Farouk For Governor

Democratic and Gubernatorial Candidate and former Houston Mayor Bill White, during his campaign, released an ad campaign that was meant to air in both Spanish and English. The ad was set to broadcast Statewide on Fridays. However, this ad was criticized for not telling the truth about the record that he had set in the period that he was Houston’s mayor. The campaign ad was accused of trying to make a revisionist history of Bill White’s term in office.

Even though Bill White claims that in his term in office as the Mayor of Houston he improved the lives of the city’s residents and that he played an important role in reducing taxes, the opposite was quite true. The candid account of his tenure was that taxes actually increased not to mention that a huge majority of the city’s residents did not see an improvement in the quality of their lives. To taint the former mayor’s record even more, Houston at the time of the campaign was one of the nation’s most polluted cities. To set the record straight, here are a number of facts that Bill White flagrantly contradicted.

According to the former Mayor, during his tenure, the rate of tax was significantly reduced by 5 times. However, this is proven untrue by accounts set in the Houston Chronicle which report that even though there were tax cuts, the amount of money that people paid increased.
In the past, the Mayor had been on record as saying that he didn’t play a role in reducing the city’s tax; that the cuts were brought about by the appraisal district.

Another claim that Bill White was quick to make, was that he had improved the quality of life for the city’s residents. According to figures, this statement is not true. The number of people living in poverty didn’t change one bit. The figures that were released by the bureau showed poverty not to have changed from 20.7%. The same was also true for children’s poverty rate, which remained stagnant at 3.13%. More evidence showed that Bill White exacerbated an already bad situation. For instance, the unemployment rate in Harris County increased during his tenure and was higher when he left office than how he found it.

During the Mayor’s tenure, at least 42,000 people remained unemployment. Another one of his claims is that Bill White, was actively engaged in cleaning up the city, however, Forbes Magazine ranked Houston as one of the most toxic cities nationwide.