The great state of Texas

We finally have a reason for the timid police response in Uvalde

Mar 21st, 2023

It was because the shooter was using an AR-15, and the cops didn’t want to get slaughtered.

Almost a year after Texas’ deadliest school shooting killed 19 children and two teachers, there is still confusion among investigators, law enforcement leaders and politicians over how nearly 400 law enforcement officers could have performed so poorly. People have blamed cowardice or poor leadership or a lack of sufficient training for why police waited more than an hour to breach the classroom and subdue an amateur 18-year-old adversary.

But in their own words, during and after their botched response, the officers pointed to another reason: They were unwilling to confront the rifle on the other side of the door.

A Texas Tribune investigation, based on police body cameras, emergency communications and interviews with investigators that have not been made public, found officers had concluded that immediately confronting the gunman would be too dangerous. Even though some officers were armed with the same rifle, they opted to wait for the arrival of a Border Patrol SWAT team, with more protective body armor, stronger shields and more tactical training — even though the unit was based more than 60 miles away.

“You knew that it was definitely an AR,” Uvalde Police Department Sgt. Donald Page said in an interview with investigators after the school shooting. “There was no way of going in. … We had no choice but to wait and try to get something that had better coverage where we could actually stand up to him.”

“We weren’t equipped to make entry into that room without several casualties,” Uvalde Police Department Detective Louis Landry said in a separate investigative interview. He added, “Once we found out it was a rifle he was using, it was a different game plan we would have had to come up with. It wasn’t just going in guns blazing, the Old West style, and take him out.”

Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was fired in August after state officials cast him as the incident commander and blamed him for the delay in confronting the gunman, told investigators the day after the shooting he chose to focus on evacuating the school over breaching the classroom because of the type of firearm the gunman used.

“We’re gonna get scrutinized (for) why we didn’t go in there,” Arredondo said. “I know the firepower he had, based on what shells I saw, the holes in the wall in the room next to his. … The preservation of life, everything around (the gunman), was a priority.”

None of the officers quoted in this story agreed to be interviewed by the Tribune.

That hesitation to confront the gun allowed the gunman to terrorize students and teachers in two classrooms for more than an hour without interference from police. It delayed medical care for more than two dozen gunshot victims, including three who were still alive when the Border Patrol team finally ended the shooting but who later died.

Mass shooting protocols adopted by law enforcement nationwide call on officers to stop the attacker as soon as possible. But police in other mass shootings — including at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida — also hesitated to confront gunmen armed with AR-15-style rifles.

Even if the law enforcement response had been flawless and police had immediately stopped the gunman, the death toll in Uvalde still would have been significant. Investigators concluded most victims were killed in the minutes before police arrived.

But in the aftermath of the shooting, there has been little grappling with the role the gun played. Texas Republicans, who control every lever of state government, have talked about school safety, mental health and police training — but not gun control.

There’s more, so go read the rest. That includes a note that the House committee report on the law enforcement response to the Uvalde massacre didn’t include any of these quotes from the officers present, and it also includes a deeply stupid and offensive quote from the deeply stupid and offensive Sen. Bob Hall. While the news of the cops’ hesitation to run into AR-15 fire is something we hadn’t heard before, the rest of this isn’t new at all. Mostly, we know what we’re not going to get from this Legislature and our state leaders. It’s just a matter of what we do about that.

Look, if we banned AR-15s and anything like them today and then began an aggressive program to buy them back and/or confiscate them, there would still be AR-15s and other guns like them out there. But there would be fewer of them, and that would lower the risk. If even the so-called “good guys with a gun” don’t want anything to do with a bad guy with an AR-15, then I don’t know what else we could do that might have the same effect. Like I said, it’s up to us. Daily Kos has more.

More on the Denton experience with marijuana decriminalization

Mar 20th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

No comments yet

A long story from the Dallas Observer.

Nick Stevens stood before the Denton City Council looking equally frustrated and determined. The activist had helped to lead the grassroots charge to decriminalize marijuana in the North Texas college town. Now he was there to defend Proposition B, which more than 71% of the city’s voters had supported in a high-turnout November vote.

Stevens and other activists with the group Decriminalize Denton had fought hard to pass one of the state’s first ordinances to decriminalize low-level marijuana offenses, but they received bad news the day after the election. Denton officials announced in a Nov. 9 memo that the city “does not have the authority to implement” some of Prop B’s provisions.

Facing council members during the Feb. 21 meeting, Stevens emphasized that even if they didn’t personally like the ordinance, they should still respect the will of Denton voters.

“That’s what being a representative is all about,” Stevens said. “It’s about listening to your constituents.”

Decriminalize Denton blasted the ordeal over Prop B as an “attack on democracy” in a press release. Advocates point to other Texas cities such as Austin that have implemented near-identical measures. Voters in San Marcos, Elgin, Harker Heights and Killeen similarly approved decriminalization during the midterm elections. But others have argued that the merits of the ordinance aside, the city of Denton’s hands are tied.

Prop B would mean, in part, that police could no longer issue citations or execute arrests for misdemeanor quantities of marijuana, except under certain limited circumstances. It would also bar law enforcement from using the “smell test,” meaning the scent of weed couldn’t serve as an excuse for search or seizure.

City Manager Sara Hensley explained during the Feb. 21 work session that Denton doesn’t have the authority to implement the parts of Prop B that run afoul of state law. She noted in her presentation that from Nov. 1 to Jan. 17, local officers made 52 citations and/or arrests related to pot or paraphernalia. (Prop B advocates have asked to see the demographic makeup of this, as did the Observer, but the police department didn’t respond to the request.)

Hensley argued that the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, which mandates that police enforce state law, essentially supersedes the proposition. Denton’s police chief further vowed that the department would continue to make minor marijuana offenses a low priority.

To Deb Armintor of Decriminalize Denton, though, hearing the number of arrests and citations was “infuriating.”

“This is what they call ‘low priority’?” Armintor, a former Denton City Council member, told the Observer. “This is business as usual.”

Another local marijuana advocate spoke at the February meeting. Eva Grecco described how she went out day after day to gather enough signatures to place Prop B on the ballot. Many seniors can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on medications each month, she said, and marijuana is a viable alternative.

“‘The times, they are a’changing.’ I am a mother. I am a grandmother. I am a great-grandmother,” Grecco said. “I myself do not smoke marijuana, but I fought very hard for this Proposition B to pass.

Grecco also tried to appeal to the council by noting that some members are themselves parents: “The more you fight the will of the people, these are the things your children will remember in the future.

“I’m just really angry — angry that all this time has gone by and certain members of this council and city manager have refused to listen or comply with the will of the people,” she continued. “Whether you like it or not, your personal choices do not matter. We do not vote for any of you for your personal choices.”

Grecco, Stevens, Armintor and the rest of Decriminalize Denton aren’t alone in their vexation. Some of the city’s voters have reported experiencing déjà vu. The battle over Prop B in uber-conservative Texas isn’t the first time that their voices have been muted following a landslide vote.

[…]

”The progressive group Ground Game Texas partnered with advocates in Denton and other cities to help lead the decriminalization campaign. Mike Siegel, the group’s co-founder and general counsel, agrees that Prop B is enforceable. City councils in Texas often adopt ordinances that may face legal challenges, he said, but they can press on until a judge tells them otherwise.

“You can see how the city manager is disrespecting the people as policymakers, even though the Texas Constitution and the city charter of Denton guarantees the people the policy-making rule,” he said. “Because the city manager is treating the people’s vote as something less than our regular city council vote, and that’s not how it should be under the law.”

The way Siegel sees it, voters should have been advised of legal risks prior to hitting the ballot box, but afterward? “Once they voted, that should be respected like any other ordinance in the city code.”

Denton City Council member Jesse Davis said the council has known for a long time that much of the measure is incompatible with state law. Davis told the Observer that parts of the ordinance, like the budgetary provisions, can’t be enacted by referendum. “Otherwise, you’d have people voting on referendums like: The tax rate is zero, the city budget only goes to fix the streets in my neighborhood,” he said.

City council members can’t simply ignore that Texas law exists and they can’t tell the police which rules to enforce, Davis said. But members are ready to focus on what they can do moving forward instead of what they can’t.

The democratic process isn’t just polls and referenda and headcounts; it includes representative democracy, Davis said. Each city council member was elected by the people, and each took an oath to uphold the laws of the U.S. and state constitutions.

Davis said a number of his constituents have contacted him about Prop B.

“I had to have some frank conversations with them about where we fall in the hierarchy of legislation,” he said. “And I’m very frustrated by some folks out there in the community who know better, or should know better, [who are] misleading people about our role in the scheme of laws and statutes in the state of Texas.”

Davis will face a recall on May 6, the same day he’s up for reelection, after detractors circulated a petition that partly claims he’d ignored “the will of over 32,000 Dentonites” when it comes to the ordinance. He contests that assertion as “factually inaccurate” and said he’s confident that voters will cast their ballot based on his record.

See here for the background. The story mentions that this isn’t the first time that Denton activists passed a ballot referendum that ran into resistance. This is a reference to the Denton fracking ban of 2014, which was challenged in court before it was implemented and subsequently nullified by the Legislature. This case is a little different in that the ordinance was implemented but not fully, with the argument being over how much of it can be done. There isn’t litigation yet (at least not in Denton) but there is a request for an AG opinion, and I have to believe that the Lege will weigh in, given their utter hostility to local control.

Anyway. I believe both sides here are arguing in good faith. I get everyone’s frustration. Ultimately, this is a state problem, both in terms of how marijuana is handled legally and in how much ability cities have to govern themselves. The solution has to be at the state level as well. I just don’t see any other way forward, given where we are. It will not be easy. There is no easy way. I wish there were.

Muskville, Texas

Mar 12th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

What did Bastrop do to deserve this?

Elon Musk is planning to build his own town on part of thousands of acres of newly purchased pasture and farmland outside the Texas capital, according to deeds and other land records and people familiar with the project.

In meetings with landowners and real-estate agents, Mr. Musk and employees of his companies have described his vision as a sort of Texas utopia along the Colorado River, where his employees could live and work.

Executives at the Boring Co., Mr. Musk’s tunnel operation, have discussed and researched incorporating the town in Bastrop County, about 35 miles from Austin, which would allow Mr. Musk to set some regulations in his own municipality and expedite his plans, according to people familiar with Mr. Musk’s projects.

They say Mr. Musk and his top executives want his Austin-area employees, including workers at Boring, electric-car maker Tesla Inc. and space and exploration company SpaceX, to be able to live in new homes with below-market rents.

The planned town is adjacent to Boring and SpaceX facilities now under construction. The site already includes a group of modular homes, a pool, an outdoor sports area and a gym, according to Facebook photos and people familiar with the town. Signs hanging from poles read “welcome, snailbrook, tx, est. 2021.”

Mr. Musk, his former girlfriend, who is the singer Grimes, Kanye West and Mr. West’s architectural designer discussed several times last year what a Musk town might look like, according to people familiar with the discussions. Those talks included broad ideas and some visual mock-ups, according to one of the people, but haven’t resulted in concrete plans.

Representatives for Mr. West, who goes by Ye, and Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, couldn’t be reached for comment.

Under Texas law, a town needs at least 201 residents before it can apply to incorporate, then approval from a county judge. Bastrop County hasn’t received an application from Mr. Musk or any of his entities, a spokeswoman said.

Chap Ambrose, a computer programmer who lives on a hilltop overlooking the new Boring and SpaceX facilities, said he believes “they want it to be secret. They want to do things before anyone knows really what’s happening.”

Mr. Ambrose has been seeking information from Boring and the county about the company’s research and testing of its tunneling machines and how that might affect groundwater and wells in the area.

He has sent drones over the area seeking clues to other structures Boring and SpaceX are building and what they plan to produce in their factories. Drone footage and YouTube videos he posted show the construction of tunnels between the Boring and SpaceX parcels that run beneath a public road.

[…]

Last June, Robert Pugh, then Bastrop County’s director of engineering, complained in an email to Clara Beckett, the county commissioner in charge of planning, that staffers had been “regularly hounded” by employees and contractors of Boring and Starlink, a SpaceX unit. They want the county to “expedite and approve permit applications that are incomplete and not in compliance” with the county’s regulations, Mr. Pugh wrote.

Mr. Pugh left his job that same month and didn’t respond to requests for comment. Ms. Beckett didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The planned town would sit in Bastrop County. An entity called Gapped Bass LLC, of which state records show Boring’s Mr. Davis serving as president, now owns more than 200 acres there, all purchased within the past two years. SpaceX has purchased about 60 more acres. The land was previously owned by longtime ranchers and other Texas families.

As of last year, Boring employees could apply for a home with rents starting at about $800 a month for a two- or three-bedroom, according to an advertisement for employees viewed by the Journal and people familiar with the plans. If an employee leaves or is fired, he or she would have to vacate the house within 30 days, those people said.

The median rent in Bastrop, Texas, is about $2,200 a month, according to real-estate listing company Zillow Group Inc.

Executives have discussed opening the houses to all employees of Mr. Musk’s companies.

Gapped Bass has filed paperwork with Bastrop County to build 110 more homes in the planned town, which it calls “Project Amazing.”

Bastrop County officials approved street names such as “Boring Boulevard,” “Waterjet Way” and “Cutterhead Crossing,” according to county meeting documents.

Boring plans to convert a home on the property into a Montessori school for as many as 15 students, according to correspondence between a Boring company official and a county government employee.

