H-GAC muffles Houston’s issues
You are an engaged, informed citizen. You know your mayor and county judge, even your council member and commissioner. But do you know the chair of your regional council of governments?
Probably not.
And yet these lesser-known governing bodies composed of elected officials and other stakeholders do some of the heaviest lifting when it comes to guiding our transportation, flood control and other regional planning.
“This organization has been hidden in plain sight for decades,” said Michael Moritz, an organizer with the recently launched Fair for Houston campaign that is looking to shake up the HoustonGalveston Area Council’s voting structure to give Houston more proportional representation in some of the region’s most important decisions.
As he goes door to door gathering signatures for a petition that would put a charter amendment on the November ballot, he says he’s struck by how little people know about H-GAC and what it does.
We’ll hold off on deciding whether to endorse the ballot measure, which if approved, would require the city of Houston to go to the H-GAC and renegotiate for a greater share of the votes based on its population, but we are grateful to the activists for raising awareness of this decision-making body through which millions of federal and state dollars flow.
“So many of the big transportation issues get decided there,” Harrison Humphreys, climate program manager with Air Alliance Houston said. “The only thing I’m frustrated with about the Fair for Houston campaign is that I didn’t come up with it first.”
The argument is simple: Houston and Harris County represent the majority of the region’s population but only a fraction of the votes. In practice, this has meant Houston’s voice is muted in major decisions, including when H-GAC approved a plan that would give Houston just 2 percent of $488 million in federal flood money or the transportation committee's approval of controversial I-45 expansion plans over the objections of Houston and Harris County.
The city of Houston, for example, has three votes out of 28 votes on H-GAC’s transportation policy committee, the region’s designated metropolitan planning organization. Harris County has another 2 votes. That’s less than 20 percent of the overall vote. It’s a tricky calculation because there are other voting members, such as Baytown, whose boundaries lie partly in Harris County and so could be argued to also represent that portion of Harris County but the overall impact to most observers is a clear imbalance away from the population center of the region.
“Unlike so many problems in politics, there is something that we as Houston voters, Houston residents can do about it,” Evan Choate, campaign manager with Fair for Houston, said.
Not everyone is sold, though.
“It goes against the whole idea of the council of governments in the first place,” said Ed Emmett, former Harris County judge and chair of H-GAC. “It’s supposed to be a cooperative entity, not a competitive entity.”
The current H-GAC chair, Waller County Judge Trey Duhon echoed those concerns. There’s even a bill in the legislature now that would double down on the voting structure.
Other local leaders have been publicly agnostic about the effort but expressed frustration with the system many times. Though the Houston Mayor’s Office declined to comment for the Chronicle’s recent reporting, Sylvester Turner has complained about “inequity” at H-GAC before, saying,” I think the inequity at some point will have to be addressed,” at a city council meeting in January. “Now what’s the most constructive way of doing that? I think the jury is still out.”
The charter amendment route could get thorny and combative.
If H-GAC were to reject a mandate from Houston to rework its voting structure, the charter amendment would require the city to leave the entity, setting off a bit of legal limbo. MPOs must include the region’s largest city and Houston would then seek to create its own MPO representing at least 75 percent of the region’s population and with the governor’s sign off. In the meantime, H-GAC’s transportation committee would still be the operating MPO.
“Both state and federal law give Houston a tremendous amount of leverage in negotiating a proportional voting structure,” Moritz said and the Fair for Houston folks believe that HGAC would be willing to play ball.
We’ve seen this sort of brinksmanship work elsewhere, forcing stakeholders to the table to address long-standing issues in the region. Voting structures across regional councils of government vary and a more proportional breakdown of votes would not be unheard of. In the Twin Cities, the Metropolitan Council, which includes the metropolitan planning organization but also has the ability to levy taxes, is appointed by the governor based on districts that consider population counts, a fact that has irritated suburban counties over the years. Portland’s Metro, meanwhile is a similarly expansive governing body but representatives are elected from districts of roughly equal population sizes. Phoenix’s regional council allows for tiered voting in some instances that incorporates both a numerical vote and a vote weighted according to population share.
These aren’t perfect fixes.
The ideal solution, according to Jay Blazek Crossley, head of non-profit Farm&City, is a federal law that requires metropolitan planning organizations to use proportional voting. We got close in the recent infrastructure bill but it was amended into obscurity and ineffectiveness.
Then again, H-GAC members could fix it themselves.
Or another state bill could also clear the way for fixes, requiring metropolitan planning organizations to assess their voting structures and propose changes that ensure proportional representation by considering current and projected population and the number of potential new jobs attached to a project.
Crossley has run the numbers for major MPOs around the state and said when it comes to proportional representation of women, people of color, and geographies, “Houston is definitely the worst in Texas and could be the worst in the nation.”
However it happens, a change could fundamentally shift how the region approaches some of its biggest challenges.
“We’ve been begging for climate change to even be mentioned at a meeting,” said Humphreys.
We’re not yet sold that this charter amendment is the way to get us there, but we welcome all the sunshine coming H-GAC’s way.