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Local politics

Commissioners Court supplements Public Defender budget and supports adding more courts

Mar 20th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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Good moves.

Harris County Commissioners Court this week approved a package of public safety measures to support state legislation to create additional district courts, expand the county’s holistic assistance response team program and look at enlarging the public defender’s office.

The measures are aimed at ongoing efforts to reduce the ongoing backlog in the county’s criminal courts system and relieve persistent jail overcrowding. The public defender’s office, for example, currently has capacity to handle fewer than 20 percent of indigent criminal defense cases, leaving the rest to court-appointed private attorneys, who last year earned more than $60 million in fees while, in many cases, taking on caseloads that exceeded state-recommended limits, a recent Houston Chronicle investigation revealed.

The resolution in support of the Texas Legislature creating six additional courts in Harris County passed by a 4-0 vote, with County Judge Lina Hidalgo abstaining, citing fiscal concerns. Hidalgo said that while she was in favor of adding more courts she would only support the measure if it required the state to cover the cost of maintaining additional courts, which comes out to an estimated $17 million per year.

“We don’t have the money for it and somebody needs to call it like it is. I will call it like it is. We cannot afford this,” Hidalgo said, adding that the county would be in a position to cover the cost had two Republican commissioners not forced the county to adopt a lower tax rate last fall.

[…]

Another measure passed by the court Tuesday directed county departments — including Harris County Public Health, the Office of County Administration and the Office of Management and Budget — to develop a plan to expand the county’s Holistic Assistance Response Team, or HART program, in which mental health and social work professionals respond to certain types of emergency calls instead of law enforcement officers. The fledgling program in a section of north Harris County, has responded to more than 1,900 calls since beginning operations last March, according to the county.

Handled incorrectly, police responses can turn deadly; according to a 2015 report from the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit that promotes access to mental health care, people with untreated mental illness are 17 times more likely to be shot dead by police.

Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told the court Tuesday that his deputies have found the program effective.

“Our busiest area was in north Harris County off the 1960 corridor. We did some holistic approaches out there that balance community outreach with enforcement and the procedural justice way. We were able to turn that area, during that pilot program, from the busiest area down to number three. And so it works,” Gonzalez said.

The measure approved by the commissioners would expand the HART program into Harris County Precinct 4.

On a motion by Precinct 4 Commissioner Lesley Briones, the court also requested the county work on a plan to expand the public defender’s office. The proposal approved by the court would save the county money by having up to 50 percent of indigent defense cases handled by the public defender’s office rather than the more highly paid private attorneys, Briones said. One of those attorneys earned $1 million last year, handing 399 felony cases and 207 misdemeanors.

See here, here, and here for the background. I agree with trying to get more courts, and I definitely approve of expanding the Public Defender Office; the story notes some issues with each, which you can read for yourself. I don’t know how I missed the Holistic Assistance Response Team (HART) story – okay, I do know, it was published last October 13, when I was fully encumbered with Election Brain – but it’s a great idea and seems to be catching on. It was also opposed by The Loser Alexandra Mealer (insert rude hand gesture here), so yay us for avoiding that mistake. Just, please, make sure that HART is an item in the Sheriff’s budget so that we don’t run into any further “defunding” bullshit. Anyway, kudos all around for this.

Harris County creates reproductive health access fund

Mar 18th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
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Good.

In a bid to protect residents’ already restricted access to reproductive health care, Harris County officials voted to approve a proposed fund to go toward Harris County Public Health and smaller community organizations at Tuesday’s Commissioners Court meeting.

The reproductive health care access fund passed on a 4 to 1 vote, with Republican Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey at odds with his Democratic counterparts.

This fund will allocate $6 million in federal dollars from the American Rescue Plan to assist Harris County Public Health and the partner organizations in providing reproductive care – including contraception, family planning education, preconception health screenings, and STI testing and treatment – to a minimum of 20,000 residents, said County Judge Lina Hidalgo.

It would not include abortion funding or related pregnancy termination services, as Texas has a total ban on abortion even in cases of rape or incest, allowing it only if continuing the pregnancy puts the mother’s life in danger.

The total amount will be distributed in three parts, with $1.1 million going toward expansions for Harris County Public Health’s services, $4.2 million to funding care at the partner organizations, and the remaining $700,000 for operating expenses for these partner organizations and the county’s health facilities.

This fund is a response to Hidalgo’s resolution passed last year following the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, making abortion illegal in in most states, said Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who accompanied Hidalgo at a press conference held on Monday at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast’s headquarters.

“There is only so much we can do to stop these draconian, dangerous laws,” Ellis said. “But we can use the resources and power we have in Harris County for residents to access health care services they need to make decisions about their health, family and future. That is what this fund will do.”

Here’s a preview story in the Chron about this action. Because this was onetime grant money, the fund is in place for two years, and after that Commissioners Court will either have to pay for it themselves or find other sources for it. That’s a problem for Future Them; this will address a real need in the here and now, and that’s what matters. Here are a couple of tweets from Judge Hidalgo about it. Good job to the four members of the Court who made this happen.

More on spending less on court-appointed lawyers

Mar 13th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Seems like a good start.

A Houston Chronicle investigation into how some private attorneys earn enormous sums to represent thousands of indigent people accused of crimes in Harris County – at a cost of $60 million to taxpayers last year – is prompting widespread calls for reform, as well as a county audit of the program.

The 10 highest-paid private attorneys each pocketed more than $450,000 last year, with one pulling in $1 million. Dozens of attorneys – not all among the highest-paid – took on far more cases than county-employed public defenders are allowed. Their caseloads also exceeded state-recommended limits.

“Obviously, these numbers are huge,” said Jed Silverman, president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association. “It’s wrong, it’s offensive to your average person off the street, and it calls into question whether or not these accused people are getting effective assistance of counsel.”

Here’s a look at what officials are doing to address the issue, and other proposed solutions.

Late last month, the Harris County Auditor told county leaders that his office “started a review of court-appointed attorneys’ fees.” Errika Perkins, who also works in the office, told the Chronicle that officials hope to examine everything from the attorneys’ billing practices to whether they’re visiting clients in jail.

“Our goal is to be able to analyze the different hours attorneys spent on different aspects of the case,” Perkins said, adding that she expects the audit will take at least a couple of months before results can be publicly released.

Two of the county’s Democratic commissioners, Rodney Ellis and Leslie Briones, separately are pushing for an expansion of the public defender’s office, which employed about 130 lawyers to represent indigent clients last year.

But Silverman and others say those changes won’t be enough.

“Everybody involved has to double down” to fix the problem, said State Sen. John Whitmire, who also is running for mayor of Houston. “There’s no justice for victims, defendants, or society … the whole damn thing’s broken.”

For their part, judges and county staff say they’re trying to improve the situation by increasing attorney pay and mentorship opportunities to entice more attorneys to take cases. Harris County courts have faced so much turmoil in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Hurricane Harvey that many attorneys stopped taking appointments, forcing judges to overload some of the ones that remain.

See here for the background. First, I’m glad to see that there is publicly-expressed support for increasing the budget of the Harris County Public Defender Office, which makes all kinds of sense. The story suggests that the max case load the PDO could handle is about half of the indigent cases, which would require slightly more than doubling their current budget. The story mentions other things that the county is doing now, but it’s not clear to me what things that it should be doing that it isn’t or hasn’t brought up. I don’t know what the particulars are that Silverman and Whitmire – who obviously would have some skin in the game as Houston Mayor, even though this is a county matter – have in mind. Be that as it may, I believe this situation will look very different in a couple of years. That should be the goal, anyway.

Harris County libraries to eliminate fines

Feb 26th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Good.

Harris County residents no longer will have to pay late fees on overdue library books, formalizing a policy the 26 branches of the county library started during the pandemic.

Harris County Commissioners Court voted unanimously on Tuesday to approve a measure making the elimination of late fees permanent, following Houston City Council’s decision last month to do the same at the Houston Public Library.

“The county will join the city of Houston, New York, San Diego, Nashville, Baltimore, San Francisco, and League City,” Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis said.

More than 1.8 million people have library cards with the Harris County Public Library system. The library’s roughly 2 million items were checked out more than 9.5 million times last year.

Late fees make up less than 1 percent of the library’s annual budget, according to Edward Melton, executive director of the Harris County Public Library system.

“During the pandemic, we stopped taking fines,” Melton said. “It’s really a very minor impact that we have on our budget, but we do see that with not having fines, people are more prone to bring back materials and also use the library, because that’s one of the barriers in terms of people not coming back.”

See here for the background; sadly, the link to my favorite (and relevant to this issue) Bloom County comic has expired, because Facebook be like that. I don’t think I had considered before how little of their budgets library fines must be. Not surprising, since they’re ten cents a day and are capped at three bucks total, but still. Some cultural axioms just get very deeply internalized. Anyway, good for HCPL, and good for the Houston library system for leading the way.

ShotSpotter

Feb 24th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

I’m more skeptical than not, but there is a way to make me less so.

Two years in, Houston’s ShotSpotter program has resulted in 5,450 alerts, 99 arrests and the seizure of 107 guns, but no real consensus on its value as a crime-fighting tool or even how to measure its success.

Critics say the numbers — just 19 percent of the gunfire alerts in the last 25 months even led to an offense report — do not justify the $3.5 million cost of the controversial tool. In the remaining cases, officers were dispatched based on the alerts but did not find any evidence, such as shell casings.

Authorities filed 126 charges related to ShotSpotter alerts, including one capital murder charge, according to Houston Police Department Assistant Chief Milton Martin, who presented an update to a City Council committee last week. Half of those charges involved misdemeanor offenses, most commonly the illegal discharge of a firearm in the city.

Not directly reflected in those statistics, Martin said, is the intelligence that HPD was able to gather from ShotSpotter data. Because residents do not always call 911 to report every gunshot they hear, the tool has allowed officers to map out areas where gunfire problems are the most severe and deploy its resources accordingly, he said.

“Just in the first year of operation, over 200 shell casings that we collected were linked to firearms that were used in other crimes in other parts of the city,” Martin said. “While that’s not an automatic ‘Oh, now we know who to arrest,’ it’s information that investigators did not have before.”

Some advocates, however, say the numbers do not justify the cost of the program: $3.5 million for a five-year contract from 2022 to 2027 at an annual price of approximately $74,000 per square mile.

“Only 20 percent of alerts result in an offense support, meaning that 80 percent of responses are a waste of public resources,” Christopher Rivera, outreach coordinator at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said. “I believe that we can use the $3.5 million…and put it into programs that actually reduce gun violence, like housing and health care and debt relief.”

[…]

Meanwhile, critics and studies of the system in other cities raise questions about the accuracy and efficacy of the gunfire detection tool.

Little consensus exists even among officials who have adopted the technology. In Texas, San Antonio canceled its contract in 2017, after just one year of operation, saying that ShotSpotter simply was not worth the money. Harris County officials, however, have called ShotSpotter a “godsend” for the Aldine area.

Chicago’s former Inspector General Joe Ferguson said Houston’s statistics so far are “in the same universe” as those in other parts of the country that have been subjected to criticism by experts.

The author of a 2021 report by Chicago’s Office of Inspector General, Ferguson found that ShotSpotter alerts rarely led to evidence of a gun-related crime and could result in biased policing behaviors. He cautioned Houston officials against making premature conclusions based on ShotSpotter data during an interview with the Chronicle.

“What was found in Chicago and has been found in other places is the false positive rate is over 50 percent,” Ferguson said. “And people don’t understand that. People assume things are worse than they are. That spawns fear, and fear spawns overreaction, both as a political matter and in terms of response in the field and on the street.”

At the same time, Ferguson applauded Houston’s incremental approach to implementing the program.

“The way that Houston is going about it is the way that these things should be approached. It started with a pilot program, it is focused, it generates the data, and the data is subjected to analysis and made publicly available,” he said. “But the results that they’ve gotten so far aren’t significantly better than what has been reported nationally.”