See here for some background. Believe it or not, there’s a lot more in this story. WSJ articles are usually paywalled but the link I got for this let me right in, so if you can go read the rest. The Austin Chronicle has a summary, and contains this bit of interest, some of which is farther down in the story:

In meetings with landowners, Musk and his employees describe his vision as a utopia along the Colorado River where Musk’s employees can live and work.

Of course a “utopia” or “paradise” centered on the Colorado probably doesn’t bring to mind images of hundreds of thousands of gallons of wastewater being poured into said river, but that is evidently what Musk and his people envision. Musk-owned tunneling company the Boring Co. has applied to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) for permission to discharge up to 140,000 gallons of industrial treated wastewater into the Colorado every day.

That’s how Bastrop local Chap Ambrose, whose house overlooks Musk’s property, found out about this utopian vision – a letter from TCEQ informing him of his neighbor’s wastewater request and of his own ability to publicly comment on the request. Led by Ambrose, a grassroots coalition of Musk’s neighbors called Keep Bastrop Boring hosted a meeting March 8 at the Bastrop Public Library to share their research, and their plans to show up at the TCEQ’s public meeting to discuss the Boring permit 7pm, March 21 at the Hampton Inn in Bastrop. (Anyone can comment.)

This is just the latest in not-helpful ideas Musk has presented in Central Texas. In April last year, we reported that ten Austin city employees flew out to Las Vegas to meet with representatives of the Boring Co. in relation to potential tunnels needed for Project Connect, although Boring Co. has no experience with public transit systems. That communication seemed to fizzle out, as have the many projects Boring Co. has attempted with cities nationwide.

Putting aside whatever animus I may have for Elon Musk, I don’t want anyone dumping 140,000 gallons of industrial treated wastewater into the Colorado River every day. I hope that request gets denied. And all respect to Chap Ambrose for Keep Bastrop Boring. May he succeed in his quest, at least as far as this goes. Daily Kos has more.

A win for butterflies

Mar 6th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I’m sure this will end up in court, but it’s still a good thing.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Monday declared the prostrate milkweed an endangered species and mandated new habitat protections for the plant, closing a chapter in a feud between environmentalists and those who advocate for unfettered border wall construction in South Texas.

The rare milkweed, which grows only in the Texas-Mexico borderlands, has for months been at the center of the fight between butterfly lovers and Texas officials. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who supports new border wall construction, said last year that formally protecting the plant would create an “influx of illegal aliens” and endanger Texans. Environmental groups say the listing will help safeguard the charismatic migratory monarch butterfly, which has a deeply symbiotic relationship with the unassuming weed.

While the prostrate milkweed has a range of around 200 miles, only 24 populations of the species are known to still exist. Those are in Starr and Zapata counties in far South Texas, as well as in neighboring states of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas in northern Mexico.

It’s the rarest species of milkweed, and it’s a critical habitat for monarch butterflies as they head north from Mexico after the winter. Monarch caterpillars can only eat milkweed, and female monarchs only lay their eggs on milkweed. Toxic compounds in the plant, which monarchs consume, help protect the butterflies from predators and give them their signature orange hue. In turn, monarchs help pollinate and spread the plants.

Historically, the FWS said in its final rule on Monday, patches of prostrate milkweed along the Texas-Mexico border were all geographically linked. They were separated and are “very unlikely” to reconnect, the agency said, due to what it called “disturbance” in the region.

That disturbance has included herbicides, oil and gas pipelines and, most notably, border wall construction green-lit by former President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration spurred a firestorm in 2017 when it began bulldozing habitat at the National Butterfly Center in South Texas, damaging habitat used by monarchs and other species. Officials with the center said they weren’t properly notified about construction and publicly criticized the Trump administration. The situation pulled some butterfly lovers into an unlikely partisan battle, and the center was later forced to temporarily close following threats and conspiracies about human trafficking.

While Trump is no longer in office, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a fellow Republican, has repeatedly said he also wants to build a wall. This year, he appointed a state border czar with a goal of speeding up that project.

In the process, the Texas state government became one of the biggest opponents of plans to list the prostrate milkweed as endangered, submitting multiple comments to the FWS. Among them was a comment from the state attorney general’s office warning the designation would have “a significant impact on national security by preventing Texas’s efforts to address the border crisis.” In response, the FWS said in its rule that prostrate milkweed is currently in danger of extinction and that the agency is therefore required to list the species as endangered.

[…]

The monarch butterfly has also been struggling, with population numbers dropping by 99.9% in some areas. The International Union for Conservation of Nature last year listed the monarch as endangered, citing declining milkweed populations as a factor, though federal officials have so far held off on making a similar ruling.

There are many factors behind the decline in milkweed, but one of the biggest is border wall construction, said [Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity]. Even after a section of wall is constructed, there is an “ongoing disturbance” as border officials keep clear land near the wall and drive vehicles along it.

“You don’t just put up the wall and leave it there,” Curry said.

I’ve noted the plight of the monarch butterfly and the battle between Monarch conservation and the border wall before. As you might imagine, I’m happy to see this news. I’m also a hundred percent certain it will draw a lawsuit, and who knows what happens from there. I’m sure I’ll keep an eye on it. In the meantime, let’s be happy that the right thing was done. There will be plenty of time to worry about any negative consequences later.

Are there more parks like Fairfield Lake out there?

Mar 4th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Yes, there are others, but most are not likely to go away any time soon. We hope.

Recent news that Texas’ Fairfield Lake State Park is closing to make way for a new upscale gated community raised a question: How many other state parks could be subject to closure because they aren’t really owned by the state?

The answer, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, is one — Lake Colorado City State Park. That West Texas Park north of San Angelo sits on land owned by The Texas Electric Service Company, and wildlife officials say they are not aware that it is at any risk of closure, said Stephanie Garcia, a spokeswoman for the agency.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department leases 15 parks, including Fairfield Lake and Lake Colorado City, from other entities. “The rest are leased from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, river authorities or city or county governmental entities,” Garcia said.

State wildlife officials have been leasing land for decades and using the properties for state parks, on land ranging in size from less than an acre to several thousand acres, Garcia said.

The lease for Fairfield Lake State Park, which is located between Dallas and Houston, was terminated recently by its lessor, Vistra. The park will be closed to the public Feb. 28 due to its impending sale to make way for a new real estate and golf course development by Todd Interests.

Here is the TPWD list of all 15 parks on leased land, including the two not owned by a governmental entity.

See here and here for the background. As nearly all of these other parks are on land owned by other government entities, it seems unlikely that they could end up getting sold to a developer, at least in the near future. But selling off properties is a thing that local governments do all the time when they need cash for their operating budgets – the city of Houston has done this many times over the past 20 years or so. The feds do it, too – just look at all the new development where post offices used to be. Maybe none of these sites have a Fairfield Lakes destiny in their future. The point is that the only way for the state to have control over that is to own those properties. Perhaps this is the nudge – and the budget, with its large surplus – that the Legislature needs to do something about that.

Actually, we could have saved Fairfield State Park

Feb 28th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

7 comments

Well, well, well.

State officials passed up an offer to save Fairfield Lake State Park this month, just days before the Texas parks department celebrated its centennial, according to newly uncovered text messages.

The 1,821-acre park sits on land the state leases at no cost from the energy company Vistra Corp., part of a larger tract that also includes the 2,400-acre lake and 3,204 acres along the northern shores. It will close permanently Tuesday. Vistra has agreed to sell it to Todd Interests, a Dallas developer.

Screenshots we obtained of a text conversation between Texas Parks and Wildlife Commissioner Arch “Beaver” Aplin, Todd Interests founder Shawn Todd and Vistra CEO Jim Burke show that, even as state officials publicly treated the park’s sale as a triumph of developer interests over the common good, they inexplicably failed to take serious steps to buy most of the parkland. Todd, Aplin and a Vistra spokesperson all verified the authenticity of the messages.

In the texts, Todd offers to complete the purchase of the entire property and then sell the parkland to the state, minus what Todd called a “tiny” carve-out in the northern peninsula of the park, for $60 million. Todd would have retained water rights and restricted some boating activities.

The carve-out would have closed hiking trails but would not have disrupted campsites, picnic areas or boat ramps, Todd said. The precise size of the carve-out was never agreed upon. But apparently, it was still a deal-breaker for the state. In response to Todd’s offer, Aplin texted, “I just spoke with the Lt Gov and he reminded me I asked him and the leadership for the ok to buy it all, not the park minus.”

When Todd pressed for compromise, Aplin responded by emphasizing the importance of the northern peninsula because of its hiking trails. The deal fell through.

The texts also reveal that the state has never made a competitive offer to buy the land. The agreement under contract is for approximately $110 million, the texts say. The state’s best offer, which Aplin texted Feb. 2, was $60 million plus a tax incentive in the form of a conservation easement to Vistra. The offer to Todd was simply for him to walk away, expenses paid, out of “altruism.” Aplin said he later offered Todd a fee in the amount of 3% to 6% of the value of the deal.

The $60 million was for the entire property, not just parkland. Aplin told us he wanted to buy the lake and expand the park.

“TPWD can commit to a 60 MM deal with commission approval,” Aplin texted. “My concept was an altruistic approach for Todd’s and Vistra. I know you have a deal at 100+ MM. We can’t get there, hence my altruistic suggestion.”

Aplin offered other perks to sweeten the deal.

“Feb 8th Centennial celebration, 100 yrs of parks with Governor Abbott presenting. It’s a big deal,” Aplin texted. “We announce this gift, both of you present, with me and the Gov, on 8th at our biggest celebration ever.” He even offered naming rights.

It’s hard to estimate the size of the donation Aplin was soliciting here. From Vistra, it was $50 million minus the value of the tax incentive. From Todd, it was opportunity cost. Todd told us he expects to make hundreds of millions developing the site. The water rights alone are worth that much, he said. When we asked Aplin, founder of the Buc-ee’s convenience store chain, if he would walk away from that much money, he wouldn’t answer.

[…]

There’s another conundrum with the state’s handling of this deal. In 2018, Aplin said TPWD asked Vistra to sell only the park portion of the property. Vistra declined, a spokesperson confirmed. But this month, when Todd offered the park portion, state officials wanted to buy the whole thing, at half price.

When the whole property was for sale, the state only wanted part. When part was for sale, the state wanted the whole thing.

At one point, the parties discussed yet another option. Todd offered to walk away in exchange for $50 million and 250 acres, and let TPWD negotiate its own deal with Vistra. Aplin declined.

None of this answers the more frustrating question of why this issue was allowed to get out of hand. In 2019, the department’s then-Executive Director Carter Smith suggested the state’s plan was wishing and hoping.

“It would be our hope that we could continue to see that lease extended with the new buyer of that property so that the state park did not go away, but ultimately we’re going to be at the mercy of the new owner,” Smith said in a hearing.

See here and here for the background. This is on the DMN editorial page for some reason, but it doesn’t matter, the story is clear enough. I can’t tell if Aplin and the TPWD are being so erratic because they sincerely believe they are constrained by what the rest of state government will let them do, or if they just don’t have the processes and organization to figure out this admittedly complex but utterly solvable problem. All I can do at this point is shake my head.

As for what could be done now, leave it to Greg Abbott to do the barest minimum possible.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has offered support for preserving Fairfield Lake State Park, which is scheduled to close within days as a private developer moves forward with purchasing the land.

[…]

Abbott, in a Thursday interview with the Star-Telegram, didn’t specifically address the possibility of eminent domain. But he said he wants to see the park remain public.

“We’re working with Texas Parks and Wildlife on doing everything we can to preserve that park,” Abbott said.

I have no idea what that means. That story was from before the DMN’s editorial, so “doing everything we can” would have sounded different when he said it. I still think the odds of the Lege taking the park land back are very small, but maybe not zero. We’ll know in a few weeks if that or any other bill related to this is likely to go anywhere.

The Denton experience with marijuana decriminalization

Feb 24th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

It’s been a challenge.

Four months after a majority of voters approved Proposition B, Denton’s misdemeanor marijuana decriminalization ordinance continues to be a difficult issue for city staff to implement completely, according to City Manager Sara Hensley on Tuesday.

Hensley, who gave a presentation to the Denton City Council, said that since Nov. 1 — about a week before Denton voters passed Prop B — 52 citations and/or arrests were made by Denton police for misdemeanor marijuana possession or paraphernalia related to marijuana.

Of those 52 cases, Hensley pointed out that 23 arrests were for primary violations other than marijuana possession. Those violations include issues such as warrants, criminal trespass or public intoxication.

Hensley said that certain parts of the ordinance simply couldn’t be implemented because it violates state and federal law.

“I recognize the voters have spoken,” Hensley told council members Tuesday afternoon. “I understand that, but we don’t have the authority.”

Nick Stevens, a board member of the advocacy group Decriminalize Denton, said later Tuesday evening at the City Council meeting that what some council members and city staff are saying publicly is different than what they claimed privately.

Stevens also said the ordinance has become a political issue instead of a nonpartisan one, as indicated by the overwhelming majority of voters who approved the measure in November. He wondered why the city didn’t provide the demographic breakdown of those citations during Hensley’s presentation because historically, minorities have been unfairly targeted by law enforcement.

“The disappointing part — outside of the breaking local law — is not giving the demographics,” Stevens told the Denton Record-Chronicle.

The Record-Chronicle requested demographic information on the citations from the Denton police Tuesday afternoon.

“All of the information the City has to provide will be included in the City Manager’s presentation today to City Council,” the Denton Police Department media relations team said in an email Tuesday. “We do not have any additional information prior to them receiving that work session report.”

