To explain why, let me address the three of the leading reasons I’ve heard in defense of the proposition:
- the City’s infrastructure, including its drainage infrastructure, needs maintenance and improvement;
- like qualifying for a mortgage before you know how much home you can buy, we need to know we have a funding source before we know the size of plan we can afford; and
- the funds from the tax will provide for badly needed jobs.
I will address these points one at a time.
As I’ve said in more than one post on this site, I agree that the infrastructure of the entire Houston Metropolitan Area, including its flood control and drainage infrastructure, needs to be fixed and improved. To do so effectively, though, we need to involve the whole Metropolitan Area. In Harris County alone, that means developing a plan with all 34 cities and with Harris County to address the infrastructure needs in a comprehensive way. Additionally, as the Cities of Katy, Friendswood, and Baytown straddle more than one county, we need to involve all of the counties that border Harris County in the planning as well. Remember, everyone in this region lives on flat land surrounded by a network of bayous, which is barely above sea-level and marshland. As a result, the storms that flood Houston streets and homes often flood streets and homes in Friendswood, Pearland, and Galveston. Only addressing the City of Houston’s issues won’t help the communities where most of our neighbors live and from where they commute, and could lead to unintended adverse consequences to neighboring cities and communities who become affected by the implementation of plans that only serve the needs of the City of Houston. We need a proposition that provides a regional plan, and a regional funding mechanism.
The trouble with the mortgage analogy is three-fold:
- that approach has led a lot of people to take out more debt and buy more square footage than they’ve needed, which was one of the causes of the recent housing bubble;
- the analogy only really works if we are raising the funds from this tax to qualify for long-terms bonds to pay for the infrastructure projects the supporters envision; and
- it essentially is an admission that there will be no plan on the table until the City gets additional taxing authority.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to give any government a blank check to develop a plan and budget that merely absorbs all the money that this tax could raise—that’s how governments and individuals have gotten into the fiscal mess they are in. As for using the funds as collateral for bonding authority, this argument shouldn’t even be applicable to Prop 1 because its supporters have told us they don’t want to use bonds to fund the contemplated infrastructure projects. As for having no plan, this may be the way people shop for a house, but businesses and governments should have plans and budgets developed before they seek to set prices or raise taxes.
As for the third argument that proponents of the proposition use, I would love to see many of our civil engineers and contractors put to work. However, creating an open-ended, 20-year, public works trough for them to eat from at tax-payer expense, is not the right way to approach planning and budgeting to address a serious public need. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, as the country is electing conservatives to national office to stop this type of use of our tax dollars at the national level, we were to approve an FDR-style boondoggle right in our own backyard? The best way to put our engineers and contractors to work is through the investment of private capital in private-sector developments, and through properly planned and budgeted public-sector projects won through competitive bidding—not boondoggles. In fact, if the sponsors of Prop 1 were serious about gaining the public’s trust and support for their idea, those engineering firms (and their principles) who have funded the proposition should state publicly that they will not bid on any project funded with this tax/fee for at least 7 years after passage of Prop 1. Such a commitment would avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest, which currently taints the whole effort.
That issue leads me to my final observation. One of the nagging problems I’ve had with this whole adventure has been its lack of integrity. For instance, why have the supporters of Prop 1 constantly called a “tax” a “fee”? This seemingly semantic question actually hides a deeper problem. The money sought through Prop 1 will be raised ostensibly to provide additional funds for the City to meet its responsibility to provide and maintain infrastructure, which is a basic governmental obligation that our general tax dollars are meant to cover. Prop 1 does not propose that the City will provide a specific, unique service to each property owner; Prop 1 does not include an “opt out” provision, where a homeowner can reject the “service” and avoid the “fee”; the revenue from the “fee” legally can be used to cover any other general operating expense incurred by the City over the next 20 years–not just to cover the cost of the contemplated infrastructure projects; and, undoubtedly, if a property owner doesn’t pay the Prop 1 “fee”, the City could foreclose on the property. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s a tax, not a fee; and to call it a fee is to be disingenuous. Let’s face it, the reason the City wants this additional taxing authority is to avoid the limits that voters have placed on the City’s ability to raise taxes. Let’s not allow this end-run on these limits through the use of this semantic subterfuge.
Instead, let’s require the City of Houston to work with all of the cities and counties in this region to develop a comprehensive infrastructure plan, to develop a budget to pay for that plan, to determine what funds are already available to cover each entity’s share of the budgeted cost of the plan, and then to come to voters for approval of a funding mechanism for the balance of the budgeted cost.
To do so, vote “no” on Prop 1.