I thought I had written about ShotSpotter before, but my archives say otherwise. This article does a pretty good job of telling you what you need to know, and there was a CityCast Houston podcast episode from last January that also discussed it, if you want to know more. My sense about this is similar to how I feel about security cameras, which is that it sounds like it could be beneficial, and may have value in certain specific circumstances, but we need to be very rigorous about the data that we have for it and make decisions based on that data. Basically, does the data say this thing works as its proponents claim it does, which is to say that it reduces or helps solve crime at a certain level, or does it not? What even is a reasonable expectation given our investment, the context in which we are using it (e.g, in a high-crime area or just someplace where the locals are loudly clamoring for it regardless of need), and the experiences of other cities? We need to know that going in, and we need to be willing to turn it off if it’s not working as hoped. If we have all that in place, then I’m willing to give it a try. If not, then surely there are better uses of the money.

Tell me you have no evidence of voter suppression without telling me you have no evidence of voter suppression

Feb 23rd, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

Hilarious.

Houston furniture magnate Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale has launched a website in hopes of gathering evidence of voter disenfranchisement in Harris County’s November 2022 election.

The initiative follows the Gallery Furniture owner’s lawsuit filed last week accusing the Harris County Elections Administrator’s Office of refusing to turn over public records related to the election.

GOP lawmakers including Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have called for Harris County to redo its November election based on claims of ballot paper shortages, though they have not provided any evidence or estimate of disenfranchised voters. McIngvale, who was a major donor supporting Republican candidates, including County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s opponent Alexandra del Moral Mealer, now appears to be searching for just that.

The website, called Hard to Vote, leads with a recorded message from McIngvale: “Do you believe you were denied the opportunity to vote in the November 2022 election? I’ve heard reports of machines that didn’t work, ballot shortages, voting locations suddenly closing. If you experienced difficulties or felt unjustly treated, we want to hear your story.”

Voters can fill out a form to share their voting experiences, upload evidence and agree to be filmed for “upcoming social media or commercial purposes.”

McIngvale said Tuesday he believes Harris County voters were disenfranchised based on reports of paper shortages, machine malfunctions and polling locations that did not open or close on time. He has spoken with plenty of those disenfranchised voters himself, he said.

“Customers come in and tell me that all the time,” McIngvale said. “They were turned away at one polling place and they gave up. A lot of them just went to another polling place. But a lot of them were disenfranchised by not having the first place open and ready to go like it should have been. It’s not that hard.”

I’m sure they all have tears in their eyes and call him “sir”, too. Not to be needlessly pedantic here – believe me, this is extremely needed pedanticism – but if they went to another location then by definition their vote wasn’t suppressed because they did in fact vote. This is why we have so many voting locations on Election Day, precisely because stuff sometimes happens. I’m sure all the lawyers for those whiny crybaby loser candidates will be thrilled to hear all this, as well as whatever other fanciful stories people contribute to your new fanfic site. You can see here for some background and here for Judge Hidalgo’s latest response to “the mattress guy” if you want. But really, a good horse laugh is all you need.

(Is it possible there are a few people who actually didn’t vote because of the paper-outage delays? Sure, maybe a couple. Anything is possible. It would be a shame if that happened, though I’d still want to know how long they waited before they gave up and why they didn’t or couldn’t go to one of the 750 other locations to vote, but it could have happened and it would be unfortunate and we would need to do better next time. It would also be nowhere close to “voter suppression”, especially on a scale that could have affected even the closest race. And the fact that the furniture dealer is openly looking for any such example, especially those that include people who did actually vote, shows just how desperate and ridiculous and baseless these Republican charges have been all along.)

Harris County votes to sue Hegar again

Feb 17th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Phony Defunding Claims II: Electric Boogaloo.

Harris County Commissioners Court on Thursday voted to sue Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar‘s office in response to his comments accusing the county of defunding law enforcement.

Hegar’s claim is a repeat of a fight that already played out between the comptroller and Harris County last August.

“They were wrong back when they tried this the first time — the comptroller and his allies — and they’re wrong again now,” County Judge Lina Hidalgo said before the court met in executive session Thursday.

Commissioners Court convened the special meeting to decide on a response to Hegar’s claim. In a 4-1 vote, the court authorized County Attorney Christian Menefee to pursue a lawsuit against the comptroller’s office. Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey, the lone Republican on the court, voted against the measure.

In a statement, Menefee confirmed his office will file a lawsuit against Hegar.

“Once again, Comptroller Hegar has abused his authority,” the county attorney said. “His math is wrong. His application of state law is wrong. There’s no explanation for it — he’s just flat wrong. If Hegar’s goal was to make headlines while insulting the basic intelligence of Harris County residents, I guess he achieved that. But we don’t plan to let him abuse his power. We’ll see him in court.”

[…]

The debate over law-enforcement funding in Harris County stems from the county’s decision to shift its fiscal year and budgeting schedule to start in October instead of March.

In 2022, the county passed a shortened seven-month budget that was in effect until the new schedule began in October. That short fiscal year has made it difficult to make year-to-year funding comparisons, and has resulted in the county and the comptroller’s office using different methods to analyze whether the constable’s funding has increased or decreased.

Under Hegar’s calculations, Heap’s “annualized” budget would have been about $48.9 million over 12 months — nearly $2.3 million more than the $46.7 million figure calculated by the county.

Hidalgo said Hegar came to an incorrect conclusion by dividing Harris County’s 2022 short fiscal year budget by seven months and multiplying that number by 12 to get the annualized budget. Instead, Hidalgo said, the comptroller should have calculated on the basis of pay periods rather than the number of months. That would require dividing the short fiscal year by 16 pay periods and multiplying that by 26 to cover the whole year, she said.

“We have 26-pay-period accounting and Comptroller Hegar should know that,” the judge said.

See here for the background. If the facts as stated above are accurate, then this really is another case of political math being used in place of, well, math. Which is what the Chron editorial board concluded a few days ago. No matter how you get there, bullshit still walks. The Press has more.

Here we go again with the “defunding” baloney

Feb 13th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

I was all set to have a peaceful weekend when I came across a press release from Commissioner Ellis’ office on Friday afternoon about this.

Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar on Friday accused Harris County of defunding law enforcement, rekindling a feud from last fall in which Republican state officials threatened to block the county’s annual budget.

At issue is a new state law passed by the GOP-controlled Legislature, Senate Bill 23, that bars large counties from cutting law enforcement spending without getting approval from voters. Hegar, responding to a fresh complaint from Harris County Constable Ted Heap, said county officials had reduced the budget for Heap’s Precinct 5 office by some $2.4 million in their most recent budget.

Hegar said in a statement that the county will be barred from increasing property tax collections — plus revenue from properties added to the tax roll last year — until it resolves the discrepancy. It could also ask voters to approve the “funding reduction” in a referendum, Hegar said.

Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said the county would challenge Hegar’s finding in court if necessary.

“We’ve seen this show before — Comptroller Hegar misconstruing the law and playing political games to make headlines,” Menefee tweeted. “His math was wrong then and it’s wrong now.”

[…]

As happened last fall, Hegar and County Administrator David Berry have used different methods to project out Heap’s seven-month budget to a full year. Under Hegar’s calculations, Heap’s “annualized” budget would have been about $48.9 million over 12 months — nearly $2.3 million off from the $46.7 million figure calculated by the county.

Adding to the confusion, Hegar and the county are separately at odds over Heap’s current budget, which was adopted by the Democratic-controlled Commissioners Court last fall. According to Hegar, Heap’s office was allotted about $46.6 million for the 2023 fiscal year. Berry’s office said Heap actually received $48.5 million.

Hegar, a Republican, said he hopes Heap and county officials can resolve the situation themselves “long before Harris County begins budget deliberations for fiscal year 2024.” He also predicted that county officials would “once again use a convoluted approach” to argue they had not reduced Heap’s funding.

“The root cause of that debate, however, remains unresolved,” Hegar said in the statement, referring to the defunding spat from last fall. “Judge Lina Hidalgo and the Harris County Commissioners Court are defunding the police.”

Hidalgo’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For his part, Berry noted that the county had already been forced to adopt the property tax revenue freeze for its current budget because Commissioners Court was unable to reach a quorum needed to set a tax rate.

Same shit, different year. Last time around, Hegar folded like a cheap suit after Harris County took the matter to court. Neither he nor Ted Heap seems to have gotten any better at math or more truthful in general, so most likely this will play out in similar fashion. But boy it sure would be nice to have a state government that wasn’t a constant threat to our local matters? Even for a few weeks. Oh, and if this is one of the final straws that leads to Constable precinct redistricting, I won’t complain.

Harris County restores some public safety funding

Feb 6th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

A bit of post-quorum-busting cleanup.

Harris County Commissioners Court on Tuesday approved nearly $10 million in additional funding for the sheriff and district attorney, three months after the Democratic majority said the unplanned adoption of a lower tax rate would force county departments to tighten their budgets.

Sheriff Ed Gonzalez’s office will receive an additional $5.6 million, covering the cost of a $1.5 million deficit plus another $4.1 million to fill 120 patrol positions to maintain last year’s staffing levels.

District Attorney Kim Ogg’s office will get $4.3 million to plug a $1.8 million deficit and restore funding for 30 assistant district attorney positions.

The sheriff’s office shortfall stems from rising health care costs. While the district attorney’s office also is contending with higher health care costs, the majority of the department’s shortfall was caused by $2.5 million in unbudgeted raises, according to the county’s Office of Management and Budget.

“(The raises) were done over my objection,” Budget Director Daniel Ramos told the court.

Ramos said that while approving the additional funding after the department gave out unbudgeted raises would set up “a moral hazard,” he recommended the court authorize the appropriation rather than risk that understaffing would worsen overcrowding at the jail.

Unlike a department headed by an appointed official, the district attorney’s office is run by an elected official with independent oversight of her office.

“It’s very difficult to have true controls over how money is spent in an elected official’s office,” County Administrator Dave Berry said.

[…]

County Judge Lina Hidalgo said Tuesday the district attorney’s office would not need a supplemental appropriation if the original proposed tax rate had passed, but departments were advised to forego raises to meet the constraints of the no-new-revenue rate.

“One of the departments decided to give the raises anyway instead of using those funds for positions. Now that department is coming back and saying ‘I need more money for positions,'” Hidalgo said. “It’s a terrible precedent.”

The district attorney’s office appropriation passed in a 3-1 vote, with Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis voting no and Hidalgo abstaining. The deal will restore funding for 15 assistant district attorney positions, with funding for another 15 positions to follow after the office submits a report on how it will implement changes to improve areas such as the intake division.

See here, here, and here for some background, and here for an earlier version of the story. It’s not explained where this supplemental funding is coming from – my best guess is that there was some slack from the previously-passed budget, as conservative estimates were used to ensure they didn’t overshoot their revenue, and now that things are clearer there’s room to fill a bit back in.

Ogg’s actions here are obviously problematic, as she exacerbated the projected deficit and then left the county in a bad position as there had already been the commitment made to fund extra positions. Not clear what the Court can do about that – I’ll predict that you won’t see that specific lineup of yes and no votes on many other items going forward (the extra funding for the Sheriff passed unanimously) – but you can add it to the list of things that will likely be brought up in the 2024 primary campaign. One other item to note is that if you go back and peruse Ogg’s January 2023 finance report, you can see that she got multiple contributions from her own employees – each contributor must list their employer, and right from the beginning you can see several who list “Harris County District Attorney’s Office”, or “HCDAO”. You have to wonder how many of those folks got raises.

On a better note, the Court also did this:

Harris County is moving forward with a plan to improve and expand access to child care as the industry struggles to bounce back from the pandemic.

Commissioners Court voted Tuesday to approve a $26.2 million program that will open new seats at high-quality child care centers for an additional 800 to 1,000 children in low-income families residing in child care deserts, according to officials.

Child care will be free for families participating in the program, which is funded under the American Rescue Plan Act. The program will also increase compensation for child care workers and providers to reduce turnover and improve quality of care.

“That is really what we need to recover from the pandemic, is to build back capacity within the child care sector,” said Sara Mickelson, director for early childhood initiatives at the county’s administration office. “This is about contracting with child care centers who can open brand new child care supply.”

The county awarded a two-year contract to BakerRipley, a Houston nonprofit, to implement the program with help from the United Way of Greater Houston. The measure passed unanimously with no discussion.

