I’ve mellowed over the years. I really have. When I first began covering and writing about politics and various governmental entities a little more than 50 years ago, I reacted with absolute outrage at the very hint of government corruption or unethical behavior by political figures. I was livid in the mid to late 1960s after President Lyndon Johnson, who campaigned in 1964 on the platform of "We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away to fight in no Asian war," began ramping up American involvement in Vietnam. I was practically apoplectic during the mid-1970s when I was part of UPI’s Watergate coverage team.
But later, when I taught college journalism courses at SMU and other universities, I was able to use Vietnam and Watergate as defining moments in political/journalistic history. The lesson Vietnam and Watergate taught us was that political leaders lie. And subsequent history has not only reinforced this fact, but also shown us they are for sale to the highest bidder and individual citizens not only don’t have a prayer of being the highest bidder, they are not even going to be allowed into the auction.
I’m not saying political leaders, whether at the national or the local level, are bad people. For the most part, I have enjoyed my interactions with politicians on a personal level, often times gaining the most enjoyment with those whose political philosophies are completely different from my own. They are, for the most part, good people. But they say and do bad things.
I’m not saying anything revelatory here. Why do all cities, including Kyle, have some form of an Ethics Commission? Because it is assumed those running the place are going to act unethically at same point. Of course, the members of these commissions are always appointed by the mayor and/or city council members which renders them pratically powerless against top leaders. Why does the legislature every session propose ethics reforms? Because it sounds good to a public that knows its leaders are corrupt. And why are these reforms never passed? I think you can figure that one out for yourself.
These days when I see morally and ethical corruption in the political arena, my reaction has become more benign than it once was. Sometimes I will react with a somewhat detached amusement, like when some senator or representative denies the overwhelming facts of climate change. They are not saying climate change doesn’t exist because they have scientific proof supporting their argument. They are saying it because they are being paid huge sums of money by oil companies to say that. Their speeches on climate change are written either by oil company executives or oil company lobbyists. That’s why arguing facts with these clowns is futile because facts don’t even dent the outer layers of their arguments.
Sometimes I react with sadness such as the time a couple of years ago when a Dallas city council person I not only respected, but wrote speeches for and who offered me the position of media liaison for his proposed mayoral campaign, was indicted on federal bribery charges. He was not railroaded. He did a bad thing — several bad things, in fact — and is now doing time in a federal correctional facility because of it.
Sometimes I react with plain old disgust, like I did when the City of Kyle came up with its PID policy. Part of it is because it reinforced my original perceptions about the city which I formed right after I moved here eight months ago — the city is controlled by developers and individual homeowners and neighborhoods don’t have a voice. In this auction for control of the city, the developers were the highest bidders.
I lived and worked in Dallas for 40 years before I moved here and when I first moved to Dallas the developers were in control there as well. But the city underwent a radical change and now homeowners and neighborhood groups battle with the city’s entrenched and powerful business interests for control. The business community usually wins when it comes to environmental issues, but don’t mess with homeowners when it comes to issues involving their homes or their neighborhoods. But, in an interestint development, the average citizen may be winning a bitter fight against the entrenched business community and stopping the construction of a toll road through a magnificent park along the Trinity River.
At the same time, city government in Dallas, unlike Kyle, realizes and owns up to its responsibility of providing basic services to its residents. Not only that, the city has adopted a completely transparent method of adopting its annual budget — using a method called "Budgeting for Outcomes"— which acts a scorecard for how well the city is providing those services. Dallas city government embraces the notion that the money its citizens pay in taxes should be used to provide such basic services as public safety and basic infrastructure.
Kyle, on the other hand, has abandoned all notions of that same kind of responsibility. You want water lines to and from your home, the city government tells new residents, you gotta pay extra for it in addition to paying the same taxes as everyone else.
The way new residents have to pay extra for these basic services they should receive simply by paying property and sales taxes is through something called a PID. PID stands for Public Improvement District. However, as defined by the city of Kyle it is neither public, an improvement or a district.
I must admit this about the folks running this city. They don’t hide their unethical behavior. They highlight it in neon and then sew it on their chest like it was some sort of perverted merit badge. Let me give you an example. On Wednesday evening the city "hosted" an open house which, according to the city’s web site, was intended "to provide information regarding how Public Improvement Districts (PIDs) work." But who did the city use to provide this information? An outfit called Development Planning Financial Group (DPFG) whose income derives solely from the creation of PIDs and which stands to make a boatload of dough once the city implements its PID policy. That’s like someone hosting a seminar on "The Current Political Situation in Kyle" and it turns out to be a fund-raiser and a campaign appearance by one particular city council candidate. Not in the least illegal, but highly immoral and unethical behavior.
How unethical and corrupt was this "informational" meeting? At one point, the DPFG representative (whose name I failed to capture) presenting this highly biased information said "If you walk away from here tonight with only one slide that you remember, this is the one I want you to focus on. How will a PID – a new PID proposed for a new development – affect the existing residents and existing neighborhoods? The answer is there is no impact whatsoever. No negative impact. No positive impact. Anyone who lives within the city of Kyle who does not live within the PID will have ... no impact whatsoever."
