City Hall hiding the price tag?
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A once secret e-mail shows City Hall and Uptown officials are hiding the true escalating cost of a controversial project to tear up Post Oak Blvd for dedicated bus lanes.
Dolcefino Consulting spent months fighting for the release of e-mails sent or received by Andy Icken, the powerful development czar under Mayor Parker. It is clear Icken is helping push the Uptown project, which will financially benefit several members of the neighborhood board, especially the Chairman Kendall Miller.
This e-mail should be explained immediately because it could dramatically affect the costs of the bus project. The project makes up most of the quarter of a billion dollar Uptown Capital Improvement Budget up for approval Wednesday at Houston City hall.
On February 2015, John Breeding notified Icken there were multi-million dollar unresolved questions, including who will pay to maintain transit centers. Metro wants Uptown to pay for riders who get on and off in Uptown, construction of a road for buses to access the Bellaire Transit Center and removal of utilities under the bus lanes. There is also debate about making the right of way so that someday it can be converted from bus to rail.
Icken response. How much of this to we have to resolve now?
Uptown Chairman Kendall Miller tells Icken the list is “very expensive” but suggests a negotiation after all the funding is secured. In other words, don’t trouble taxpayers with the multi-million dollar fine print of a project they are totally paying for. It is now October, and the bottom line is still being kept from taxpayers on the eve of a key vote!
“Houston City Council should demand all the numbers now,” says Jim Scarborough of the Uptown Business and Property Owners Association. “They are playing hide and seek with the
taxpayers. That is no way to spend public money.”
In the e-mail, Miller suggests Icken handle negotiations later to figure out how much TIRZ money needs to flow to Metro. This is what happens when you have too many city bureaucracies. If this is such a great transit idea why isn’t the transit agency running the whole show? Why is Uptown, not Metro, building transit centers that will only use Metro buses?
We know budget documents show the cost to buy the land needed to tear up and widen Post Oak has gone up 70% since Houston City Council approved the project. Uptown is now refusing to say how much they are having to pay for land, which could drive the final cost much higher. The vast majority of the property needed for the project has not been bought and lawsuits are promised.
And now we know the proposed Bellaire Uptown Transit Center will barely have any parking, reducing projected commuter ridership by 50%. Why isn’t City Hall crying foul that those transit centers are a mere shell of what they were supposed to be? Why are they so afraid to slow this project down?
And why does the Mayor refuse to wait until the Texas Attorney General rules on whether Metro can legally participate in this “transit project.”. Is the Mayor willing to refund our tax
dollars if she is wrong, like on the rain tax and HERO?
Maybe we should just do what Parker, Icken, Miller, and Breeding want. Approve the money before these multi-million dollar disputes are settled and before we know the real cost.
P.S. Uptown money and Metro money may sound different to politicians, but they are both tax money to the folks paying the bill!
Read the K. Miller Email or see it embedded below.
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