When one of the most innovative cities in America takes its first crack at mass transit you can bet it won’t be buses, trains or streetcars.

No, Round Rock, Texas, elevation 709 feet, is thinking about a gondola system, like those crawling up and down the ski slopes of the world.

While the average mope on a Round Rock street might ask, ‘Are you really serious?’ the mayor of the city, Alan McGraw, is quick with a reply. “Why not?”

“The problem with government in general is the thinking is not very innovative,” McGraw told Texas Watchdog. “I am fascinated at this being a viable transportation alternative.”

In keeping with the kind of thinking Forbes Magazine recognized when it named Round Rock the second most innovative city in America in 2010, McGraw said he got the idea a couple of years ago.

Every time McGraw turned around the city was faced with a right-of-way issue that, invariably, cost money and time. Wouldn’t it be great, he thought, if you could plan over the top of everything already here?

The creative nucleus at Frog Design in downtown Austin were thinking about it, too. They put together a proposal for Austin. They couldn’t get an audience in spite of ongoing transit troubles, in particular with the city’s little loved commuter train to and from Leander.

Round Rock has no corresponding troubles because it has no bus system, no train, no entrenched transit union. But with a population of about 105,000, the city is one of the fastest growing in Texas.

And so McGraw welcomed Frog Design to City Hall last week for a multimedia presentation that had a lot of Austin and no Round Rock.

Alan McGraw

No matter.

The presentation was a little light on specifics. After realizing most commuters would not be wearing ski clothes and would be scudding along in the Texas heat, Frog’s factoring in of climate control for gondolas quadrupled its low-end estimated cost from $3 million to $12 million a mile.

That figure could go as high as $24 million a mile, a figure that compares favorably to the $100 million Austin is estimating it will cost to complete a mile of urban rail. Which doesn’t compare favorably to much of anything.

At a top speed of 15 mph, the gondola system can be ruled out as a regional transportation alternative, McGraw said. At fewer than a dozen people to a gondola, dangling one behind another in a loop, there remain the problems of traffic density and of maximizing pickup and dropoff opportunities.

Michael McDaniel, the principal designer of what he likes to call “The Wire,” said Round Rock has a big advantage over Austin in that the city isn’t saddled with the political baggage of existing mass transit.

“We think it would be pretty hilarious that Austin, the city that likes to keep things weird, wouldn’t do this, but Round Rock, the place that keeps things normal, would,” McDaniel said.

Neither is McDaniel worried that the residents of a suburb in a state known for its individual vehicle culture would be reluctant to park their pickup trucks somewhere on the cable circuit and grab a gondola.

The designers have even toyed with an elaborate design allowing for door-to-door service, a sort of ski in and ski out system, he says.

“It’s really up to the city to decide what they want to do,” McDaniel said. “Round Rock would be starting fresh, from the ground up.”

McGraw’s undimmed enthusiasm begged the question, could there be an ulterior motive for considering an untried transit method with technical hurdles that threaten to make it costlier and less efficient than a bus or a train?

There is the coolness factor of having the only gondola system of its kind in the country, McGraw said. But he promised that wouldn’t color any cost/benefit analysis the city would need to do.

Although the Frog presentation never mentions it, could the gondola system open the door to the state’s first indoor skiing park? McGraw freely admitted he likes to ski. One of the planning team at Frog Design came up with the gondola concept, in part, because he is a ski bum, McGraw says.

There are stranger places to plan such a complex. In 2009, Snow Sport Entertainment Ltd. was all set to build Texas Alps, a $70 million complex as part of a proposed $1.6 billion World Villages of Grapevine, right next to the Grapevine Mills Mall, when the world economy collapsed.

The investors, including former Texas Rangers hitting star Rafael Palmeiro, later filed for bankruptcy.

Could the Texas Alps arise from the gently rolling hills of Round Rock? Alec Sohmer, who headed the original Alps project, told Texas Watchdog his group had no plans for Texas, and a deal for a similar skiing complex in Georgia has stalled.

Sohmer wasn’t aware that anyone else was moving ahead on a skiing village in Texas.

But are you sure, Watchdog asked McGraw. “No, not at all,” he said, amused at the question.

At the end of the presentation, McGraw told Frog Design the city’s line of communication would be open, nothing formal, nothing set for an upcoming agenda. McGraw, he said, is always ready to listen.

“It’s open-ended. I like the idea of having another arrow,” he said, mixing his skiing and archery metaphors, “in our quiver of transportation.”

***
Contact Mark Lisheron at 512-299-2318 or mark@texaswatchdog.org or on Twitter at @marktxwatchdog.

Photo of gondola by flickr user tomkellyphoto, used via a Creative Commons license.

Like this story? Then steal it. This report by Texas Watchdog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. That means bloggers, citizen-journalists, and journalists may republish the story on their sites with attribution and a link to Texas Watchdog. If you do re-use the story, e-mail news@texaswatchdog.org.

Around the clock, seven days a week, in a plant 233 miles away, a full complement of energy professionals stands at the ready to provide wood-fired power to Austin Energy customers.

The staff isn’t sure when they will be needed next. The $128 million plant has produced electricity for less than two of the seven months it has been in operation.

But  for the next 19 years a little less than $2 will be added every month to the bill of the average Austin Energy customer to pay for a plant that, when it does produce energy, produces energy too expensive for any energy company to want to buy.

“It is one of the biggest boondoggles I’ve seen in modern history,” an obviously agitated Tony Bennett says. Bennett is the acting director of the Texas Forest Industries Council. “Just thinking about how they pulled this off makes me mad.”

Bennett was among those who tried to persuade Austin Energy five years ago to think a little bit harder before trying to pull off building a new biomass-burning generating plant in the pine woods of East Texas.

The Council was part of a once-in-a lifetime coalition of consumer and good government advocates, environmental activists, and commercial and industrial interests who came together in 2008 to plead with the Austin City Council to reject the plan.

The City Council unanimously approved allowing Austin Energy to charge its customers to build the plant. The plan allowed for the energy company to enter into a guaranteed contract for 20 years for energy valued at the time at $2.3 billion.

“What is the most disturbing thing to me was that they put this contract through in about two weeks, almost in secret,” Bennett says. “I can tell you it shocked the forest products community at the time, the way they hurried it along.”

The reason for its urgency was that Roger Duncan, then head of Austin Energy, considered the plant a necessary component in his plan for Austin Energy to get 35 percent of all of its energy from renewable sources, spokesman Ed Clark says.

