess that is fine. Hopefully Houston doesn’t mess up Lake Conroe.

Texas is a shitehole. I’m uncertain how it is even a red state anymore bc there’s certainly alot of trash there. Houston and its surrounding areas alone have so many strays in bad shape running the streets and it just gets worse in the RGV. Dallas, Ft. Worth, too. It’s become a 3rd world country.