In a recent letter to the editor, Mike Bass made a string of specious arguments that cannot go unchallenged.
1. While Bass considers the WRUD to have been greatly beneficial in the past dealing with “our” needs, the fact is the WRUD has served as a beneficial tool to one entity and one only, that of the developer who formed it. It was born to fund developer roads, which like all other roads are transferred to the county for maintenance at taxpayers’ expense.
2. Bass also claims the WRUD does not fund projects outside of The Woodlands’ territorial boundaries. I’ve been made aware that embedded in the WRUD enabling legislation, formulated by the developer in 1991, is the power to spend WRUD funds inside or outside the boundaries of the WRUD. Funds have already been spent outside WRUD boundaries in Creekside, no?
3. Bass says there should be no worry about the WRUD funding the Woodlands Parkway extension. However, to my knowledge, there is nothing stopping the WRUD board from doing so at this time.
4. The assertion that the WRUD greatly benefits the residents in The Woodlands since it only includes commercial properties within its territories, in a property tax “only” on these commercial properties, is frankly loaded with the arrogance of a redistributive bureaucrat with no conscience or regard of private property. It’s the age old-envy “willing to enrich some at the expense of others.” The WRUD currently has about 45 residents for voting purposes among whom only three are “officially” developer recognized. If Bass will be transparent about the identity of those three privileged voters, who have been exclusively empowered by the developer in a twisted modern-day form of feudalism to take from unsuspecting “commercial” tenants to give to the Lord developer’s road projects via taxation and to vote for future bonds, then perhaps public opinion may have an effect on the future existence of such an arrangement.
5. While Bass believes the board has been partly successful in dealing with the issue of voter representation by encouraging major business taxpayers to nominate representatives to run for election to the WRUD board, the fact is the public needs to realize that any “business taxpayer” elected in this manner will just be another developer-pick who can only be voted in by the handpicked “privileged voters” above in item 4. It will be a case of developer-picked millionaire/billionaire-developer-voters, electing developer-sensitive board members, as usual.
6. And finally, Bass said the WRUD also created two more positions on its board to allow the county and The Woodlands Township to appoint a representative to the board. The reality is, one can substitute the word “developer” for “WRUD” at any time for the true perspective here. Handpicked board members have voted for the developers’ “will” since 1991. Two dual-purpose elected officials, of which one is a major proponent of the Woodlands Parkway extension, is not contributing to residential voter control of the WRUD.
No, the township board does not need to recognize the WRUD’s “benefits.” Instead, it should decry its existence and illegitimate formation that relied on captive voters that are on the developers’ payroll, a gerrymander to exclude all the residents of The Woodlands, alternately bulldozing residences when it suited the developer and awarding special residence land-use to new crony voters at its own will.
Since it appears that our local DA is unwilling to act on this, particularly the MUD Rent-A-Voters, the township should call for an FBI investigation into this unethical, if not illegal practice.
John Wertz
Vetting Committee Chair
Montgomery County Tea Party