Unlike solar power and wind power, wood or biomass is a source of energy that could be called on in the dead calm of night, Clark says.

“Roger wanted that renewable component that would allow us to have power to dispatch 24-7,” he says.

Roger Duncan and Austin Energy could not at the time the contract was signed in 2008 have anticipated the explosion of hydraulic fracturing that created a buyer’s market for a seemingly endless supply of cheap natural gas, Clark says.

They could have had they listened to several industry experts who were part of a generation plan task force formed by former mayor Will Wynn in 2007, Trey Salinas, a spokesman for the Coalition for Clean Affordable Renewable Energy, says.

At least three of those experts who later helped form the coalition told the task force that most every reliable forecast predicted a protracted period of low natural gas prices driven by technological breakthroughs like hydraulic fracturing.

“They can’t say they couldn’t know because they were told,” Salinas says.

More than two years ago, while the plant was under construction, Michael Webber, who supported the plant as associate director of the Center for International Energy & Environmental Policy at the University of Texas, admitted to Texas Tribune the plant was controversial to begin with and no longer made economic sense.

In spite of the failure of additional federal tax breaks to materialize that would have made biomass more competitive, construction pushed on. Not long after the plant  fired up for the first time this past summer Southern Power, a subsidiary of the Southern Company in Atlanta, acquired it.

By agreement, Southern Power has the plant fully staffed around the clock, ready to serve Austin Energy’s needs, spokesman Tim Leljedal says. In spite of the substantial lack of work, Leljedal confirmed that the company has not reduced staff nor has it been asked to by Austin Energy.

Leljedal declined to say – per the contract – how much Austin Energy customers were paying by the day, week or month when the plant is idle.

Clark confirmed Austin Energy is paying a capacity fee to Southern Power, but would not say what it was, per the contract. But the fee and the contract are little different from those signed with other renewable energy companies in generation arrangements that are increasingly complicated.

At one time, Austin Energy envisioned the biomass plant running 90 percent of the time. Officials have downgraded the outlook to 75 percent and promised the plant would be firing on all burners by this summer, Clark says.

When asked if Austin Energy customers would be expected to cover the shortfall in the $2.3 billion contract, Clark says, “We’re not going to come close to that $2.3 billion figure.”

The problem is, advocates have for five years been unsuccessful in getting Austin Energy to make the terms of the contract public. No one really knows what utility ratepayers are paying for.

“CCARE (Coalition for Clean Affordable Renewable Energy) has always strongly believed that Austin Energy should release the 2008 Biomass contract,” Salinas says. “We do not feel there is a legitimate reason that a signed contract should be kept confidential and held from the public for over four years.”

The Austin City Council is currently deciding on whether or not to hand oversight of Austin Energy over to an independent board.

“We view this biomass plant decision as Exhibit A for why we need an independent board overseeing Austin Energy,” Salinas says.

***
Contact Mark Lisheron at 512-299-2318 or mark@texaswatchdog.org or on Twitter at @marktxwatchdog.

Photo from the Sam Houston National Forest by flickr user NixBC, used via a Creative Commons license.

Like this story? Then steal it. This report by Texas Watchdog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. That means bloggers, citizen-journalists, and journalists may republish the story on their sites with attribution and a link to Texas Watchdog. If you do re-use the story, e-mail news@texaswatchdog.org.

With a nearly $1 billion federal renewable energy tax credit in doubt, Texas Rep. Mark Strama delivered what to another audience would have been an odd message.

Strama, an Austin Democrat, is an energy guy, a technology guy, whip smart and a little unpredictable. Invited to give the keynote address to the Texas Renewable Energy Industry Association on Dec. 12 at a resort hotel south of Austin, Strama drew a few gasps admitting he supports hydraulic fracturing. Safe and clean hydraulic fracturing, of course.

Mark Strama

But the product of that technology, abundant, inexpensive natural gas, was not necessarily a good thing, Strama told the group. Rather than pouring some of the windfall into new energy technology, utilities are providing a palliative, allowing millions of people to pocket their utility savings.

The not so simple truth, Strama said, is that after all of the billions of tax dollars that have been spent no one is any closer to knowing when the wind, solar and biofuels industries can survive without government subsidy.

What’s more, Congress’ reluctant decision to extend the renewable energy tax credit, and for only one year, may be a signal that in an age of cheap natural gas there isn’t the political will to ask ratepayers or taxpayers for more renewables support.

Renewable energy played almost no role in the presidential election dialogue. The energy tax credit passed with no outcry outside of the political class.

Of the roughly 600 bills filed through the end of the second week of the 83rd session of the Texas Legislature, just two contain the phrase renewable energy. One of them, a bill by Strama, is specific to the city of Pflugerville.

The other, House Bill 303, calls for the state to require utilities to get 35 percent of their generating capacity from renewables, two percent of it from solar energy, by Jan. 1, 2020.

The bill, written by state Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, D-Austin, like similar bills in the past two sessions, is likely to go nowhere. Rodriguez chose not to respond to calls and a list of several questions about the bill and renewable energy e-mailed to him by Texas Watchdog.

Strama won’t be offering any major renewable subsidy bill in this session.

“Honestly, a lot of the work I’m going to be doing is to protect what we already have now,” Strama said. “This is just not a priority issue to most people right now.”

Perhaps it isn’t a priority to most people because, at least in the abstract, they like the idea of supporting renewable energy. In 2009 the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation in Austin surveyed 993 registered voters, 85 percent of whom thought Texas needed to increase production of wind and solar power. Nearly 80 percent, 73 percent who identified themselves as conservative, supported the idea of subsidies, loans and tax incentives to those energy businesses.

In November, a national survey from the Texas A&M Energy Institute and the Bush School of Government and Public Service found 59 percent of the public for increasing renewable research and development funding and 60 percent supporting tax breaks for companies developing renewable energy technology.

But if all that funding and those tax breaks meant the price of gas going up at their local pump, the survey said nearly 70 percent would change their answer.

A public intolerant of an increase of a few pennies they can see is a public historically oblivious to its donation of billions of dollars it doesn’t see. In November, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin, estimated Texas would contribute $567 million a year on the renewable energy tax credit alone.

In their study, Josiah Neeley, policy analyst with the Armstrong Center on Energy & the Environment and Bill Peacock, director of the Center for Economic Freedom for the Foundation, drilled deeper.

Overall, including federal funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, wind, solar and other alternative energy got $7.1 billion of taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies since 2006.

