Mayor Lee P. Brown must be getting tired of hearing that his administration can’t communicate, because at a recent senior staff confab he unveiled a new weapon in the war for little minds. Brown’s aides handed the assembled bureaucrats laminated pocket cards with the imposing title “Mayor Lee P. Brown’s Guiding Principles.”

Predictably, the guiding principles are as wordy and nebulous as most of the mayor’s rhetoric. Instead of trying to remember the gobbledygook, Brown’s staff now can simply whip out the little lapel memory-joggers and read, read, read.

“The mission of the City of Houston is to improve the quality of life in Houston through ACCESS,” declares the Übermayor. The cards explain the acronym:

“Act with Accountability, Integrity, and Professionalism.
Care for Children and Communities First.
Cultivate Economic and Social Diversity.
Encourage and Respond to Public Participation.
Strengthen Leadership Through Partnerships.
Serve to Make a Difference Today!”

The Guiding Principles then force-march the reader through the main points of Brown’s snooze-alarm stump speeches. First is the hazy concept of “Neighborhood Oriented Government,” which might be summarized as everybody gets together and talks a lot and things get better and better.

Then there are those “Opportunities for Youth,” which seem to boil down to more-money-for-kids things like library services and federal funds for school district improvements. Unlike the mayor’s recent brochure on youth programs, which had to be junked because of grammatical errors, the Guiding Principles language is vacuous, but it is spelled correctly.

Under “Transportation and Infrastructure,” the mayor calls for yet another transit study which “will address our long term needs including rail, Metro revenue growth, etc.” One wonders about that “etc.”

“Economic Development and Trade” includes the bid proposal for the 2012 Olympic Games, known to cynics as Houston Meltdown, and trade missions to promote Houston’s business development, of which the mayor has already taken a few.

Finally, there’s the “Continuous Improvement” principle, with a final scattershot of buzz phrases like “leveraging technology,” “improving employee productivity,” “competition with the private sector” and “improving the environment.”

If we stick to these principles, exhorts the mayor, “we can position Houston to be a premiere ‘World Class City’ of the 21st Century.”

Either that or the earth’s leading producer of hot air.

— Tim Fleck

This article appears in Dec 10-16, 1998.