Recently a concerned reader asked: “If Houston’s finances are so atrocious, then why does the City still have a credit rating of AA?” I answered him, “You should call and ask them; please let me
My previous column presented my reasons why the City should not approve the agreement with the Firefighters regarding deferring payments into its pension fund. What City leaders should do, however, is at least two new
On Friday the 13th (March 13, that is), I was invited to testify before a special meeting of City Council, called by four brave members to hold public discussion on an “agreement” that Mayor Parker,
The City of Houston has not been paying all its bills. It has funded its deficits by borrowing — from its employees’ pension funds, from bondholders and others. Meanwhile, the City’s Long Term Financial Management
Over the past few weeks, many of Houston’s leaders – members of City Council, business executives, journalists, etc. – have posed the question to me: “What can we do to fix the City’s pension problems?”
The previous article demonstrated that the City of Houston is in deep financial trouble, losing population and jobs, while expenses grow faster than record revenues and while the pension problem (the greatest issue confronting the
Late in the afternoon of December 26, 2014 — a post-Christmas Friday holiday for many — the City of Houston released its Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) for fiscal year 2014, just meeting the legal
For the past several months, the international press has been fixated with reporting on the unexpected but dramatic slide in world oil prices – from a high of $107 per barrel in June 2014 to
In previous articles, I discussed the explosive growth of City of Houston expenditures over the past twelve years. The per capita cost of City government has risen 46% over that time, and the City projects
To address the City of Houston’s unsustainable fiscal trajectory, several current (and aspiring) elected officials have proposed increasing property taxes. They seem to view the City’s chronic deficits of more than a decade as a