Robert Clayton Lanier was born on March 10, 1925, and grew up in the oil-patch suburb of Baytown, Texas.

[1] In 1983, Governor Mark White appointed Lanier to the Texas Highway Commission, where he served as chairman until 1987.

[3] As chairman, Lanier accused Metro staff of hiding studies that showed ridership of a rail system would be less than originally predicted and not as economically viable.

Lanier resigned in December 1989 after learning Whitmire would not reappoint him because of his lack of commitment to building a rail system.

[4] Lanier spent months searching for a politician who could knock the 5-term Mayor Whitmire out of office, but he eventually decided to do it himself.

In the 1991 Houston Mayoral election, Lanier challenged Whitmire and won on the promise of putting more police on the streets, abandoning the METRO rail plan, and diverting transit funds into paving roads and sidewalks.

Term limits prevented his candidacy in 1997, enacted in 1991 and reinforced in 1994 by a grass-roots citizen initiative spearheaded by the conservative political activist Clymer Wright.