[…]

At Tuesday’s Denton City Council work session, Police Chief Doug Shoemaker was also on hand during Hensley’s presentation to answer questions and reassured council members that misdemeanor amounts of marijuana would continue to be a low priority for police. He also reaffirmed that the odor of marijuana wasn’t initiating probable cause and search and seizure issues, though it was part of the process in some cases.

Denton Municipal Judge Tyler Atkinson discussed the deferred adjudication process that is available to people who receive misdemeanor marijuana charges and how the municipal court does its best to work with offenders by lowering fines, offering community service and other opportunities.

Atkinson also mentioned that the court sends text messages to people to let them know about the process and how to expunge their records. The videos are also posted on YouTube.

“We’re the only city in the whole state that sends them out and [posts them] online,” Atkinson said.

After Hensley’s presentation, council member Jesse Davis mentioned that it has been an all-or-nothing-type situation with the decriminalization issue and suggested finding a “middle ground” by implementing parts of the ordinance that doesn’t violate state law.

In Hensley’s presentation, she pointed out that the City Council does have the discretion to amend the budget in regards to how city funds are spent.

For example, the Proposition B ordinance states no city funds will be used for THC testing of misdemeanor amounts of marijuana. But, it requires a council approval and not a voter one under the city charter, as Mayor Pro Tem Brian Beck pointed out in early December when he tried to get his fellow council members to pass a duplicate ordinance of Proposition B to give it the budgetary teeth it needed.

“I’m willing to talk about what we have in our authority to do,” Davis said regarding the budget and which part of the ordinance can be implemented. “It is fair. It is not fair for the voters to tell us to break the law. That is nonsense and not our job.”

Beck and fellow council members Vicki Byrd and Brandon Chase McGee encouraged city staff and other council members to follow the will of the voters and allow the courts to decide what can and can’t be implemented.

“I think we need to fully implement it and if the state slaps our hands back, we know where we are,” McGee said. “We’re answerable to the people. None of us got 70% of the votes. None of us. How often do we see that 70% pass anywhere? There is no reason not to do it, so let’s do it.”

A video of how to expunge one’s record in Denton is embedded in the story. I found this to be fascinating, and quite different from the experiences in Bell County and Hays County, not to mention the pre-vote conflicts in San Antonio. All of that was discussed in the story as well, so go read the rest. There is a legitimate question about what a City Council is supposed to do with a voter-passed ordinance that one can reasonably read to be in violation of state law, at least in part. The bigger issue here remains the fact that state and federal law are much stricter about marijuana than the public wants them to be. Cities can only nibble around the edges of that, and at their own peril in a state like Texas. The problem needs to be resolved at a higher level, and that’s a much more difficult thing to do.

Some rocky times for Texas’ cryptocurrency miners

Feb 21st, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Their boundless optimism never wavers, however.

Cryptocurrency miners began flocking to Texas in the past five years, drawn by the state’s low energy costs and relaxed regulations. As they began setting up shop, lawmakers and local officials were touting the boom as an economic lifeline for the state’s struggling rural communities where many landed.

Nearly 30 crypto mines set up shop in Texas, big data centers that consume tremendous amounts of energy to run banks of computers humming away to mine new bitcoins.

But now, many — if not most — are struggling to stay afloat amid the plummeting value of the commodity they create and soaring electricity costs.

“Bitcoin miners are operating under the very slimmest of margins right now,” said Lee Bratcher — president of the nonprofit Texas Blockchain Council. “There are not many bitcoin miners that are making profits similar to what we would have seen. The bitcoin mining industry, as a whole, is tightening the belt.”

That’s a big turnaround from 2021, when bitcoin’s value peaked at $68,000 and miners collectively earned more than $60 million a day, according to data from Blockchain.com. By the end of 2022, the value had plummeted to less than $17,000 — and miners’ take was $10 million a day. As a result, mining companies that borrowed millions to set up during the bull run now are facing uncertain futures. Several have gone bankrupt. Others are trying to sell off assets. Some have started returning equipment to bankers who financed it.

Shares in Riot Platforms Inc., which operates the state’s largest bitcoin mine northeast of Austin, are down about 60 percent from this time last year. They closed Thursday at $6.13.

Still, many in the crypto mining industry and those who support it remain optimistic it can weather the downturn, saying that it provides a side benefit for Texas as a means of managing the state’s electrical grid, which can also be an occasional source of substantial revenue for the mining companies.

[…]

[Bratcher] estimated that bitcoin mining created about 2,000 direct and 20,000 indirect jobs statewide.

“It’s still contributing to the Texas economy at a pretty significant clip,” he said. “The miners are still following through on their aspirations to be good citizens and good corporate citizens.”

Opponents, though, have decried crypto miners as profiteering on the state’s electrical grid while generating a dubious product.

Ed Hirs, an energy fellow and economics lecturer at the University of Houston, said crypto enables bad actors to avoid local and state taxes and hide activities when engaging in criminal activities. And bitcoin miners, he said, have been striking moneymaking deals with the state’s struggling power grid to buy energy at low rates to make bitcoins.

“They remind me of used car salesmen,” he said during a recent interview.

[…]

Murtuza Jadliwala, an associate professor who taught an undergraduate class on cryptocurrency at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said he supports research into the “groundbreaking” blockchain technology — a digital ledger that enables bitcoin by recording the history of transactions. But he’s not a fan of bitcoin itself.

“Do we need cryptocurrencies in our life? I don’t think so,” he said. “There are already good forms of currencies that humans have gotten used to.”

As part of his academic research, Jadiwala has interviewed state comptrollers around the nation to assess economic arguments for bitcoin mining.

“From the states’ perspective, I presume bitcoin mining can be profitable as a business,” he said. “In Texas, we already have pollution and a climate crisis, and on top of it you’re creating this additional pressure on a delicate energy ecosystem. Is it worth it? It might have been worth it if it’s basically doing something good for humanity. I personally don’t see that.”

The Texas cryptominers’ problems mirror those elsewhere, which I hope isn’t too much of a surprise to anyone. But the fall of FTX a few months ago, which is one cause of the current woes but by no means all of them, didn’t dampen anyone’s enthusiasm, so there’s no reason to believe that the “we just have to ride this out” mentality is going anywhere. Much of the growth of cryptomining in Texas has been in rural areas, and I continue to wonder what will happen if the gravy train derails. Maybe if things slow down that will answer some of the questions about electricity use that have been raised. Until then, I’m just going to keep an eye on this. I remain highly skeptical but oddly fascinated by the whole thing.

Fairfield Lake State Park is officially closing

Feb 16th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

At the end of the month.

A popular state park southeast of Dallas is poised to become an exclusive community with multimillion-dollar homes and a private golf course.

Fairfield Lake State Park will close Feb. 28 after months of negotiations between private companies and the state failed to secure a deal.

The landowner of Fairfield Lake State Park is selling the property to a Dallas developer, who plans to build the high-end gated community. On Monday, Texas Parks and Wildlife received a notice to vacate the 50-year-old lease within 120 days.

Although the park has been open to the public since 1976, the property is owned by Vistra Energy, which has leased the land to the state at no cost.

Vistra is selling to Todd Interests, the developer responsible for high-end projects in downtown Dallas, including The National and East Quarter. The developer, Shawn Todd, has indicated he will no longer lease the land to the state.

[…]

The park’s closure comes at a critical time: Texas is growing fast, with the population soon expected to hit 30 million. Park visitation skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic and shows no signs of slowing, park officials have said.

In 2021, Texas state parks had a record 9.94 million visitors. Last year, Fairfield welcomed 82,000 visitors, more than during any year in its history

On average, parks are seeing a 2% to 5% jump in visitors each year. This year, the number is expected to top 10 million for the first time.

Texas, however, lags behind other states in public parkland, according to a report by the nonprofit Environment Texas Research and Policy Center. The state ranks 35th in the nation for state park acreage per capita. Texas has 8 million more people than Florida, but 86,000 fewer acres of state parkland, the report says.

“Texas really doesn’t have enough state park land,” said Janice Bezanson, senior policy director for the Texas Conservation Alliance. “It’s particularly sad to see a popular park shut down at a time when we should be celebrating our state parks.”

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the state’s parks system, with numerous celebrations planned across the state. Later this year, Palo Pinto Mountains State Park is scheduled to open about 75 miles west of Fort Worth. It will be the region’s first new state park in 25 years.

Elected leaders on Tuesday bemoaned the park’s closure and urged the companies to continue to work with the state for a solution.

“Texas cannot lose a state park to development,” state Sen. Charles Perry, a Lubbock Republican and chairman of the state’s water, agriculture and rural affairs committee, said in a written statement. “Some 80,000 hardworking Texans will lose a place of solitude, sport fishing and priceless memory making if the park is closed.”

See here for the background. It’s a shame, but it’s not unexpected at this point. The real question is what if anything the Lege will do about it. I don’t see them taking action about this deal, though as we well know by now the current Lege has no problems with barging into situations it had previously left alone. As the story notes, more than a dozen other state parks are on leased land, meaning that someday this could be their fate as well. The Lege would be well within their normal parameters to do something there, and with a ginormous surplus the funds are there to just buy up all that land, which the TPWD didn’t have the money to do for Fairfield. So what’s it gonna be, Sen. Perry? You’ve done the talk. Got any action in there? The Chron has more.

UPDATE: A potential course of action, from the Trib:

State Rep. Angelia Orr, R-Itasca, whose district includes the park, filed a bill Tuesday that, if passed by the Legislature and signed by the governor, would allow Texas Parks and Wildlife to use eminent domain to seize the park’s land.

Orr said lawmakers also are working on a bill to prevent more state parks from being closed.

“This treasured piece of Texas has blessed our local families and countless visitors for generations, and losing it is hard to comprehend,” she said. “I join park lovers in Freestone County and across the state in expressing my sincere disappointment in hearing this news. As a result, we are now working on legislation to prevent this from ever occurring in any of our other beautiful state parks going forward.”

That us a clear path forward. Less clear that Republicans will take it, given how upset some of them are about eminent domain in other contexts, but ideological consistency is not the point here. I would classify this bill as an underdog, if only because most bills are, but if enough Republicans are upset about this, it will have a chance.

State Sen. Charles Schwertner, R-Georgetown, Chairman of the Business and Commerce, Finance and State Affairs Committee voiced his displeasure on Tuesday.

“Today’s heartbreaking announcement of the closing of Fairfield Lake State Park is a tremendous loss for Freestone County and all Texans who enjoy our state’s unique parklands,” he said. “It is unfortunate that Vistra and this private developer were unable to come to an agreement that would have allowed the state of Texas to purchase the park from Vistra to maintain it for future generations of Texans.”

There’s a bill that’s just been filed that may be of interest to you, Senator. Go talk to your colleague in the House about it.

DCAD’s ransomware experience

Feb 11th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

A story of great interest to me.

On Election Day 2022, Dallas County Chief Appraiser Ken Nolan and his staff showed up for work, but there was an unexpected problem. Nothing worked.

The Dallas Central Appraisal District’s desktop computers, all 300 of them, were frozen. Emails didn’t go through either. The website disappeared.

The only message that came through was from the world’s No. 1 cyber extortion group – Royal Ransomware.

Nolan recalled from memory what the message said: “We are Royal Ransomware, and if you’re reading this note, we’ve taken control of your systems. We can help you guys. We just need some money.”

What happened next amounted to the worst time in Nolan’s 42-year career at DCAD, including the past 18 years as chief appraiser.

The second largest appraisal district in the state struggled for the next 72 days without its website, historical data, messages and more. Ninety percent of the office data is online, not on paper.

The hackers demanded almost $1 million, Nolan said. “I was ready to tell them to piss off, and we’ll see if we can get going on our own.”

But that wouldn’t work. “We were scared to death to touch anything,” he said.

[…]

Texas appraisal districts are a favored target for Royal. In December, the Travis Central Appraisal District in Austin was similarly hacked by Royal. That was the second time for Travis, which also suffered a 2019 attack.

DCAD backed up its web data every day in the cloud. But the hackers found a way to break into that, too.

Nolan believes the attack was unknowingly launched by an employee who clicked on a fake email that appeared to come from a vendor. Who was it?

“Trust me. I’ve asked that question,” he said.

[…]

For blame on matters like this, victims should look in a mirror, says Auburn University information systems professor Casey Cegielski. Because these incidents usually begin when an employee clicks on a dirty link on a web page or in email, these attacks are self-inflicted wounds.

“There should be consequences for failure on the part of the employees,” he said.

DCAD has hired a third cyber company to monitor its entire system.

Employees must now use two-step authentication to log into the system. To get the code each day, “You have to have a cell phone to work here,” Nolan said.

DCAD said it was unable to immediately say how much it paid outside companies for work on the ransomware attack.

Getting the decryption key After getting paid, Royal handed over the decryption key. The district is back in business. But not completely.

Some work, such as registering homestead exemptions, has fallen two months behind. The mobile version of the site isn’t working yet. The district is asking property owners with outstanding issues to give it three more weeks to catch up before it’s ready to tackle a backlog.

After contacting the FBI and hiring a cybersecurity company, which negotiated with the hackers on their behalf, DCAD paid $170K to get the decryption key for their data. The real cost as noted is likely a lot higher, and that’s without factoring in in the stress, the lost time and productivity, and the confidence of their customers.

