11 Comment

• Major Market January 28, 2016 at 9:24 am

  Re: Katy’s 2nd Football Stadium
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  I’m glad to see that the people of Katy can throw $57 million at building a new stadium – next door to the old one – to increase capacity to 12,000. It must be nice to know that they wipe with $20 bills on the Katy prairie.
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  Seriously, we gripe about how our schools need more dollars – yet they devote $57 million to an extracurricular activity. I’m all for Texas football but this is just too much.
• The Roanoker January 28, 2016 at 10:17 am

  Regarding the UT land grab without state authorization….
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  “It is an encroachment, but it’s happening all over the place – so why not Houston?” William G. Tierney, the co-director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California, wrote in an email last week.
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  Because it violates state law and rules that are enforced by the THECB….
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  However I will glady be on the first flight out of the Roanoke Valley to help UT move dirt if the Texas Legislatrue opens up PUF funds to UH. Otherwise forget about it…
• Commenter7 January 28, 2016 at 10:55 am

  I have loyalties to both UT and UH. Give UH access to the PUF and let UT do whatever it wants academically in Houston. Boston has like 5,000 colleges and the city is better off for it. Let’s stop all the inter-academia bickering and let Houston get more educational options.
• Gisgo January 28, 2016 at 12:12 pm

  My grandmother will do handsprings before UT and A&M give up their PUF monopoly: they are *flagships*.
• TheNiche January 28, 2016 at 12:32 pm

  The Chronicle is reporting the Exxon property tax litigation as though its something that happens rarely or occasionally; but it happens every single year without exception for all or nearly all of its properties. The fact of the matter is that if you have control of ANY property that’s over about $1.5 million, there isn’t some kind of extenuating circumstance, and you aren’t constantly litigating the values, then you’re just doing it wrong.

  Exxon will probably win a big, probably in the form of an out-of-court settlement, and it probably should. HCAD is going to want to value the campus on a cost approach to market value, but doing so first of all creates inequity by comparison with any other new office buildings that are being valued on an income basis, and it also ignores that a campus of that size has very few (or no single) prospective buyers. If it were hypothetically sold off, it would probably happen piecemeal over the course of years, the same as with the HP/Compaq campus, and if it happened immediately then it would certainly be below replacement cost. While the campus as-is where-is may make sense for Exxon, the appraisal cannot be based on the assumption that Exxon should occupy it.

  These issues are apart from how most big commercial property owners game the system year in and year out that the Chronicle’s comment section is lighting up about. HCAD actually does make big errors that are essentially arbitrary, and at times they do so knowing full well that they aren’t being intellectually honest about them. They would rather settle big stuff like this in court than set a value that appears low at a glance and then have the next property owner come and attack them because a technically correct decision to set a lower value appears to be inequitable.
• Commenter7 January 28, 2016 at 1:06 pm

  Is “Montrose” the name of a new gas station company? Looks like they ripped off the chevron logo. Probably overpaid for the logo, too.
• Luz January 28, 2016 at 1:22 pm

  Ditto on what Commenter7 said. Even though I’m an alumnus of UH, I support higher academia and fully believe in the expanse of more educational opportunities.
• sbv January 28, 2016 at 2:50 pm

  So TXDOTis spending 242 Million dollars to expand I-10 from Brookshire to the Brazos river. That looks to be about 10 miles total. Does it really cost 24 million per mile to build a freeway? This desperately needs to happen (all the way to 71 actually) as that is a very dangerous stretch of road, but that seems egregiously expensive.
• Superdave January 28, 2016 at 5:53 pm

  Katy football is ridiculous. As is the community’s unwavering and blind support of it. 57 mil would buy a crap load of textbooks for all the non football playing students.

  The “Montrose District” idea reinvigorates old discussions about neighborhood boundaries. Parts of the mapped hood overlap with other marketable hoods (esp “Museum District”).

  As a grad of SFA I can attest that other state schools have been forgotten, though they educate tens of thousands of Texans every year. So I feel for UH and agree that this is an encroachment.

  Freeway expansion is so expensive because they charge “government prices” that are significantly higher than free market prices. That is part of the nature of government projects. Expect it, or privatize it.
• etherist January 29, 2016 at 8:15 am

  sbv: our first lightrail line in Houston cost $30 per millimeter! No joke, just arithmetic. About $45-50 million per mile.

  So we’re getting a deal on the freeway expansion, really.
• joel January 29, 2016 at 10:01 am

  it’s not like Katy fell hook, line & sinker for the stadium. there was some strong opposition, but at the end of the day you gotta spend it all on something before the state decides to spend it for you.
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  besides, it’s not like there’s anything else to do in Katy on a friday night anyways.