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ELB wrote:That's too bad. The Leg should make it clear NOW they are not going to bail out cities that can't control their spending and pensions.

There were a lot of ads on the radio saying Houston needs to regain control of its pensions from the Legislature. I suspect the Legislature may have a lot of requirements for the pensions that put Houston in an unfavorable position. Since they were ads and not for a candidate, someone was paying for them and who knows their motive.

As I don't spend anytime researching Houston's pension problem at all, I am just assuming we are underfunded and may have used the pension nest egg as a place to borrow money, just like Social Security and the Feds.

I also suspect that since such few people vote in these off year run off elections, the mayoral candidates can garner a big voting block by promising City employees more and more if they are elected. If you remember the Conservative candidate who said he would get the pension system under control was not supported by the police and fire organizations.

In addition, I believe our pension system promises employees an 8% return on their money. That may have been easy to do 15 years ago and was easy to promise back then, but is impossible today, unless you are really lucky or take a great deal of risk.

Something like 20% of the city budget is strictly for pensions, the percentage is growing every year. Couple that with the percentage that is simply to pay of previous debt and the City has little left for current operations. I have heard that we spend more for police who are retired than we spend for police who are working.

If anyone know the real situation please correct me.

All I really know is my property taxes go up 10% a year and now are the biggest expenditure I make every year.

Moved from Houston to the suburbs a few months ago. I was sad to notice that I could not vote for Houston elections anymore.
Houston is indeed a liberal dot surrounded by conservative cities/burbs.

locke_n_load wrote:Moved from Houston to the suburbs a few months ago. I was sad to notice that I could not vote for Houston elections anymore.
Houston is indeed a liberal dot surrounded by conservative cities/burbs.

I would have voted for Bill King if I could have voted in the Houston election... Sucks that I don't live in the city proper so I can't vote for things like that, even though they will have a direct impact on me.

I emailed King's campaign office after speaking with someone there.

Someday, a politician or official is going to insist on lawful elections, and I think it will make some ripples.

My beef is that the requirement for specimen ballots are not respected, there are screwed up elections where the secrecy of ballot format contributed to the disaster, and it leaves elections wide open for hacks like SQL injection on maliciously malformed ballots.

I don't trust electronic elections. I trust them less when points of election law are ignored.

philip964 wrote:
...In addition, I believe our pension system promises employees an 8% return on their money. That may have been easy to do 15 years ago and was easy to promise back then, but is impossible today, unless you are really lucky or take a great deal of risk.

Something like 20% of the city budget is strictly for pensions, the percentage is growing every year. Couple that with the percentage that is simply to pay of previous debt and the City has little left for current operations. I have heard that we spend more for police who are retired than we spend for police who are working.

...

This is the pattern in many cities -- when city employee unions and associations can turn out the troops to vote, it is easy for today's politician to sign agreements binding the city to unrealistic and unsustainable obligations that only come due in the future. It is in the interest of each new politician and the city employees to kick that can down the road, at least just past the point where the politician has retired on his own fat pension or gone on to higher office.

I live just outside the Houston city limits on the Northwest side of town. I hope and pray that we never get annexed as I'm certain that the only thing that would happen is my taxes would go up drastically while my civil services went down. As it is the county doesn't do much of anything except take our tax money and every year ask for more. We have to hire deputy constables to patrol our neighborhood and our HOA has also recently started fixing potholes on their own as the county won't show up to do it. One of the not too old retired members just took to doing it himself instead of waiting for someone to come and fix it that never came.