Critics: Mayor fails to heed his task forces
Hurricane Harvey’s toll on Houston’s poorest residents was still coming into focus in September 2017 when a group of policy experts appointed by Mayor Sylvester Turner presented him with a “road map to confront inequality in Houston.”
The 103-page report recommended repealing the city’s property tax revenue cap, piloting an early childhood education program for low-income families and establishing an ambitious new jobs program.
Nearly three years later, none of the key proposals has come to fruition.
Members of the equity task force say they are among the dozens of advisory boards, committees and other temporary groups that have issued policy recommendations at the mayor’s request, only for him to reject or ignore the vast major
ity of their advice. Turner’s reluctance to act on proposals from his own appointees has fueled growing discontent among progressive policy activists and disaffected supporters of the Democratic mayor, according to interviews with advocates and former members of various mayoral task forces.
The tension began brewing before Turner won re-election last December, as some progressive groups and community leaders urged the mayor to pursue a more expansive vision if he was granted a second term. Since then, Turner’s response to the police reform movement sparked by the killing of George Floyd and his refusal to support an eviction grace period ordinance recommended by a citycounty task force has stirred further disappointment.
“After not seeing some basic recommendations move forward, I stepped away to focus my energy elsewhere. I was done,” said Ginny Goldman, chair of the equity task force and a co-chair of Turner’s 2016 transition team. “I’ve got to say, if asked to join a task force or committee under this administration today, I would certainly turn it down. It’s a terrible use of people’s time right now writing reports that sit on his shelf, rather than bring people together for meaningful action.”
Turner’s critics say his approach to controversial or systemic issues follows a predictable pattern: Appoint a task force, often accompanied by a speech brimming with sweeping progressive language, before passing on most or all of the advisory group’s policy recommendations.
The reports generated by Turner’s task forces typically come months later, when the public has refocused its attention elsewhere. His task force on Confederate statues, appointed shortly after the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., took seven months to recommend the removal of Houston’s statues. Nothing happened until June of this year, when Turner ordered them taken down — 17 days after Floyd’s death, which set off widespread removal of Confederate symbols.
In a statement, Turner said he gives “careful consideration to all recommendations provided to me,” some of which he said he is unable to enact because they would create legal or financial risks for the city, or require legislation from higher levels of government.
“The recommendations made by a mayoral task force or commission are generally provided after due consideration, culminating in a nonbinding final report,” Turner said. “It is my responsibility as mayor to determine which recommendations are in the city’s best interest and whether they should or should not be implemented.”
‘What we need is action’
During his first term, Turner formed groups to advise him on topics ranging from gun violence prevention to immigration, helping garner broad support from Democrats and liberals in his reelection campaign despite a brewing sentiment that those groups had yielded few measurable results.
Six months into his second term, the mayor confronted perhaps the most intense progressive backlash of his tenure. Around the same time he rejected calls to cut the police department’s annual budget, Turner issued an executive order that was panned as “largely a restatement of existing policy.” Soon after, he formed a 45-member Task Force on Policing Reform that critics condemned as a delay tactic on an issue they said has already been studied.
“The mayor shouldn’t pretend that the calls for police reform were suddenly sprung on him this week. His own transition team in 2016 made a litany of reform recommendations,” Tarsha Jackson, a City Council candidate who served on Turner’s criminal justice transition committee, wrote in a June Chronicle op-ed. “Houston does not need another study. What we need is action on the existing recommendations for police reform.”
Not all of Turner’s appointees share the same critical view of the mayor. Jay Blazek Crossley, a member of Turner’s traffic and transportation transition committee, applauded the mayor’s move to adopt Vision Zero, which aims to reduce roadway deaths, and his letter to state officials earlier this year seeking changes that would displace fewer residents and businesses in low-income and minority communities during the massive Interstate 45 rebuild project.
“I ended up thinking of the transition committees as the city trying to use people’s brainpower as a sort of worksheet, to try to think through a bunch of stuff and gather ideas,” Crossley said. “And I feel that a lot of the ideas we discussed, maybe they didn’t end up in the report, but the city has effectively used those ideas.”
Still, nothing has commanded local attention quite like the recent push for police reform. Since his 2015 campaign, Turner repeatedly has called for a major increase in Houston’s police force, even teasing the idea of adjusting the property tax revenue cap for that reason alone.