As we know, multiple other government entities in Texas have been hit with ransomware attacks. While banning TikTok on government-owned devices has its security merits, a stronger focus on ransomware and defenses against it should be a higher priority. We are quite attuned to it where I work, I can say that much. Given the recent history and the risks entailed, there really ought to be more of a coordinated effort from the state to emphasize cybersecurity. DCAD’s experience was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. And that goes for every other agency in the state.

The 988 hotline has been very busy lately

Feb 10th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I don’t suppose this is a surprise.

Calls to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline have surged in Texas and the U.S. since its launch last summer, highlighting the demand for mental health services in the wake of the pandemic and the related workforce challenges.

Staff at four call centers in Texas answered 9,478 calls in December 2022, a significant increase from 5,043 calls in December 2021, said Jennifer Battle, vice president for community access and engagement at The Harris Center.

The Harris Center in Houston handled more than half of those calls, Battle said, with trained crisis counselors working around the clock to pick up the ringing phones.

The nation has seen climbing call volume over the last six months after transitioning from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a 1-800 number, to a shorter, more memorable three-digit code. People experiencing thoughts of suicide, a mental health or substance use crisis, or other emotional distress, can call, text or chat online 24/7 with a trained crisis counselor.

The ease of access, increased awareness from media and social media campaigns, investments by states and federal agencies to create funding streams and build the crisis care network, and the significant mental health impacts from the pandemic have contributed to the soaring call volume, Battle said.

Calling the crisis lifeline should be similar to calling 911 or 211 for other services, she said.

“Our hope is that over time it helps normalize and de-stigmatize the act of asking for mental health support,” she said.

Texas answers roughly 70% of the in-state calls, an improvement from roughly 40% several years ago, Battle said. The rest get diverted to a national back-up call center. Although the state lags behind others by that metric and is working to improve upon it, Battle said, Texas still answers more calls than every state except California and New York.

Texas has been keeping up with the demand with funding and resources from state and federal partners, Battle said. But hiring and retaining the workforce for an emotionally demanding job with night and weekend hours remains a challenge.

“The last things we wanted was to have 988 roll out and then not be able to meet demand,” she said. “(But) it’s been very successful. We’ve been able to talk to and serve so many additional folks right here in our community.”

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission plans to put $33 million in federal grants toward workforce expansion and increased responsiveness to the hotline through 2024, according to an agency spokesperson. Much of the funding comes from the Mental Health Block Grant, although Texas additionally received grant money from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

I’m glad to hear that it has been adequately funded, as clearly the need is there, but as with anything else in this state I worry about its long-term prospects. I can’t imagine this counts as a priority for our state’s leadership, so the possibility of it becoming a victim of belt-tightening, reorganization, or just neglect is present. At least in the near term it looks good. It would be a good idea to let your State Rep and State Senator know that you think this service should be fully supported.

RIP, Jeff Blackburn

Feb 9th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Here’s a guy who made a difference.

In the summer of 1999, police in the tiny town of Tulia carried out one of the largest drug stings in West Texas history. Nearly 50 people were arrested, almost all of them Black, and several were quickly sentenced to life in prison. “Tulia’s Streets Cleared of Garbage,” the local newspaper declared.

Convictions in the remaining cases seemed all but certain, even though they were riddled with inconsistencies. None of the defendants had drugs on them when they were arrested and the allegations against them hinged on the often-contradictory testimony of a single undercover police officer. So in a last-ditch effort, one of the defendants’ lawyers asked for help from a prominent young attorney in Amarillo named Jeff Blackburn.

Over the next four years, Blackburn exposed one of the country’s most celebrated drug busts as a sham. Together with a team of lawyers and activists, he helped prove that the undercover officer was a serial liar. He secured early releases for dozens of the defendants and even convinced then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry to pardon them.

Blackburn’s work in Tulia helped set the stage for more than a decade of reforms to Texas’ criminal justice system — many of which are still considered the most transformational in the country. As founder of the Innocence Project of Texas, he helped exonerate dozens more people and, in the process, convinced lawmakers to do improve evidence requirements in criminal cases and increase compensation for the wrongfully convicted.

On Tuesday, the man once called the “trouble-makingest lawyer in West Texas” died of kidney cancer at age 65. In a series of recent interviews with the Houston Chronicle, Blackburn reflected on the changes that he helped bring about and insisted that the work was bigger than any one person.

“I really dislike the notion of people going, ‘Here was this extraordinary guy or person, and that’s how things happened,’” he said from his home near Taos, New Mexico, where he lived out his final days with friends and family. “I’m an ordinary lawyer.”

Any other conclusion, Blackburn said, is “essentially discouraging regular people to take up the cause.”

Blackburn went on to found the Innocence Project of Texas, helped get the Timothy Cole Act and Timothy Cole Innocence Commission passed, pushed for reforms on the use of confidential informants, and more. I blogged about the Tulia stuff here, and I think the original Texas Observer story about it is here. The Chron’s obit for him is long and richly detailed, so go read it. It’s also a reminder that a lot of work on this subject remains – among other things, it’s still easy for corrupt cops who get fired at one law enforcement agency to get hired by another, a key aspect to the Tulia story – and the bipartisan consensus on various forms of criminal justice reform has largely been broken. But that work is as urgent as ever, and it’s not going to do itself. Read about Jeff Blackburn and remember his legacy.

EPA asked to investigate TCEQ’s water permitting process

Feb 5th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Need to keep an eye on this.

The Environmental Protection Agency says an informal investigation is underway after more than two dozen environmental advocacy groups submitted a petition against the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The petition alleges that state regulators are not doing enough to protect water quality in Texas, as is federally required.

The environmental groups are asking the federal agency to step in and repair Texas’ “broken system” of issuing permits to control water pollution, saying the state has made it too easy for industries to contaminate its water.

“We really feel that the TCEQ regulations, frankly, are not sufficient to ensure clean water,” said Annalisa Peace, executive director of Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance, an environmental protection nonprofit based in San Antonio.

Historically, the TCEQ has been criticized for being a “reluctant” regulator and for being industry friendly. Many environmental groups have been pushing for permitting transparency, opportunities for more community input, and accountability of the state agency.

The Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance, Environmental Integrity Project, Sierra Club, Clean Water Action, Public Citizen and 16 other groups filed the petition in 2021, stating that Texas has a major water pollution problem with state rivers, lakes and estuaries “so polluted they are considered impaired under the federal Clean Water Act.”

The Clean Water Act is a 1972 law designed to reduce pollution in America’s waterways. According to the petition, the state’s water permitting process does not recognize people who use waterways for recreational purposes, such as fishing or kayaking, to petition for a contested court hearing — only those who own land nearby.

The petition also states that industries are not required to document “the economic or social necessity of projects.” Environment advocates believe companies should provide documentation that shows there are no other options to their projects that could avoid pollution of the waters in order to obtain permits.

“They are the ones who are wanting to pollute the environment,” Eric Allmon, an attorney representing the petitioners, said about the industry. “The applicant should bear the burden of demonstrating compliance.”

Allmon said the EPA’s informal investigation is a preliminary step that determines whether there is any merit to the allegations from environmental advocates before the agency formally reviews the TCEQ’s track record on enforcing water quality standards.

[…]

If the EPA concludes that TCEQ is not enforcing the Clean Water Act, then the federal agency can proceed with a formal investigation and could revoke TCEQ’s authority to regulate water quality. The TCEQ would have 90 days to fix the problems or lose its authority.

I confess that I look at this with at least as much trepidation as any other emotion. Sure, this could end up with the TCEQ actually doing more to protect Texas’ waters. It could also end up with Ken Paxton filing a lawsuit against the EPA that ultimately results in SCOTUS doing serious damage to the Clean Water Act and/or the EPA itself. I have no trouble believing that the TCEQ has at best been half-assing this job, and I don’t want to tell these groups to be ruled by fear. But in the current climate, with the courts being what they are and a state government that has no interest in serving the public, we have to take this kind of thing into consideration. I hope I’m being way too pessimistic.

Never underestimate the power of ducks

Feb 5th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I don’t track “favorite stories” for a given year, but if I did, this would be a lock to make it for this year.

Alicia Rowe, an Austin therapist, first came across news of her death in a British tabloid.

The Daily Mail UK had run a story online about how her parents, Kathleen and George Rowe, had been sued for feeding the neighborhood ducks after feuding with their homeowners’ association in Cypress.

The article offered zero ambiguity about her demise: “Texas couple who began feeding neighborhood ducks to cope with loss of only daughter are sued for (up to) $250,000 by HOA for causing a nuisance and are forced to sell home to cover costs,” read the article’s headline.

Alicia, who is in her 30s, was the Rowes’ only child.

She stared at the article in shock. Then she wondered how she had died. She had her suspicions.

When she texted friends about the surreal development, they quickly found that versions of the story, which first ran in the Houston Chronicle in July, were everywhere: Alicia had also died in the Washington Post and in Business Insider India and in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The rash of stories had all come out roughly five months earlier, and thoughts about what people who knew her parents imagined had happened to her – what they were still thinking – niggled at the corner of her mind.

So she called the Houston Chronicle reporter who broke the story, and the reporter called Kathleen and George Rowe’s lawyer, who called Kathleen.

“She wanted me to communicate her apologies,” the lawyer, Richard Weaver, told the Chronicle shortly afterward. “She reiterated her words to me. And it was that she had lost her daughter. When she told me she’d lost her daughter, I thought she’d passed away.”

Five months had passed, Kathleen and her lawyer had spoken to additional outlets and no one had asked for a correction.

Alicia had cut off contact with her mother years ago; she was estranged, not dead. The misunderstanding, by multiple parties (for the original story, the Chronicle had also spoken with Kathleen about the “loss” of her daughter), had landed everyone involved in a predicament. Newspapers, as a rule, don’t use euphemisms to talk about death.

[…]

A Chronicle tool charting how many people are visiting its website showed 83 people read the story in the month after the correction was issued. More than 100,000 readers had viewed the Chronicle story in the months prior.

That’s why the Chronicle proposed this followup story about her predicament, Alicia agreed. “It’s this weird intersection of media, family trauma and how fast information gets around,” she said.

Alicia said the last time she was on speaking terms with her mother was roughly six years ago.

“There was a lot of both physical and emotional abuse in my home growing up,” she said. Alicia said she was often manipulated through lies and misleading information, while being presented to those outside the family as the problem child in order to garner sympathy. That pattern led her to ask her mother to cease contact.

Soon after, her mother started telling neighbors that her daughter had “passed,” Alicia said. “She had taken down all the photos of me in the house and had planted a memorial garden to me in the backyard. I had this series of letters, basically saying, ‘If you want people to not think you are dead, you need to come back and talk to us and tell everybody that you are not dead.’”

She no longer had a copy of the letters, and Kathleen did not return phone calls about the factual dispute.

Alicia said that she had a hunch why her mom had told her lawyer and the media that she started feeding ducks after the loss of her only child: “to have a reason why she’s not following the rules.”

“It’s kind of hard to be mad at the lady with a dead daughter that just wants to feed the ducks, right?”

Hard to beat a story that contains family estrangement, newspaper style guides, and ducks. My first thought when I saw this was that surely I had blogged about the original article and this woman’s duck-feeding parents and their legal issues. But that was not the case, though I did blog about a different duck feeding matter. Instead, I had blathered about it on the radio, which is why it stuck in my mind. One way or the other, I am just drawn to a good duck tale.

This article also contained an update on the original:

Kathleen and George did not respond to calls for comment on this story. They were not home at duck-feeding time on a recent Tuesday. The ducks that had once lined up outside their porch, craning their necks to see the owners, were also gone. In their place was a “Sale Pending” sign and a lockbox on the door. The couple was moving out. On Jan. 19, their lawsuit with their HOA in the masterplanned neighborhood of Bridgeland settled.

I don’t have anything to add to that. If you read that original story, whatever you may have thought about the main characters and their HOA, now you know more.

Somehow, Texas could lose a state park

Feb 4th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

You wouldn’t think that would be possible, but you would be wrong.

Texas is at risk of losing a state park forever.

Fairfield Lake State Park, an 1,800-acre gem overlooking a beautiful 2,400-acre lake, nestled within the convergence of three Texas ecoregions – the Post Oak Savannah, Piney Woods and Blackland Prairies – and along the bustling I-45 corridor between Houston and DFW, could be lost to private development if a deal is not reached soon to continue the park’s existence.

“We are absolutely, clearly in dire straits of losing our park,” Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission chairman Arch “Beaver” Aplin III said during a recent briefing at a commission work session.

Texas owns most of its state parks, but not Fairfield Lake.

The lake was created in 1969 by Dallas Power and Light Company, Texas Electric Service Company and Texas Power and Light Company to cool the coal plant, Big Brown. Those three companies merged and eventually became TXU Energy, which eventually conveyed the property to Luminant, a sister company under Vistra Corp. The park property has been leased to the state since 1971, free of cost.

In 2018, Big Brown shut down and Vistra Corp/Luminant gave TPWD a two-year notice that it was going to end the lease. Since then, the lease has been extended, allowing the park to continue operations after 2020.

The park was put up publicly for sale in 2021, and the entire property, (the TPWD park, lake and additional land totaling more than 5,000 acres) is currently under contract with a private developer out of Dallas, Todd Interests. The lease with TPWD can be terminated with 120 days of notice and the park could close as early as this month. Public access to the lake would end, too.

[…]

Despite the hope to buy and eventually expand the park, TPWD remains in a challenging position. The property is under contract and chairman Aplin said during the commission work session that the buyer is intent on canceling the lease. Todd Interests did not respond to a request for comment.

“It’s all hands on deck, it’s very important to us,” Aplin said.

