Mayor Delivers State of City Address

Houston continues to move forward. History will look back on these last years as a special time for Houston. In a world of conflict and economic gloom, Houston stands out as a place where people from diverse backgrounds work together and economic opportunity grows. The state of Houston? Well, we’re moving forward.

Since I gave my first State of the City address our region has added a quarter of a million new employees. That growth far outstrips that of other American urban centers.

A real estate investor in all the major states of this country told me that the American economy looks like a race, where, he said, “Houston is far in front with the lead, then comes a small pack of other Texas cities, and then farther behind is everywhere else.”

In my first State of the City address I noted that while some may be concerned about our national image, the real test of our success is how many free Americans move here. So the rising population and employment doesn’t simply signify more opportunity. Those who move here are the most credible possible endorsement of our civic direction.

Our greatest challenges arise from this very success. We improve traffic with the SafeClear program and flexible working hours, and then see gains erode as greater growth means even more vehicles. We allocate more funds for infrastructure, but witness increases in building costs because of shortages in materials and skilled labor. But we would rather be dealing with those kinds of problems than those that arise from stagnation and loss of hope.

Today I would like to share with you and other citizens seven key challenges for Houston in 2008. For six of those challenges — crime, property taxes, drainage, mass transit, fair treatment of the City’s work force, and energy efficiency — I will describe specific plans for which we need your help. The seventh issue concerns the right balance between growth and protection of our quality of life for all Houstonians. On that we will have some obvious choices, and harder ones. I invite your ideas and engagement in a lively and important civic debate.

Six Key Challenges for 2008
First, let’s continue to reduce the violent crime rate in Houston, Texas. The violent crime rate per 100,000 in Houston in 2007 was down by over 8% compared to 2003, the year before I took office. But we can do better. We need to increase the number of new police officers and cadets by 8% in the next two years. That effort, combined with the build-up in the last eighteen months, will increase the police force by 500, while maintaining the equivalent of another 500 officers through overtime programs. And we will not do this at the expense of long-needed upgrades in IT, patrol cars, helicopters, and the radio system. These investments will not be cheap, and we will expect HPD to be accountable for the effectiveness of these measures by a continued reduction in crime rates.

Second, we should bring to $500 million the amount of funding dedicated for drainage projects by the City of Houston in this Administration and the years immediately following. About a quarter of a billion in drainage projects are now underway or completed. That compares to $15 - 20 million a year before this Administration. Already flooding risks have decreased in subdivisions such as Timbergrove, Garden Villas, the Englewood area, and many more.

Third, we should raise the senior exemption on property taxes and cut our tax rate for the fourth consecutive year. We will be the only major city in Texas to cut its property tax rate in each of the last four years. And our fiscal discipline resulted in an upgrading of our bond ratings last month, at a time when credit ratings generally are going down.

Fourth, we will try to become the first Texas city to reach a reasonable and affordable multi-year agreement on compensation for our civilian employees. We will honor the agreement we made with the union not to bargain outside the sessions which have continued for eight months. We agreed some time ago that the lowest-compensated hourly employees will have the highest percentage increases. But we will continue to insist that some significant portion of higher compensation must depend on acceptable performance of the individual employee. And when people in this room or any audience in Houston hear some assertion that we are deliberately mistreating city employees, let it be a clear sign to you that someone is trying to pressure us because we are also representing the interests of our taxpayers.

Fifth, Houston residents and businesses struggle with higher energy bills and we need to bring them down. During the last State of the City address I described specific goals to delink the growth of our economy from the growth in electricity and fuel consumption. We are making good progress. We invite each of you to participate in the Green Consumer Expo that the City of Houston is sponsoring at the George R. Brown Convention Center this April. We applaud the real estate developers who have overwhelmingly migrated to LEED certification for Class A office buildings. I thank the Greater Houston Partnership for hosting two big working sessions on energy efficient design and construction. Our path-breaking residential energy efficiency program, first initiated with CenterPoint eighteen months ago, has now slashed power consumption for over fifteen-hundred residences, and we aim to knock out another thousand during this calendar year.

