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Despite recent progress on addressing the city’s budget deficit, Houston continues to deal with the aftermath of years’ worth of mismanagement—and that mismanagement might have been worse than we previously thought.
According to a recent report by City Controller Chris Hollins, overtime spending last year had skyrocketed in multiple departments. The fire department, for example, spent 94% of its overtime budget, while the solid waste department managed to outspend its overtime budget by a full 75 percent.
So why is something as simple as waste management becoming such a massive thorn in the city’s side? Well, according to former City Council Member Greg Travis, there isn’t just one reason. He explained, “The reason they’re going through all this overtime is because they don’t have enough people—that’s number one. Number two is mismanagement, and number three is setting priorities.”
Travis went on to say it may be time to make some drastic changes in order to solve these ongoing budget issues. He said, “Waste management should not be under the city anymore; we should hire that out and privatize it. We’ve been saying that for years, and of course they’re not going to do that. That goes for a number of other functions as well.”
His primary reasoning for this is the simple fact that in the public sector, there aren’t any incentives to do things more efficiently. By contrast, in the private sector, efficiency and coming in under budget are the only things that are incentivized.
So is a major correctional shift like this even possible? Travis thinks it is. He said, “I think first of all, it takes the mayor. You’ve got to put pressure on the mayor; you’ve got to put pressure on the council.”
He says citizens need to speak up and make it clear to local leaders that they’re tired of dealing with these ever-worsening budget issues.