What happens after two years, which is presumably when this federal funding runs out, is unclear. My assumption is that if this is deemed to be successful, the Court will find a way to continue paying for it. It’s a great idea, and it should provide a great benefit not just for the recipients, but for all of us in the long run. It’s a travesty that this couldn’t be included in the big infrastructure bill, but the fight continues. Kudos to all for making this happen.

Pension reform had the desired effect

Feb 3rd, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

It’s a good thing Houston got this done when it did. We couldn’t get it done earlier, and I don’t think we could get it done now.

Mayor Sylvester Turner

Now, nearly six years after Mayor Sylvester Turner shepherded a package of reforms through the Texas Legislature and the ballot box, the city’s pension systems face a far brighter future, according to business leaders, financial analysts and City Hall officials.

The city’s pension liability has shrunk to $2.2 billion, a quarter of what it was in 2017, according to City Hall figures. The city’s net financial position increased last fiscal year from $3.7 to $5.9 billion, an achievement Controller Chris Brown, the city’s independently elected financial watchdog, attributed to the reforms. And the city’s three pension systems have healthier funding levels, all while the city is on track to eliminate its debt in 30 years.

“My administration promised fiscal responsibility, and that is what we have delivered,” Turner said.

The results are not necessarily set in stone. Houston’s pension costs remain relatively high, and a market crash could test the reforms. The city faces other financial challenges, as well, from a structurally unbalanced budget to a pay dispute with firefighters. Still, the city’s pension picture unquestionably has improved from the crisis Turner inherited when he took office.

Turner’s reform package had three primary features: cutting benefits, infusing two of the pension systems with $1 billion in cash from voter-approved bonds, and recalculating the city’s payments.

The cuts, valued at $2.8 billion at the time, centered mostly on cost-of-living adjustments and survivability to descendants and family, instead of earned benefits for retirees. The cash infusion gave an immediate boost to the police and municipal systems. The recalculated city payments used more realistic projections of investment returns, shared risk if the market takes a downturn, and — most importantly — put the city on track to eliminate its debt.

Turner deemed the packages a “shared sacrifice.” The systems and their members took hits to their benefits and contributed more on their end, and the city had to issue more debt and start paying more in contributions.

“Whenever I go around the country, and I talk about this, it seems like Houston is the gold standard in pension reform for U.S. cities,” said Brown, a frequent critic of the Turner administration’s financial policies on other topics. “This should be a Harvard Business School case study in how to compromise in government.”

[…]

The state has codified Houston’s pensions systems into state law, meaning any reforms had to wind their way through the Legislature.  That was no easy feat, according to Greater Houston Partnership President Bob Harvey. The partnership first tried to tackle the pension debt in the Legislature in 2013, and found it would be a far more precarious enterprise than it first imagined. The idea of a shared sacrifice made it more feasible in 2017.

It is possible, Harvey said, that Turner was uniquely capable of getting these reform done, given his history and standing in the Texas House.

“I think that’s a fair statement,” Harvey said. “I think him doing it in his first year of office, when he has a 26-year history in the Texas House, that is what gave him the political equity to move something like this. It still wasn’t easy. There were times when it looked like this wasn’t going to be possible.”

I tend to think that Mayor Turner was the right Mayor at the right time to get this done, perhaps in part because it was so central an issue in the 2015 campaign. I don’t remember what happened in the 2013 session, but things can fail in the Legislature for any number of reasons. If this needed to happen this year, or in 2025 with a new Mayor, I’d be pretty doubtful about it. There’s too much general animus towards cities in general and Houston in particular, and not enough chamber-of-commerce-type Republicans to make up for it. The point is we got it done, it did what we hoped it would do, and we can turn our attention to other issues now.

A new proposal for adding sidewalks

Jan 25th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

I’d like to hear more about this.

Some homeowners and developers soon may be able to opt out of requirements to build sidewalks and instead pay a fee into a new fund the city would use to build sidewalks across Houston.

City Council on Wednesday is scheduled to consider a proposal to create a “sidewalk-in-lieu fee” to give developers another way to comply with the sidewalk ordinance.

Under current regulations, property owners and developers are required to build a sidewalk in front of a property unless the project meets certain exemptions. This approach, however, has led to disconnected segments, known as “sidewalks to nowhere,” that do not contribute to a network needed by pedestrians, according to David Fields, chief transportation planner at the Houston Planning and Development Department.

With the new measure, applicants can choose to pay a fee of $12 per square foot if the required sidewalk construction is unsuitable or unfeasible. The fees would go into a new fund, which is expected to generate $1.7 million a year for the city to build sidewalks in a cohesive manner. That would be in addition to the existing sidewalk program’s $3.3 million annual budget.

The plan also would divide Houston into 17 service areas; 70 percent of the sidewalk fees collected in each area would be spent within its boundaries and 30 percent would be used citywide. The idea, Fields said, is to balance the need for sidewalk projects throughout Houston.

“The objective is a citywide pedestrian network to help the city grow sustainably and responsibly,” Fields said. “The in-lieu fee is one additional option for how we get there.”

The basic idea makes sense, and from reading the rest of the article it sounds like there’s a consensus for this. CM Robert Gallegos notes that it doesn’t address the need to fix existing sidewalks, though he still appears to favor the idea. Lack of sidewalks, and lack of good sidewalks, is a longstanding problem in this city, one that greatly limits non-car options for people, especially people with mobility challenges. Any tangible step we can take towards making that situation better is one I’d like to see happen.

No more library fines in Houston

Jan 15th, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Good news for some of you, I’m sure.

Houston Public Library patrons no longer will have to pay overdue fees and will have a month-long amnesty period to get past fines canceled.

City Council on Wednesday unanimously approved the library’s proposal to eliminate overdue fees — currently 20 cents per day for adult and young adult books and 10 cents per day for children’s materials — for all patrons at its more than 40 locations. The goal is to encourage more residents, especially younger and low-income Houstonians, to utilize the system, Mayor Sylvester Turner said.

“A fine-free library system evens the playing field and incentivizes Houstonians to become lifelong users of our Houston Public Library,” Turner said in a statement. “When you analyze the numbers, you see that young people account for more than 27 percent of users with fines, preventing them from accessing free resources and tools for learning. Simply put, this is the right thing to do.”

The library has issued 1.4 million library cards to consumers, according to a 2020 library foundation report. The branches have 3.6 million materials, which includes laptop computers and tablets.

Research on public libraries consistently shows late fines do not make people return books on time and actually can deter those who owe fines from using the facility again, according to Houston Public Library spokesperson Julie Mintzer.

The change will cost the library system approximately $60,000 per year in revenue generated by late fines, Minztzer said. The library has a $44 million annual budget. Going forward, book borrowers still will be responsible for the cost of damaged or lost books.

At the request of CM Amy Peck, Council will get briefed on the effect of the change at the end of the year so they can consider revisions to the ordinance if needed. All this seems reasonable to me. Fines for overdue books topped out at $10, so their cost was unlikely to be a deterrent to anyone. Be all that as it may, I just wanted the excuse to embed one of my favorite Bloom County strips:

You’re welcome.

Mayor Turner’s final year

Jan 3rd, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

The big local political story, besides whatever violence the Legislature commits to Houston and/or Harris County, will be the 2023 Mayor’s race. The incumbent still has a full year to go, though, and he has his plans for what he wants to do with his remaining time in office.

Mayor Sylvester Turner

Mayor Sylvester Turner plans to focus his final year in office on moving existing projects across the finish line, with an emphasis on housing, crime, parks and community facilities.

Turner said he wants to accomplish his administration’s goal of helping to build 10,000 new housing units in his second term, while also continuing the city’s progress since 2012 in reducing homelessness. His “One Safe Houston” plan to address violent crime has several elements that are funded through the rest of his tenure, including expanded crisis response teams. And there are renovations underway in 22 community parks that he wants to see through before his term ends in January 2024.

“It’s about finishing up many of the priorities and projects that are currently on the books,” said Turner, who revealed recently that he worked this summer while battling a cancer diagnosis. He now is cancer-free.

Next year, though, could force confrontations with structural issues at City Hall that Turner is satisfied to leave to his successor, such as a potential adjustment to the city’s revenue cap, and the resolution of a yearslong contract stalemate with firefighters that has spanned nearly his full tenure, and which now rests with the Supreme Court.

[…]

Turner has said a garbage fee — Houston is the only city in Texas without one — is necessary to sustain Solid Waste operations, though he is not likely to take that on in his final year. He likewise has argued an adjustment to the revenue cap is necessary. The most recent discussion of the cap came in October, after it forced the city’s eighth rate cut in nine years. At-Large Council Member Michael Kubosh wondered aloud how the city could afford its growing police and fire budgets with those restraints. Turner said he would present an adjustment to the cap if council desired it.

Turner said that adjustment proposal still is in the works but acknowledged he is not “100 percent on it.”

“Some of the these things need to be left for the next mayor,” he said, and the ruling in the firefighters dispute could affect his calculus, as well. “A modification of the revenue cap may not be adequate to address it. In that case, I won’t present it. I’ll leave it up to the next mayor to address how he or she, and the people in this city, should deal with it.”

Turner argues he has done his part tackling intractable problems facing the city. The 2017 pension reforms he ushered in have slashed the city’s daunting debt in that arena from a $8 billion liability to about $1.5 billion. The issue that once dominated city government and politics now is mostly an afterthought. The city’s liability for retirement benefits likewise was expected to grow to $9 billion over 30 years, but cuts Turner implemented are expected to reduce that at least in half.

“I can’t fix everything, but we’ve fixed a whole lot,” Turner said.

Turner and other elected leaders in the city long have said the cap strains the city’s finances and hinders its ability to provide adequate resources to residents. It has cost the city about $1.5 billion in revenue since it first hit the cap in 2015. In that time, it has saved the owner of the median Houston home about $946, or about $105 per year.

I’m not sure I have any hope left about raising the revenue cap. If there actually is some action on it, the most likely scenario is what we have done before, which is to carve out a limited exception for public safety spending. That’s more likely to pass a public vote, and less likely to get cracked down on by the Legislature. It’s at best a band-aid, if it even happens, but you know nothing significant will ever happen until we have a different state government, and we know that ain’t happening for at least another four years.

As for the firefighters, there are two issues that need to be resolved by the courts before anything gets left as a mess for the next Mayor, and those are the pay parity lawsuit and the HFD collective bargaining lawsuit, both of which just had hearings before SCOTx. I have no prediction for either – we may or may not get rulings on them before the November election, but if we do there will be a big new issue for the candidates to talk about. Modifying the revenue cap in some form would leave the next Mayor a bit of leeway in how they try to resolve whatever they need to resolve with these issues. I don’t need more reasons to support modifying the stupid revenue cap, but other people do, so there you have it.

As for the long-discussed trash fee, I support the idea as long as the funds are used to really improve solid waste collection in the city. There’s plenty of innovation out there, but just making sure everything gets picked up in a timely fashion, which is a labor and equipment issue at its core, is the first priority. I think this has a better chance of passing this year than in the future just because some number of people who won’t be facing re-election can vote for it, but we’ll see. Just have a productive last year in office, that’s all I ask.

League City to mess with its libraries

Dec 9th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

This is watered down from the original proposal, which was a true book ban situation, but it’s still bad and dumb and ominous.

At a packed League City council chambers Tuesday night, residents made their voices heard about a proposed resolution that would rewrite the criteria on which materials are allowed in the city library for children’s books.

Out of 63 speakers, only 10 supported the resolution during the citizens speaking portion of the meeting that lasted nearly two hours. The crowd overflowed into a separate city hall room watching on a monitor.

However, the council late Tuesday voted 4-3 to support the resolution.

Councilman Tommy Cones who backed the resolution, said: “We’re not trying to ban books by any means. I don’t want to take out books about the gay community, but I certainly don’t want minors to pick up a book and sit at a table and start looking at some of these pictures we were handed out tonight.”

John Bowen, another councilman, pointed out the lopsided nature of the speakers, adding: “I’m not saying that those who are for this are not here but they are not making their voice heard. To me if something is that important those people would come forward.”

