KHOU-11’s Amy Tortolani reports that industrious downtown thieves have been busy stealing parking meters:
Free parking places are popping up all over downtown Houston. Someone has been stealing parking meters and that’s taking a bite out of an already tight city budget.
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Friday morning, police found another eight missing meters. Over the last three months, 70 have been stolen from Houston streets.
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Undercover agents say it’s not easy to steal the meters. Each meter and pole weigh about 75 pounds. In some cases, the the bad guys even pulled out the concrete with the meter adding another 20 pounds.
It can’t be easy to steal the meters, and it doesn’t reflect well at all on downtown policing that 70 meters have disappeared in three months. Indeed, we suspect it’s another (unreported) manifestation of HPD’s manpower shortages, which continue to be ignored by Mayor White and his council.
It is slightly ironic that downtown meters are disappearing, since Mayor White and crew just recently blanketed downtown with new downtown meters in an effort to boost municipal revenues.
In another effort to boost city revenues, Mayor White and the uniformless police chief continue to agitate in favor of using traffic cameras around town to catch red light runners. Most media reports suggest that new equipment will have to be installed around town, but anyone who has been paying attention since the uniformless police chief got to town will have noticed that cameras have been installed already in many intersections all around town. Perhaps that’s coincidence, perhaps not.
Predictably, the Chronicle editorial board weighed in on the side of “good guy” Mayor White, shooting down those who criticize the proposal on privacy concerns. Those concerns are not irrelevant, but of greater concern is the fact that the private company that will provide the equipment will get a cut of revenues generated by citations, thereby creating an incentive to write citations, but not necessarily an incentive to improve traffic safety and enforcement.
Given the nature of public-private partnerships in this city, this is one proposal that should get more scrutiny than Mayor White’s proposals to enrich private interests generally have received from the current members of Council. The matter will be considered on December 15.