The Public Utility Commission last year made way for a nearly $7 billion project at utility ratepayer expense to run electricity transmission lines from West Texas wind farms to urban centers where the generation would be used.

Since 2006, $2.46 billion has supported development of wind farms in something called Competitive Renewable Energy Zones, the study says. The zones were made possible when the Legislature in 2001 passed the Texas Economic Development Act.

Federal grants have pumped another $1.65 billion into wind farms, $290 million from the stimulus for various energy programs, including $52 million for more than 30 solar projects, several of them that will not pay for themselves for 50 or more years.

The cost of supporting the legal requirement that utilities purchase a percentage of renewable energy set by the Renewable Portfolio Standard is estimated to have cost power users an extra $69 million this past year, Neeley and Peacock contend.

The Legislature created the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, which has since 2005 devoted $44 million to  renewable energy-related projects, according to the Governor’s Renewable Energy Industry Report. Two years earlier, lawmakers passed the Texas Enterprise Fund which has invested nearly $5 million in renewable energy projects.

Lucy Nashed, Gov. Rick Perry’s spokeswoman, said, “Here in Texas, we strive toward an all-of-the-above strategy to address our state’s energy challenges and create a diverse and robust electric generating portfolio that uses a variety of sources, including traditional technologies such as natural gas, coal, nuclear, and newer technologies such as wind, clean coal and solar power.”

However, Nashed says Perry favors weaning the entire energy industry off industry-specific credits and subsidies while lowering taxes on domestic energy producers.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation feels the same way, only more so.

Josiah Neeley

“Our message has been very clear,” Neeley said, “we’d like to see no government support for any energy industry and want to see no new energy supports. If natural gas or wind is doing well we’d like it to be due to the work of the market, not the government.”

The numbers suggest wind and solar still need the work of the government to have a hope in the market. With subsidies it currently costs $22 per megawatt hour to produce electricity with wind, 44 cents to produce it with fossil fuels, Neeley says.

Although power generation rates and costs are different for every utility, a customer with Austin Energy can choose to “buy” only renewable power through its GreenChoice program at a cost of 5.7 cents a kilowatt hour compared to the normal rate of 3.4 cents.

The average GreenChoice customer pays $23 more a month, Austin Energy says.

Forecasts by the Electric Power Research Institute show that while wind and solar are getting more competitive, they are unlikely to come close to natural gas at least through 2025. (Please see charts on pages 1-11 and 1-12 of its report here.)

Further lost in the tangle at the intersection of commerce and government is what all the incentives, particularly in the wind industry, do to the pricing of energy.

Wind companies have at times been able to sell their energy below the market price, knowing it must be bought by somebody, and still make a profit, a practice decried both in a study by the consultant NorthBridge group and Donna Nelson, chairwoman of the Texas Public Utility Commission.

Advocates, including Strama, acknowledge the wind and solar industries would collapse without taxpayer and ratepayer subsidy but contend that coal, oil and gas have been subsidized for 100 years, renewable energy for a few decades.

Neeley says the Energy Information Administration points out that in 2010 renewable energy generates less than 10 percent of the energy in the country but gobbles up 55 percent of the subsidies. Fossil fuels are responsible for 70 percent of the generation while taking 16 percent of all energy subsidies.

Neeley says the public ought to be concerned that in an energy market commanded by already low prices for natural gas, artificial pricing for renewable sources will cut further into profits.

“In the long term there is a real threat to investment by the industry,” Neeley says. “If you can bid onto the grid at negative prices, nobody is making any money.”

“I don’t think the public has a good grasp of what is in their energy bill,” Fred Beach, with the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas, says. “They have a very poor appreciation of who pays for what in energy generation. There is a need for much greater transparency.”

Beach refers to himself as a technologist, someone paid to examine the role of science and technology in energy policy. An opponent of direct government investment in renewable energy, Beach is, nonetheless, in favor of utilities meeting state standards for renewable energy use, however they do it.

Like Strama, Beach considers natural gas a low-cost bridge fuel to help consumers and the industry along while wind and solar technologies are improved.

“Right now, I think it’s a bridge to nowhere, an opportunity being wasted,” Beach says. “The industry doesn’t need that much more help. And I’m not a big fan of the government spending yours and my tax money. I am in favor of regulation that says meet this standard. We don’t care how you get there.”

Beach said energy consumers are further hurt by renewable policies pushing large-scale development of wind and solar power with a power plant model developed for coal more than 100 years ago.

Wind technology is ideal for large-scale generation. Solar power, at least today, is best suited to individual arrays on top of homes and businesses, Beach says.

This hasn’t stopped CPS Energy in San Antonio from going forward with a $1 billion, 400-megawatt solar development or Austin Energy considering a plan to have ratepayers underwrite $750 million to increase the city’s total solar power generation by 50 times by 2020.

San Antonio, with Democratic Mayor Julián Castro’s enthusiastic support, is resisting what Colin Meehan calls a “sugar rush” of low natural gas prices that cannot last.

Meehan, an energy analyst for the Environmental Defense Fund in Austin, objects to criticism of renewable energy development rooted in the present. Wind and solar power continue to get cheaper.

Nor is Meehan patient with the idea that the Legislature is incapable of big thinking when it comes to renewables. In 2009 the House and Senate passed a $500 million plan by former Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, to offer rebates to individuals and companies to install solar arrays.

The bill, however, died over a procedural disagreement as the session expired. No similar bill has been introduced since.

This fall, when the Environmental Defense Fund joined several other groups in asking that the Public Utility Commission on its own order utilities to increase their renewable percentages, the commission refused the petition.

Strama says he believes the window of opportunity to attract promising solar businesses has closed. Renewable energy industry leaders, in particular wind energy, are predicting a very quiet 2013.

In recognition of the reduced circumstances, Strama says he intends to introduce a bill that would have ratepayers underwrite the construction of solar arrays on public school rooftops.

The same bill in the 2011 session never made it out of Calendars Committee.

In his speech to the Texas Renewables Energy Industry Association, Strama said he thought the Legislature was further from its renewable goals than five years ago. Still, he remained confident technology would eventually do the only thing that could sustain renewable energy: lower prices.

“We’ve been providing energy from coal on an enormous scale for 100 years,” Strama said. “Nothing you could say would convince me we won’t someday be able to provide renewable energy on an enormous scale.

“People are right to ask about a timetable. We don’t have a timetable.”