One after the other, residents of various backgrounds and ages spoke against the proposal, which would prohibit the city from spending tax dollars to materials targeted to children under 18 that “contain obscenity”.

Former educators, school psychologists, current and former members of the library’s board of trustees told personal stories of how books enriched their lives, and in some cases, personal struggles, and spoke on the broader issues of censorship.

“I thought the days of book burning were over,” said one former teacher.

[…]

Many chided the resolution’s language which seemed to equate pedophilia with homosexuality, and others mocked the authors for its use of terms like “ideologue sexuality”.

“I looked it up and I got two hits,” said one, “and both were from the League City agenda”.

“No one has been able to tell me what ‘Ideologue sexuality” is,” said Saultczy Khobahlt Bleu before the meeting. Bleu, a League City resident, encouraged residents to attend Tuesday night’s meeting as a statement.

“I don’t think they knew what they were getting into and didn’t expect this kind of response (against the proposal).”

Kirsten Garcia, a former educator, spoke about how, as a young survivor of sexual assault, books helped her journey toward healing when she couldn’t tell her story to anyone.

“When you tell groups of people – whether they are survivors of rape, or pedophilia or whatever category they fall into – that literary (books) about them is not welcome we’re essentially telling them they are not welcome in the library,” Garcia said before the meeting. “When we start to exclude literature about certain groups of people, we are telling those people that their voices and experiences don’t matter.”

Councilmember Justin Hicks said the resolution is not a book ban.

The proposal, a third revision, is a watered down version of the original that would have prohibited the city from spending tax dollars on materials targeted to children under 18 that “contain obscenity.”

Authored by councilmembers Hicks and Andy Mann, the resolution would limit the use of tax dollars to purchase materials for the city library, specifically books aimed at children under age 18. Topics singled out for scrutiny in the resolution include gender ideology, pedophilia, rape and bondage, and “ideologue human sexuality.”

Opponents say the resolution, which has been revised three times since it was first made public, is an attempt to censor and leans heavily on materials that “contain obscenity,” a vague description some say is used to target LGBTQ-related and other perspectives.

From the earlier story, here’s what had been originally proposed:

Councilmembers Justin Hicks and Andy Mann added a proposed resolution to the agenda late last week that would prohibit the city from spending tax dollars on materials targeted to children younger than 18 that “contain obscenity,” specifically related to a list of five topics that include gender ideology, “idealogue human sexuality,” pedophilia, rape and bondage. It quickly made rounds on Facebook ahead of Tuesday’s council meeting.

[…]

After the initial agenda went out and before Tuesday’s meeting, Hicks and Mayor Nick Long told the Chronicle they planned to introduce a revised resolution that would only create a system for challenging books’ presence in the children’s section, Long said.

The original version of the resolution on the official council agenda as of midday Monday was not the final version, Hicks said. That version, which circulated on Facebook, proposed an auditor to review the books and send the report of “noncompliant materials” to city council, which could then vote for the city manager to restrict minors’ access to the books or “to remove the materials from circulation altogether.”

Hicks provided what he called an updated version of the resolution to the Chronicle that laid out a different process. People could bring challenges over books to a community standards review committee that would be created by the city council. The committee could then decide whether to restrict minors from accessing the book or remove it all together. A challenger would have the option to appeal the board’s decision.

Long said he will propose creating a 15-person committee, including seven members of the existing library board and eight members representing different sections of the community, including parents and educators, to review complaints. The council would then hear appeals of that committee’s decisions.

I too have no idea what “idealogue sexuality” is, but I do know that’s not how you spell “ideologue”. Maybe that’s why no one could find this alleged term on the internet. The people who showed up to this Council meeting to voice their opposition to this still-very-bad ordinance did a good job of saying what was bad about it, so I will just note that of the three Council members quoted in the story in support of it, two of them were just re-elected to League City city council, which has four-year terms. (Andy Mann was unopposed so he’s not listed there but you can find him in the Election Day report at harrisvotes.com. League City is in both Harris and Galveston counties, which is why the Harris vote totals are different than what you see in that tweet.) My advice is to make note of who supported this and who didn’t, and show up in equal force at their next election. Because (say it with me now) nothing changes until people like CMs Hicks, Mann, and Cones lose elections over the bad things they do.

City approves new regulations on outdoor music festivals

Dec 8th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Hope they help.

Houston City Council on Monday approved stricter permitting requirements for outdoor music events on private property with more than 500 attendees.

There has been an increasing number of instances in which organizers only informed the city of their plans days before an event, sometimes leading to an additional cost of thousands of dollars for city staff and law enforcement to handle unexpected safety issues at the venue, according to city and law enforcement officials.

Under the new ordinance, organizers would have to turn in permit applications at least 60 days prior to the event and have a detailed safety plan in place. Failure to do so will result in a late fee and require the organizer to pay for any extra public expenses associated with the event.

The ordinance would bring the level of review for large music events on private property on par with those on public property.

“With social media and everything, all of a sudden you can get hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of people showing up,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said at Wednesday’s City Council meeting. “And then something happens, and then here we are on the news because people are saying to us ‘Did you all permit that, why didn’t you permit it, and why did you all allow this to happen?’ ”

[…]

Turner said the ordinance was tailored specifically to deal with music events because city staff and first responders have identified the most problems with those types of events.

“I asked them to carefully craft a very narrow ordinance since we’re dealing with people’s private property,” the mayor said. “When you cast that net and include everything, then you really are imposing the city’s will on private property owners across the board with little or no justification for it.”

See here for the background. I’m fine with this, but I will continue to wonder if there isn’t more that can and should be done. As with the AstroWorld task force recommendations, I’d really appreciate hearing a discussion with some experts about this.

Houston to spend more fixing water pipes

Dec 4th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Seems like a good idea.

The city is poised to at least double its annual spending on water line repairs, citing two years of pipe breaks and leaks driven in part by ongoing drought conditions.

Houston lost nearly 20 billion gallons of water from January to August of this year, according to records obtained through a public information request. That represents about $75 million in potential revenue for the city’s water utility system.

City Council on Wednesday approved six emergency purchases related to water infrastructure maintenance totaling $21 million. In the previous five fiscal years, the city spent $9 to $10 million annually to repair broken water pipes, city records show.

Such emergency purchases are common during a drought, when extreme heat and dryness put pressure on the pipes around shrinking soils, Houston Public Works spokesperson Erin Jones said.

In June, record temperatures and a significant drop in rainfall prompted the city to issue a drought advisory — which remains ongoing — asking residents to limit outdoor watering and routinely check for water leaks. The last time Houston issued such restrictions was during a more severe state-wide drought in 2011, Jones said.

“All those warmer months without rain in April and May, that’s causing like a domino effect of more heat and more breakage,” she said. “It’s not as bad as what it was in 2011, but it’s important to remember that we were and still are in a drought.”

Houston has an aging underground infrastructure, Mayor Sylvester Turner said during Wednesday’s council meeting. Combined with more extreme weather conditions brought by climate change, spending more money on contractors to fix the main lines is unavoidable, he said.

“We were being overwhelmed, and so we ended up bringing on more contractors to address the situation. That has helped, and it does come with an expense,” Turner said. “We have to recognize the changing conditions and the infrastructure that’s going to be required in order to mitigate more water main leaks.”

From January to May, the amount of water lost to leaks each month nearly doubled, from 1.8 billion gallons to 3.1 billion gallons, data show. The largest water losses occurred in March, April and May, when they accounted for more than 20 percent of the city’s total treated water, slightly less than the 25 percent at the height of the 2011 drought.

That’s a lot of water, and getting the pipes fixed is not just sensible environmentally it’s also a good idea financially. I think the city has been a bit lax on this historically because we’re in a pretty wet climate and generally haven’t had to worry about having enough water. It’s very clear now that that is not a safe assumption any more.

One more thing:

Councilmember Mike Kubosh said the city should ask the state for more support, noting Texas was to receive an estimated $35 billion over five years from the infrastructure bill passed by Congress in November 2021.

“Some of the cities have crumbling infrastructure, like ours,” Kubosh said. “Thirty billion dollars just sitting there…It’s the people’s money. It doesn’t make sense that they’re not using it.”

By all means, feel free to pick up the phone and call Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick and tell them that. I wish you the best of luck in that endeavor.

Local AstroWorld task force gives its report

Dec 1st, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Sounds mostly okay to me, but one person who knows a lot more about this stuff than I do is not impressed.

A task force formed after the deadly Astroworld concert unveiled a clearer agreement Monday between Houston, Harris County, NRG Park and those seeking permits for major events that local leaders say will improve safety — but one expert said falls far short of protecting people or living up to the promises of reform after 10 people perished last November.

The interlocal agreement between the city and county revises the current major event plan, last amended in 2018. Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia, a member of the task force, called it a “great step in a collaborative fashion to look at things in our front windshield,” that included more specifics on the authority to reject permits, review safety plans and standardized the permit applications filed to the city and county.

Mayor Sylvester Turner said he was satisfied the new agreement helps clarify responsibilities and offers a clear set of rules.

“They just were not aligned as they needed to be,” Turner said of protocols in place during the Astroworld disaster.

A veteran mass event expert, however, said his review of the new agreement provided little hope for improvement.

“They simply have taken 12 months to come up with a two-and-a-half page agreement … that can still be interpreted different ways,” said Paul Wertheimer, founder of Los Angeles-based Crowd Management Strategies, and a 40-year veteran of safety planning and protocols for large events.

Wertheimer called the new agreement a “clumsy approach to address the critical failures of Astroworld.”

[…]

The new agreement, which for now only covers NRG Park as a pilot of a more universal agreement, applies to any event with an expected attendance of 6,000 or more. The new agreement also requires a unified command center so law enforcement, medical staff and firefighters are operating in the same location or on the same radio channels on-site at the event.

“Thank goodness we all got together,” Police Chief Troy Finner said, noting the new agreement allows him to reject any security plan.

Previously, details for major events did not specify who exactly had the authority to reject plans for not following protocols, leaving decisions up to various offices with the city and county.

The existing agreement “painted in broad strokes,” said Steven Adelman, vice president of the industry group Event Safety Alliance, which helped design local standards for major events.

“What we have done, frankly, is paint with much finer strokes,” Adelman said.

[…]

Communication was one of many issues raised after the Astroworld disaster. Lack of a unified command structure, confusion about who bore responsibility for turning off the music as Scott played and design details of the fencing that corralled the crowd on three sides have been blamed for creating confusion as people were crushed by the forward-pressing mob of music fans.

None of those issues are satisfactorily addressed by the new agreement, Wertheimer said. The new agreement leaves open standards for crowd size, and does not require approval of a crowd management plan — different from an emergency plan — which details established exits and what safeguards are in place to avoid a crowd surge or rush that can trample or asphyxiate people.

“There appears to be a lack of knowledge about crowd management,” Wertheimer said, adding that many locations have far more detailed plans than Houston.

In Chicago, for example, any event with an expected size of 10,000 or more must receive approval from the city’s parks board, after review by several city departments.

While the new agreement more explicitly states the authority of police and fire to control the site and stop the show if needed, Wertheimer said making that more clear without actual tangible changes in the rules is insufficient. Nor should any of the ongoing lawsuits related to the event stop public officials from strengthening rules or changing regulations.

See here for the background. Note that this is not the same as the state task force, whose recommendations were “ridiculed” according to Wertheimer. Like I said, I don’t know enough to really evaluate this, and I was not able to find a copy of the report so all I know is what’s in this story. I would love to hear a 15-20 minute interview with Paul Wertheimer and Steven Adelman, to hash out what is good, bad, deficient, unnecessary, innovative, and whatever else about this report. CityCast Houston, please make this happen.

The boil notice

Nov 29th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Yeah, it’s a pain. And now schools are closed again, which my daughter appreciates but probably most grownups do not. Also a thing many grownups did not appreciate was how long it took for the boil notices to go out.

The city’s boil water advisory drew a torrent of criticism from Houston residents and some city council members who complained the public announcement should have been made sooner and more widely.

