The Chronicle‘s Melanie Markley reports that another nonprofit organization fears the city may try to scrap longstanding legal and moral commitments in order to squeeze more money out of valuable real estate:
The Center Serving Persons with Mental Retardation isn’t the only nonprofit that faces an uncertain future because of a 99-year lease the city now says is invalid.
Next door, the Center for Hearing and Speech shares a building with the Harris County Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority on city property leased for 99 years in 1965. The building sits on a prime 3-acre tract at the corner of West Dallas and Shepherd.
Renee Davis, executive director of the center that teaches deaf children to speak without using sign language, said she has not been contacted by the city, but she worries that her facility could face the same scrutiny as the neighboring center for the mentally retarded.
Representatives of the center for the mentally retarded are in ongoing talks with the mayor’s office. The city had threatened to sell the 6 acres that the center leased because the directors would not agree to pay closer to market-value rent for the land near River Oaks.
[snip]
Davis said her lease with the city sets $31,065 annual rent, which is waived if the nonprofit provides at least that much in services to the community.
Davis said her center provides more than $1 million a year in services to at least 1,000 hearing-impaired children. The center is staffed with teachers, audiologists and speech pathologists who help deaf children learn to communicate verbally.
“We believed that this was a partnership with the city,” Davis said. “They would lease the land to us and we would provide very difficult kinds of services that need professional expertise for deaf children, and the taxpayers did not have to bear the burden of providing those very specialized services.”
Ms. Davis described the utility of such arrangements beautifully in that last paragraph, underscoring the human/moral component of the contractual arrangement.
The following spin is just strange:
White said he wants to develop a uniform policy to reduce the risk of lawsuits against the city claiming the leases are not valid, which could disrupt the nonprofits’ operations.
Huh?
Let me take a stab at parsing that: The City of Houston needs to disrupt the nonprofits’ operations by breaking its longstanding legal and moral commitment to some of the weakest members of our community (people most in need of a helping hand!), in order to reduce the virtually nonexistent risk of someone other than the City of Houston suing the city, and potentially disrupting the nonprofits’ operations.
Well, that certainly makes sense!
Seriously, assuming there is a legal risk of some local developer suing the city over these contractual arrangements (which have never been a problem before), in the hopes of eventually getting hold of valuable real estate — does anyone think a local developer would go there?
Putting it slightly differently — can you imagine the firestorm that would erupt in the local media and from bloggers (many of whom have sat this one out) if, say, Perry Homes decided to sue the city in an effort to boot the deaf and retarded and grab their land? That wouldn’t fly. That’s why it’s a virtually nonexistent risk.
But the risk posed by the city under this mayor, for whatever reason, is real.
As we’ve been saying all along, Mayor White needs to back off on this one.
PREVIOUSLY: City readies “Boot the Mentally Retarded” revenue stream, “Please help save my home”, If only Tilman Fertitta were on the board of directors…, Baker Botts takes on White’s “Boot the Mentally Retarded” revenue stream, Former city attorney elaborates on leases, center.
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