***
Contact Mark Lisheron at 512-299-2318 or mark@texaswatchdog.org or on Twitter at @marktxwatchdog.

Photos of wind turbines by flickr users nikkorsnapper and and the russians are here, used via Creative Commons licenses.

Viewed in one very particular way, carefully following the bureaucratic contours of a $327 million stimulus energy efficiency program, the weatherization of Brandi and Byron Hockaday’s south Austin home is a success story.

Rules and guidelines were followed. Contractors and inspectors returned again and again to check the work. And when things weren’t right Austin Energy made them right at its own expense. And none of it, or almost none of it, cost the Hockadays a dime.

And yet, after more than two years and well over $14,000 spent, no one involved, least of all the Hockadays, believes they should have gotten involved with the federal weatherization assistance program in the first place.

On Oct. 31, after the latest of dozens of complaints, Austin Energy customer service representative Ann Salerno put an official end to its relationship with the Hockadays.

“For many months while assisting you, Austin Energy has exceeded its role as the involved electric utility,” Salerno said in a letter, one of a fistful Brandi holds in her hand on the sofa in their living room. “Austin Energy staff has gone above and beyond its obligations, and, at this point, there is nothing else Austin Energy can do to assist.”

But what about the gas line left exposed and running right alongside the air conditioning line in the bedroom wall? The positive test for mold? And the incessant cycling of an air conditioning system that is supposed to be the best in the industry?

All of the contractor errors, the unexpected visits to fix things that never got fixed. The arguing that one time nearly led to a fistfight. The derision and condescension from at least one of the Austin Energy officials.

“They damaged our house, they put our family in danger and they’ve repeatedly said we need to be done with this,” Byron says, unable to stay seated next to Brandi. “That’s what’s flooring us here. We’re tired of this shit.”

Spend five minutes with the Hockadays, and you are convinced tired isn’t at all the right word. They have painstakingly filed every document – paper and electronic – generated by their case. They recorded phone calls with workers, contracting supervisors and Austin Energy program leaders. They’re already tag-teaming their latest contractor.

The Hockadays aren’t tired by a long shot.

Pulling up to the Hockadays’ home in a neat, middle-class neighborhood, it is difficult to grasp how, indeed, they ever got involved in the program.

There is an older model, silver Jaguar in the Hockadays’ driveway of a nicely maintained 1,400-square-foot home.

Brandi and Byron Hockaday

The Hockadays built this house themselves in 1999. Both of them had good-paying jobs with a commercial printing company until day care costs for their two children made it more cost effective for one of them to stay home.

“We flipped a coin, and I became Mr. Mom,” Byron says. “It worked out because I wanted to get my own mobile IT business started.”

It worked out until June of 2010 when Brandi was laid off after 13 years with the company. In an economy that a congressional majority thought only a nearly $1 trillion stimulus could help, the Hockadays’ combined work experience came from an industry in decline.

Brandi started investigating and found that the family now qualified for food stamps. They enrolled the children in Medicaid for their health care. And when she went to the Austin Energy website she spotted a house ad for a “Free Energy Program.”

She filled out a two-page application sometime in late July.

The program the ad referred to was part of the Weatherization Assistance Program, the U.S. Department of Energy’s $5 billion contribution to the $862 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The goal of the program was to help low-income Americans save money on their monthly bills by making their homes more energy efficient at no cost to them.

Joseph Guerrero, now the weatherization program coordinator for Austin Energy, says his company dispatched the inspector based, according to the program’s guidelines, on little more than the Hockadays’ current combined income.

An interview with the Hockadays, a visit to the home, past earnings, the value of the home, even the Jaguar in the driveway was not part of the calculation, he says.

“We had no authority to question any of it. It’s not arbitrary,” Guerrero says. “Had we denied it for any of those reasons, you can bet TDHCA would have been notified.”

On August 4 an inspector came to the Hockaday home and did a series of energy tests.

“On his way out the door, he told us it was one of the nicest homes he had been in since he started doing the inspections,” Brandi says. “He said, if anything, we’d probably be eligible for low-energy light bulbs.”

Unknown to the Hockadays at the time, Austin Energy was under threat of having its $5.9 million stimulus grant yanked by the state Department of Housing and Community Affairs. Texas Watchdog reported Austin Energy had managed to weatherize just 56 homes in the 18 months since the stimulus bill passed. Only four of the 44 agencies in the weatherization program had done fewer homes.

In the first year of the stimulus contractors statewide had spent $3.7 million, mostly on administrative costs, and had weatherized a total of 47 houses. Program directors from all over the state complained they were under tremendous pressure by Housing and Community Affairs to spend their stimulus grants.

“Is time running out for this program? Absolutely,” state program director Michael Gerber said of Austin Energy at the time. “We will de-obligate funds before we let one penny of this funding go unspent.”

Two months after the initial inspection, Robert Meredith, the owner of a second contractor, Go Green Squads, came to the Hockadays’ door with good news. The initial tests showed they qualified for a new air conditioning system.

The air conditioning system they had was working fine, Byron says. The inside unit had been replaced in 2008, and the outer unit had been repaired in the past couple of years, he said.

Meredith, Byron says, pressed them to decide. A new energy-efficient system would help them realize hundreds of dollars in savings.

“He said we were about to lose this if we didn’t decide and that we had to get this done,” Byron says. “My initial reaction,” Brandi says, finishing his thought, “was ‘Wow. Awesome.’ Byron’s reaction was, don’t muck around with it. I love my AC. Byron gave in.”

A ‘deceptively complex’ government program

The decision to install a new air conditioning system in the Hockaday home was based on calculations punched into thresholds set by the federal government, nothing more, Guerrero says.

At no time did Austin Energy officials issue a directive to speed up or increase spending on the units they were weatherizing, he says.

Susan Meredith, Meredith’s wife and the company’s co-owner, says Austin Energy gave the company 10 days from the time a work order was generated to start work. Never did Austin Energy call for spending over and above that recommended on the work orders, she says.

On Oct. 8, 2010, Go Green Squads installed an new air conditioning system and thermostats. The $2,433.27 in expenses was paid for by the federal program, which allowed for a maximum of $6,500 to be spent on each housing unit.

“And for nine months we thought it was the best program in the world,” Brandi says. “We felt like we won the lottery.”

Until the day Byron came home and felt warm. The Hockadays regularly set their thermostat at 75 degrees. The temperature read 77 degrees, and to get there the air conditioning unit was running for hours at a time without cycling off.