I ask for your support for the adoption of a new, practical Energy Code for the City of Houston. We have worked to define reasonable standards for almost a year, and we have some consensus, though not unanimity. This Energy Code will make Houston a national leader. These standards will actually lower the cost of occupancy in Houston, and make us more competitive. Under the leadership of its new mayor, Dallas also intends to update its Energy Code this spring, to make them the national leader. Help me make sure that Houston wins that race.

Sixth, 2008 should be the year for new rapid transit starts for Houston. Help me and Judge Emmett support the important work of METRO.

Seventh: Balancing Growth and Quality of Life
So long as Houston is growing it will be a changing work in progress. We worked hard these last four years to preserve and improve our quality of life, while Houston has grown at record pace. We have expanded parks, cut pollution, and preserved our most historic neighborhoods and many of our most historic structures.

Houston has escaped the fate of some cities where investment in new offices and plants and stores and houses occurred almost entirely outside the city limits, because of patronage politics, deteriorating schools and other services, and well-intended but counterproductive over regulation. We are proud of the fact that middle class families can afford new houses within our City limits.

But it is also simply the fact that a city, like any business of any size, needs to plan ahead. Houston has had a thoroughfare plan, a drainage plan, and a parks plan, among many other plans. We take pride in the fact that this Administration has made progress in implementing those plans.

For the rest of the State of the City I would like to simply talk to you about some of the obvious and then more difficult choices that we can make to improve our quality of life in the face of incredible growth. Let’s start with four obvious choices.

More trees. The City of Houston has proposed a five year tree-planting budget with $2 million per year for new tree planting and maintenance. We challenge other governmental entities and the private sector to match that amount. This program will allow us to plant 100,000 new trees. I would ask the Quality of Life Coalition, the Greater Houston Partnership, and Trees for Houston, Harris and Ft. Bend Counties and our philanthropic community to assist us in this investment which will improve our City’s appearance, absorb more greenhouse gasses, and cool down the surface temperatures of our city.

Recycling greenwaste. I have asked our Solid Waste Department to massively increase the recycling of green and wooded wastes, which are now sent to our city dumps. Under the leadership of City Controller Annise Parker and Lorne Baine a Blue Ribbon Committee highlighted the fact that we dump tens of thousands of tons of trees, branches and grass every year into our limited and precious landfills. Council Member Brown’s Sustainable Development Committee last week approved a needed revision in our disposal contracts. This year we will establish chipping facilities in every quadrant of our city, and we will ask neighborhood groups to make sure that the trees and branches are placed at the proper times and the proper places, segregated from other materials, so that they can be chipped and reused. If we do not do that, within twenty years we will fill the solid waste capacity available to Houstonians as our city grows and face the unacceptable dilemma of either limiting growth or paying sharply higher taxes. Wasteful use of limited landfill space threatens neighborhoods endangered by landfill expansion, and responsible growth.

Historical preservation. Preservation of our history helps us maintain a sense of identity and continuity, providing an important balance to the change accompanying rapid growth. As we complete Discovery Green this spring, let’s turn to our next major public/private partnership for civic improvement — the rehabilitation of our historic Ideson building and Gregory School, which will contain the City’s valuable history and archives.

Revitalizing neglected neighborhoods. An obvious but not so easy step to improve the quality of life is the revitalization of our most neglected neighborhoods. Finally, it has taken us nearly four years to foreclose on thousands of abandoned properties, demolish over two thousand dangerous buildings, and upgrade the infrastructure in our most neglected neighborhoods. There have been hundreds of new homebuilding starts in these neighborhoods, which we call Houston Hope. Now I am asking all homebuilders of Houston to help us build new housing on over seven hundred lots that will be made available at submarket prices, with generous down payment assistance programs, so that many working people can obtain the independence and dignity of owning their own house. The City will work in parallel to continue to build community-based organizations where new homes are built. The whole city will be safer as working families move into neighborhoods which too often had become magnets for crime.

Nothing is more important than revitalizing neighborhoods based on home ownership. Consider Chakeitha Allen whose faith and hope has been renewed by Houston Hope. Ms. Allen, a manicurist, was in the process of starting over after being widowed. She had been a renter for the last eight years and had almost given up on her dream of homeownership. While surfing the web she came across Houston Hope. Ms. Allen visited one of the builders and signed a contract that very day. She said it was a blessing from God. And to show that her foundation was truly built on “The Rock,” she placed a Bible in the slab before the concrete was poured on her new home.

