Ben Hall targets Bill King

Two entertaining and substantive press releases issued by Houston Mayoral candidate Ben Hall this week put the spotlight on one of his opponents, Bill King.

First was this one about neighborhood slush funds:

THIS IS HOUSTON….NOT CHICAGO

Bill King says he wants to give some neighborhoods tax money to do whatever they want with it. That is a misguided idea.

The Chicago style neighborhood bosses we already have would just love such a fund to manage. That is the kind of logic that is letting a couple of unelected bureaucrats in Uptown try to spend $200 million dollars on a bus boondoggle.

The last thing we need to do is line the pockets of a select few. That’s not back to basics. That’s like throwing salt in the open fiscal wound at Houston City Hall.

We have allowed more than 500 million dollars to sit in the bank accounts of a couple of politically protected neighborhoods.  That is money that could fix our streets, provide more police, and address flooding.

“We don’t need neighborhood slush funds. We don’t need higher taxes. And we don’t need to adopt Chicago-style neighborhood bosses,” says Ben Hall. “Everyone benefits if we move the entire city forward together, not financially divide the city as suggested by Mr. King.  We can do better!”

Always smart to get a Chicago reference in.

This morning’s hit was about the HERO and King’s reluctance to take a stand on it.

A QUESTION FOR BILL KING

All of a sudden Bill King says he has questions about the HERO bathroom ordinance. He told a GOP blog he doesn’t understand why the Houston ordinance is longer than other cities. What a bold question!

Since we know Mr. King is a lawyer from his work as a tax collector and lawyer for HISD, we have a question too!

Have you read the ordinance? If you had you would have known how to vote a long time ago!

Even two weeks ago Bill King said he would abstain on the HERO vote. There is no confusion. Ben Hall was against HERO from the beginning, calling it a sloppily written law that was a danger to women. He is the only mayoral candidate who took a stance regardless of the politics.

We don’t know what Bill King’s position is today, but the week isn’t over.  We don’t know if Mr. King was this wishy-washy when he was Mayor of Kemah, but Houston deserves bold decisive leadership, not a guy who makes decisions based on which way the political winds are blowing.

I was also amused by the Kingwood Tea Party’s promotion of King garnering the endorsement of the “C” Club of Houston. The amusing part was the picture used – the cover of King’s latest book:

Nothing particularly wrong with being a moderate but it does explain a lot about Bill King.