Water

This Chron story was posted last week, and it is on the front page of the hard copy today. Here is how it starts:

Houston lost 30 billion gallons of fresh water due to leaks last year despite spending 3.5 times more on pipe repairs as the city grapples with increasingly outdated infrastructure and more extreme weather.

The city shelled out $34.6 million to fix damaged water pipes in the fiscal year that ended in June, new data obtained through a records request shows. This marks a significant jump from the of $9.2 million to $10.5 million it spent repairing pipes in each of the previous four years.

Here is the entire read: Houston’s damaged pipes cost city 30 billion gallons of water, $35M (houstonchronicle.com)

How much is 30 billion gallons of water? I found this online today:

According to the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, about 9 million people use over 1 billion gallons of drinking water every day in the Big Apple.

The featured photo is from this morning. It is KPRC-TV consumer reporter Amy Davis doing another story on City of H-Town water bills. Amy said this morning that she has been reporting on H-Town water bills since November and has saved residents over $46 thousand in overbillings. 

I know what she is talking about. I have written about my own water issues.

We should not be losing 30 billion gallons of water each year. 

That is 30 days of drinking water for a city the size of New York.

I am hoping the next administration will fix everything that is wrong with the water department. Water is a big deal these days.

_____

Charles Blain from Urban Reform is one of the regular talking heads on What’s Your Point. He has an op-ed in today’s Chron on HISD Superintendent Mike Miles wanting the authority to spend up to $2 million without the approval from the Board of Managers. Blain doesn’t think it is a good idea and here are how his op-ed ends:

Miles told his board members that he can be trusted. “One of the things that happen in big districts is this non-competitive bidding process, using vendors of friends or other acquaintances in the district, political interests, whatever, and I don’t do that,” Miles said. “Bad actors are bad actors. Whether it’s $100K, $500K or $1 million, it’s not going to stop them from acting badly, no matter what the amount is.”

Miles is right that a bad actor will seize any chance to leech off of the system. But bad actors always claim to be trustworthy; otherwise no one would trust them. Even if Miles’ own heart is pure, what if a bad actor fools him? 

And should board policy be made on the basis of the superintendent’s personality? What if the next superintendent isn’t as upright?

For a tax-funded entity that has long struggled ethically and financially, our collective tolerance for risk should be low until the district’s new leadership proves itself.

So even if the board believes that Miles should, in fact, have authority to spend more without approval, why increase that limit all at once by 900 percent? Why not gradually move to that new, higher limit with quarterly or biannual increases?

The board of managers serves as not just a check and balance but as representatives of the communities that make up HISD. They shouldn’t remove themselves from this process less than 90 days after being appointed — particularly in a time of extreme change for the district.

As board member Janette Garza Lindner put it, “Shouldn’t the dust settle a little bit on some of these organizational changes before we start to trust that these processes are going to work as intended?”

Let the dust settle.

Here is the entire op-ed: A million-dollar blank check for HISD’s Mike Miles? Not so fast. (houstonchronicle.com).

It is a good op-ed.

_____

Former MLBer Rocky Colavito is 90 today. He played from 1955-1968, mostly with Cleveland and Detroit. He had 374 career dingers, 1,159 career RBIs, and was selected to nine AL All Star games. He was one of my favorites when I was a kid. Happy Birthday, Rocky Colavito.

We won last night and are two games out of first place in the AL West. We wrap up the series at Camden Yards this afternoon.