I told you those were the relatively obvious things we can do to balance growth and quality of life. And there are harder issues, which I need your help on.

People who build the buildings in which we work, live, and shop within the City limits ought to have predictable, non-discriminatory incentives for partial public reimbursement of their water and sewer investments. This Administration has built on the innovative and effective concept of Developer Participation Contracts begun in the Lanier Administration, expanded in the Brown Administration, and increased with additional funding during my Administration. These tools have allowed in-city development to compete more effectively, on a more level playing field, with developments outside the City limits. They provide strong incentives for new single family residential developments. Last year we spent approximately $25 million in these incentives for qualified projects. Builders are required to comply with all City requirements on permitting, building codes, and requirements for subdivision plats and plat approvals. For example, there have been additional requirements imposed in the last four years to reduce the flooding impact of new development and to require a set aside or contribution to necessary park space.

Some believe we should impose additional conditions on these utility reimbursement agreements, separate from our normal regulatory requirements. I strongly disagree. If we discriminate against particular developments in the reimbursement of utility services, we will limit consumer choice, affordability, and investment within the City limits.

In the Trip 2000 report, adopted by the Greater Houston Partnership about seven years ago, knowledgeable civic leadership in this community highlighted that the mobility needs of a rapidly growing community could not simply be met by expansion of additional lane miles within the built infrastructure. The Report described our need for more mass transit, better traffic management, and policies which make it easier for people to live closer to where they work. This Administration has worked to accomplish these goals.

Of course, there has been and will be some friction between existing property owners, who may want to want to limit development around their residences, and residents moving from outside the City who want to be closer to work, shopping, schools and other amenities.

This Administration has tried to fairly and carefully balance those competing interests, within the framework of our ordinances and deed restrictions.

My Administration believes that consumers should have a wide variety of choices provided by those providing housing and commercial facilities. We also understand that there are reasonable rules and regulations that any community needs to preserve its quality of life, and that those investing in a house within a platted residential subdivision ought to have some predictability about the future of our neighborhood.

Houston will benefit from a healthy and open debate concerning these policies, by individuals who pay attention to the detail and make practical suggestions about how the City can improve without compromising the affordability or choices offered to consumers within our community.

To those neighborhood activists, I urge you to consider that those who build houses, stores, and office buildings within our City are not your enemy. Few of us live in houses built by amateurs with donated land and materials. Those who build houses and buildings do not survive unless they serve the needs of Houston consumers with a variety of choices.

To those in the real estate development community, please remember that those who live and work in homes and other buildings in our City have a lot at stake in our neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods have had to live for too long with hourly so-called motels and rental properties which are falling apart right smack in a residential neighborhood. Now no neighborhood group should have the right to “pull up the ladder behind them,” but the passion of civic club leaders who work hard to improve and maintain their own property values is a tremendous asset for our community. Show me a neighborhood which doesn’t care about its future and I’ll show you a neighborhood in decline.

As we continue to work on these issues, I want to thank our partners in Harris County. I also want to thank my partners at City Hall - our Controller and the members of City Council who typically work hard every day to solve problems and make Houston even better.

And none of us could accomplish any of that without the thousands of dedicated City employees who make many sacrifices, big and small, to make this City work.

Please think about 26-year-old Brandon Everett and his family today. Brandon is a Houston firefighter and the father of a 2 year-old and a 5-week-old.

His throat and mouth were burned on Monday, MLK Day, when he was fighting to save the home of a citizen.

Brandon and his crew were attacking the fire from within the house with a handheld hose. A strong gust of wind blasted the smoke and heat horizontally directed toward the crew.

Three injured firefighters were removed. Brandon wasn’t breathing. His fellow firefighters and his captain successfully applied CPR, as they have done with so many Houstonians on EMS runs. We thank them. Brandon is slowly recovering, in critical but stable condition.

Brandon, by his acts, represents our City employees far better than my words today. You honor me by allowing me to serve beside him. We do so because we love this City. God bless Brandon Everett and the people of Houston, Texas.

[As drafted, not as delivered]