“The irony here of this being our centennial-year celebration and losing one of our gem state parks, is just absolutely unacceptable to me. Everyone has my word that we will work as hard as we can, but we can only deal with the cards that we’ve been dealt.”

Rep. Ken King (R), chair of the Texas House of Representatives’ culture, recreation and tourism committee during the 2021-22 session, vowed to not let this park go away quietly.

“Texas Power and Light was a regulated utility. Vistra is now going to sell the property they’ve acquired since. They’re not a regulated utility… There’s almost $70 million of taxpayer-funded improvements on this property. If they were still a tax-regulated utility, that money would have to go back to the ratepayers. That’s not how this works, now. They’re going to make a huge profit at the expense of the state of Texas. I think it is categorically wrong, and I’m going to fight it the whole way,” he told the commission.

Losing a park like this to private development would be unprecedented. “To our knowledge, we have not closed any sites,” a TPWD spokesperson said.

Fairfield Lake State Park is in Freestone County, between Buffalo and Corsicana off I-45, so closer to Dallas than Houston. As the story notes, the TPWD didn’t have the money to afford the property when it came on the market, but after the passage of prop 5 in 2019, which allocated more funds to TPWD via sales taxes on various sporting goods, it could try again now, but it may be too late. I’d suggest the Lege get involved, but it may be too late for that as well. If that’s the case, the Lege could still pass a law to require some level of public access to this land and the lake, and could put restrictions on any sales like it in the future. There are ways to at least mitigate this and learn from the experience, so I hope they will do that. We’ll see.

(If you’re trying to remember where you’ve heard the name Arch “Beaver” Aplin before, he’s the co-founder of Buc-ee’s.)

Winter storm 2023

Feb 3rd, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

5 comments

I don’t know if this one will get a name, but I can imagine what a lot of folks are calling it.

Thousands of frustrated Texans shivered in their homes Thursday after more than a day without power, including many in the state capital, as an icy winter storm that has been blamed for at least 10 traffic deaths lingered across much of the southern U.S.

Even as temperatures finally pushed above freezing in Austin — and were expected to climb past 50 degrees (10 Celsius) on Friday — the relief will be just in time for an Arctic front to drop from Canada and threaten northern states. New England in particular is forecast to see the coldest weather in decades, with wind chills that could dive lower than minus 50.

Across Texas, 430,000 customers lacked power Thursday, according to PowerOutage.us. But the failures were most widespread in Austin, where frustration mounted among more than 156,000 customers over 24 hours after their electricity went out, which for many also meant their heat. Power failures have affected about 30% of customers in the city of nearly a million at any given time since Wednesday.

[…]

For many Texans, it was the second time in three years that a February freeze — temperatures were in the 30s Thursday with wind chills below freezing — caused prolonged outages and uncertainty over when the lights would come back on.

As outages dragged on, city officials came under mounting criticism for not providing estimates of when power would be restored and for neglecting to hold a news conference until Thursday. Mayor Kirk Watson said Thursday the city would review communication protocols for future disasters.

Austin Energy at one point estimated that all power would be restored by Friday evening, then later stated Thursday that full restoration would now take “longer than initially anticipated.” Soon after, Watson tweeted, “This is a dynamic situation and change is inevitable but Austin Energy must give folks clear and accurate info so they can plan accordingly.”

Unlike the 2021 blackouts in Texas, when hundreds of people died after the state’s grid was pushed to the brink of total failure because of a lack of generation, the outages in Austin this time were largely the result of frozen equipment and ice-burdened trees and limbs falling on power lines. The city’s utility warned all power may not be restored until Friday as ice continued causing outages even as repairs were finished elsewhere.

“It feels like two steps forward and three steps back,” said Jackie Sargent, general manager of Austin Energy.

School systems in the Dallas and Austin area, plus many in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Memphis, Tennessee, closed Thursday as snow, sleet and freezing rain continued to push through. Public transportation in Dallas also experienced “major delays” early Thursday, according to a statement from Dallas Area Rapid Transit.

The weather has been lousy here in Houston, but it has not been freezing, so we have escaped the worst of this. I feel so bad for everyone in the affected areas. The story says that so far seven people have died on the roads as a result of this storm.

On Twitter, I’ve seen a lot of people talking about the trees on their streets and the sound they make as they collapse under the weight of the ice on them. The Trib covered this as well.

All day and all night after the ice storm struck, Austin residents listened for the cracks, splinters and crashes. Each crack of a falling limb could shut the power off — if their home hadn’t gone dark already.

“It’s a really, really thick layer of ice,” said Jonathan Motsinger, the Central Texas operations department head for Texas A&M Forest Service. “Trees can only support weight to a certain extent, and then they fail.”

Across the Texas Hill Country this week, trees snapped under the weight of ice that accumulated during multiple days of freezing rain. Some of the most iconic trees were among the most severely damaged: live oaks (some of them hundreds of years old), ashe junipers (the scourge of allergy sufferers during “cedar fever” season), cedar elms. As their branches gave way, they took neighboring power lines with them.

“The amount of weight that has accumulated on the vegetation is probably historic, extreme,” Austin Energy general manager Jackie Sargent said during a Thursday press conference.

Ice can increase the weight of tree branches up to 30 times, said Kerri Dunn, a communications manager for Oncor. The utility reported that almost 143,000 of its customers in North, Central and West Texas were without power Thursday afternoon.

“The amount of weight that has accumulated on the vegetation is probably historic, extreme,” Austin Energy general manager Jackie Sargent said during a Thursday press conference.

Ice can increase the weight of tree branches up to 30 times, said Kerri Dunn, a communications manager for Oncor. The utility reported that almost 143,000 of its customers in North, Central and West Texas were without power Thursday afternoon.

[…]

Austin has almost 34 million trees in the city, according to an online tree census maintained by Texas A&M Forest Service and the U.S. Forest Service.

“It’s a big point of pride,” said Keith Mars, who oversees the city of Austin’s Community Tree Preservation Division.

Mars said that shade from the trees saves Austin residents millions of dollars a year in energy costs by cooling homes during hot summer days.

“Trees are infrastructure,” Mars said. “How much maintenance and how much care we provide, so that [the trees] can continue providing those other benefits, is the kind of tradeoff that we all have.”

I don’t really have a point to make here. I hope everyone who has had to endure this week’s terrible weather has made it through all right, and that there are enough trees left over to keep things shaded. The Austi Chronicle has more.

Project Unloaded

Jan 28th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I approve of this.

Jordan Phan spoke into the camera in a Tik Tok post with background music and several hash tags.

“I’ve spent the summer researching whether guns make us more or less safe, and the unfortunate truth is that guns make us all less safe,” the college sophomore said, listing several facts about women’s safety and domestic violence. “Guns are rarely used to protect, but often used to kill.”

The post was part of a wider campaign for a group called Project Unloaded. Instead of pushing for policy change or working with at-risk youth in neighborhoods, the organization aims to save lives and tackle gun violence by changing America’s gun culture — starting with young people on social media.

“I felt there was a missing piece in the larger movement to prevent gun violence, ” said Nina Vinik, the organization’s founder and executive director.

Most people think guns make them safer, she said, but research indicates the opposite is true.

“That myth is really at the core of America’s gun culture,” said Vinik, a Chicago lawyer. “We’re out to change the cultural narrative, to bust that myth and create a new narrative that guns make us less safe.”

The group launched a social media campaign called SNUG – Safer Not Using Guns – roughly a year ago in Houston and Milwaukee. It has since expanded into ten more cities, according to the organization, and the message has reached more than a million people on Tik Tok and Snapchat.

The campaign is meant for young people because their opinions and views are still changing. It includes partnerships with young Tik Tok influencers and Instagram posts loaded with statistics about the risks associated with firearms.

For example: Firearm-related injuries are the leading cause of death for American children and adolescents; suicide rates are four times higher for young people with guns at home; families in gun-owning homes are more than twice as likely to die by homicide.

[…]

Nearly a third of young people have had personal experience with gun violence, according to a report released in September by Project Unloaded. Black and Hispanic youth are more impacted than their peers.

The report found, too, that teens and young adults ranked gun violence as a bigger issue than abortion access or climate change. Half of the respondents in the survey said they think about school shootings every week.

The survey also discovered that young people changed their minds about gun ownership after reviewing facts about firearm risk.

“Gun violence is having a devastating impact on this generation of young people, and Gen Z is at the forefront of culture change,” Vinik said. “We’re talking directly to teens and really empowering this generation to be the ones to kind of propel that cultural change.”

While gun-related policies stall in the legislature, Hoyt said he hopes to help drive a cultural change by equipping people with information.

“We want to make sure we’re providing people all the facts we have, but we also don’t want to tell them exactly what to do,” he said. “Each person on their own has to decide.”

You can learn more about Project Unloaded here, and I presume on TikTok; as an Old Person, I don’t use that particular app, but I’m sure their target audience does. Founder Vinik talks a bit later about finding ways to make change that doesn’t rely on elected officials. Changing, or at least affecting, the culture is a great way to do that, but at some point the legislative and judicial processes need to be addressed as well. Putting out an effective message that can later help drive electoral behavior is a great way to start. I wish them all the best.

More on the collegiate TikTok bans

Jan 24th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

An interesting perspective from a professor in Texas.

The bans have come in states where governors, like Texas’s Greg Abbott, have blocked TikTok from state-issued computers and phones. Employers can generally exercise control over how employees use the equipment they issue to them. The move to block TikTok on public university networks, however, crosses a line. It represents a different type of government regulation, one that hinders these institutions’ missions.

The bans limit university researchers’ abilities to learn more about TikTok’s powerful algorithm and data-collection efforts, the very problems officials have cited. Professors will struggle to find ways to educate students about the app as well.

Many, as my students suggested, will simply shift from the campus Wi-Fi to their data plans and resume using TikTok on campus. In this regard, the network bans create inequality, allowing those who can afford better data plans more free expression protections, while failing to address the original problem.

Crucially, TikTok isn’t just a place to learn how to do the griddy. It has more than 200 million users in the U.S., and many of them are exercising free-speech rights to protest and communicate ideas about matters of public concern. When the government singles out one app and blocks it on public university networks, it is picking and choosing who can speak and how they do so. The esteem and perceived value of the speech tool should not factor into whether the government can limit access to it.

The Supreme Court has generally found these types of restrictions unconstitutional. Justices struck down a North Carolina law in 2017 that banned registered sex offenders from using social media. They reasoned, “The Court must exercise extreme caution before suggesting that the First Amendment provides scant protection for access to vast networks in that medium.” Years earlier, the court struck down a law that criminalized digital child pornography. It reasoned lawmakers “may not suppress lawful speech as the means to suppress unlawful speech.”

Nearly a century ago, the first instance in which the Supreme Court struck down a law because it conflicted with the First Amendment came in a case that involved a blanket ban by government officials on a single newspaper. The newspaper was a scourge to its community. It printed falsehoods and damaged people’s reputations. Still, justices reasoned the First Amendment generally does not allow the government to block an information outlet because it threatens the “morals, peace, and good order” of the community.

Each of these laws, while put in place by well-meaning government officials, limited protected expression in their efforts to halt dangerous content. The First Amendment, however, generally doesn’t allow government officials to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Any limitation on expression must only address a clearly stated government interest and nothing else.

So, what is the government interest in blocking TikTok? Perhaps the most coherent statement of TikTok’s perceived national-security threat came from FBI Director Chris Wray in December. He emphasized, because of China’s practice of maintaining influence in the workings of private firms who do business in the country, Chinese officials might manipulate the app’s powerful recommendation algorithm in ways that distort the ideas Americans encounter. American TikTok users might see pro-China messages, for example, while negative information might be blocked. He also averred to TikTok’s ability to collect data on users and create access to information on users’ phones.

The University of Texas’s news release from earlier this week parroted these concerns, noting, “TikTok harvests vast amounts of data from its users’ devices—including when, where and how they conduct internet activity—and offers this trove of potentially sensitive information to the Chinese government.”

These are valid concerns, but apps such as Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and YouTube also harvest vast amounts of data about users. Their algorithms do far more than simply supply information. Facebook’s and YouTube’s algorithms, for example, have both been found to encourage right-wing extremism. They are, as Wray and Texas’ news release lamented regarding TikTok, distorting the ideas Americans encounter. Why aren’t we blocking them, too? The obvious answer is that none of these companies are owned by a Chinese firm. But can’t firms such as Meta, Twitter, and Google execute the same harms officials have listed from within the U.S.?

See here and here for the background. The author didn’t say where he teaches, but Google suggests he’s a journalism prof at SMU, which has no compunction to follow suit as it’s a private school. The main thing I took away from this is the possibility that someone at one of these schools, or multiple someones aiming for a class action, could file a First Amendment lawsuit to overturn the bans. The distinction between enacting a workplace ban on (basically) company-owned devices and a more general ban at a university seems clear to me. Whether anyone will take this up or not I couldn’t say – filing a federal lawsuit is no small thing. But it could happen, so we’ll keep an eye out for that.

PUC makes an attempt to fix the grid

Jan 21st, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

People are skeptical.

The Public Utility Commission voted Thursday to make a substantial change to the state’s electricity market in a controversial effort to get the whole system to be more reliable. The agency said it will let the Legislature review its plan before moving forward with putting it in place.

The idea, known as the “performance credit mechanism,” is a first-of-its-kind proposal. It’s meant to help produce enough power when extreme heat or cold drives up demand and electricity production drops for various reasons — such as a lack of sun or wind to produce renewable energy or equipment breakdowns at gas- or coal-fired power plants.