The initial news release announcing the advisory went out to subscribers of the City of Houston Newsroom at 6:44 p.m. Sunday, about eight hours after the East Water Purification Plant first experienced a power outage that caused the water pressure to dip below state safety requirements.

In addition to the press release, the city put out a Twitter announcement at 7:27 p.m. and a text message to subscribers of a city notification system called AlertHouston around 10:30 p.m.

Even then, many residents did not learn of the boil water notice until later Sunday night, provoking a wave of criticism and complaints about the lack of communication from city leaders.

“Why was there no notice earlier in the day?” asked Stephen Madden, a local resident who found out about the notice around 9 p.m. Sunday when it was too late to find water supplies. “At least a heads-up that there may be an issue? We need a full explanation.”

Houstonian Andrew Jefferson said he first learned of the boil water advisory on social media around 10:30 p.m. Sunday.

“My wife asked me, ‘Why not just send out an alert on peoples’ phones? I think that would have been a lot more effective of a measure…It’s just irritating,” he said.

City officials did not notify the public sooner because there was no evidence of contamination and staff did not know whether the pressure drop was serious enough to trigger a boil water notice, Mayor Sylvester Turner said at a press conference Monday. The city spent hours working with state regulators at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to determine the appropriate next step, he said.

A TCEQ spokesman, however, said any drop in pressure below the state’s emergency regulatory standard of 20 pounds per square inch triggers the requirement to issue a boil water advisory.

Of the 16 monitoring sites that dropped below 20 psi after the power failed around 11 a.m. Sunday, 14 rose back above that within two minutes, and the other two rebounded within 30 minutes, according to Turner.

“The thinking was it was not going to trigger a need for a boil water notice,” the mayor said. “We were in collaboration with TCEQ and a decision was made out of an abundance of caution to issue the boil water notice.”

The city did not directly inform all water customers about the emergency. Though legally obligated to notify the public whenever the water pressure falls below the required level for any amount of time, the city, by law, only has to send out a statement to newsroom subscribers, according to Houston Public Works spokeswoman Erin Jones,.

“We rely on the media to get it out to the public,” Jones said. “We are required by state regulations to only send a release within 24 hours of the incident, so we were actually ahead of the game.”

[…]

District A Councilmember Amy Peck said the city should have sent out an emergency alert to all Houstonians. She said she did not find out about the outage and water pressure drop until she saw the press release.

“The AlertHouston message should have gone out at the same time as that media release, and it’s not enough because AlertHouston is something that you have to opt in for,” she said. “It should have gone out as a wireless emergency alert that you basically have to opt out of.”

Turner said he thought he had issued an emergency alert, but Public Works Director Carol Haddock confirmed such an alert never went out.

Houston’s Office of Emergency Management issued a statement Monday afternoon saying it initially was unable to send out an alert because of a communication issue that had to be resolved with state and federal agencies.

“We did reach out to Harris County to send a message on our behalf, but the message would have been sent to over two million non-residents who did not reside within the city of Houston city limits, therefore not feasible,” Deputy Director Thomas Munoz said.

District I Council Member Robert Gallegos said Public Works should have informed council members and municipalities that purchase water from Houston in a more timely fashion.

“I would have preferred Public Works notifying the council members one on one so we could have taken appropriate action, instead of reading it on a city tweet,” Gallego said. “Also, the local municipalities that buy their water from the city, those mayors should be notified about the city of Houston issuing a boil water notice.”

Sure seems to me like there were options for doing better. I get the Alert Houston emails, and it hit my mailbox at 10:30 PM on Sunday. If I hadn’t had a late work call that night, I wouldn’t have known about it until I got up on Monday. I don’t know what the best way to do this is, but that’s something the city should work on. And for the record, as this Twitter thread documents, the state – the TCEQ and the Legislature – could do a lot more to require cities to do better. This is one of those times where a blanket state law makes sense, and the one we have now is inadequate. But regardless of that, the city of Houston can and should do better. Let’s at least learn from this experience, OK?

UPDATE: Well, the lifting of the boil notice arrived as an audible alert, like an Amber Alert, on my phone at 7 AM. So that was different. Campos was unimpressed.

What to expect when you’re expecting a (larger) Democratic majority

Nov 25th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

I have three things to say about this.

Despite narrowly winning reelection against bruising campaigns by well-funded challengers, the Democratic majority on Commissioners Court has made clear it intends to continue its progressive remake of Harris County.

Though neither County Judge Lina Hidalgo, Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia or Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis invoked the word “mandate,” their public promises of four more years of what they have been doing leaves little doubt about their intentions.

Adding a fourth Democrat in Precinct 4, where former county court at law judge Lesley Briones ousted incumbent Commissioner Jack Cagle will only strengthen that resolve.

It also will prevent the lone Republican remaining on court, Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey from pulling off a quorum break as he did this year with Cagle to prevent the Democratic majority from passing its preferred property tax rate.

“Democrats will likely lean into a more progressive agenda now that they have uniform control of the court,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “They as much as campaigned on this promise.”

The question, Rottinghaus said, is how far Democrats should go in a progressive direction.

“Voters didn’t provide an overwhelming mandate for a major left shift and probably signaled some modest opposition to or, at least, different emphasis on priorities from the prior four years,” Rottinghaus said.

I’m old enough to remember the 2006 election, you know, the one where Rick Perry was elected with 39% of the vote. There was some Discourse at the time about how Perry should be humbled by his weak showing and should mend his ways and just somehow not be so Rick Perry-like. He did none of those things, was easily re-elected again in 2010, was briefly a Presidential candidate in 2012, and eventually became a Cabinet member. Mandates are what you make of them.

With the new stronger majority on the court, Harris County Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel said she is concerned Democrats will be punitive toward those who have challenged them, pointing to Hidalgo’s victory speech delivered the day after the election.

In those remarks, Hidalgo spoke about her critics who have accused Democrats on the court of defunding police, including what she called “unscrupulous politicians of both parties.” She called out Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, a Democrat, without naming her directly.

“That was sort of what was implied with her statement addressed to those people who didn’t support her. So, does that mean she’s not going to be supportive of the constables and the DA’s office?” Siegel said. “Because it’s one thing saying that you’re for funding and you want to make crime go down, but now it’s time to deliver. That’s what she told people.”

Oh, Cindy. Have you seen what Republicans are promising to do in Congress now that they have a slim majority? That’s what being punitive looks like. There are some significant policy differences between Judge Hidalgo and Commissioners Court on the one hand and Kim Ogg and the Constables on the other. Judge Hidalgo has – I’m gonna say it – a mandate to use her office to implement the policies she and the Court campaigned on and think are best. If Ogg and the Constables, who are all up for election in 2024, disagree about that, they can make a campaign issue out of it and hope to get their own mandate at that time. If Hidalgo and the Court really do overstep, that can be ammunition in their fight.

Still, Rottinghaus said, the opposition Democrats faced during the election cycle reflected the difficulty they had messaging on crime issues.

“Governing a massive and ideologically diverse county like Harris means compromising,” he said. “So, despite a solid majority, the close election shows Democrats on the Court need to encourage Republicans to come back to the table.”

This is just your periodic reminder that Harris County Commissioners Court operated with a Republican majority for at least 40 years – I’m only able to verify the Court’s makeup via election results back to about 1974 – before Dems took it in 2019. We operated under Republican laws, rules, norms, and assumptions for a long, long time. Only so much of that can be changed to reflect the current political reality in four years’ time, especially when a Republican minority was still able to wield a budget veto. The fact is that this now-larger Democratic majority – which even with the benefit of redistricting was still hard won – will continue to modify, update, and undo some of the things that we had long done under Republican rule. Everyone needs to wrap their heads around that.

A few words from Judge Hidalgo

Nov 22nd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
9 comments

Plus a few words that she could have said but didn’t, which I will fill in.

Judge Lina Hidalgo

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who narrowly won re-election last week over a strong push from GOP candidates and donors, outlined plans for her next four years in office, including continuing anti-crime efforts and doubling down on early childhood education.

“In some ways, it’s a continuation of the past four years — the work we’ve done to tackle violent crime, for example. We’ve already been able to bring down that violent crime rate by at least 10 percent. These are August numbers. We need to do more. We’re going to continue doing that,” Hidalgo said in a press briefing held Thursday.

Hidalgo took a jab at the two Republicans on commissioners court, Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey and Precinct 4 Commissioner Jack Cagle, who broke quorum for more than six weeks to stop Democrats from passing their proposed property tax rate. While the Democrats were proposing a tax rate decrease, Ramsey and Cagle argued for a slightly lower rate on the grounds that residents needed more tax relief.

Because the court was not able to reach a state-required quorum of four members present to set the tax rate by the end of October, the county defaulted to what is known as the no-new revenue rate, the levy that would generate the same revenue as last year. The county is projected to take in an additional $45 million from new properties on the tax roll.

Facing a lower tax rate, the court voted to approve a lower budget, cutting nearly $100 million that was to be allocated to law enforcement, including raises for sheriff deputies.

“I’m proud of the record investments we’ve made in public safety, even despite the fact that two colleagues boycotted our budget process and forced us to cut some expenses we’d planned,” Hidalgo said. “Even with that, we’ve been able to see results and we’re working really hard, including with the recent bond that passed, to try to strengthen our criminal justice system.”

County government will keep tackling issues that traditionally have not been on the agenda, she said.

That’s what she said. She didn’t say anything about Constable/JP redistricting, either as a political goal or a policy goal. She didn’t say anything about taking all of those $100 million in forced budget cuts from Tom Ramsey’s precinct, which I would totally tell her to at least publicly muse about if I were advising her. She didn’t say anything about whiny crybaby sore losers pursuing their completely bogus “investigation” of the Elections office. She’s a responsible elected official, and I’m a yahoo on the Internet, so that probably has something to do with it. But these are things that could be said, and maybe will be said in a more measured and nuanced way at some point in the coming weeks. We’ll see. Oh, and be sure also to see the hilariously thin-skinned response she drew for her victory celebration from a local furniture salesman and gambling aficionado. Someone needs a nap, I’d say.

UPDATE: Said furniture salesman gets roundly panned by Chron readers.

HISD redistricting is on the docket

Nov 18th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Already happening, in fact.

Current districts

Houston ISD plans to redraw the boundary lines for its nine school board trustees based on population changes reflected in the latest U.S. Census.

HISD officials emphasized that the changes only impact voting, not what schools children are zoned to. The district is required to adjust those boundaries when the U.S. Census reflects a significant population shift.

The board presented two plans, which are fairly similar, and aim to decide by mid-December. Both aim to return each district to within 10 percent of a predetermined ideal size of about 164,000 people.

District VII, represented by Bridget Wade and spanning from River Oaks to Briarmeadow in west Houston, has seen the most growth, so it will be redrawn.

That district also saw growth 10 years ago, the last time the Census was done. However, the growth wasn’t considered significant enough to warrant being restructured. District I, which represented the north side, and District IX, the south, were the only two to be restructured 10 years ago after the last Census.

On the flip side, this year’s Census data showed that District III in southeast Houston shrank. Dani Hernandez represents that district.

It’s difficult to adjust just one or two districts, said Sydney Falk, an attorney of Bickerstaff Heath Delgado and Acosta LLP, an Austin-based law firm that did the analysis.

“It’s a ripple effect,” Falk said. “As soon as you touch one, you need to adjust the others.”

He added that all the changes were relatively minor. Districts I, III, IV, VII and VIII will all be restructured. Districts II, V, VI, IX generally won’t change.

I couldn’t find anything about the proposed plans on the HISD website, but I’m sure something will appear sooner or later. There are some community meetings happening if you want to discuss the matter; I’m sure the proposed maps will be present at these.

HISD did a small redistricting in 2011 as noted, and then had to do it again in 2014 after the annexation of North Forest ISD. I expect the process to be pretty peaceful and straightforward this time around.

And if you’re wondering if HCC will go through a similar process, the answer is Yes, they will, and they are.

The Houston Community College Board of Trustees is conducting a once-per-decade redistricting process to better align HCC districts based on equitable population distribution.