That is a lie. And that’s what makes the city’s PID policy morally and ethically corrupt. Its foundation is a lie. Those who live outside the PID will enjoy a positive impact, a likely increase in city services unfairly and unwittingly subsidized by those living inside the PID. Here’s how. As these PID communities proliferate and grow the property values within them will increase. That means those living within the PIDs pay increasingly more in property taxes. Now do you think for one minute the city will act ethically and morally and restrict the use of that increased income on services for people living within the PID?. Of course not. (Although in cities that do act ethically and morally, it’s this increase in the amount of property taxes incurred by those living in the new subdivisions that used to pay for their infrastructure needs, not a PID.) That money will be used to provide additional services to the city as a whole. Those living outside the PID get the benefits from those inside who have to pay twice for the same services.
What was interesting about this presentation was not so much the untruths spoken by the DPFG representatives, but by the fact he withheld a lot of information to keep from presenting the whole truth. For example, at one point he said a PID "is a way to keep the existing residents having to pay for the things that are not a direct benefit to them." That’s true, but what he failed to say was that city’s already had tools at their disposal to do exactly the same thing. They are called Impact Fees, defined as "a fee that is imposed by a local government within the United States on a new or proposed development project to pay for all or a portion of the costs of providing public services to the new development." These fees were developed to help cities, like Kyle, dealing with unbridled growth to help manage that growth. Sometimes, they worked too well. They stopped growth completely and that’s why cities that are not morally and ethically corrupt developed better ways to manage growth. Kyle has impact fees, but impact fees are paid by the developers up front, who then add them on to the cost of the new homes they develop. But what if there as a way that neither the city nor the developer had to pay what they rightfully should? Because, like I said earlier, government is for sale to the highest bidder, developers pushed through legislation allowing for these PIDs. (To remind you once again how proudly Kyle leaders publicly display their ethically corrupt merit pages, recall that one developer, during the first public city council meeting on the city’s proposed policy, thanked the city for allowing him and other developers to prepare that policy.)
But there’s more. The money homeowners have to pay in addition to their property taxes doesn’t just go to pay for the infrastructure they received. In this municipal version of the old shell game, the unsuspecting homeowner also has to pay an ongoing fee to DPFG or whichever company the city uses to "administer" the PID, which is nothing more than a concept to begin with. Or as the DPFG representative put it "Another thing to remember is that all the administrative requirements of the PID can and should be outsourced to professional management firms. And that is a requirement under the proposed policy – the daily activities of all PIDs in the city of Kyle will be managed by outside professionals. The PID will pay for that." In other words, he is saying, these homeowners will be paying my salary. Starting to get the picture of how unsavory this whole business is?
Later he said "The city is not at risk. The city has no legal or moral obligation to pay any of the debt involved in these bonds. Our firm has been involved in these types of financing for over 20 years and we have never seen a city have to write a check." Translated to non-bureaucratic, regular human being language this means the developer is protected, the city is protected, the PID administrators are protected. The only one not protected — the person being hung out to dry here — is the homeowner who can have his house foreclosed upon. And that homeowner is the only one of this unholy quartet that had absolutely no voice, none whatsoever, in the formation of the PID. The only voices heard in the original proposition were the terrible threesome of developer, city, and the PID administrators.
"When the (PID) bonds are sold the money is placed in trust with a trustee," the rep said. "When the developer incurs an expense, they submit a draw to the city. The city reviews those expenses to make sure they are qualified (i.e., the developer has, for instance, successfully hidden the cost of his PID petition within the water line expenses) and the city approves the payment of those expenses out of the trustee account." But then he added "The developer can’t just say ‘give me my money’. It doesn’t work that way."
Wrong. As he himself just admitted in the words that opened the previous paragraph that’s exactly the way it works. I’m going to put at zero the over/under on how many times the city will reject a developer’s request for PID money.
I also got a silent laugh out of the fact that when asked how many other states used PIDs to finance new subdivisions, he named seven — Arizona, Nevada, California, North Carolina, New Mexico, Utah, and South Carolina (California, however, did away with PIDs several years ago) — which means, of course, that 43 states don’t think they are a good idea. Of course, he’s not going to say that.
When asked a similar question, what other cities around this area, use PIDs, he named Lago Vista, Leander and Manor. What do all those cities have in common with Kyle? They are smaller communties in the shadow of a fast growing metropolitan area and desperately want to cash in on that growth at the lowest possible cost, especially if the only person at a financial risk is the person who doesn’t live there yet.. They want rooftops. That’s all. "If we build it, they will come." And the unethical part of all this is they don’t care if these new residents have a decent quality of life once they are living in these cities because, they figure, once they buy the house, they are residential prisoners of the city.
Not only that, the city forced the prisoners to pay for the construction of the prison.
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