Houston continues to struggle with finances, personal clashes

HOUSTON — It’s been another bad week on top of a difficult year of internal strife at Houston City Hall.

The latest meltdown started on Monday, when Councilwoman Natasha Schachle resigned her post, claiming her personal priorities had changed and she no longer wishes to serve as a public official. Her term expires October 2012.

On Tuesday, City Treasurer Carolyn Grabowski informed council via email that as of noon Wednesday, the city needs $18,400 to cover payroll and has $62,000 in outstanding bills and debts she’s not sure how to pay.

Later on Tuesday, Houston Mayor Virgie Thompson ordered drastic staffing cuts at the Houston Police Department and is looking into trimming costs at city hall.

Council members Ruth Blanchard and Lance Wilson also were upset by the realization that their recent efforts to recall Thompson from the council were doomed due to bad timing.

All this comes on top of recent news of a possible FBI investigation into city finances and misdemeanor assault charges being filed on Deputy Mayor Jim Johansen after an argument during a council meeting threatened to become physical.

“I’ve been in this city for 30 years and I’ve never seen it in such a poor financial state before,” Blanchard said Wednesday. “We’ve been around forever and ever as a city and we’ve never been so broke. And the mayor isn’t here enough because of her other job to be able to serve effectively. I’m upset and I don’t know how to fight this situation.”

Police Capt. Charley McAnally is having trouble understanding why the mayor gave him a choice to either lay off his two officers and stay on full-time himself or cut everyone — including himself — to only 20 hours each week except for emergencies.

Although he chose for everyone to stay on part-time and be on-call 24/7 because his officers are starting young families and need their jobs, he said he thinks Thompson’s priorities are off base.

“We’re the only department that generates any income for the city and we’re the most important service in the city,” McAnally said Wednesday, adding he’s worried he’ll now lose his officers because they can’t afford to be without a full-time job. “I’ve run the department by myself before and it was extremely difficult. The public is the one that suffers the most.”

McAnally, Blanchard and Wilson said they find it strange the council balanced the city’s budget in December and now is struggling to cover bills.

According to Grabowski’s email to council members, in addition to the $18,400 needed for payroll, the city has $32,000 in outstanding bills that are currently due, such as vehicle payments, utility and fuel bills, and the final installment for nonhealth insurance coverage.

In addition, Grabowski said the city already borrowed $40,000 from its capital account that has to be repaid and there are no outstanding grant funds coming in.

“I’m not going to call it a crisis or an emergency,” Grabowski says in her email. “I am just presenting you with the facts.”

Although she’s expecting between $11,000 and $14,000 to come in from sales taxes and property tax within the next 10 days, she said she can’t predict the actual amount coming in.

“We have not identified any other consistent streams of income, but we have taken on additional obligations,” Grabowski wrote. “How would you like me to proceed?”

Reached at home Wednesday due to illness, Thompson said she didn’t want to talk about the police department cuts until she’d had a chance to talk to McAnally regarding his options, but she confirmed that she also cut the city’s part-time animal officer and firefighters are doing all their training without pay.

She said she is considering making cuts to the clerk’s office, which currently employs two people full-time, but she wants to wait until City Clerk Michelle DeLong returns from vacation in a few days.

“We need to get our finances squared around,” the full-time special education teacher said.

Blanchard and Wilson said they were devastated to discover this week they can’t submit a recall petition against Thompson because it can’t be filed within the last 180 days of her term, which ends in October.

“That means we’d have to file it tomorrow and we don’t even have a draft from the clerk’s office yet, so we haven’t been able to gather signatures,” Wilson said. “It’s ironic now that Virgie’s accomplished what she wanted to do in the first place, and that was to destroy the police department.”

Blanchard and Ralph Buzard, a planning commissioner, had submitted to the clerk’s office over the past week an application to petition for Thompson’s recall containing the required signatures of 10 Houston residents. One of those residents was Wilson and another was outspoken local blogger Nancy Sult.

They claim Thompson violated the law by allegedly falsifying her timecard and receiving payment for hours she never worked in November.

Thompson has denied the allegations.

Thompson’s detractors had high hopes for booting her through a recall, but didn’t realize the stipulation that it couldn’t be filed within the last six months of her term.

“For the two years that Roger Purcell was mayor, there were constant allegations that he was driving the city into the ground,” Wilson said. “But in the end, that never happened. Now Thompson is at the controls and within five months we’re there.”

Council had discussed the possibility of raising the property tax rate to generate income, but inner squabbles and public outcry have so far prevented that idea from moving forward.

Council members Johansen and Kathleen Barney could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

A public hearing on the budget was scheduled for Thursday after deadline for today’s print edition. The agenda included a resolution amending the policy and procedures manual to include a social networking policy and amending the policy on pay dates and timesheet deadlines. Visit the Frontiersman online, frontiersman.com, or see Sunday’s newspaper for coverage of Thursday’s meeting.

An executive session was also scheduled for the end of the meeting to discuss McAnally’s latest performance evaluation conducted by Deputy Mayor Johansen.

For more information, see the city’s website at houstonak.com.

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.