Posted on 01/02/2009 11:16:07 AM PST by weegee
Somebody pass Mayor Bill the black-eyed peas...
Between dubious pocket park dealings and roundabout red light camera study findings, the mayor has had a belly full of bad press lately.
It was no way to end a year. Or begin a U.S. Senate campaign. Especially when you're facing a field of contenders vying to replace an officeholder — Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison — who hasn't even resigned yet.
No doubt, Bill White is still the Golden Boy of Houston politics, fresh from an admirable performance in his familiar role standing between Houston and the ravages of natural disaster.
His administration has been so bereft of scandal and intrigue that a certain columnist was reduced in a previous commentary to fantasizing about the gas-chugging Hummer the ever-green mayor surely must be harboring in his garage.
Then came new details on the precarious doings leading to the creation of the Post Oak Lane pocket park near the Galleria.
The Chronicle's Mike Snyder reported the story some months back, but last Sunday's piece by Carolyn Feibel and Bradley Olson connected the dots with new information that prompts serious questions about whether City Hall abused its eminent domain power, perhaps even broke the law, to seize private land apparently needed not by the city, but by influential developer and political contributor Ed Wulfe...
...Apparently, the mayor fails to see that, to the average person, the order of events detailed by the Chronicle stories — the incestuous web connecting developers and generous political benefactors to politicians — doesn't pass the smell test.
...we have the long-awaited findings of a city-ordered red light camera study that seemed to ask more questions than it answered.
It also provoked questions about objectivity: One of the authors, Rice University professor Bob Stein, is married to the mayor's agenda director...
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Houston PING
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The Comical is only now discovering the connections between Houston Democrat mayors seated by Bob Lanier and the city’s property developers.
I ain’t voting for him.
Houston Red Light Camera Report Undermines TxDOT Camera Study
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