Under the new concept, which still has many details to work out, companies such as NRG would commit to being available to produce more energy during those tight times. The companies would sell credits to electricity retailers such as Gexa Energy, municipal utilities and co-ops that sell power to homes and businesses.

The credits are designed to give power generators an added income stream and make building new power plants worthwhile.

Theoretically, the credits help retailers and customers by smoothing out volatile price spikes when demand is high — but there’s wide disagreement over whether this will happen in practice. Some electricity providers filed for bankruptcy after the 2021 winter storm because they had to pay so much for power.

Critics of the plan say the idea is risky because it wasn’t properly analyzed and has never been tested in another place. Members of the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce wrote to the PUC in December that they had “significant concern” about whether the proposal would work.

[…]

Experts disagree on whether the performance credits will actually convince power companies to build more natural gas plants, which are dirtier than wind and solar energy but can be turned on at any time. Some say new plants will be built anyway. Others say companies can simply use the credits to make more money from their existing plants without building more.

Michele Richmond, executive director of Texas Competitive Power Advocates, wrote in her comments to the commission that the group’s members were “ready to bring more than 4,500 [megawatts] of additional generation” to the state grid if the new system were adopted. That would be enough to power 900,000 homes. The group’s members include Calpine, Luminant and NRG.

If the PUC doesn’t change the market, there won’t be enough reason to invest in building new power generation facilities and keep operating existing facilities, she wrote.

The Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club was among groups that asked the PUC to spend more time considering whether the new credits are the best solution “before making fundamental changes to our market that would increase costs to consumers,” as Conservation Director Cyrus Reed wrote.

The independent market monitor, Potomac Economics, which is paid by the PUC to watch the market for manipulation and look for potential improvements, does not support the idea. The group believes enough corrections have been made already to make sure the grid is reliable.

Still others, such as Alison Silverstein, a former senior adviser at the PUC and the Texas Public Power Association, which is made up of municipal-owned utilities, cautioned that there wasn’t enough reliable information and analysis about the proposed credits to make such a significant decision.

The grid’s reliability must improve, Silverstein wrote to the PUC, but “we cannot do so at any cost, and we cannot do so using poorly understood, poorly-analyzed, or unproven market mechanisms to address unclear problem definitions and goals.”

Silverstein added: “If the commission makes a bad decision on … market reform due to haste, erroneous problem definition, sloppy analysis or misguided rationalizations, all Texans will bear the consequences for years through higher electric costs, lower reliability, and a slower economy, and millions of lower income Texans will suffer degraded health and comfort as they sacrifice to pay their electric bills.”

See here for some background. The PUC unanimously approved the plan, which was spearheaded by Greg Abbott’s appointed Chair. I sure don’t know enough to say whether this will work or not. It sounds like it could, but there’s more than enough uncertainty to make it a risky proposition. I get the argument against waiting for more data, but I have to wonder if there were some other ideas with greater certainty that could have been used in the meantime. Not much to do but hope for the best now, and maybe take the idea of “accountability” more seriously in the next election. The Chron, whose headline says that electricity prices are likely to rise under this plan, has more.

UT bans TikTok on campus WiFi

Jan 18th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

This feels like a bit of an overreaction to me, but we’ll see if others follow suit.

The University of Texas at Austin has blocked access to the video-sharing app TikTok on its Wi-Fi and wired networks in response to Gov. Greg Abbott’s recent directive requiring all state agencies to remove the app from government-issued devices, according to an email sent to students Tuesday.

“The university is taking these important steps to eliminate risks to information contained in the university’s network and to our critical infrastructure,” UT-Austin technology adviser Jeff Neyland wrote in the email. “As outlined in the governor’s directive, TikTok harvests vast amounts of data from its users’ devices — including when, where and how they conduct internet activity — and offers this trove of potentially sensitive information to the Chinese government.”

[…]

Abbott’s Dec. 7 directive stated that all state agencies must ban employees from downloading or using the app on government-issued devices, including cellphones, laptops and desktops, with exceptions for law enforcement agencies. He also directed the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Department of Information Resources to create a plan to guide state agencies on how to handle the use of TikTok on personal devices, including those that have access to a state employee’s email account or connect to a state agency network. That plan was to be distributed to state agencies by Jan. 15.

Each state agency is expected to create its own policy regarding the use of TikTok on personal devices by Feb. 15.

More than half of states in the U.S. have banned the use of the social media app on government devices in some capacity in recent months, according to a CNN analysis. Across the country, a growing number of universities have banned the app on devices connected to campus networks, including Auburn University in Alabama, the University of Oklahoma and the schools within the University System of Georgia.

The ban could have broad impacts particularly at universities serving college-age students, a key demographic that uses the app. University admissions departments have used it to connect with prospective students, and many athletics departments have used TikTok to promote sporting events and teams. It’s also unclear how the ban will impact faculty who research the app or professors who teach in areas such as communications or public relations, in which TikTok is a heavily used medium.

See here for the background. As the Chron notes, students will still be able to access TikTok off campus, but I’m sure this will cause a whole lot of complaining. It’s not clear to me that this is necessary to comply with Abbott’s previous directive, but I presume UT’s lawyers have given the matter some consideration and I’d take their conclusions over mine. Other big public universities have not yet announced anything, though on my earlier post a commenter who works at a Texas public university said that their school has done something similar. This will be very interesting to see.

There are a couple of big questions here. One is whether the TEA will weigh in on the matter for Texas public schools, or if it will be left up to individual districts. Far as I know, HISD has not taken any such action, and as it happens they have their own TikTok account. The other thing is how this might affect the ability of athletes to make NIL (name, image, likeness) money for themselves. NCAA athletes with a significant social media presence can earn a ton of money for themselves. If this starts to affect recruiting, you can be sure that people will hear about it. Even if the TEA takes action in the public schools, it’s not likely to have much effect since the UIL still bans athletes from making NIL money, but if this really does cause a ripple then anything can happen. Like I said, very much worth keeping an eye on this.

UPDATE: As of later in the day, Texas A&M and TSU have followed suit and implemented similar bans. That certainly lends credence to the “no it wasn’t an overreaction” thesis. UH had not taken any action as of this publication.

UPDATE: The University of North Texas joins in, as do all of the other schools in the UT system.

More on our future doctor shortage

Jan 16th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

This is unsustainable.

Abortion restrictions have forced Texas obstetrician-gynecology residency programs to send young doctors out of the state to learn about pregnancy termination, a burdensome process educators say is another example of abortion bans undermining reproductive health care.

At least one Houston-area program, the University of Texas Medical Branch, began sending residents out of state this year, to a partner institution in Oregon. Two other local programs, Baylor College of Medicine and Houston Methodist, said they still are working out arrangements for their own out-of-state rotations. McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston declined to comment on its plans.

The changes follow revised requirements from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the standard-bearer for residency programs, which maintains that abortion training is essential for providing comprehensive reproductive health care. Requirements updated in September say OB-GYN programs in states that ban the procedure “must provide access to this clinical experience in a different jurisdiction where it is lawful,” with exceptions for residents who choose to opt out.

Experts, however, say it takes month of coordination to arrange a temporary rotation in another state, leaving some inexperienced physicians with few options.

“There is no question that the restrictions in place following the Dobbs decision pose a risk to the training of up to 45 percent of OB-GYN residents who are training in states where abortion care is restricted,” said Dr. AnnaMarie Connolly, chief of education and academic affairs at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “The joint efforts of ACOG … and countless residencies in protected states are directly addressing this risk to medical education and training.”

[…]

Arranging an out-of-state rotation is a logistical feat, Steinauer said, as it takes up to nine months to develop a plan for housing, airfare, training permits and other needs.

The university also takes on additional costs. To send two UTMB residents to Oregon for two weeks, it costs $5,216 for housing, $1,689 for airfare and airport transportation, $240 for parking and $370 for training permits, according to documents obtained through an open records request. The Ryan program is paying $1,500 for each resident, while the university picks up the remaining expenses, documents show.

There also is a strain on the host institution, said Dr. Aileen Gariepy, director of complex family planning at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. Some programs that offer abortion care may only have the capacity to accommodate their own residents. With a small number of programs left to take on a crush of new learners, “we may be doing a disservice to the training needs of all of our trainees,” she said.

She noted that Weill Cornell does not have the space yet to take on residents from its affiliate institution, Houston Methodist, which has approached the school about an out-of-state rotation.

“This kind of legislative interference in medical care is unprecedented,” she said. “We didn’t have a plan for that.”

[…]

Beyond the immediate challenge of meeting accreditation requirements, some educators publicly have expressed concern that abortion laws will make it harder for Texas to attract and retain OB-GYNs.

Out of nine publicly funded OB-GYN residency programs in Texas, six saw a drop in applicants from 2020 to 2021, the year SB8 was enacted, according to documents obtained by the Chronicle. Seven of those programs saw a drop in applicants in 2022.

Experts caution against drawing conclusions based on those trends. Yaklic noted that the number of graduates interested in OB-GYN programs often fluctuates, and recent changes to the application process may have influenced the data.

Still, at UTMB, many applicants have asked about abortion training during interviews, he said. Even before the Dobbs decision, earlier abortion restrictions caused medical school graduates to favor states that allow the procedure.

See here for some background. It’s certainly possible that we’ll more or less get acclimated to how things are now and the system will limp along as degraded but basically functional, with the bulk of the cost being borne by the people with the least power and fewest resources. It’s also possible, as noted in the comments, that the Lege could pass a bill to outlaw out-of-state abortion training for medical students in Texas, and then we’ll see how bad things can get. All I’m saying is that our state’s forced-birth laws are going to have a negative effect on overall health care, and we are already starting to see it happen.

Universal Studios to open a theme park in Frisco

Jan 14th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Of interest, at least to those in the target demographic.

Another major development is coming to Frisco.

City business leaders on Wednesday morning announced that a new Universal Studios theme park is planning to come to the booming Collin County suburb.

The park will be a kids-themed park with immersive experiences and rides involving Universal movies, leaders said.

Universal operates five theme parks and several more resorts.

The Frisco park will sit on 97 acres near the Dallas North Tollway and Panther Creek Parkway. The park will be about one-fourth of the size of Universal’s main theme parks, officials said. The Frisco park will be “a scale appropriate for our young family audience,” officials said at the press conference.

Officials did not announce an expected opening date.

It’s been a few years, but I’ve been to the Universal Studios park in Florida. It was fun – I was there as part of a business trip, which these things are quite conducive to. This one will be pitched a little differently, per the Dallas Observer.

The new park will be built on the northeast corner of Dallas North Tollway and Panther Creek Parkway, just a few miles east of the Grandscape entertainment and shopping district in The Colony. The 97-acre park, tentatively named Universal Kids Florida, will be “a one-of-a-kind theme park, unlike any other in the world, specifically designed to inspire fun for families with young children,” according to a statement released by Universal Parks & Resorts.

“We have a portfolio of terrific attractions that appeal to young families around the world and we had an idea to bring all those together and create a destination that is specifically designed to appeal to families with young children,” said Mark Woodbury, chairman and chief executive officer of Universal Parks & Recreation at Wednesday’s press conference after revealing the first artist’s rendering of the new theme park. “That’s what you’re seeing in this illustration now, and that’s what we hope to bring to Frisco.”

Universal’s new Frisco location will also have an adjacent hotel themed to the park’s kid-friendly design, with room for expansion for future attractions and services. Universal released an artist’s rendering of an overview of the theme park showing possible attractions. These include a boat ride on a lake at the center of the property, a land with a medieval castle, a visitors center and playground space that looks similar to buildings in the film Jurassic Park and the Netflix kids’ animated series Camp Cretaceous, based on the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films.

Woodbury described the park as “a lush landscape environment [with] four or five themed lands, each one of them full of attractions, interactive experiences, discovery experiences, exploration, learning opportunities and just a rich, rich experience for families to enjoy together.”

So far, neither the city of Frisco nor Universal have released any further details regarding construction or a possible opening date, nor which movie or television properties and attractions will be included in the new theme park concept. Universal noted in its statement that the park is “intended to have a completely different look, feel and scale than Universal’s existing parks and will appeal to a new audience for the brand.”

The new Universal Studios concept in Frisco is aimed at younger visitors, and will be the first American expansion made by the theme park in the almost 33 years since Universal Studios Florida opened in Orlando.

Click over the see the artist’s rendering. I have to assume that the name will have “Texas” in it and not “Florida”, because that would just be weird. But who knows. It will surely be a few years before this thing opens. What do you think, is this something you’ll be first in line to experience or something you’ll avoid like the plague? TPR, the Chron, the Current, and CultureMap have more.

Nobody knows the state of the gas supply in Texas

Jan 14th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

That can be a problem during freezes. You know, like the one we had over Christmas.

As questions continue to swirl about widespread outages Atmos Energy customers experienced in North Texas and beyond last week, the opacity of Texas’ sprawling natural gas industry is being scrutinized.

Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday called for the Texas attorney general and the chief regulatory agency of the state’s natural gas industry to investigate Atmos Energy for the outages in Grand Prairie and elsewhere.

The Railroad Commission opened an investigation Tuesday. No timeline for any findings has been provided, and Atmos Energy continued to avoid answering basic questions about what led to service outages, including questions The Dallas Morning News sent to the utility Thursday.

But some answers might have been available already if Texas had an independent market monitor for natural gas akin to what is in place for Texas’ electric grid. Following the deadly 2021 February freeze, ERCOT, the power grid operator, has also proposed the idea of a so-called gas desk to provide real-time information on the resource.