After the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas concluded in a June report that Turner had failed to act on any of the major recommendations from his criminal justice transition committee, the mayor said the committee’s proposals did not go far enough in light of the recent shift in public opinion. Turner did not, however, say why he declined to take up the recommendations in the four years before Floyd’s death.
The mayor’s supporters have praised him for sticking to his view that the Houston Police Department is understaffed, arguing that activists who favor police funding cuts represent a minority of the population.
“What you saw right here in Houston was a mayor, Sylvester Turner, who’s probably one of the best mayors in the country, listen to the community,” Houston Police Officers’ Union president Joe Gamaldi said last month on Fox News. “He listened to the hardworking, law-abiding members of our community and said, ‘We’re not going to defund the police.’”
While the police task force deliberates, Turner is facing separate scrutiny from housing advocates who want him to help residents catch up on rent if they have come under economic hardship from the COVID-19 pandemic. Members of the city and county’s eviction prevention task force, which includes Turner’s appointed housing director, unanimously supported an eviction grace period ordinance that they drafted last month and presented to the mayor.
Turner has declined to put the ordinance on the City Council agenda, which he alone controls. The mayor argued that a grace period would only postpone tenants’ financial burdens, which would continue to grow during the moratorium.
Instead, Turner has implemented a $35 million rent relief program, which requires participating landlords to halt all eviction proceedings through September. Acknowledging the measure will fall well short of addressing the need, Turner also has pleaded with federal and state lawmakers for additional aid.
Advocates have questioned what, if anything, is preventing the city from implementing a grace period in the meantime. Jeff Reichman, a member of the housing task force, tweeted, “What’s the point of the task force if our recommendations are ignored without consideration?”
Bryan LaVergne, co-chair of the Houston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, said “every family evicted in Houston will be kicked out by Turner’s own boot” if he does not take up the ordinance.
“The mayor’s actions are clear: When he doesn’t want to take a bold stance for Houstonians, he hides behind powerless task forces,” LaVergne said.
Turner, asked whether he fears Houston would face a legal challenge if City Council approved a grace period, cited a nonbinding opinion issued earlier this month by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that stated local governments cannot prohibit or delay evictions.
“This is not surprising, as a number of cities are currently engaged in lawsuits over imposing eviction moratoriums or grace periods,” Turner said. “The city of Houston’s approach to addressing the issue of evictions was more comprehensive by providing $30 million in direct rental assistance (and $5 million from the private sector), $40 million for homelessness prevention and $500,000 in tenant legal aid.”
‘A weak public sector’
Turner’s task force approach in some ways highlights the clash between his vision for the office and the hopes of his disappointed supporters. In an interview last year during the mayoral race, Turner said he had more agency to push for progressive policy as a state representative, where he said he could take on “a very partisan role.”
“As a legislator, it’s one thing to be on the floor of the Texas House or in a committee or even out in the community, and you’re championing certain policy initiatives,” Turner said.
In his current role, Turner said, “I’m the CEO, the city manager of the city of Houston in a nonpartisan position, and I represent 2.3 million Houstonians. I can’t lose sight of that.”
Though he has resisted the profound changes proposed by groups such as his equity task force, Turner passed a landmark overhaul of Houston’s troubled pension system during his first term. To get the package across the finish line, the mayor secured support from the Greater Houston Partnership, the city’s main business alliance, and other members of the business community.
Turner has often turned to the private sector to work around the city’s budget constraints, pushing forward programs such as Complete Communities and a park sponsorship initiative that require buy-in from the business community.
Stephen Klineberg, the founding director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, said the close relationship between the public and private sectors — a longtime feature of Houston government that he said is driven by the city’s low tax rate — comes with pitfalls.
“We rely on the private sector enormously because we have such a weak public sector,” Klineberg said. “The result is that there’s too many vested interests. It’s hard to get a broad consensus to form, and even when you have it, it’s hard to sustain innovations and initiatives.”
Goldman, the equity task force chair who also co-founded the Texas Organizing Project, said Houston’s financial constraints do not preclude Turner from pursuing lofty goals.
“Houston has one of the most powerful mayoral forms of government in the country,” Goldman said. “We were hoping that he was coming back home from the Legislature to use the mayoral levers of power to aim high and push well beyond what some might consider possible. But frankly, that just hasn’t happened.”