ReBuild Houston again goes to voters
Mayor says program on roads, drains won’t be changed
Eight years after voters narrowly backed the idea, the controversial street and drainage program known as ReBuild Houston is expected to appear again on the November ballot in the form of an amendment to the city charter.
The immediate outcome of the election, however, may be unusually muted: Mayor Sylvester Turner said he will implement the program as it is being run today even if voters repeal the legal language that would force him to do so. The drainage fee at the heart of the program also is not at risk in the election.
“We are simply saying in November to the voters: Go and reaffirm the dedicated purpose for which this fee is intended, put a lockbox around it,” Turner said. “Voters are not being asked to increase the fee or create another fee, just to reaffirm what already is.”
The conservative opponents who forced the do-over by convincing the Texas Supreme Court that the city’s 2010 ballot language did not make clear the initiative would include a new “rain tax,” as they call it, agree the city’s ability to collect the fee is not at issue. However, they say the item’s defeat this fall could, depending on the outcome of other pending cases, force the city to change how it spends that money.
A more immediate concern for plaintiffs’ attorney Andy Taylor is that the city’s pro-
posed ballot language for the measure still fails, in his view, to clarify that local property owners will be the ones to pay the drainage fee.
Mayoral spokesman Alan Bernstein said the city is aware of the court’s position and prepared the ballot language accordingly. City Council members will discuss the item next week.
“If a majority of Houston voters want to tax themselves, that’s their right to do so, but if the voters are misled into taxing themselves I’ve got a major problem with that,” Taylor said Wednesday. “The whole reason the Supreme Court invalidated the last election on the drainage fee was because the city in the ballot language failed to inform the voters that they would be paying for the drainage fee if they supported it.”
Dispute over financing
Engineers, long upset with what they saw as City Hall’s chronic underinvestment in Houston’s drainage systems, gathered signatures in 2010 to force a referendum that would enshrine a two-decade, $8 billion infrastructure renewal program in the city charter.
The charter change, the city argues, chiefly was about financing. It barred the issuance of new debt for street and drainage repairs, switching instead to a payas-you-go model to be paid for with the new fee. It committed a portion of the city’s annual property tax revenue to streets and drainage so that, as old road bonds were paid off, more cash would become available for projects. And it capped maintenance and operations spending from the new fund at 25 percent. Grant funds from other governments also were added to the pot.
The roughly $5 monthly drainage fee that was added to residents’ water bills in July 2011 was established not by the charter amendment, the city says, but by an ordinance the City Council passed that year. The fee is based on the square footage of impervious surface — essentially, pavement — on each property.
Conservative opponents have launched a number of lawsuits against ReBuild since then. In one case, Taylor argues the drainage fees the city has collected should be repaid to taxpayers or that the portion of the fees spent on street surfaces should be refunded. In another, he argues the fees Houston has collected have exceeded its 14-year-old, voterimposed revenue cap.
Those cases rely on the fact that the courts have voided the 2010 charter change, which exempted the fees from the revenue cap and also added “streets” and “curbs” to the definition of “drainage” infrastructure — words that are not in the state law that lets city levy drainage fees.
While those fights have wound their way through the courts, about $1.8 billion has flowed through the ReBuild program for reconstruction or repair work — including an estimated $785 million in drainage fees — and roughly $1 billion in debt has been paid off, Houston Public Works Director Carol Haddock said.
More weight on drainage
Responding to a directive from Turner ahead of the fall referendum, Haddock said Public Works leaders are re-evaluating how ReBuild money is allocated, with the intention of placing greater weight on the drainage needs associated with a project.
“What the mayor is saying is, back in 2010, this was sold on flooding and drainage. What he’s told me is that 50 percent of the money needs to go into projects that were identified for the purposes of solving flooding and drainage,” Haddock said. “Within the confines of what’s written on the ballot language, we can shift those percentages and we can go to what was promised to the public and we can reformulate this program, reaffirm it, in what they originally bought into.”
Turner said there is much about the program he does not intend to change, noting he sees benefits to pay-as-you-go financing.
He also said that in the context of Harris County’s $2.5 billion flood bond election on Aug. 25 and incoming federal funds tied to Hurricane Harvey, it is not necessary for the city to take on more debt to try to fix the region’s inadequate infrastructure by itself.
“We don't necessarily have to take a look at another approach,” Turner said. “We just have to tie in with things that are already taking place or in progress.”
Local Democratic political consultant Keir Murray said ReBuild Houston, broadly, is unpopular. In his view, the shift away from debt financing and a resulting lean period when there was less money available for projects started the program off on the wrong foot with the public.
Council members also disliked the extent to which Public Works’ “worst-first” formulas dictated spending; the council ultimately pushed for more control over project lists and shifted more money to local street and drainage projects and away from reconstructions of major thoroughfares.
“It’s complicated to communicate under any circumstances, but I’m not aware of any efforts that were ever made to communicate any of that,” Murray said. City officials should say, “‘Yes, we’re collecting this money but this is how it’s being used,’ so people feel like they’re getting something for what what they’re paying. I’m not sure people feel that way or know what they’re paying for at this point.”