The board is considering redistricting options at meetings over the next several months. Options currently under consideration are available for the public to comment on and review at an HCC information web page on redistricting located at www.hccs.edu/about-hcc/board-of-trustees/hcc-redistricting-information.

Community residents can review proposed maps and provide map suggestions via a redistricting form at the web page or by emailing [email protected] All submitters must provide their full name, home address, a phone number and, if available, an email address.

“Redistricting is the process by which the boundaries of elective single-member districts are periodically redrawn in response to changes in population,” said Board Chair Dr. Cynthia Lenton-Gary. “We encourage members of the public to visit this site for information and updates concerning redistricting and the proposed maps we will be reviewing.”

Districts are determined based upon U.S. Census data. If population numbers show that a single-member district exceeds the population of the least populated, single-member district by more than 10 percent, the district map must be re-drawn. The goal is to ensure that each single-member district consists of near equal population across the system.

That was posted on October 10; I trust you’ll forgive me for not having that at the forefront of my mind at the time. Their index page for redistricting has all the information you could want. Current and proposed maps are here – not surprisingly, they all look very similar – and the timeline tab indicates they plan to adopt a map next April. Like I said, all the info is there for you to see.

The case for redrawing Constable/JP precincts

Nov 15th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

A Twitter thread of interest:

Note that he means the Justice of the Peace courts. Current maps for those precincts are here. Note that the Constable and Justice of the Peace precincts are the same. Note also how large geographically precincts 4 and 5 are. I’m sure they were quite empty in the 70s, but that was a long time ago. That’s one of the main theses in the accompanying article, which focuses on population growth and caseloads, and how they affect people facing evictions, which are handled by the JP courts.

Every Monday morning, Judge Israel Garcia, Jr., who serves as Harris County Justice of the Peace for Precinct 5, stares down a punishing docket of eviction, debt collection, and traffic cases for the week. His courtroom has a line out the door of parents and children, desperate to resolve a dispute with their landlord or settle a longstanding debt. But the law can be unfriendly to these defendants, and Judge Garcia must know that relief will never come.

All Justice of the Peace Courts in Harris County deal with large caseloads, but the number of cases in Precinct 5 is seemingly endless. If you visit our Harris County Evictions Dashboard, you’ll see how imbalanced the caseload really is – there are 10 times as many cases in Precinct 5 compared to Precinct 6.

What’s going on here? Do renters in Precinct 5 have a much higher risk of eviction than renters in other areas? Are its residents that much more likely to fall behind on their credit card payments or speed through a school zone? No. The reason why Precinct 5 has more cases is because it has more people –  a lot more people. And it has more people because Harris County hasn’t redrawn the boundaries of JP courts since 1973.

For this blog post, I explore just how lopsided the caseloads in Harris County’s JP Courts have become due to a lack of redistricting over the past 50 years. I also show the results from a simulation I ran of 1,000 new maps for the courts that account for population change. Every single one is better than what we have today.

I discussed the political case for redistricting the Constables in an earlier post. That’s a separate matter from what David McClendon is advocating. The two goals, if they are indeed goals for Commissioners Court, would be in some tension here. My first thought is whether McClendon took the Voting Rights Act into account in this exercise, because Precinct 6 – one of two precinct with Hispanic Constables and (with the election of Dolores Lozano in Precinct 2) all Hispanic JPs – would be first in line to be made larger. Precinct 2, the other of those two precincts, is right next to it. Precincts 3 and 7 have Black Constables and JPs. Any potential redrawing of these precincts needs to ensure that Black and Hispanic voters aren’t losing representation.

The Constables are currently five Dems and three Republicans, with Precincts 4 and 8 being all-GOP, while Precinct 5 has one JP from each party following Israel Garcia’s win in 2020. As a practical political matter, Commissioners Court is not going to draw a new set of maps that will make it harder for Democrats to win. Again, as far as I can tell, McClendon didn’t take that into account.

And that’s fine. That wasn’t his idea, and his goal was to even out the caseloads to enable a better process and hopefully better outcomes for tenants facing eviction. The good news here is that McClendon ran a thousand maps, each of which were better than the existing one for his purposes. That strongly suggests to me that the political purpose of not making it harder for Dems to get elected – while also at the least not making it easier for a few specific Constables to get re-elected – can be achieved at the same time as making the courts function better for everyone. Maybe there’s not an optimal solution for each in the same map, but surely improvements can be made. I would absolutely advocate for Commissioners Court to take a long look at this.

Here’s the result of the Republican Commissioners’ budget busting

Nov 4th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

The Republican minority on Commissioners Court made this happen.

Harris County will eliminate more than 500 vacant jobs, delay some flood control projects, postpone a sheriff deputy cadet class, and cancel raises and cost of living adjustments for county law enforcement after the default to a lower tax rate forced by the two Republican commissioners.

Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey and Precinct 4 Commissioner Jack Cagle skipped six straight Commissioners Court meetings to block the adoption of any property tax rate by the Democratic majority, saying taxpayers deserved a break amid soaring inflation and the ongoing spread of COVID-19.

With early voting underway and three members of Commissioners Court on the ballot, the county’s annual budget process also played out amid escalating political rhetoric, with Republicans and Democrats accusing one another of defunding the police.

State law requires a quorum of four members of the court to adopt a tax rate. By preventing the court from setting the rate last week — the last week it legally could — the Republican commissioners forced the county to default to what is known as the no new revenue rate, the levy at which the county will take in the same revenue as last year, plus $45 million from property added to the tax rolls in the last 12 months. Only $15 million of that additional revenue will go toward operations, the county budget office said recently; the remaining $30 million will be used for debt payments.

The no new revenue rate is 53 cents per $100 of assessed value, down from the previous rate of 58.1 cents. In a bid to reach a compromise with Cagle and Ramsey, Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia had proposed a rate 56.3 cents, 1.2 cents lower than the rate originally proposed by the Democratic majority. It would have included 200 additional members of law enforcement. Cagle earlier had pitched a rate of 55.6 cents and included 200 new lawmen. For the owner of a $300,000 home, the difference between the two commissioners’ proposals would have been about $16.

[…]

Budget Director Daniel Ramos said departments have eliminated an estimated 560 vacant positions as a result of the lower-than-expected tax rate.

He said most of those positions were planned to be filled and that in some cases, departments have used savings from not filling vacant positions to pay for other expenses such as contractors, overtime and maintaining services. Eliminating those vacant positions will mean reduced services in those departments, including the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, he said.

“IFS has medical examiner vacancies because of how specialized the position is, so they use the savings from positions being vacant to offset medical contractors to complete autopsies,” Ramos said. “Harris County will do less autopsies because they don’t have that funding anymore.”

The eliminated vacancies in the sheriff’s office will result in the department reducing the number of people it can hire and the amount of overtime it can pay patrol officers.

The $16.6 million loss for the sheriff’s office is the equivalent of 175 entry-level deputies, according to a memo from Ramos.

Jason Spencer, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, said Sheriff Ed Gonzalez will decide what gets funded and what does not as the department makes “some tough decisions.”

The postponed cadet class could be restored later, Spencer said.

“We expect to continue to lose deputies at the usual attrition rate, so it might be a situation where we have a cadet class down the road just to keep our heads above water with staffing,” Spencer said. “It wouldn’t be adding positions. It would just be replacing ones that we’re able to afford.”

Ramos said county staffers, including law enforcement officers, are feeling the effects of the county receiving less tax revenue than expected as planned cost of living adjustments and pay increases have been canceled.

“Most departments were able to absorb it into their vacant positions,” Ramos said. “We don’t have a final number quite yet, but there are hundreds of vacant positions that got eliminated across basically all departments.”

The Harris County Flood Control District lost its proposed $23 million increase, while the Harris Health System budget decreased from a proposed $957 million to $822 million.

Some flood control maintenance projects will be deferred to future years, Ramos said in a memo to county leaders last month.

“The type of projects that will be deferred include erosion repair, outfall repairs, sediment removal and conveyance improvements,” Ramos said. “Further deferral of maintenance projects will increase the risk of infrastructure failures during flood events.”

Additionally, the lower funding for the flood control department could jeopardize a $290 million federal grant for sediment removal that requires the county to advance the cost of the project before being reimbursed.

See here and here for some background. There’s a separate story about the effects this will have on Harris Health. My “favorite” detail from this story is that the cuts will affect “cybersecurity upgrades”, which speaking from my professional perspective sure seems like a bad idea. And the most fun part about all this is that unless there’s a 4-1 split on Commissioners Court, all this can happen again. Doesn’t seem like a great way to run a government, but it’s what we’ve got.

Mayor Turner’s cancer treatment

Nov 3rd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

I’m very glad to hear he’s doing well.

Mayor Sylvester Turner

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner revealed Wednesday that he was diagnosed with cancer this summer, for which he had surgery and received six weeks of radiation treatment.

Turner said he went to the dentist for a root canal, and doctors ultimately found osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer, in his jaw. He had surgery for nine hours on July 30, the mayor said, followed by an eight-day hospital stay and weeks of radiation in August and September.

Turner discussed the illness publicly for the first time in a question-and-answer discussion with former ABC-13 anchor Tom Koch after his seventh annual “State of the City” address.

“I’ve also had my own personal medical situation. For all of my life, I’ve been the healthiest ever,” Turner said. “I go to the dentist to get a root canal, on my way to France with the trade mission. Doctors come and say, ‘Well, it’s a little bit more than a root canal.'”

The mayor said he got a biopsy, and just before departing for France doctors told him he would not be able to make the trip. During the operation, Turner said surgeons took part of his leg bone to restructure his jaw. He had radiation every weekday morning at 7:30 a.m. from Aug. 1 to Sept. 12.

“Back at City Council that day, I continued to do what I needed to do in the city of Houston. Let me tell you, I have been blessed,” Turner said to applause. “As I look at the seven federally declared disasters, and then I look at what I’ve had to endure myself, and then you bounce back. What I would say to you is this is an incredible, incredible city.”

[…]

Turner’s office did not elaborate on the mayor’s prognosis after the event.

“That’s the extent of what he plans to share at this time,” said Mary Benton, Turner’s communications director.

There’s a larger conversation we could have about how much our political leaders need to tell us about their health, but I’ll save that for another time. In retrospect, given that there was no noticeable change in how the city was operating, it’s hard for me to say that we needed to know this information any sooner than now. Reasonable people may see it differently. As I said, I’m very glad that Mayor Turner is doing well, and I wish him all the best.

Republican Commissioners skip the meeting they called

Oct 18th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

On brand. So very on brand.

The two Republican members of Harris County Commissioners Court have announced they will skip a special meeting Monday to discuss a compromise tax rate proposal by Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia, reversing the position they took Friday, potentially ending a month-long impasse that has held up budgetary decisions and become a significant issue in November’s county judge and commissioners races.

On Friday, Precinct 4 Commissioner Jack Cagle said he would attend the meeting if he was assured no vote would take place.

The county attorney’s office confirmed Friday afternoon that the purpose of the meeting is for court members to have a discussion and that no final vote on a tax rate can occur.

By Monday, Cagle’s position had changed.

In a statement, Cagle said, “I have read that Commissioner Adrian Garcia is now calling his most recent tax increase proposal his ‘final offer.’ There can be no good-faith negotiations with someone who announces publicly that he has made his final offer. In addition, Commissioner Tom S. Ramsey has announced that he will not attend Monday’s special session of Commissioners Court. Given Commissioner Garcia’s publicly announced refusal to negotiate in good faith and given the absence of a full quorum of court members in attendance, I will not attend the special session of Commissioners Court scheduled for Monday afternoon.”

Cagle on Friday said he would attend the special meeting hours after Garcia held his news conference in which he called his proposal his final offer.

Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey has reversed his decision, as well, according to a statement from his office released on Saturday: “He was hopeful in attending Monday’s special meeting of a ‘discussion’; however, vagueness around the “possible action” in that meeting paired with Tuesday’s meeting details leaves the door open to take other actions relating to the massive tax increase. Commissioner Ramsey is officially rescinding his offer and will not be attending Monday’s meeting.”