Thus began a series of calls and responses from contract workers. They did temperature readings. Had Byron seal and insulate his attic door. The ductwork was checked. The plenum, an air circulation chamber in the attic, was rebuilt. Several times.

During these months of trial and error, the Hockadays reported condensation on their vents and a musty smell in the house.

Around one of the openings in the attic, Byron found black soot he thought was mold. The contractors insisted it be referred to as a mold-like substance. In January of this year the Hockadays had tests done that determined the mold-like substance was mold.

At the same time, the Hockadays’ monthly utility bills were now exceeding the bills for the same months with their old air conditioning system.

In the absence of solutions, Byron offered troubleshooting suggestions like checking the coil that were routinely ignored, he says. It seemed as though the workmen were going through the same motions again and again. During one visit insults were exchanged and challenges made before Byron and a crew member could be calmed down.

“They were coming here all the time, all different times of day. They’d never call, they’d just show up. Then they never did anything. It was like watching monkeys hump a football,” Byron says.

From then on, Brandi systematically worked her way up alerting the chain of command at Austin Energy to their problems.

On Dec. 20, 2011, Austin Energy ordered another full inspection of the home and followed it with a systematic retracing of all the steps that had so far bedeviled the other contractors.

But not until March 20, 2012, did the company reach the conclusion that the air conditioning system installed by Go Green Squads needed to be replaced. The coil Byron had been pointing to was designed for a four-ton air conditioning system. It had been trying to cool the house in a three-ton system.

“There definitely was a problem with the system,” Susan Meredith says. “And we were very committed to fixing their system. But there are so many different factors involved. That is why I say this is a deceptively complex program.”

Austin Energy decided that it wouldn’t be Go Green Systems but McCullough Heating and Air Conditioning that would install not only a new air conditioning system but a new furnace.

The cost, $8,604.81, was more than three times the first system. The company did some additional calculating and cut two checks to the Hockadays totalling $453.58, an estimate of the cost of the additional energy consumed by the old system.

In all, Austin Energy turned over just $3,000 in bills for the Hockaday work to Housing and Community Affairs for federal reimbursement. Austin Energy assumed the rest.

Guerrero said he didn’t want the blot on a program he is proud of.

“I thought it was in the interest of everyone involved that we change out the equipment for a new system,” Guerrero says. “Our goal was to satisfy a customer who had some extreme concerns. I think that by looking at the facts of the case alone, this was not a normal course of business for us.”

By the overall standard of Austin Energy work, the Hockadays weren’t normal business. Of the 1,886 units weatherized with stimulus funds, Austin Energy went over the $6,500 budget 13 times, a check of the records by Texas Watchdog showed.

Nine of the thirteen were total bills under $7,000, one of them over the limit by 83 cents.

Despite its slow start and by the decidedly low standard set by a program beset throughout with administrative incompetence, poor workmanship and allegations of fraud Austin Energy was a solid performer.

(You can track the program’s performance and that of all the other local programs in the Weatherization Assistance Program in charts provided here.)

Once threatened with a loss of funding, Housing and Community Affairs eventually shifted more than $3 million more from laggard programs to Austin Energy. The program spent all but $1,100 of its $9.2 million, Guerrero says.

And while Texas Watchdog tracked a rather dismal record of workmanship problems statewide, Austin Energy performed better than most. (You can examine the results of eight spot inspections of contractor work done by the Department of Housing and Community Affairs did over two years here.)

“One house out of all those we worked on is a pretty good record, I think,” Guerrero says.

Utility: Responsibilities fulfilled

But what of the record at that one house?

In the weeks that followed, the Hockadays discovered a water buildup in a garage ceiling that showered water and sopping drywall on computer hardware Byron had stored there. Negotiation with the contractor for reimbursement came to an impasse when the Hockadays wouldn’t surrender the hard drives for replacement.

McCullough tracked the moisture problem and in July rebuilt the plenum, return and filter system.

The installation of the air conditioning system, Byron says, has juxtaposed an air line unsafely with a gas line running to the new furnace. The Hockadays have demanded an inspection. McCullough insists they already deemed the parallel lines safe.

The Hockaday home gets cool, with digital thermostats festooning the house to prove it. But Byron swears this new, top-of-the-line energy efficient air conditioner still cycles for hours.

It is December, and in the cool weather the Hockadays can’t be sure, but all of that cycling, Byron says, isn’t going to save them any money come summer.

And if something more should go wrong, Austin Energy has said it won’t be coming around any more.

In the hundreds of units done by Go Green Squads as one of the six contractors used by Austin Energy, Susan Meredith says she never experienced anything like the Hockadays.

Understanding the cold calculating of eligibility and rehabilitation, Meredith still wonders if this program ought to have been serving a family like the Hockadays. She thinks the couple knew what they were doing, that they “gamed the system.”

Austin Energy and its contractors, she says, were caught in the classic quandary: Was there too much government or not enough government?

“In hindsight we shouldn’t have bent over backwards,” she says. “We spent so many hundreds of dollars we didn’t bill for trying to make them happy. All we did was create a bigger problem.”

The weatherization assistance program, at least at the start, would not allow anyone to walk away from the Hockadays, Guerrero says. Austin Energy, he says, has more than fulfilled its responsibilities.

The Hockadays do not believe that. It takes them nearly three hours on the sofa to tell their story, and only because they are forced to leave out all sorts of details. The Hockadays are consumed by the details.

Brandi is working again, at home and as a virtual assistant at a fraction of her old salary, she says. Byron is still working to make a go of his business. Their combined income, Brandi says, would easily make them eligible for the Weatherization Assistance Program if it were available today.

Knowing what they know now, the Hockadays say they would have never applied. But having done it, having gone through it, they aren’t about to give up.

“From the time we applied, all we expected them to do is do their job right,” Byron says. “That’s all we asked all along. I don’t think that’s too much to expect. Do you?”

***
Contact Mark Lisheron at 512-299-2318 or mark@texaswatchdog.org or on Twitter at @marktxwatchdog.

Photo of light bulb by flickr user ikewinski, used via a Creative Commons license. Photo and video of the Hockadays by Mark Lisheron.

Like this story? Then steal it. This report by Texas Watchdog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. That means bloggers, citizen-journalists, and journalists may republish the story on their sites with attribution and a link to Texas Watchdog. If you do re-use the story, e-mail news@texaswatchdog.org.

For decades, Texans have relied on special districts for services that local municipalities can’t provide. Water to an isolated settlement. Crime prevention in a region that can’t afford full-service cops. Flood control in susceptible areas.

