It's even hard to get a handle on how much money the public works department spends in a year. A formal request for annual totals since 1994 took days to produce. The money comes from so many different sources, Stein explained, that it's tough to pull it together in one place. "You have to see the budget book to understand how complicated this is," she says.
By the time anyone figures it out, Lanier will be long gone.
Of course, his legacy will remain. And while many will remember how he built a sidewalk next to the local elementary school or fixed the potholes downtown, others will have less fond associations -- Beth Mo-lenda, for example, who lives with her family on Donna Bell Lane in the Oak Forest neighborhood just outside the northwest corner of the Loop. Molenda was startled when the bulldozers showed up in June and began preparations for an overlay. After all, the area had been repaved about two years earlier. And Donna Bell is a dead end with almost no traffic. "None of the streets were in bad shape," Molenda says. "Believe me, they were quite passable in comparison to the majority of the streets in the city of Houston."
Worse, the heat from the newly laid asphalt damaged the grass and trees along the street, leaving a browned, burnt zone Molenda says is still quite evident. On nearby Glebe Road, the contractor failed to mill the existing overlay and laid blacktop up to the curb line, causing instant flooding each time it rained.
The inspector assigned to the project didn't call the contractor on the problems, but the neighbors certainly did. Following widespread complaints, the city asked the contractor to remill the pavement and fix the job according to specifications. At first, John Hatch said he thought the city would pay for the extra work. Now, he's not sure. "It seems clearer to me now that the contractor owes us," Hatch says. "He should pay for the correction."
In response to a query from the Press last July, Hatch wrote a memo reviewing the complaints. A forester concluded that the damage to the foliage wasn't permanent, he wrote, adding that "a review of available records did not indicate any overlay of streets that were overlaid within the past two years."
"We also point out that the purpose of the Neighborhoods to Standard Program is to bring the streets within the target neighborhoods' boundaries up to city standards," Hatch continued.
Asked if those standards are written down or spelled out in any way, Hatch said he didn't know. "I'm sure we have something in mind when we say we want to bring a certain neighborhood up to city standards," Hatch said.
Molenda has her own idea. "The more we come up to standards," she says, "the worse our neighborhood gets.
