Results tagged “texaspublicinformationact”

Thousands of people have gotten citations from the city's red-light camera system since it went online back in September — so you'd expect that some of them would be public employees driving public vehicles, right? Right. According to the Chronicle, more than 100 government and school vehicles have been tagged running red lights, resulting in some $8,000 in fines. The Chronicle got the information under the Texas Public Information Act; though the 100 citations are a very tiny fraction of the 34,000 issued so far, they're kind of troublesome. "Anytime anyone runs a red light, we have a concern about that," HISD spokesman Terry Abbott said (the school district has gotten five camera citations). "It's the same as speeding or anything else. We have policies in place to discipline drivers who don't follow the law."

Keith Plocek over at HouStoned called our attention to a post he wrote today about Write On Metro, the transit agency's fledgling blog. Write On is a pleasant enough read, sure — we learned, for example, that people in Cypress are nearly wetting themselves over being able to ride the bus into the city and read the heartwarming story of Bobby Moon, Metro's audit manager, who rides Metro to lunch every day (and, as you might expect, pinches pennies doing so).

The latest twist in the mayor pro tem saga: The discovery of a dented filing cabinet in City Hall that may or may not have been jimmied open to retrieve ... well, we're not sure what. The black, 5-foot cabinet was kept in an unlocked City Hall break room adjacent to the pro tem office, where four workers reportedly helped themselves to a couple hundred thousand dollars in unauthorized payraises and bonuses. The damage to the file drawer — a "visible dent just above a drawer handle," according to the Chronicle — was discovered when an employee asked the City Hall Annex building manager to unlock the cabinet to get documents that had been requested under the Texas Public Information Act.