But the web of special districts is at times marked by self-dealing and relationships greased with campaign cash, which passes from the firms and developers who make a living off the districts to the lawmakers who authorize them.

These deals result in government that is not always for the people by the people, but instead is driven by special interests — lawyers, lobbyists, and management firms — that make huge profits on the backs of residents.

For example:

• A consultancy for special districts, Municipal Accounts and Consulting, is owned by attorney Joe Schwartz, whose law firm Schwartz Page & Harding handles the elections and management of several special districts, which give their business to Municipal Accounts.

Schwartz’s office said he sold the limited partnership to Mark Burton, a certified public accountant who was the registered agent of the operation when it began in 2002. Texas Watchdog was unable to locate any state records confirming the sale. The company has an address of 1300 Post Oak Blvd, Suite 1600, in Houston. Schwartz’s law firm occupies the 14th floor.

• For years, developers aspired to turn some prime acreage north of Arlington into some Rodney Dangerfield-in-Caddyshack living — “Condos over there! Plenty of parking.”

In 2007, Huffines Communities landed the big fish in the form of Viridian Municipal Management District, which sold bonds for millions of dollars in roads and infrastructure and has broad taxing powers to build everything from playgrounds and amphitheaters to signs and monuments.

The legislation creating the district was sponsored by state Rep. Paula Hightower Pierson, D-Arlington, in April 2007. Eight months later, Hightower-Pierson received a campaign donation of $5,000 from Robert Kempel, president of Huffines, the first of three donations he would make to her through 2010. One fawning story pegs the total public “contribution” at $337 million, “if all goes as planned.”

• In late 2006, state Rep. Hubert Vo, D-Houston, received campaign donations of $500 each from Hawes Hill Calderon and Allen Boone Humphries Robinson. Four months later, in March 2007, Vo and state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, carried a bill creating the International Management District, which would become a client for both firms. Hawes Hill manages the district, and Allen Boone is a mega law and lobbying firm which handles legal affairs for districts across the state including International.

After the 2007 session, Vo received additional donations, $2,500 in August from Hawes Hill and $500 in September from Allen Boone.

Vo has since received one donation from Hawes Hill, $1,000 in May.

Perhaps even more cozy is the building on Bellaire in Houston that houses the offices of the International Management District; records show that it is owned by ERA Investment, a company registered in 1997 by Vo and his wife, Kathy.

David Hawes

David Hawes, of Hawes Hill Calderon, said the space for the district is donated by Vo, saving the district the $600 a month it was previously paying in rent.

The building was purchased in 2004 by Vo’s company although his financial disclosure for 2007 does not state his interest in the building at 11360 Bellaire. Vo did not return a call asking for a comment.

One of the largest district management firms in the state, Hawes Hill Calderon has been a major player in the explosion of special districts in the state. The Houston-based firm is an efficient and effective team of professionals, handling everything from security to graffiti removal for businesses often located in tough neighborhoods.

“Cities do what they can, but they can’t do everything,” Hawes said. “If I can provide security to drive into these district centers and help, it’s a service to the commercial community.”

Hawes said that in one district, they were able to cut burglaries of businesses by up to 70 percent in a given period.

For graffiti abatement, the city often cites a business if it does not clean up the spray paint in a given time period.

“As a business owner, if you have someone managing the removal, you avoid a fine.”

At the same time, Hawes Hill has contributed to the campaign funds of lawmakers and elected officials who authorize the districts.

“It’s become a cottage industry. There are people making their entire living off these special districts,” said Martha Wong, a former Republican state lawmaker from Houston.

She pointed to Hawes Hill, which wanted her to support a special district in the Montrose area to provide extra publicly-funded services such as police patrol and litter pickup.

“They wanted to me introduce legislation for their management district, but I found out there was a big resistance to it,” Wong said. “My goal was to have 75 percent of the landowners approve it and to make sure every land owner in that area was notified.”

Martha Wong

Wong refused to carry the bill because of the overwhelming opposition.

“When you work it out and the neighborhood agrees, I’ll carry it,” Wong recalled telling the district organizers.

The organizers got a more sympathetic hearing from Ellen Cohen, Wong’s successor in the House, who sponsored the bill creating the Montrose Management District in 2009.

Today, that district is being sued by landowners who claim they submitted a lawful petition to dissolve the district’s mayor-approved board, but the board denied the petition’s validity.

Wong said special districts are “good for specific projects, but that’s all they really need to be used for.”

Yet the districts continue to bill residents and business owners for web services, landscaping, advertising; it’s a potpourri of services that often border on questionable, like the branded jump ropes the folks in Brays Oaks Management District ponied up for last year.

Residents of Brays Oaks in June 2011 also paid $5,000 down on the  $20,000 lobbying bill for Allen Boone Humphries during the legislative session.

The number of lobbyists for special districts exploded in the early 2000s, jumping from 412 in 1999 to 2,271 in 2004. The number has since fallen, to 610 in 2012.

Trey Lary, uber-lobbyist to special districts and a lawyer with Allen Boone Humphries, received between $50,000 and $99,999.99 for his services to Hawes Hill Calderon in 2005, records show. Three other Allen Boone lawyers worked for Hawes Hill that year, including Joe Allen. All made in the $50,000 to $99,999.99 range.

That year the Legislature created the Greater Sharpstown Management District. The contract to manage it went to Hawes Hill.

Hawes, himself a lobbyist, in 2009 represented the Harris County Improvement District #10B and Harris County Improvement District #6 — later known as the Five Corners and Montrose management districts — as well as some investment groups.

Hawes also lobbied for INCAP Financial Group, which was in the final stages of creating the Dallas North Oak Cliff Municipal Management District in Dallas. Hawes Hill is the manager of that district.

Right now, there are lobbyists working on special district issues for the upcoming session, which begins in January.

Jody Richardson, a veteran lobbyist with Allen Boone Humphries, has helped create special districts since 1982. She has spent time every month this year since February lobbying for special districts, according to her filings with the Texas Ethics Commission.

She attributes the increase in special districts in Texas, up 25 percent in the last 30 years, to land development becoming more “sophisticated.”

“The consuming public wants stuff,” Richardson said. “They don’t just want a house. They want a house in a master planned community, with hike-and-bike trails and amenities. All of that costs the developers money. And they need to put them in place to attract homebuyers.”

As far as the campaign donations from district firms to lawmakers, Richardson said looking at it as trading favors is “simplistic.”

