Commentary

BILL KING has a nice new blog post, “Would you like a transit lesson with that shoe shine?“ Under the current METRO leadership, the needs of those who actually use transit in Houston seem much

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS reports that public policy pundit Bill King testified to the Senate Finance Committee yesterday on the state of Houston’s finances: A longtime critic testified that during White’s six years as mayor,

THE CHRONICLE reports that Mayor Annise Parker is skeptical whether METRO can afford to build two controversial rail lines (the Westpark/University and Uptown lines), and that she reiterated her call today for new management at

MAYOR ANNISE PARKER said today that all options but tax increases will be considered in trying to make up a multimillion dollar budget shortfall. Here’s an interesting quote from the Chronicle story by Bradley Olson:

MATT BRAMANTI scores with this tweet: We expect Jeff Cohen will be hitting the links the rest of the week. Honestly, though, did America’s worst big-city daily really need to devote 30+ grafs to this

MARC CAMPOS notes that new HISD chief Terry Grier has been busy in his first six months, upsetting the usual suspect: So far it looks like to me that the only person that is publicly

THE CHRONICLE reports on METRO’s plans to issue $2.6 billion in bonds to finance its light rail construction (and, ostensibly, to avoid the limits imposed by the 2003 referendum on the boondoggle’s skyrocketing costs). The

BARRY KLEIN passes along a guest commentary (“More trains + short blocks: The coming downtown mobility mess”) that we have posted here. We have previously reviewed METRO’s coming downtown mobility mess here.

ONE OF THE (MANY) DISTURBING ASPECTS OF SHREDDERGATE is how chatty METRO officials have been about the firing of Pauline Higgins, former chief counsel for the transit agency. They even released personnel documents purportedly showing

SLAMPO checks in with an update on his favorite, non-resident Houston Councilmember, Al(oysius) Hoang.