City employees, not a Mayor or Council Members, are who deliver city services. They need to be respected, supported and properly compensated. It’s not too late for the candidates running for City Council, Mayor and Controller to lay out detailed substantive ideas to better protect our City against crime and flooding and their policy propels for making city government work better for all Houstonians.
Below is what I would like to hear from the candidates running for Mayor and City Controller.
THE SPEECH
I am running for Mayor to fix our city budget and to help make things better and safer for all the families, entrepreneurs and businesses of our entire City.
Fixing the City’s General Fund budget is bigger than both pension reform and pay parity.
Fixing the city budget starts with prioritization and transparency.
As Mayor, my first priority will be fiscal responsibility and accountability to ensure that we properly fund public safety and quality of life services from police protection and firefighters to timely trash pickup and recycling, in our neighborhoods, to maintaining and improving our parks and modernizing our library services to give all our children and young people as well as all Houstonians citywide digital access to knowledge in all forms.
As Mayor, I will work with Metro to not just build a more modern and comprehensive city and regional public transportation system, but to also better rebuild city roads and to partner with the city, county and TXDOT to better coordinate road and flood control construction projects.
Improving our transportation system and better protecting our city and region against flooding should not increase your frustration, commute or congestion on city streets and local highways.
Building a better city must include input from our civic clubs and Superneighborhood Councils to help reduce crime, mitigate against gentrification and find long term solutions to help the homeless and ensure that Houston remains an affordable city for working class Houstonians and the long-time residents of our inner-loop neighborhoods, especially our senior citizens.
As Mayor, I will work to help our senior citizens and their families to repair and hold on to their homes.
Homeownership is not just a source of shelter, it is also source of generational wealth for many Houstonians.
If our city is to have the revenue it needs to pay for city services and fairly compensate all city employees, including our municipal employees, we must hold on to and attract more homeowners, businesses (both small and large) and attract more tourists to our city to collect more in sales taxes.
We can do these things with focused leadership.
As Mayor, we will not spend hundreds of millions of dollars without a Council vote.
As Mayor, I will use technology to improve police protection, fight gang violence and empower all Houstonians to be a part of the solution. We started with 911, then added 311, under my leadership we will take technology based security to the next level and put neighborhood watch on your smart phones and tablets.
We are going to create a high-tech security Next Door type app in Houston. You will not only be able to write about what happened, you will be able to see in real time what is happening in the streets of your neighborhoods and help prevent crimes in real time also whether you are at home, at work or just out and about. This technology is already available to individual homeowners from private companies. As your Mayor, I will work with our civic clubs to help bring a citywide system to all Houstonians who want to utilize it.
I am running for Mayor to fix things. To meet head on and solve the big problems and challenges facing our City right now to make Houston better, in the present, for our children and grandchildren and their future.
There will be people who say that we can’t fix things in Houston. I am not one of those people.
Anyone who can only see the problems and can only give you slogans should not be the next Mayor of your city.
I am personally asking you for your vote, support and prayers to be our City’s next Mayor.
Thank you and God Bless Houston. For constructive dialogue, you may contact me directly >>>
Hon. Robinson is the former Chairman, City of Houston Transportation, Technology and Infrastructure Committee; Former Vice Chairman, Houston-Galveston Area Council Transportation Policy Council (H-GAC TPC) and Associate Professor of Public Administration, Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs, Texas Southern University.
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