See here for the previous entry. I’m sure you can imagine just how shocked, shocked I am at this turn of events. We’re way into the farce zone at this point, so barring an unlikely change of heart on their part it’s time to move on to other political solutions. Let’s get that 4-1 majority and not have to worry about this going forward.

UPDATE: You know what Commissioners Cagle and Ramsey had time for yesterday? A little golf, and some fundraising.

There may be a county budget deal available

Oct 16th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

I don’t trust anything Commissioners Cagle and Ramsey say, but we’ll see.

The two Republican members of Harris County Commissioners Court said Friday they would attend a special meeting Monday to discuss a compromise tax rate proposal by Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia, potentially ending a monthlong impasse that has held up budgetary decisions and become a significant issue in November’s county judge and commissioners races.

Precinct 4 Commissioner Jack Cagle said he would attend the meeting if he was assured no vote would take place.

The county attorney’s office confirmed Friday afternoon that the purpose of the meeting is for court members to have a discussion and that no final vote on a tax rate can occur.

Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey announced he would attend the meeting a short time later.

The two Republican commissioners have skipped the last three Commissioners Court meetings to block the three Democrats on the court from adopting a property tax rate. They view the Democrat-supported rate as too high at a time residents are dealing with the highest inflation in years amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. They also want the county to fund more law enforcement.

Garcia’s proposal, unveiled in a Friday morning news conference, would set the overall property tax rate at 56.3 cents per $100 of assessed value, 1.2 cents lower than the rate originally proposed by the Democratic majority.

The current overall county tax rate is 58.1 cents per $100 of assessed value.

Under the rate of 57.5 cents originally proposed by the Democrats, the owner of a $250,000 home with a standard 20 percent homestead exemption would save about $12 in the first year, assuming the appraised value was unchanged from the previous year.

Under Garcia’s proposal, that homeowner would pay $36 less.

Garcia’s plan calls for an additional $20 million to hire 200 additional law enforcement officers, echoing Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey’s call for 200 additional law enforcement “boots on the ground.” It also includes a 2.5 percent pay increase for law enforcement officers.

“Today I make you my final offer,” Garcia said. “It checks every box that each of my colleagues has stated as a priority. … If my Republican colleagues continue to refuse to show up to work, it proves, once and for all, they had no intention on getting any deal done.”

State law requires a quorum of at least four members to set the property tax rate. The court has until Oct. 28 to set the tax rate. Failure to come to an agreement would force the county to adopt what is known as the “no new revenue rate,” a levy that generates the same amount of money as the previous year. In Harris County’s case, the no new revenue rate would include an additional $45 million from developed properties added to the tax roll this year.

Again, this is a legislative minority getting to set the terms because of an anti-majoritarian component of our state constitution. If we are going to bring up the quorum-busting by Democratic State House members again, I will remind you that 1) unlike the State House Dems, Commissioners Cagle and Ramsey can do their thing from the comfort of their homes – they do not have to flee to another state to avoid being detained by the cops and dragged back to the county courthouse; and 2) the Republican legislative majority eventually got everything they wanted and all they had to do was wait it out, while the Democratic Commissioners Court majority has no choice but to negotiate. Either way, they cannot do what they would have done if the two Republican Commissioners didn’t have this power. These are two very different situations.

As far as the fear that somehow the three Democratic members of Commissioners Court will suddenly appear, gavel them into an official meeting, and pass their preferred budget before they can abscond again, the following is from the Harris County Attorney’s office:

Harris County Commissioners Court has issued a notice for a special meeting on Monday, October 17 that will focus on proposed tax rates and changes to the budget.

In response to members of court claiming they will skip the meeting because of concerns that a tax rate may be adopted, Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee issued the following statement:

“There is no ‘vagueness’ about whether Commissioners Court can adopt a tax rate at Monday’s special meeting. The answer is no. Nor does the court having the Monday meeting mean that they could adopt a tax rate at some subsequent meeting with fewer than four members present.

If any member of court plans to skip Monday’s meeting, they should be honest about why, and not claim that they’re doing so out of fear that a tax rate could be adopted.”

State law requires that prior to a Commissioners Court holding a tax hearing those rates must first be noticed to the public at least 5 days prior to the hearing. Any vote to adopt those rates must take place after the hearing but not later than 7 days after the hearing.

Like I said, we’ll see. I don’t trust these guys and neither should you. Even if there’s an agreement reached, it was done under ridiculous circumstances. The Adrian Garcia deal, if that’s what we get, is fine as it is, it’s the process that’s the problem.

Houston City Council approves its new map

Oct 14th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Now we wait for the lawsuit(s).

City Council on Wednesday approved new boundaries for the city’s 11 districts for the 2023 elections, featuring modest adjustments affecting parts of downtown, Braeburn, Greater Inwood and a few areas in southeast Houston.

The new boundaries aim to balance district populations based on the latest census data.

By law, the most populous district should not have more than 10 percent more residents than the smallest district. Based on the 2020 census, Districts C and G need to give up some neighborhoods. Districts H, I and J, on the other hand, have lost too many constituents and need to expand. Overall, fewer than 3 percent of the Houston’s 2.3 million residents will change districts.

The redistricting plan had gone through several iterations based on months of internal discussions and public feedback. On Wednesday, four council members also offered amendments to the proposal, three of which were successful.

Despite the majority support for the new maps, council had to vote twice to approve them after it was revealed late Wednesday that the city secretary called out the wrong agenda item before the council voted during the morning session.

The council reconvened at 6 p.m. for a public hearing on a proposed bond election. Following the hearing, which drew no speakers, the council confirmed the new maps by a 14-2 vote, with District I Councilmember Robert Gallegos and District E Councilmember Dave Martin dissenting.

[…]

City Demographer Jerry Wood said throughout the design process he had to juggle competing interests from council members and the public and was unable to accommodate some requests.

“If you go into this thinking that you’re going to make everybody happy, you’re going to be sorry for thinking that,” Wood said. “If you go into this thinking that you’re going to make as few people unhappy as possible, then you might have some success.”

See here for some background. The map I’ve embedded is from the early part of the process and doesn’t include any of the changes made at that Council meeting, so go here for the latest details. CM Gallegos has some issues with the process and with an amendment that affected District I; the story did not say why CM Martin voted no. Overall, this was pretty painless, certainly easier than it was in 2011 when we had to add two new districts. That doesn’t mean there won’t be legal issues:

Much of the discussion around redistricting has centered on the lack of Hispanic representation at City Hall.

While about 45 percent of Houston residents are Hispanic, Gallegos of District I is the only Hispanic council member out of the 16, even though the city previously created two other Hispanic-opportunity districts, H and J.

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), one of the largest Hispanic civil rights organizations in the country, has promised to sue the city over what its advocates characterize as a gross underrepresentation of Latinos on the council.

The goal of the lawsuit is to replace the city’s five at-large seats, which represent voters citywide, with single-member seats, which cover a certain geographical area, to improve minority representation.

The city has hired a law firm in anticipation of the legal challenge.

“We are asking for equity and fairness, and we just don’t have that with the current districts,” said Sergio Lira, a Houston-based leader with the organization. “That’s why we are filing the lawsuit to push for changes.”

Some are worried that Kamin’s amendment could have an adverse effect on Hispanic votes.

The areas set to move to District H instead of Freedmen’s Town, have high percentages of Hispanic constituents, but are experiencing gentrification and are expected to see a decline in Hispanic populations in the following years, according to Wood.

Gallegos said that he did not originally agree with LULAC’s demand to abolish Houston’s at-large seats, but in light of these new developments, he plans to work closely with the organization to advance its cause.

“After what happened this morning, I agree that we need all single-member districts to make sure that we have the representation we need,” he said.

See here for some background. I don’t have anything to add to what I wrote then. I think the plaintiffs would have a decent chance of prevailing if they file, but it’s not a slam dunk. An alternate possible outcome would be to agree to move City Council elections to even-numbered years, as the natural boost in turnout would create a more diverse electorate and thus could raise the chances of Latino candidates in citywide races. That was one of the things that happened in Austin, in addition to the switch to districts from At Large; their elections had been in May of odd years, for maximal non-turnout. Greg Wythe wrote on this topic some years ago at his sadly defunct blog, and it’s stuck with me ever since. There are good reasons to keep city elections in the odd years – Lord knows, we have enough to vote on in the even years, and putting them in the even years would very likely make them more overtly partisan – I’m just saying it’s a possible option. We’ll see what happens.

Just keep staying away, Commissioners

Oct 12th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

At this point the pattern is clear. They’re just going to keep staying away, at least until after the election. At which point one can hope that one of them will have a more permanent vacation from these duties.

For those of you who like to bring up the Democratic legislators’ quorum busting from last summer, I will say again that these two have the right to do what they are doing, per the law and the rules of the chamber. That doesn’t mean they’re free from being criticized for it. I will also note that for a variety of reasons, the quorum-busting Democrats eventually came back, and the thing they were trying to stop got passed by the legislative majority in place. Also, for those of us old enough to remember 2003, the Legislature made some subsequent rule changes to make it harder to break quorum, and there were some penalties in terms of committee assignments and other bureaucratic matters in the next session. Assuming there’s still a Democratic majority on the Court in 2023, it would be well within their rights to see about making life a little less pleasant for whichever of their Republican colleagues are still there. I hope someone is at least thinking about that.

City news release website hacked

Oct 7th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Oops.

Looking for a mail-order Russian bride or wondering how to order a school term paper online? Or maybe you want to improve your slot machine skills by playing online casino games. The city of Houston’s official website for news releases has you covered.

The page on Wednesday morning featured a spate of blog entries on a variety of confounding topics that were decidedly unrelated to City Hall. They were taken down by the afternoon, after the Houston Chronicle inquired about them.

The source of the blog entries, many of which were nonsensical, was unknown Wednesday. Mary Benton, the city’s communications director, said she alerted the information technology department to the posts. The listed author on the articles, a housing department employee named Ashley Lawson, did not actually write and post them, Benton said.

The entries appeared on the city’s news site, cityofhouston.news, a WordPress blog that does not share a domain with the city’s primary website, houstontx.gov.

Christopher Mitchell, the city’s chief information security officer, said no city information was compromised.

“We were recently made aware of improper posts appearing on a blog site utilized by the city to allow individual departments to post departmental content,” Mitchell said in a statement. “The blog site is hosted on a third-party platform and is not connected to any City of Houston enterprise systems. At no point did the city experience a compromise of city systems, data, or information. The origin of the posts was from an active account that was no longer in use, and the city is taking all necessary precautions to correct the issue and prevent a recurrence.”

The posts, often in broken or garbled English, had appeared at least 29 times since Sept. 13, displayed as “uncategorized” entries among more routine posts about police and fire investigations and where to get a flu shot.

Yeah, from a cybersecurity perspective this is (most likely) more of an embarrassment than a breach. It’s a good reminder of why obsolete accounts should be routinely deleted, or at least disabled. There are simple ways to monitor for this kind of activity – even fairly low-tech solutions, like automatically emailing new post notifications to an admin, are worthwhile – and I suspect the city will be doing that in the future. If you have to experience a public cybersecurity failure, there are much worse ways to do so. Please take this relatively painless opportunity to learn from it.

Republican Commissioners abscond again

Sep 29th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
5 comments

Cowards.

Republicans Tom Ramsey of Precinct 3 and Jack Cagle of Precinct 4 skipped Tuesday’s Commissioners Court meeting as part of an ongoing battle of political wills that could extend until the deadline for approving a tax rate passes at the end of October.

The decision prompted the three Democrats on Harris County Commissioners Court to go into an executive session to discuss with the county attorney’s office whether they have legal options to compel the two missing commissioners to attend. County Judge Lina Hidalgo had little to report after the session but said the county attorney’s office is researching options.

The court will consider the tax rate again at its next meeting on Oct. 11, potentially forcing the two Republican commissioners to make a similar decision next month if they have not reached a compromise by then.

Hidalgo opened the meeting alternately lambasting Ramsey and Cagle’s absence and lamenting the potential impacts of the county’s inability to approve its proposed tax rate.

“Our hospital system will operate at a $45 million deficit,” Hidalgo said. “A cadet class will be at risk.”

State law requires four members of the court be present to set the property tax rate.

