E-Board and Petitions
Last season, the ‘Stros ended up with five players hitting more than 100 base hits. How many have more than 100 this season?
A few folks chuckled at this post on our Next Door yesterday:
Does the city of Houston provide free sand bags.
New to the area and with the current storm on the way I was wondering if the City of Houston has places we can go to fill up sandbags.
Can’t fault them for wanting to be prepared. Are you?
Commentary is glad to see that I am not the only one who thinks the City of H-Town’s petition process is flawed. See how the Chron E-Board ends one of their takes today:
We’ve said before that we believe parity is bad public policy. Just because police and firefighters wear badges and uniforms and drive around in vehicles equipped with sirens doesn’t mean there’s a direct equivalence between their jobs. If there’s a crime wave, putting parity in the city charter could hamstring a future mayor struggling to spend more money on police.
Still, the process that kept this referendum off the ballot is flawed and it needs to change. Every petition for a referendum must be processed by the city secretary’s office, which conducts the time-consuming task of confirming how many people signing their names are actually registered Houston voters. In this case, City Secretary Anna Russell is following her longstanding practice of verifying voter petitions in the order in which they’re delivered to her office. She says her staff, in addition to its regular duties, has been dealing with another petition on pension reform delivered to City Hall earlier this year. Nothing in any city ordinance or state law sets a deadline for processing those petitions. As a result, neither of these issues will appear on the November ballot.
Our mayor and city council need to straighten this out. They need to set clearly defined timelines for processing petitions delivered to the city secretary’s office. If citizens like the firefighters want an issue to appear on the November ballot, they need to know a deadline for submitting petitions. That’s only fair, and it’s the only way to avoid accusations that the mayor and city secretary are playing fast and loose with election rules.
We probably haven’t seen the last of the firefighters’ parity pay plan. Assuming they gathered enough valid petition signatures to require a referendum, we’ll see it on the ballot next year. But unless our city sets clearly defined timelines for processing petitions, firefighters won’t be the last people to think they’ve been cheated out of their place on the ballot.
Here is the entire take: http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Off-the-ballot-11953935.php.
This tweet is asking folks to vote on a campaign promise:
ANTONIO ARELLANOVerified account @AntonioArellano
Should @SylvesterTurner keep campaign promise & issue Municipal IDs to all Houstonians, regardless of their immigration status?
Folks certainly know my feeling on this. It was a bad idea during the campaign. Playing to the crowd doesn’t always work.
The ‘Stros have seven players who have more than 100 base hits this season with Carlos Beltran sitting on 96 of course.
We won last night and are still four games up on the Red Sox with 36 to go.
Camposcommunications' Blog 
Marc, despite my previous comments on the petition process, I think most people, including myself, agree the process should be streamlined. My point of contention recently is merely that the same people making false claims of the Mayor holding up the process never once complained about the process in the past so it is merely when their personal interests are at stake do they wail like little children about it. Given the people they hired to assist them in the process, there is no doubt they were aware that there would be no time to verify all the signatures, the group merely playing it like a violin to regain some of the sympathy they used to have before just about everyone in politics tore them a new one this past year (from their hand picked Mayor & city council to the GOP led state legislature and governor, to the courts).
I don’t know if setting a specific deadline for counting is the best way to go, what if several major petitions are submitted at the same time one year, the firefighter fall back plan of letting those who submit the petitions join in with the counting/verification process seems a bit too risky for my tastes, I’m sure you’d howl if a right wing immigration reform group wanting mass deportations offered to count their own signatures for example, but instead of making false claims like the firefighters have done, perhaps offering constructive suggestions (deadlines don’t verify signatures) for improving the nuts and bolts of the process might help?