“The reason those lawmakers carry those bills is because that land is in their district,” she said. “If you think a senator or a representative is going to sell his soul for $500 or $1,000 or $2,000, then you must not respect your government very much.”

Richardson sees only a “network of specialists” that cater to the needs of a demanding district system, businesses that are filling a market demand.

Phillip Savoy, of Austin-based Murfee Engineering Co., said in a hearing regarding districts last year that his group has “built an entire engineering business on putting together the process to create these districts. We have found a mechanism to allow communities to expand their infrastructure. Without putting the tax burden on the whole community, it goes to the people who live in the [municipal utility district].”

* * *

Perhaps the granddaddy of special district largesse is state. Rep. Jim Murphy, who earns a six-figure salary to manage Westchase District in Houston. His deal as general manager calls for a monthly fee of $22,491 in addition to other payments for consultancy and an upfront payment of $7,711.

He was first elected to the statehouse in 2006, a Republican from the Houston area and the owner of District Management Services, a sort of one-stop company that manages the affairs of special districts much the same way as Hawes Hill.

But instead of relying on lobbyists to advocate for Westchase, Murphy, who was voted out in 2008, handled the job himself.

In April 2009, state Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, carried a bill to give broader powers to Westchase, such as the ability to receive money from tax increment finance zones. It authorized the board of the district to change the number of voting directors, “provided the board determines that the change is in the best interest of the district.”

It also gave the district broader powers to tax for services, including infrastructure.

When it came time to hear testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, there was one witness to testify for the bill: Jim Murphy, who was now a registered lobbyist for special districts and authorities. The bill was signed by the governor in June 2009.

Murphy was re-elected in 2010. In April, as Murphy struggled to retain his seat in the primary against challenger Ann Witt, the district became an issue.

The Witt campaign unveiled a web site and sent out a mailer outlining the numerous Westchase contracts handed out to Murphy donors, including Rehak Creative Services, whose owner, Robert Rehak, has donated at least  $7,000 to Murphy’s campaigns since 2005.

Other contract-holding contributors include Phonoscope, BMS Management and Brown & Gay Engineers.

“Double Dipping. Skirting the Law. Bilking Taxpayers. Rewarding Cronies,” a banner at the bottom of one page of the mailer claimed in fairly standard attack ad format.

Murphy did not return a call for comment.

Rehak sued Witt for defamation, claiming Witt’s connecting of dots constituted an unlawful act. A district court judge in Harris County quickly dismissed the case, granting attorney’s fees to Witt. The decision is on appeal.

Witt’s daughter, Ellen Witt, was managing the campaign and felt she had found a wedge issue that would boost her mother’s chances of winning.

It didn’t work. Ann Witt lost 59 percent to 41 percent.

***

Ellen Witt, former deputy attorney general for legal counsel in the Office of the Attorney General of Texas, feels people aren’t aware of the power of special districts.

The districts often do a poor job of posting their public meetings, she said, and usually use a .com URL rather than the .gov that is used with other taxpayer-funded operations.

For example, for a district outside Denton, public meeting notices are posted to a fence post.

“People don’t understand that these are government entities,” Witt said. “For people to hold government accountable, they need to know that a group is a government entity to begin with. Many of these are operating under the radar. And they don’t seem to want the public to know they exist.”

Indeed, even though taxpayers in a municipal utility district in North Texas had paid off the district’s debt in 2010, the board continued to meet and tax residents. It took a court order and an election to undo the district, which, as far as some residents were concerned, had done nothing to let the public know of its existence.

“We had no idea there was a board that met every month,” said Mary Arceneaux, a resident of the district in Corinth, near Denton. “They had meetings, they were spending our money, they had elections, and we never did find out. That’s how they kept the same people in there on the board for 15 to 20 years.”

Most legislation creating districts names the initial board members. Those members sometimes remain in place for years due to a power structure that can leave little room for new voices.

In the Montrose Management District, two-thirds of the board members are donors or supporters of Mayor Annise Parker, who presides over the City Council, which in turn approves board members.

Once the districts are created, they’re hard to rein in.

Not even the governor could stop a move in 2007 to change the power structure of the Buffalo Bayou district in Houston. Democratic state reps. Garnet Coleman and Ellen Cohen co-authored legislation that reduced the number of board members from 31 to 9. The measure passed, but Gov. Perry vetoed it, pointing out that the amendment would not only decrease the number of board members but also name nine directors “without the approval of the local governing body.” Today, the board has nine members, anyway; three of those named in the vetoed legislation are among them. The other 22 spots are left vacant.

Over the years, lawmakers have reviewed internal, mostly academic reports on special districts that have confirmed their majority view that districts are a good thing. The most this 2002 Senate committee report could muster is that “there was not adequate oversight regarding certain activities by certain special districts … specifically, the ability to divide or convert to another type of district.”

A critical, geeky analysis in 2007 from Fordham Law Review offered a candid look at the problems of districts.

This 2008 assessment by the Texas Senate Research Center offers a dry, academic look at districts, posing few questions but conceding they are an “invisible” layer of government.

A 2001 series in the Dallas Morning News, Government by Developer, exposed a number of questionable elements of the districts. Among them: The moving of money between developers and the lawmakers that author bills creating districts, the relationship between lawyers, lawmakers and developers and the practice of hiring voters to elect a board that suits the power structure of the district.

All three strategies are still rampant. For the third, one need only look as recently as 2010, when a 30-something entrepreneur, Alan John Lesselyong, moved into a FEMA trailer to elect officers and approve $400 million in bonds for a Denton County district.

Lesselyong was the sole voter in the district. He was de facto election judge, from the polling place set up behind the trailer.

Legislators have vowed to look into possible problems with the system of special districts, but so far, done nothing.

State Rep. Dennis Bonnen, R-Angleton, claimed in 2010 that the voter residency laws were “something that needs to be looked at.” Addressing residency laws could make it more difficult for some districts to be assembled.

But when pressed last month about it, Bonnen said he was going to be busy with other things in the upcoming session.

State Sen. Jane Nelson in 2011 tried to convince her colleagues to address the hiring of voters for special districts, giving a half-hearted plea in a hearing.

In 2001, though, Nelson, R-Flower Mound, had co-authored a bill creating the Frisco Square Management District in what has become one of the ritziest of north Dallas suburbs.

Nelson declined to speak to Texas Watchdog.