See here and here for the background. There’s apparently some talk of a compromise, which would need to happen soon, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Giving this much power to a governing minority is the problem here. I don’t know what legal options the majority has, but I do know that the Speaker of the House has the authority to call upon the Texas Rangers to round up legislative quorum-busters, which is why they always flee the state. Maybe Judge Hidalgo can call on the Sheriff to pick up the wayward Commissioners and haul them into the meeting room so that the legal requirement of at least four members being present can be met? I suppose if this happens the next thing we’ll hear about is Angela Paxton driving them away, probably as they hunch down in the back seat of her SUV, for the safety of the suburbs. Just for the comedy value, I’d like to see this scenario play out. I won’t hold my breath for it.

The new county COVID risk assessment system

Sep 22nd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

We’ll see how it works.

Harris County has revamped its method for assessing the public’s risk for contracting COVID-19, replacing the threat level system that has been in place since early in the pandemic with a community level system that places a greater emphasis on new cases.

The change was made due to a “decoupling” of the relationship between new cases and new hospitalizations during the most recent wave of COVID-19 fueled by the BA.5 subvariant of omicron, Judge Lina Hildalgo said during a news conference Thursday. Harris County did not see a spike in hospitalizations as COVID-19 cases surged this summer, she said.

The new system will allow the public to make their own decisions about the level of risk they are comfortable with taking, knowing that the chance of being hospitalized with a severe illness is relatively low if they have been vaccinated and boosted, Hidalgo said.

“We’re turning a page on a phase of this virus, and I’m very hopeful that we won’t have to go back to a time when surge hampered the entirety of the community,” Hidalgo said.

Hidalgo said the threat level system had been an important tool for gauging risk throughout the pandemic. It had been updated before, but this week’s changes represent a “wholesale redesign,” she said.

The new system uses a trio of color-coded community levels that indicate the risk for contracting COVID-19. Low is green, medium is yellow and high is orange. Harris County is currently yellow, but Hidalgo anticipated the community level could rise to orange with the risk for transmission increasing with children back in school.

[…]

The Harris County Public Health website offers guidance for each of the three threat levels, including recommendations for wearing a mask, traveling and social gatherings when the county is green, yellow or orange. The site will continue to offer other pertinent information, such as wastewater monitoring data and the percentage of county residents who have been vaccinated and boosted.

I had to find the appropriate webpage for this on my own – click the embedded image to get there. The old threat level webpage now gives a 404 error. This new system seems fine and reasonable. The main concern is about what might come next.

Q: So how are we doing these days? The numbers certainly look better than they did.

A: They are falling, no doubt about it. But we have to keep in mind that we don’t have a lot of details about the real number of cases. Most of us are getting diagnosed at home using home testing kits. The numbers were always underestimating by a factor of four or five. Now it’s probably seven to 10. So you have to have to look trends.

Numbers are going down. But here are numbers I keep reminding people of: We’re still losing 400 or 500 Americans a day to COVID, which makes it the third or fourth leading cause of death on a daily basis in the United States. There’s still a lot of terrible messaging. People say we don’t have as many hospitalizations. Or that everybody has been infected or vaccinated or vaccinated with breakthrough. All of that is true. On a population level, it has had mitigating effects. But that doesn’t help you make an individual health decision.

People conflate that with individual health decisions. If you’re unvaccinated, there’s still a possibility you could lose your life to COVID. Even if you’re vaccinated and not boosted, there’s that possibility. And we’re seeing the boosters aren’t holding up as well as we’d hoped. That’s one of the reasons I’m strongly encouraging people to get this new booster, which has the mRNA for the original lineage and an added one against BA.5. After four or five months, there’s risk again for being hospitalized. The coverage declines from 80 percent to 50 percent protection against hospitalization.

Then this BA.5, even though it’s going down, it’s a long, slow tail. It’ll be around well into the fall. And the toughest thing to get people to understand is what’s going to happen in the winter. Obviously there’s no way to predict. But I think it’s still quite likely that we’re going to see a new variant just like we have the last two winters. Last winter it was omicron, BA.1. The winter before that we saw alpha. And new variants are arising because we’ve done such a poor job vaccinating low and middle-income countries.

We don’t know what a next variant could look like. More like the original lineage? Or something more like BA.5? The advantage of the new combined booster is that it gives you two shots on goal. It’s more likely to cross-protect against what’s coming down the pike. That’s no guarantee. But we’ve never done this before in terms of what the FDA does. We’ve never vaccinated against something that might be lurking out there. It’s a paradigm shift. What’s happening, and I don’t think the FDA will phrase it this way, but we’re creeping toward a universal coronavirus vaccine.

That’s from a Q&A with Dr. Peter Hotez, who knows better than I do. But I do know enough to say that you should get the omicron booster. And I also know enough to say that political stunts that endanger public health are bad. I think that about covers it.

Republican Commissioners skip out again

Sep 16th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

Cowards.

Harris County’s two Republican commissioners skipped Tuesday’s Commissioners Court meeting, preventing county leaders from passing a property tax rate and proposed budget for the next fiscal year beginning on Oct. 1.

State law requires four members of the court be present to set the tax rate. With only the court’s three Democrats present, the county was forced to adopt what is known as the no new revenue rate, a levy that brings in the same amount of property tax revenue as last year.

[…]

County Judge Lina Hidalgo said the two Republican commissioners “don’t have a plan, they have a campaign ad.”

Hidalgo added that Ramsey and Cagle’s decision to skip the budget vote defunds law enforcement by millions of dollars.

[…]

With the adoption of the no new revenue rate instead of the proposed rate, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office will lose out on $5.3 million in proposed increases. The Sheriff’s Office will lose $16.6 million for patrol and administration, plus another $23.6 million for detention.

In response to that funding difference, Dane Schiller, spokesperson for the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, said in a statement: “It is crucial that our criminal-justice system be properly funded – the right number of deputies, courthouse staff and prosecutors – and it is up to our elected leaders to set funding priorities.”

Overall, the $2.1 billion budget will be $108 million less than the county had proposed.

The loss of the proposed increases for law enforcement comes after efforts by Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar that briefly blocked the county from considering its $2.2 billion budget proposal.

The court had moved forward last week with the budgeting process after a lawyer for the state acknowledged in a Travis County courtroom that the comptroller had no authority to block the county from approving its budget. Hegar can take action only after the budget is approved and if it violates a new state law that bars local governments from reducing spending on law enforcement.

See here for the background. Yes, the Republican Commissioners have done this before. The Constitution allows for this form of minority rule. That doesn’t mean I have to respect it. The main thing I will say here is that I never want to hear any Republican whine about “defunding the police” again, not after the ridiculous bullshit we’ve had to endure from the Comptroller and now from these two clowns, who will be fully responsible for cutting the Sheriff and District Attorney’s budgets. Move on to something else, this has lost all meaning.

Comptroller caves on phony “defunding” claim

Sep 8th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

In the end, he folded like a lawn chair.

Harris County is moving through the process of passing a fiscal 2023 budget with a 1 percent dip in the property tax rate, after the specter of the state blocking its approval eased in a Travis County courtroom Tuesday.

Prospects for approval of that $2.2 billion budget and the new tax rate next week remain unknown, however, hinging on whether enough members of Commissioners Court show up.

Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar, despite recently threatening to block Harris County’s proposed budget over its alleged defunding of law enforcement, has not formally determined that the county violated state law or otherwise taken action to prevent county leaders from adopting a budget for the upcoming fiscal year, a state attorney said in court Tuesday.

The acknowledgment came as part of a county lawsuit challenging Hegar’s claims, including those from a letter last month in which the Republican comptroller told county officials they would need voter approval to pass their budget for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1.

Commissioners Court moved ahead with its budgeting process in the meantime, meeting Tuesday to consider the county’s property tax rate — a procedural step before the court can vote on next year’s budget. Officials first must propose the tax rate, the step taken Tuesday, then hold a public hearing, scheduled for Sept. 13. At that meeting, provided enough commissioners show up, the court can approve the rate and the budget.

On a 3-2 vote, the court on Tuesday proposed the overall tax rate for the county — comprising four rates covering county operations, the Harris Health system, the flood control district and the Port of Houston — at 57.5 cents per $100 of assessed value. That represents about a 1 percent decrease from the current rate of 58.1 cents per $100.

[…]

In an emergency hearing before Travis County state District Judge Lora Livingston, attorney Will Thompson of the Texas Attorney General’s Office — which is representing Hegar and Gov. Greg Abbott in the lawsuit by the county — said the dispute “may be a situation where there’s much ado about nothing and the parties are in more agreement than they realize.”

“The comptroller just has not made a final determination,” Thompson said. “He has not done anything that binds Harris County at this stage. Harris County remains free to adopt a budget, in its normal process, following its normal rules for having public meetings and things like that.”

Instead of ruling on Harris County’s request for a temporary order preventing Hegar from blocking Harris County’s budget, Livingston told attorneys for the county and state to, essentially, put Thompson’s comments in writing in a formal court filing. She gave the two sides until Wednesday afternoon to submit the document.

The statement from Thompson came a week after Harris County Administrator David Berry sent Hegar a letter asking him to clarify whether he had “made or issued a determination that Harris County’s proposed budget violates the law” or prevented the county from adopting a budget.

Hegar responded by encouraging Berry to resolve the issue with the Harris County constables who initially complained about their funding.

“I understand that you want assurances from my office, but only Harris County can resolve this issue and clear the path to adopt its budget,” Hegar wrote.

See here and here for the background. It’s very clear from the state’s response to the lawsuit is that they were bluffing the whole time and they knew it. This is why the lawsuit was the right response, despite the whining from Constables Heap and Herman. You don’t concede when you’re right. Kudos to Judge Hidalgo, Commissioners Ellis and Garcia, and County Attorney Menefee for properly fighting this.

The rest of the story is about whether the two Republican members of the Court will break quorum again in order to prevent the budget and property tax rate from being passed. I don’t feel like deciphering their eleven-dimensional chess strategy this time around, so let’s just wait and see what happens. If we get the election results we want, we won’t have to worry about these shenanigans again.

Investigating abortions is Houston’s “lowest priority”

Sep 3rd, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

So says Mayor Turner, and I’m glad to hear it.

Mayor Sylvester Turner

Mayor Sylvester Turner said Thursday that investigating abortions under the state’s near-total ban is the city’s “lowest priority” when it comes to crime.

Turner said the city would continue to marshal its limited law enforcement resources toward driving down violent crime. While the city cannot ignore the law, Turner said, he wanted to assure medical professionals and pregnant Houstonians that police here will not seek to interfere in sensitive health care decisions.

“I want women to get the best health care that we can offer in this city, and I don’t want doctors or health care providers or practitioners to second-guess themselves in providing the best health care,” Turner said at a City Hall news conference. “We cannot undo the law, it is on the books. It is what it is. We cannot supersede it, but we certainly can prioritize how our resources will be used in this city.”

[…]

Matt Slinkard, the city’s executive assistant police chief, acknowledged the city is duty-bound to enforce the law, but said Houston Police Department officers would remain “laser-focused” on violent crime. Police officials told City Council this week that violent crime is down 10 percent year-over-year, though it remains above pre-pandemic levels.

Slinkard said he was not aware of any complaints filed with the department since the law took effect last week. The mayor also sent a letter to District Attorney Kim Ogg outlining those priorities.

Turner spoke at City Hall along with members of the city’s women’s commission and council members, a majority of whom are women.

Like I said, good to hear. As you know, multiple other Texas cities have taken similar action, via the passage of an ordinance called the GRACE Act. Those have spelled out the things that the city and its law enforcement agency intend to de-emphasize to the extent that they can. One thing those cities have in common is that they all operate under the weak mayor/city manager form of government. I feel pretty confident that’s why they passed these ordinances via their city councils – their mayors don’t have the executive authority to set those policies on their own. It’s possible there could still be a Council vote of some kind on this, but for the most part I’d expect this to cover it. I really hope it’s all an academic exercise, that in a few months we’ll have a Congress and a Senate that can pass a national abortion rights law. Until then, every bit of local action is appreciated.

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