901 Bagby: Inside The Mayor's Office

Angel Ponce was sitting in a hospital wheelchair — a few stories up at Memorial Hermann — watching pedestrians jump curbs and board buses below, and feeling like he no longer belonged in that world. In this episode, he tells Owen Conflenti how that moment eventually led him to run the City of Houston's Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities — and what he's building so no one in Houston has to feel that way again. Angel walks Owen through what MOPD actually does for Houston's 215,000-plu...

Joshua Sanders is the City of Houston's Chief of Intergovernmental Relations — the person responsible for protecting and advancing Houston's interests at the Texas Legislature, in Washington D.C., and across all 16 members of City Council. In this episode, Owen Conflenti sits down with Sanders to explain what that office actually does, and why the 18 months between legislative sessions may matter more than the 140-day session itself. Sanders breaks down the scale of the job — over 2,000 bills...

Every dollar the City of Houston puts into arts funding through the hotel occupancy tax returns approximately $28 in economic impact. Michele Leal, Director of the Mayor's Office of the Arts, opens with that number — and the rest of the conversation is about proving it. Leal walks Owen through the two engines behind Houston's public art collection: the HOT grant program and the civic art ordinance, which requires a portion of every public construction budget to go toward art — bringing insta...

Herbert Sims was a 22-year-old Urban Fellow stepping out of the Manhattan Municipal Building on the morning of September 11, 2001. He stayed through the end of that year, then came home to Houston — and the City called before he had a plan. Twenty-four years later, he runs the Department of Neighborhoods: the city office that most Houstonians have never heard of and that may do more to connect residents to local government than any other. In this episode, Owen sits down with Herbert to trace...

Marta Crinejo has been the gatekeeper for every vote on Houston City Council for 14 years — and the first thing she did when she met Mayor Whitmire was refuse a direct order. He told her she should just agree with him. She said no. She immediately assumed she'd fired herself. She hadn't. He was testing her. And having fun. Marta is the City of Houston's Agenda Director, a role she's held across five mayors after walking into Mayor Annise Parker's office and saying three words: "I want ...