3 Comment

• Wolf Brand Chili March 10, 2017 at 9:04 am

  RE: City Council Votes to Replace/Pay for New Ellington Airport Tower
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  Well, I’m glad that they are replacing it from damage 8 years ago. And, it will be more than double the height of the current tower. I can only hope that this will open the door to the further development of our third area airport since Hobby may be capped out at some point.
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  The population boom in Pearland, Alvin, the Clear Lake area, and the SE quadrant would seem to be able to support this. (I remember when the old Continental had some flights out of Ellington.)
• Cougarnaut March 10, 2017 at 9:45 am

  UH does not need more carts running around the place. It is difficult to take a contemplative stroll around campus (as I am wont to do) if you have to be on high alert for silent (buy deadly) and unmarked electric carts speeding by with drivers glued to their cell phones. The Cushmans piloted by maintenance guys are fine; they are careful and have gear to haul around. It’s reckless staff people using electric carts as personal transport that really bug me. Hey, faculty are busy, too, why don’t THEY get carts? Or even Segways? (well, not really). Energy Research Park too far away? Too bad!
• TheNiche March 10, 2017 at 1:48 pm

  RE: Property Tax Reforms. The stats in that article are totally screwy on all sides. One should never ever use the Census Bureau’s ACS program to estimate home values. They are highly unreliable, *especially* to compare year-over-year. You’re better off using MLS data, but even then you’ve got to make adjustments for sample bias in terms of what gets listed and sold as well as for any special terms; more importantly, any increase in a median value over a period of time ought to exclude the homes that were built in the intervening years. However, besides that, this would reflect changes in market values before the effects of exemptions are applied. If you click through to Ed Emmet’s response, his reply regarding these values (in item 3) is far more cogent and germane to the issue. It’s unfortunate that the journalist painted Emmet’s opinion of the subject so two-dimensionally.
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  More fundamentally, this so-called “property tax reform” is being done all wrong. The ‘prime directive’ of the Texas Property Tax Code is that all taxation shall be uniform and equal; and then it goes on at length to prescribe dozens of tax exemptions as well as a procedure for protesting and litigating values which create inequality as a matter of course. Every two years, without fail, we add more inequality to the Property Tax Code. The biggest exemptions are for owner-occupied structures, and the way that they are applied is fairly progressive . However, the big winners are indirect beneficiaries of simply having an overly complex system: they are people whose houses are over $1 million in value or businesses over about $500k, who regularly have enough at stake and enough leeway to litigate their property taxes and cherrypick from examples where the ARB lowered values during the regular administrative hearings; meanwhile, both the appraisal districts and administrative courts are clogged, only adding to expenses which are thereafter extracted unequally from taxpayers. It’s a mess.
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  The goal of property tax reforms ought to be that everybody pays their fair share. However, that is on *nobody’s* legislative agenda.