Susan Combs

State Comptroller Susan Combs, eyeing a higher office bid and with great fanfare, recently announced a new web site that allows residents to track the taxing entities in and around their area, including districts. The site was applauded by the conservative Americans For Prosperity group.

Combs considered in March lobbying for a moratorium on the creation of special districts, although she has little jurisdiction in that regard. Nonetheless, she told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram last month that she now favors a more political – albeit likely results-free – path of talking with lawmakers.

Combs declined to talk with Texas Watchdog.

Wong, the former state legislator from Houston, said the whole special district process needs to be addressed in the legislature. “People have tweaked the rules” over the last few years, making it easier to create districts.

Austin is the only place that can change the situation that some feel has gotten out of hand, making taxpayers pony up millions that used to be part of the risk taken by an entrepreneur, a developer, even a lawyer.

“Legislators need to do a better job of letting people know that these are government entities,” added Ellen Witt, the former AG’s office lawyer. “I don’t know why more people haven’t raised this issue with their representatives. “

***
Contact Steve Miller at 832-303-9420 or stevemiller@texaswatchdog.org.

Photo of money by flickr user AMagill, used via a Creative Commons license.

Like this story? Then steal it. This report by Texas Watchdog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. That means bloggers, citizen-journalists, and journalists may republish the story on their sites with attribution and a link to Texas Watchdog. If you do re-use the story, e-mail news@texaswatchdog.org.

The Houston management district board that approves $37 million in property development tax breaks is packed with insiders from the local real estate community, including two people connected to major developer Hines as well as at least two who are already city vendors.

The city council voted last month to allow the Downtown Management District to decide who can receive tax breaks for developing inner-city living spaces.

Of the 27 board members on the Downtown Management District, which was created legislatively in 1995, 12 have real estate ties, and a company operated by board member Kenny Meyer owns property in the district.

Others with ties include Leslie Ashby of Ashby LLP, whose firm handles real estate litigation; Frank Staats, a vice president with Moon Acquisition Holdings, a national development and real estate holding company; and Paul Layne, whose former employer, Brookfield Properties, was paid $7,218 by the city of Houston in February, shortly before he left Brookfield.

Meyer manages a number of properties downtown within the district boundaries. He had expressed interest in the area a few years ago before he was on the board, with buildings owned by one of his other companies, FKM Partnership, searching for tenants.

John Mooz is an executive with Hines, one of the area’s largest developers. Stewart O. Robinson, a real estate fixture in Houston, left Hines in December 2010 and now runs SOR Real Estate Advisors. The city paid Hines Reit 2800 Post Oak, on offshoot Hines company, $67,000 between June 2010 and June 2012, records show.

Mike Sullivan

The ties between board members and the industry receiving tax breaks “underscores my opposition to this,” said Mike Sullivan, the lone city council member to oppose handing the tax break process over to the district.

The city council voted in August to allow the board to deliver up to a $15,000-per-unit tax rebate to developers of 2,500 residential units within a specified zone. The rebate will be paid from future property taxes and assessments. See the outline of the arrangement here and information from the district’s site here.

“These are tax dollars that will be rebated,” Sullivan said. “There are better uses for $37 million.”

The district takes in more than 2,000 properties appraised at more than $7.6 billion.

Bob Eury, the Downtown Management District’s executive director, said that the process for selecting developers who may receive the rebate is “tightly prescribed. … Obviously, this is really first come, first serve, and we have conflict-of-interest policies, so obviously the board members can’t participate in anything that they will directly benefit from.”

Anyone receiving the benefit of a public money abatement will have to “meet the critera defined by the city council,” added Andrew Icken, chief development officer for the city.

The plan was crafted under Chapter 380 of the Texas Local Government Code, which permits municipalities to pay for economic development. It was created in 1989, when the state, with 16 million people, was about 36 percent smaller than today’s 25 million. A 1987 statewide vote that allowed the creation of economic development programs allowed the legislation.

In Fort Worth, this type of arrangement is considered anathema: “This incentive may only be used as a gap financing tool of last resort,” reads that city’s assessment of Chapter 380 arrangements. “The use of this incentive is for projects facing extraordinary impediments to development and offering significant positive impact to the community and surrounding neighborhood where the project is located. Limitations on how this incentive is used are predicated on the source of the funds and terms and conditions of the award to the City and the project.”

The city of Arlington uses a checklist of benefits for the city and administers the program itself.

The city of Austin handed tech giant Apple an $8.6 million tax incentive earlier this year under a lengthy 380 agreement. The city lists its 380 beneficiaries here.

Dallas used a 380 to lure, well, Dallas.

The city of Houston in 2010 granted three companies 380 agreements: Ainbinder Heights, for development in the Washington Avenue area, InTown Homes for Memorial area development, and Dean Foods.

Icken said that the city has executed 14 such contracts now, and contends that Houston’s are among the more stringent. View the list here.

“Some cities give money up front or simply give grants through this program,” he said.

The 380 deal with Ainbinder turned into a protracted legal battle after a nonprofit filed a lawsuit against the city and Ainbinder. The action attempted to halt any 380 agreements by the city, claiming the city was “failing to provide sufficient controls to ensure that 380 agreements are not abused as either an end run around bond finance procedures or as political favors returned to well connected developers.”

The city prevailed.

Under the arrangement between the city and the Downtown Management District, the district will enter into agreements with the developers, calculate the funding to be remitted to the developers and send those calculations to the city for payment.

Sullivan pointed out that the original use of the 380 provision in the state was to spur development in areas that need a boost, “but the downtown has historically done well.”

Bob Eury

Eury contends that the city of Fort Worth’s definition of the 380 agreement  - “extraordinary impediments” – fits perfectly in the affected area around the George R. Brown Convention Center.

“It’s expensive land,” Eury said. “The whole way it is designed is to stimulate this area. It’s a front door for Houston.”

“Extraordinary impediments” to Ickens as well?

“I would not choose those words,” he said.

Among the locations on the district’s development project list are a city-owned warehouse at 1002 Washington, which was purchased by the city in January 2011 to be converted to its permit headquarters. The list, though, shows no indication that the interests of its board members are being appeased.

***
Contact Steve Miller at 832-303-9420 or stevemiller@texaswatchdog.org.

Photo of downtown Houston by flickr user Daniel Ray, used via a Creative Commons license.

Like this story? Then steal it. This report by Texas Watchdog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. That means bloggers, citizen-journalists, and journalists may republish the story on their sites with attribution and a link to Texas Watchdog. If you do re-use the story, e-mail news@texaswatchdog.org.