In November of last year, Richard Connelly shined some light on a seemingly arcane bit of business on Mayor White’s agenda:
It’s probably not a great idea for a city government to do business with a developer of low-income housing if that developer is the subject of an FBI probe that may bring down Dallas’s mayor pro tem.
So it’s likely a good thing that Houston didn’t lend developer Brian Potashnik $2.3 million, as it planned to do at one time.
But how it reached that decision shows the city bureaucracy is still a wondrous thing to behold.
Approval of the two loans to Potashnik was on the agenda of City Council’s Housing Committee November 15; the meeting ended before they reached the item, so discussion was rescheduled for November 21. Between those dates, committee chair Shelley Sekula-Gibbs was asked (by a Houston Press reporter) whether she knew about the FBI investigation.
It turns out she did, and had asked the city’s director of housing, Milton Wilson — all the way back in June, when a deal with Potashnik was first proposed — to respond to her concerns about the Dallas matter. She never heard back from him.
“We have had some very ill-conceived, ill-advised relationships with
