As a city budget crisis looms, some current city leaders (and a few aspiring ones) have suggested that a shortage of revenue is to blame.
In reality, as local businessman Jim Noteware points out, the City of Houston continues to rake in record revenues, even as it spends even more, suggesting the City has a spending problem:
City revenues in all funds (general and enterprise) have increased consistently and dramatically since 2002, the last year the city balanced its budget under the accrual basis of accounting. In 2002, total revenues were $2.6 billion; in 2015, total revenues are budgeted to exceed $4.064 billion, an increase of 56 percent in 13 years.
Read the entire article here: Why Houston is broke — it’s not about revenue – Jim Noteware, Houston Business Journal.
The journalists at the Houston Chronicle would never characterize it as a spending problem, of course — that taxpayer-friendly perspective is not how their institutional sources view it at all. Kudos to the Houston Business Journal for featuring a different perspective.
