Q&A with John Whitmire
What character traits and experience do you feel will make you an effective mayor?
My experience in the Texas Legislature has taught me you can’t get anything done unless you work with everyone. As mayor, I intend to work with City Councilmembers, the County and the State because we work better when we work together.
As a legislator, I have dealt with many of the issues facing Houstonians today—public safety, transportation, and mental health, to name a few. I have helped create billion-dollar budgets for the State of Texas.
In my time in the Texas Legislature, I have many accomplishments of which I am proud. I championed and helped create a Senate district for our Latino community. I worked hard to push through the James Byrd Hate Crimes Act, the Sandra Bland Act, and the Martin Luther King Jr. birthday and Juneteenth holidays. I have helped implement prison diversion, second chance opportunities, and a program to allow female prisoners to keep their newborn babies with them instead of having them taken away immediately after birth. Bilingual education. Improved access to voting. Decriminalizing truancy. Indigent healthcare. I created the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority, which led to the construction of Minute Maid Park, Toyota Center, and NRG Stadium. Just this year, I wrote and passed bills that will bring millions for economic development into downtown Houston, require courts to prioritize trials for persons accused of murder and capital murder to get those offenders off the streets, and require the City of Houston to treat firefighters fairly through arbitration.
What are the two or three most important issues facing the city today?
- Public Safety, including fire, police and municipal employees
- City infrastructure, including streets, water lines, flooding and drainage
- City services, including garbage pickup, outrageous water bills, illegal dumping, a barely functioning Permitting Office
- Budget, transparency and ethics
What changes, if any, do you recommend for the city’s budget?
The City Controller is projecting General Fund expenditures will increase by 4.32 percent compared to the prior year, while recurring revenues are only expected to increase by 2.86 percent, and as ARPA funds go away this problem is only going to get worse. We have been relying on one-time or short-term funding sources, like ARPA funds, to pay for recurring expenses. Bottomline, Houston’s budget is structurally imbalanced. This is not sustainable.
To right our fiscal ship will require a comprehensive assessment of where we currently stand and developing a long-term plan to get us out of this hole. We must fund only what we can afford, with a priority put on public safety, infrastructure, and basic city services like garbage pickup, water service and parks. To balance our budget we need to look at consolidating the city’s 25 departments and combining services with other government entities. For example, working with Harris County to share libraries, parks and public health. I will see that we work with the county on shared expenses. The future of this city remains bright, but we are at a tipping point. To avoid falling off a fiscal cliff we must face these long-term structural challenges head-on.
What can and will you do to try and control the soaring rents and prices for homes in Houston?
The City must make affordable housing a priority. We need to ensure Houstonians have a broad span of housing options at a variety of prices from which to choose. This includes more and better-funded programs to assist homebuyers with down payments and incentivize new construction of affordable homes. We should also provide help to people who are in danger of losing their homes; currently Houston is experiencing escalating rental rates, which is increasing evictions. We need to improve our Permitting Office and streamline our review process so builders and homeowners can move forward with their projects in a timely fashion. But we must ensure new development does not drive out the original residents of a neighborhood due to increased property taxes or rents. We cannot lose the neighborhood history and variety that make Houston such a vibrant city.
What do you propose to do about controlling the damage from flooding and other climate issues?
Obviously, flooding is a regional problem and we need to work with all government agencies in a coordinated effort to prevent flooding. Something as simple as maintaining ditches can make a big difference and I’m glad to see that the city is now spending more money to do that. We need more flood mitigation projects like the innovative Willow Waterhole Greenspace Park, which has helped prevent flooding in the Westbury area while creating a beautiful amenity for the community. I secured $1 million in state funding this year for the expansion of that flood mitigation/greenspace.
Build Houston Forward (formerly ReBuild Houston), funded by a drainage fee, has been in existence for ten years with no meaningful improvements being made towards making the city more resilient to a major natural disaster. The funds were supposed to be in a lockbox for needed projects but have been used to pay salaries of Public Works employees. We need to honor the spirit of that ballot initiative and use the money for priority projects to make the city more resilient.
We need to have a better relationship with the General Land Office, which controls federal funds. It is beyond comprehension that Houston would receive no funding at all from the recovery dollars. I have worked with many state officials getting assistance for Houston, including the current Land Commissioner and I will remind all of them that: As goes Houston, so goes Texas.
I will place a greater emphasis on our OEM office and ensure that it is fully staffed and ready for an emergency. We need to have in place plans to coordinate with our many nonprofits like the Red Cross. We need to ensure that we reach out to all our residents with information in their language. I am pleased to see OEM now using social media to deliver information about surviving our heat emergency in various languages; we need to ensure that continues and is expanded. And I am the only candidate who can reach out to our state officials in the middle of the night to get help sent to Houston immediately.
How do you propose to keep our schools, events, and people in general safe from attacks?
We need to increase the number of police officers on the street. This can be achieved partly by hiring civilians to do some of the administrative jobs that officers are doing now and coordinating with other law enforcement agencies that operate within Houston, e.g., constables, school districts and Metro.
We need to get guns and violent offenders off the streets. That’s why I passed Senate Bill 402 this past session, requiring courts to give priority to murder and capital murder cases. We have hundreds of persons accused of these crimes out on bond or as fugitives, committing more crimes. We need to get them locked up to protect our residents.
We need to strengthen the Community Policing Program; when police officers and people in the community know each other and work together, we can reduce and prevent crime.
We also need to better equip our officers on how to handle mental health situations, including enhancing de-escalation training.
We should provide more and better “Second Chance” or re-entry programs that work quickly to integrate former offenders back into the community and help them with housing, jobs and other services so they don’t have to return to crime to support themselves.
To help prevent crime committed by our young people, we need to expand our efforts to work with schools, nonprofits and businesses to provide after-school programs and summer job opportunities.
About John Whitmire
Strong leadership and commitment to public service define John Whitmire. He has spent his adult life as a public servant, working for Houstonians in our state’s Capitol. Now, John is running for Houston Mayor. He wants to take his years of experience and put it to work to fight crime, improve city services and infrastructure, and make Houston a better place to work, live, and raise your family.
John’s father was a social worker, his mother was a nurse. From them, he learned compassion and that you should treat everyone as you would want to be treated. John helped put himself through school as a social worker for what was then called the welfare office.
While still a student at the University of Houston, John ran for a seat in the Texas House and won. He served five terms there before being elected to the Texas Senate. After 40 years in that body, he is considered the Dean of the Senate, the longest-serving member.
He has served as the Chair of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee for several years, advocating his tough and smart crime positions.
In his time in the Texas Legislature, John has many accomplishments of which he is proud. He championed and helped create a Senate district for our Latino community. He worked hard to push through the James Byrd Hate Crimes Act, the Sandra Bland Act, and the Martin Luther King Jr. birthday and Juneteenth holidays. John has helped implement prison diversion, second chance opportunities, and a program to allow female prisoners to keep their newborn babies with them instead of having them taken away immediately after birth. Bilingual education. In-state tuition for dreamers. Decriminalizing truancy. Indigent healthcare. John created the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority, which led to the construction of Minute Maid Park, Toyota Center, and NRG Stadium. Just this year, he wrote and passed bills that will bring millions of dollars for economic development into downtown Houston, require courts to prioritize trials for persons accused of murder and capital murder to get those offenders off the streets, and require the City of Houston to treat firefighters fairly through arbitration.