From the InBox:
Turner: It Will Cost you $2.8 Million to Find Out
How I Spent $400 Million of Your Tax Dollars
If you would like to know how Sylvester Turner spent $400 million of your tax money without City Council approval, it will cost you a cool $2.8 million to find out.
Under City rules, the mayor can sign contracts up to $50,000 without Council approval. In January, we got a tip from a City employee that Turner was aggressively using this rule to benefit some of his cronies and that if we were to file an Open Records request for those contracts, we would find some very “interesting” expenditures. So, we filed a request for all contracts the City had entered into since Turner took office but had not been approved by Council.[i]
Under the Texas Public Information Act (“TPIA”), the City is entitled to recover its costs in producing any documents. Last week we received a letter from the City Attorney stating that the cost of copying the contracts would be $2.8 million and if we would send over a check for 50% of that amount, they would begin copying the contracts.
The cost estimate stated that it would take 155,000 hours to assemble the documents. That is 75 people working full-time for a year.[ii]
There are two possibilities here. The first, and I think most likely, is that the cost estimate is a desperate attempt to conceal what is in those contracts. The other is that Turner has actually entered into so many contracts that were not approved by Council that it would take 75 people working for a year to copy the contracts. I am not sure which of those two possibilities I find more disturbing.
Transparency is the cornerstone of an efficient and ethical administration. Turner’s administration has been the most opaque in my lifetime. In his very first budget, Turner deleted hundreds of pages of detailed schedules about how the City’s money was spent. According to the Attorney General’s office, the Turner administration has filed over 1,400 objections to TPIA requests filed by citizens and the media. This is the exact opposite of transparent government.
In the coming weeks, I will be announcing a comprehensive ethics/transparency plan that I will implement when I become mayor. Part of that plan is that EVERY contract the City signs will be placed on the City’s website with a searchable index. Also, my administration will report to Council and the public each month as part of the Monthly Operating and Financial Report any contracts that were signed that month but that were not approved by Council with a brief description of the purpose of each, the amount, and a hyperlink to the contract.
These are easy things to do. The only reason any mayor would not do them is because he or she wants to hide from taxpayers how their tax dollars are being spent.
Houstonians deserve better than this. If you want a truly transparent administration, please consider supporting our campaign to clean up City Hall and get it back to the basics of providing those core municipal services which you are entitled to expect.
[i] On March 5, City Controller Chris Brown reported that just in FY2017-2018 Turner had spent $397 million that was not approved by City Council. (View the hearing here at 10:00 and 19:00)
[ii] The City also objected to the Texas AG that some of our requests were “confidential.” How a City contract can be confidential is beyond me. If you would like to see the actual correspondence between us and the City, here are links to the documents:
- Our initial request.
- City’s request to narrow the scope of the request.
- Our limitation to contracts in excess of $5,000.
- City letter transmitting cost estimate.
- City Letter to AG Claiming Confidentiality
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Based on reading the ridiculous attachment, it is obvious why the hours are so high. They are going to copy the information by hand rather than using a copy machine.
As absurd as this sounds, the only costs listed are for labor which even by printing by hand makes no sense as paper and ink do cost money. These fools running our government prove daily what idiots they are in this case with the absurd number of hours plus no materials costs.
This guy is the epitome of corruption. I have been an officer in the area (not going into details on name, assignment, or shift) for years and have seen a dramatic change since he took office. Now, SO many blacks think the Mayor is god and if I don’t do as they say, they’ll have him come for my job. I hear it all the time, “I know mayor turner” or “Mayor Turner is going to make sure this doesn’t happen again”. The worst part is I know he condones this and tells people to tell him when police hurt their feelings. Houston NEEDS a conservative, though most voters are too stupid to realize it. Let’s give it at least two years after this “Black Girl Magic” crap took office and we’ll see the product of electing crooks who want to give their buddies passes from facing the wrath of the law.
I have no idea what such a request should cost but I know that many have characterized it as asking for a copy of every contract under $50k since Turner took office when it actually included every transaction in the city since that time that wasn’t specifically approved by city council. That has to amount to a ton of work since we learned the initial number of contracts in just a portion of that time was almost 150,000 of them, all listed on the city controller website.
So he was asking for over a half million documents even in the amended request, at least some of which likely included sensitive material not subject to such requests, which strikes me as a rather broad fishing expedition based solely on a tip from an anonymous employee. Couldn’t the employee provide at least some clue regarding what transactions were going to be most important or perhaps the request could have been amended to only include those with many transactions as it appears the point was avoiding the $50k cap?