Posted on 03/27/2024 2:05:50 PM PDT by george76
Mayor John Whitmire proposing a 5% cut across the board, except for fire and police departments..
Tax hikes and increased fees for parking and city services are likely ..
The Mayor of Houston says the city is 'broke' after overspending for decades.
Experts say the problem has existed for years, but COVID handouts from the federal government helped mask them.
...
A tax hike through a bond is expected in November.
...
The city has been struggling to make firefighters whole, from meeting its contractual obligation to their pension, to paying backpay and wage hikes that have been promised years ago.
Whitmire's plan to settle with the first responders will cost taxpayers $650 million for over the next five years.
'I don't like a five percent cut now, but you have to make tough decisions, and folks put me in this position to make tough decisions, and I'm going to do my job,' Whitmire stated.
The city also gave away some of its revenue to the public transit system in the 70s.
'They spent $3 billion on light rail system that is performing horribly,' Democrat John Whitmire, who was elected in December, gave the bleak warning at a City Hill meeting this week where he proposed a five percent cut across all city spending to alleviate the cash-flow problem.
'I think we can all agree that we're broke,' Whitmire said, before proposing the planned cuts.
'This gives us a chance to discuss the financial picture of this City. It is broken! It was broken when I got here, ' he said.
America's fourth largest city is spending more money than it's taking in, leaving it with a $160 million deficit,
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
DEI at work for you.
bankruptcy / insolvency is a good thing
bloated, corrupt, one-party political structures that we see across the USA can not change otherwise.
How many diversity officers?
During the 1980s a Houston Councilman wanted to know how 4 white women being downtown Meter Maids had become 17 black women, and why did collections revenue drop with that change?
Austin is woke & broke too. They have yet to admit it.
Not when it is a dodge to absolve responsibility of the previous (democrat) office holder.
just how much did they charge your city per rainbow f(l)ag ?
just how much , mayor, did they charge your city per rainbow f(l)ag ?
Leftism never works. It seems Leftism is unraveling all over the country. Russia will defeat us without firing a shot. Leftism killed America.
A rich city, growing, with a great industry, run into the ground by Democrats.
They literally ruin everything they touch.
“I haven’t eaten in about a week I’m so hungry when I walk I squeak
Nobody calls me friend it’s sad the shape I’m in
Going back to Houston, Houston, Houston” https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/5236178/Dean+Martin/Houston
Tax the illegals.
Paying for illegals ...
“bankruptcy / insolvency is a good thing
bloated, corrupt, one-party political structures that we see across the USA can not change otherwise.”
You would think that would be the end result but it hasn’t been the case so far.
Obvious failures have not had any blowback on the dems ability to amass power.
LOL! Good question!
Except for 13 years, going back to 1921 every mayor of Houston has been a RAT!
The last seven Houston mayors have all been Democrats. What a surprise.
I’m a bit surprised, given the stranglehold Democrats have had on San Antonio and Bexar County government for over 20 years, that we’re not having the same problems.
Houston was hit with the big oil crash in the mid-1980s. Many people walked away from their mortgages, and the entire state began a decade-long diversification of their economy away from exclusively oil.
This is probably why parking tickets were down. People got laid off and moved away from Houston.
See The 1980s Oil Bust Almost Broke Houston. Almost:
Excerpt:
“It started with the 1982 recession,” says Bill Gilmer, head of UH’s Bauer College of Business. “Houston thought we were the smartest people on the earth at that time and had everything figured out, and the rest of the country just didn’t know how to run their business. Then oil prices started to fall.”-PJ...It was brutal. Houston lost 211,000 jobs between February 1982 and March 1987. One out of eight Houstonians were unemployed because of the downturn. Tent cities became a part of the landscape. “Real estate collapsed because we had overbuilt,” says Gilmer. “All those people who’d moved down here from Michigan gave the banks the keys to their homes and moved back, because there was simply no work here.”
So many Houston banks were on the verge of collapse—they’d been lending money assuming that $35 oil prices in 1982 (a new high at that time) were the modern benchmark, but by 1986 oil was going for less than $10 a barrel—that the city lost its entire banking industry.
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