[…]

Austin-based energy expert Doug Lewin said the opacity of Texas’ natural gas system remains a problem for Texas’ energy system. While the public can see in real time how much electricity is being generated, consumed and the price, none of that can be said for Texas’ lightly regulated gas industry.

ERCOT’s former interim CEO Brad Jones proposed creating a “gas desk’’ after he took the reins of the power grid operator following the dismissal of most of its leadership in the aftermath of the February 2021 deadly winter storm that killed more than 200 Texans.

Natural gas outages contributed in part to the vast outages that plagued the state during the freeze. And the Legislature, in a sweeping grid overhaul bill, set up a confidential body designed to foster honest cooperation and intercommunication between the power industry and the natural gas industry.

But no further action was taken to strengthen the transparency of the natural gas industry, which provides fuel on a global scale. While Texas’ oil and gas industry is vast, it enjoys lax regulations and is overseen by the exas Railroad Commission, an agency some argue is only in place to serve the industry it regulates.

“There effectively is no regulator of the intrastate gas system,” Lewin said.

Creating a so-called gas desk would be the bare minimum Texas could do, Lewin said.

“If we don’t do that, then the policymakers, the legislators are just telling the state of Texas, ‘Sorry, you’re on your own. Y’all better go buy generators,’” Lewin said.

But the idea of a gas desk has already faced pushback from legislators. At a Dec. 5 meeting of the Texas House State Affairs Committee in which legislators were questioning the ongoing power grid redesign, Corpus Christi Rep. Todd Hunter told the head of that process, Public Utility Chairman Peter Lake, that he would have a lot less pushback on his proposed untested market model if he could assure the gas desk idea was dropped.

“If you say yes, there are a lot of questions that will just disappear,” Hunter said.

Lake did not make any assurances.

That story was from December 30, so adjust your inner calendars accordingly. I assume Rep. Hunter pushed back on the gas desk idea because his benefactors in the industry squeezed him about it. If that’s not the case then someone will have to explain to me where that reluctance came from. It sure seems like a sensible idea, and given that the Railroad Commission isn’t interested in doing this on their own initiative, it would be up to the Lege to make them. I would not hold my breath in anticipation of that, of course. We were assured that the grid was fixed, so what more do you want? KERA and the Chron have more.

Texas Department of Agriculture sort of recognizes climate change

Jan 9th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

It’s a start, I guess.

On the heels of a historic drought that devastated crops from the High Plains to South Texas, a new Texas Department of Agriculture report released Tuesday linked climate change with food insecurity and identified it as a potential threat to the state’s food supply.

The food access study, coordinated by the TDA and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, notes that “climate instability” is strongly associated with soil loss, water quality, droughts, fires, floods and other environmental disasters. 2022 was one of the driest years on record for Texas, and about 49% of the state was still in drought conditions at the end of December. The drought resulted in failed crops, low yields for farmers and diminished grazing, which forced ranchers to cull their cattle and led to the highest amount of livestock sales — nearly $2.7 million — in more than a decade.

“From the agricultural perspective, concerns were expressed regarding droughts, drying up of artisanal wells, water use restrictions, fire threats and dangerous conditions for farm workers,” the report says.

Extended dry periods devastated Texas’ agricultural production, said Victor Murphy, a climate service program manager with the National Weather Service.

“We’re seeing longer periods without any precipitation, then when it does come, it’s in shorter, more intense bursts,” he said.

In total, Texas received a similar amount of precipitation in 2022 as in 2021, but most of that precipitation came all at once at the end of the summer.

Much of the state went through the worst of the drought conditions from June to August, during the high heat of the summer while plants are still growing. This was a sharp contrast to the torrential rainfall totals that followed. At the end of August, the Dallas-Fort Worth area was hit with a 1,000-year flood that brought 13 inches of rainfall in 18 hours.

[…]

The report recommends several actions, including having farmers work alongside researchers and policymakers, creating more food forests that allow trees to restore soil health and improve water quality, and strengthening bonds between local farmers and businesses to boost the farm-to-school infrastructure.

The report, which was submitted to the Texas Legislature on Dec. 31, also points to other factors that are making it harder for Texans to access and afford food, such as wages falling behind rising costs of living and lack of access to food in rural areas. Another issue is organizations being unaware of others with similar goals; for example, the report notes that certain grocers are interested in expanding delivery services into rural markets, while several food banks have acquired trucks to do the same.

The study includes suggestions that lawmakers could consider to help more Texans have consistent food access, such as expanding online and delivery options for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program participants and allowing more stores to accept those benefits.

Lawmakers have already filed some bills to address food insecurity during this year’s legislative session. State Rep. Shawn Thierry, D-Houston, filed House Bill 1118, which would offer tax credits to grocery stores that open in food deserts.

There’s no link to the report in the story, and I couldn’t find anything obvious on the TDA homepage or Twitter feed, so you’ll have to take what this story gives you. I wouldn’t expect the Lege to do much about this – they’re no more likely to care about the food insecurity of poor folks than they are about climate change – but at least they’ve been told about it.

Don’t Musk my rural Texas

Jan 8th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

For your perusal.

In August 2021, a handful of Bastrop County residents noticed something big unfolding on quiet Walker Watson Road.

The two-lane road, about a quarter-mile long from end to end, bisects cow pastures, corn fields and woods. It’s lined by 15 homesteads, most on lots of 1 acre or more. Farmers have lived there for generations. Other residents are newcomers looking to escape the hassles of city life.

What they had in common was an appreciation for the area’s peacefulness.

Then the cement trucks, backhoes and tractors arrived.

Seemingly overnight, an 80,000-square-foot warehouse and on-site modular homes for employee went up on the south side of the road, towering over the fields. The construction frenzy brought noise at all hours, light pollution and heavy traffic.

Residents soon learned that the newcomer was The Boring Co., a tunnel firm owned by Elon Musk, one of the richest men on Earth.

One year later, the commercial rocket company SpaceX, another Musk-owned firm, started building a 521,000-square-foot structure across the street from The Boring Co. property.

Emails between SpaceX and Bastrop County officials indicate that the company plans to build a manufacturing plant at the site for Starlink, a subsidiary that’s creating a global broadband internet network via satellites. Construction began in May 2022.

Neighbors say the companies have created nuisances besides noise and strong nighttime lighting, including water runoff spilling onto the roadway. Records obtained by the Express-News back up those claims. The documents also reveal that the companies have pressured Bastrop County officials to approve numerous permits at breakneck speed, and that The Boring Co. has been cited for two code violations and issued three warnings of noncompliance.

On June 22 of this year, then-county engineer Robert Pugh complained in a letter to Bastrop County Commissioner Clara Beckett about the heavy demands both companies had placed on the county’s Development Services Department, which has a dozen employees in engineering and development-related jobs.

Pugh wrote that staff had been “regularly hounded” by Boring Co. and Starlink employees and consultants to “expedite and approve permit applications that are incomplete and not in compliance with the Commissioners Court (CC) regulations.”

[…]

“Sooner or later, I knew either my health or urban sprawl would take this little spot of nature away from me. I never dreamed it would be industry,” said Lynn Collier, who owns a ranch on the road with her two brothers. “I never dreamed that a factory would just come and buy all this up.”

So far, The Boring Co. has dug a tunnel between the two companies’ properties — which total about 100 acres — and built a miniature neighborhood on its site, complete with a soon-to-open Montessori school.

Collier sees strong similarities between her corner of Bastrop County and Boca Chica, near Brownsville in South Texas, where SpaceX has snapped up many residential properties near its spaceport. The company ceremoniously renamed the community “Starbase.” The Boring Co. has offered to buy out homeowners in Bastrop County, too.

“If you are someplace in rural Texas, and somebody has enough money, they just take over,” she said. “If it can happen here, it could happen anywhere.”

I’m not a rural person, and I would have expected there to be a lot of growth and construction in Bastrop County because of its proximity to Travis County. As someone who has driven to Austin via State Highway 71, which goes through Bastrop, for over 30 years, anyone can tell you that it is vastly different than it used to be. I don’t doubt that things are more frenetic than ever and that this can be chaotic and unpleasant for residents there. I also don’t doubt that anyone in Elon Musk’s orbit will do whatever they can to game things in his companies’ favor, whatever the cost to others may be. I don’t have any prescriptions here, I just thought this was an interesting read. Good luck to all those that have to deal with this.

Thirty million Texans

Jan 1st, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

We reach another milestone.

Fueled by migration to the state from other parts of the country, Texas crossed a new population threshold this year: It is now home to 30 million people.

New estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau put the state’s population as of July 1 at 30,029,572 following years of steady growth. This makes Texas the only state, other than California, with a population of more than 30 million.

The state’s population has been on an upward trajectory for decades, accompanied by demographic shifts that have reshaped everything from its politics to its classrooms as people of color have powered its growth.

Texas’ population increased by 470,708 people since July 2021, the largest gain in the nation. Texas regularly holds that top spot on the bureau’s annual population updates. Roughly half of that growth came from net domestic migration — the number of people coming to Texas from other states — while the other half was split almost evenly between net international migration and natural increase, which is the difference between births and deaths.

The state’s source of population gains often fluctuates year to year. The bureau’s estimates from 2010-19 showed Texas’ growth based on natural increase and net migration, including both domestic and international, were close to even over the decade.

I imagine that between the pandemic and Trump-instituted restrictions, the numbers for international migration have trended down. We’ll see how that affects the next decade.

On a related note, looking at the historic Census figures for Texas, thirty years ago the average State House member in Texas represented about 120K people. Twenty years ago that would have still been less than 150K people. Now that State Rep has 200K constituents, and rising. A State Senator now represents nearly one million people. We’re not going to do anything about that, but we really ought to think about it. Just putting it out there.

The Uvalde bus driver who helped save shooting victims’ lives

Dec 31st, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Great reporting.

When Uvalde school bus driver Sylvia Uriegas got the call on May 24 to report to Robb Elementary, she had no idea about the horror she was approaching.

With nothing but a rudimentary first aid kit filled mostly with Band Aids, Uriegas had been called to the scene of one of the nation’s worst mass school shootings — with no training for the important role she would play as the chaotic scene unfolded.

When Uriegas and two other bus drivers, who were taking kids to a field trip at a nearby park, reached the school, the streets were swarmed with law enforcement and parents. The central office dispatcher who asked her to report to the school had warned of an “emergency” — but said no more.

With her normal path to the building blocked, Uriegas backed her bus up and found another route. The two other school buses followed. Another driver opened her door and asked a bystander what was happening. Only then did they learn that there was an active shooter inside Robb.

Ultimately, Uriegas’ bus became a makeshift ambulance that carried kids with gunshot wounds to the hospital.

“We’re not first responders,” Uriegas said. “But then we were.”

Her experience echoes many of the stories from Uvalde on that day. Chaos, unclear chains of command and confusion about protocol prevented an effective response that could have saved at least a few of the 19 children and two teachers slain by the lone gunman. Police waited 77 minutes after the shooter entered the school before they stormed the classroom where he was holed up with dying children and teachers.

Once the classroom was breached, officials lacked the resources and coordination needed to provide the proper medical response.

Though Uriegas did save lives, it made her aware of a glaring hole in the district’s school safety plan.

“I could have gone in knowing a little bit better,” Uriegas said. “But we’ve never been trained.”

Other than speaking at school board meetings asking for better training, she kept her thoughts and feelings to herself, knowing what she saw and experienced could not compare to the parents who had lost children, and the survivors themselves.

But when she ran into some of the family members of slain 9-year-old Jackie Cazares, they urged her to tell the story from the driver’s seat — the full scope of all that had gone wrong, of the mishandling and lack of preparedness needed to be made public, they said.

As the passage of time and the levity of the holidays pushes the tragedy from the headlines, Uriegas and the families don’t want complacency to set in, for Uvalde to forget just how unprepared it had been.

So Uriegas has decided to tell her story.

And you should read it. One infuriating detail is that neither Uriegas nor other bus drivers who helped ferry traumatized children to the reunification center after the shooting received any counseling provided by the school district. She got some for herself anyway, and is still very much dealing with her own post-traumatic stress. All I can say is God bless you, Sylvia Uriegas, and your fellow bus drivers. Please do keep telling your stories.

ERCOT makes it through, with an assist from the feds

Dec 26th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

In case you were wondering.

A day after ERCOT asked the U.S. Department of Energy for an emergency order allowing its generators to bypass emissions standards to stave off potential outages, Texas’ electric grid met demand with ease on Saturday.

The grid operator’s worst-case-scenario did not come to pass, and with weather continuing to warm over the weekend, it seems unlikely the system will experience issues.

Temperatures rose to 39 degrees in Houston on Saturday, nearly 10 degrees higher than Friday. Demand reached a high of about 65,753 megawatts at 7:50 a.m., and at the same time, about 74,252 megawatts of power were available. One megawatt is enough to power about 200 homes during severe temperature events.

By 4 p.m. ERCOT officials said there was 27,876 more megawatts committed by generators than the forecasted demand.

The forecasted demand was much more accurate Saturday than it was Thursday night and Friday, when ERCOT’s demand forecast was at times more than 10,000 megawatts — or 2 million homes’ worth of power — less than what actual demand came onto the grid. Friday morning, demand reached 74,000 megawatts, a new winter record.

That unexpected and record-seasonal-high demand, along with a series of generation failures, led ERCOT officials to ask the U.S. Department of Energy on Friday to issue an emergency order that would allow natural-gas and coal-powered generators to bypass federal emissions standards in order to generate as much power as possible.

ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas wrote to the agency that there were about 11,000 megawatts of outages among thermal generators that use coal and natural gas as fuel, 4,000 megawatts among wind generators and 1,700 megawatts of solar units that were “outaged or derated” due to the freezing weather. One megawatt is

“Most of these units are expected to return to service over the next 24 hours. However, if these units do not return to service, or if ERCOT experiences additional generating unit outages, it is possible that ERCOT may need to curtail some amount of firm load this evening, tomorrow morning, or possibly tomorrow evening or Sunday morning, in order to maintain the security of the ERCOT system,” Vegas wrote.

In plainer language, that meant if those units stay offline, and if other units trip offline, ERCOT might have ordered local utility providers to rotate power outages Friday evening, Saturday morning, Saturday evening or Sunday morning.

[…]

In a statement, ERCOT officials said the request for emergency powers was taken as a precautionary measure and “would allow generators to promptly respond if conditions warranted.”

“ERCOT has sufficient generation to meet demand. Every available on-demand generation resource is contributing electricity to the grid during this extreme cold weather event,” ERCOT officials wrote.

However, thanks to warming weather and seemingly stable generation, those emergency measures will likely be avoided this weekend.

The issue was not of insufficient power being generated or power suppliers being knocked offline because of the cold, but that the electricity retailers underestimated the demand for power, and would have had to buy more at much higher prices. Reporter Shelby Webb explained that in this Twitter thread from December 23. It’s great that we made it through without widespread power outages, and it’s even better that we made it through without having to pollute more to do it, but this was not a success of the current setup. It was luck. Anyone who points at this freeze and claims a victory for “fixing the grid” is at best misinformed.

The Christmas Bird Count

Dec 26th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

If you’re looking for a little holiday project…

For the 123rd year in a row, the Christmas Bird Count is happening all over the country. Bird enthusiasts and nature lovers head outside, take a census of birds in their area and report what they’ve found to the National Audubon Society, a nonprofit conservation organization.

Always planned around the holidays, the count has been called the longest running citizen science project in the world.

Recently, though, the project has shown a drop in some bird populations. Last year’s Christmas counts in Texas showed the biggest rate of decline in bird numbers in 14 years, according to a report from the Audubon Society.

Texas bird counts now “have had five years in a row where declining species out-numbered increasing species,” the study says. “Ninety-one species (24%) were at their lowest level for the decade.”

[…]

But there may also be reasons unique to Texas that explain a sudden drop in numbers.

“The lack of birds has become readily apparent and left many wondering the same thing – ‘Where Have All the Birds Gone?'” writes birder Noreen Baker as part of Travis Audubon’s Ask-a-Birder project.

Baker was responding to a question from Wes Renick, manager of Wild Birds Unlimited, who says people are noticing fewer birds at their backyard feeders and bird baths.

The reasons, Baker speculates, could include recent drought and the 2021 winter storm, which “did kill birds over a large area.”

Less troubling reasons for this year’s decline in Texas bird sightings could be that there has been more food available in other states that has postponed or slowed bird migrations through Texas.

The point is that we need more data, and that’s where you can come in. You can help your local Audubon group do its count for the year – go here for the Houston area and here for Central Texas to learn more. Links for other areas are there as well. The counting goes through January 5, so go click now if you want to participate.

It’s winter surge time again

Dec 22nd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, though I think you already suspected this.

COVID-19 cases are rising across Texas two weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday, echoing last year’s surge of the omicron variant.

There are more than 18,000 positive cases across the state this week, up from a little over 7,000 the week of Thanksgiving.

“Thanksgiving this year was kind of like PTSD,” said epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina, author of Your Local Epidemiologist. “I think all of us epidemiologists were holding our breath, just to make sure this was going to be a regular Thanksgiving.”

While hospitalizations and deaths are still low thanks to COVID-19 vaccinations and the updated bivalent booster that targets omicron, cases have been steadily climbing since November.

The change this year, Jetelina said, is the combination of flu, RSV, and now COVID. The Texas Department of State Health Services reports the intensity of influenza-like illness has remained “very high” in the past few weeks, with an increase in the number of influenza outbreaks and more than 28,000 positive flu tests in the week ending in Dec. 3.

“RSV and flu are just back with vengeance,” she said. “We’re starting to get a sneak peek of what this new normal is.”

Other states, like New York, have issued a health advisory to encourage people to mask indoors while cases are high. Jetelina said it’s important to think about protecting the most vulnerable members of the community, like the elderly and folks who are immunocompromised.

“I’m going to have 90-year-old people at my house for Christmas this year,” she said. “That, to me, means I am wearing an N-95 mask in public everywhere I go the week before Christmas. It helps ensure I don’t miss the event because I’m sick, but it also helps break that transmission chain so I don’t bring it to my grandparents.”

She says it’s not too late to get vaccinated to protect against COVID and the flu.

“I’m tired, everyone’s tired, [but] the virus isn’t tired of us,” she said.

We saw this coming in October, and we know what a “tripledemic” is. The virus levels in the wastewater are high. You know what I’m going to tell you: Get your bivalent booster and your flu shot. Wear that mask in crowded indoor spaces. Isolate yourself if you feel sick. Think about the high-risk people in your life. We’re not in 2020 any more, and the current dominant strains are thankfully not as virulent as delta was. You really can do a lot to maximize your safety while giving up very little. But you have to actually do it.

No, really, are we emotionally prepared for this freeze?

Dec 22nd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Ready or not, here it comes.

State officials warned residents Wednesday to prepare their homes and vehicles for the coming freeze while trying to reassure on-edge Texans that the electric grid will stay online.

Temperatures are expected to plummet Thursday into single digits — with even lower wind chills. Leaders urged residents to check their car tires and batteries to be sure no one gets stranded on the road, to burn wood or gas inside only if there’s proper ventilation, and to insulate pipes.

“This is a dangerous storm coming our way,” said Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management. “The temperatures will be extremely cold and the winds will be high, which will generate some very dangerous wind chills.”

Forecasters predicted life-threatening minus-10-degree wind chills in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and wind chills as low as minus 30 degrees in the Panhandle, Kidd said. Aside from light precipitation in the Panhandle, the state was expected to stay dry.

The lack of concerns over icy roads and infrastructure makes this a different threat than the 2021 Winter Storm Uri, which overwhelmed the state’s main electric grid and killed hundreds of people. Officials are promising that, this time, the power will stay on.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the grid that powers most of Texas, and the Public Utility Council made improvements after Uri, such as ensuring natural gas-fired plants have additional sources of fuel on site and improving communications among electricity regulators, oil and gas regulators, and the Texas Division of Emergency Management.

“The grid is ready and reliable,” said Peter Lake, chair of the Public Utility Commission, which regulates grid operators, on Wednesday. “We expect to have sufficient generation to meet demand throughout this entire winter weather event.”

ERCOT officials expected power demand to be highest from Thursday night through Saturday morning. The peak — near 70,000 megawatts — was predicted Friday morning, when grid operators expected to have nearly 85,000 megawatts of supply if all goes as planned.

“We do expect to have sufficient generation supply to meet the forecasted demands,” said Pablo Vegas, ERCOT’s president and CEO.

Of course, in an extreme scenario, the grid could still face rolling blackouts or tight conditions, and ERCOT could still issue a conservation notice. There may also be local power outages that have nothing to do with the viability of the power grid, caused by things such as wind knocking trees onto power lines.

See here for the background. We’ll find out soon enough. You’ll forgive me, and millions of other Texans, if we remain skeptical. I hope you all stay warm and safe, and that we have a good long time before we have to worry like this again.

Now is a great time to buy a Christmas tree

Dec 22nd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Procrastinators rejoice.

When it came to buying a Christmas tree in Houston it paid off to procrastinate.

Prices, already high last year, jumped further this year as retailers sought to lock in supplies despite increases spurred by skyrocketing fertilizer and fuel costs. But that strategy appears to have overestimated demand, leaving many tree sellers with stock they are now hustling to sell down before the holiday passes and glorious trees become plain old mulch.

In a survey of wholesale Christmas tree growers across the U.S., every grower surveyed said that the cost of growing and selling Christmas trees has gone up from last year, according to the Real Christmas Tree Board, an industry research group. As a result, more than 70 percent said they increased their prices from 5 percent to 15 percent, and another 16 percent said price increases would be even higher.

That held true in Texas, where Stan Reed, executive secretary of the Texas Christmas Tree Growers Association, said fuel and fertilizer fed the increases. There are only about 150 farms in Texas that can grow varieties of pines, cypress and red cedar that are used as Christmas trees, according to Reed. Other popular trees, such as fir and spruce, are imported from North Carolina, Michigan, Oregon and Wisconsin.

Reed said a seller importing 600 trees from Oregon paid $10,000 this year, compared to about $6,000 last year, making each tree just under $7 more expensive to import.

Buying from farms or lots that source from within the state may be cheaper, but even at those locations the increased price of fertilizer has tacked on an additional costs to be passed on to consumers. Global fertilizer costs have soared over the past year, rising 80 percent in 2021 and another 30 percent in the first half of 2022, according to the World Bank.

But while those higher prices were passed along to shoppers earlier in the season, many Houston tree sellers have launched deep discounts in the past week or so. At Houston Garden Centers, which has more than 20 locations around Houston, Christmas trees are half off. And Buchanan’s Native Plants in the Heights started giving away trees Monday.

Those free trees are first-come, first-served, so don’t wait too much longer. There were some drought-related issues last year that also contributed to a tight tree supply and more incentive to stock up for this year. However we got here, if you’ve been holding out to wait for a bargain, this is your time. I hope your kids forgive you for making them wait.

New Land Commissioner, same screw job for Houston and Harris County

Dec 21st, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I didn’t expect any different. I’m still mad about it.

(Probably) Not Dawn Buckingham

When akeway Lakeway Republican Dawn Buckingham jumps from the Texas Senate to the helm of the state General Land Office next month, she will inherit control of the state’s Hurricane Harvey recovery, a slow-moving multibillion-dollar effort to help Southeast Texas recover from the 2017 storm and prepare for future ones.

With two weeks left in his term, outgoing Land Commissioner George P. Bush remains at odds with Houston and Harris County officials over two key issues: the state agency’s efforts to seize funds from the city’s beleaguered housing recovery programs, and the distribution of billions in federal aid meant to protect storm-vulnerable areas against future damage — none of which is going to Houston, thus far.

In an interview this week, Buckingham, who easily defeated Democrat Jay Kleberg in last month’s midterm election, made clear she will continue steering the Harvey recovery in much the same manner as Bush, with no plans to redistribute the mitigation aid so Houston and Harris County receive a bigger slice, as local officials had hoped.

Buckingham said the agency also would continue its ongoing efforts to recoup from the city nearly $141 million earmarked for housing recovery, small business grants and various nonprofit services, a move spurred by the city’s failure to meet key spending benchmarks over the summer. The GLO plans to put the money into its own program focused on rebuilding Harvey-damaged single-family homes in Houston, which previously was run by the city before it ceded control to the state agency last year.

“What we’re seeing is, they haven’t been able to meet their own metrics,” Buckingham said. “And so, I think with the limited amount of time that these resources are available, and the limited amount of recovery that’s happened at this point, we’re anticipating that there’s going to be a redirection of funds.”

The feud between the General Land Office and city of Houston erupted in April 2020, when Bush informed Mayor Sylvester Turner he planned to take over the city’s entire $1.3 billion recovery program, arguing his agency could pick up the pace. After a legal skirmish, the two sides struck a deal in early 2021, with Turner relinquishing control of Houston’s sluggish single-family housing program, leaving the city with some $835 million to continue its other initiatives, including a more successful effort to build affordable multifamily housing.

As part of the deal, the city and GLO agreed on spending benchmarks to measure the city’s progress on each of its remaining programs. This summer, the GLO notified the city it had missed the mark on seven of its nine programs, spending nearly $100 million less than it should have, according to a July letter from Deputy Land Commissioner Mark Havens. As a result, the agency in October laid out its plan to recover about $141 million from the city, pending approval from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Houston officials long have accused the Land Office of providing opaque oversight that has obstructed their recovery progress, a charge the GLO denies. City leaders also say their programs prioritize low-income, disabled and senior residents, which they say is harder and slower but necessary to ensure the most vulnerable storm victims are not left behind.

In the latest $141 million dispute, the city’s housing director, Keith Bynam, has said the Land Office is painting a misleading picture by overlooking factors beyond the city’s control, such as adverse economic conditions and the city’s inability to spend money on three of its programs for about eight months while it was under a GLO audit.

[…]

A Chronicle investigation found the GLO’s initial $1 billion distribution went disproportionately to inland counties that, by the state’s own measure, are less vulnerable to natural disasters than coastal counties that received little or no funding.

HUD also found the Land Office discriminated against communities of color when it denied aid to Houston and Harris County, with scoring criteria that steered funds away from diverse urban centers and toward projects in whiter, more rural counties, according to the federal agency.

GLO officials have disputed the finding and rejected calls from federal housing officials to negotiate a settlement with Houston-area officials. The agency has also ignored an initial HUD deadline to come into compliance with civil rights protections, along with a subsequent letter over the summer from HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge, who said she may refer the matter to the Department of Justice if Texas did not reach a voluntary agreement within 60 days.

Havens said the Land Office has not heard from HUD or the Justice Department since. Turner spokeswoman Mary Benton said the city also had yet to hear from the Biden administration, though the mayor on Thursday sent Fudge a follow-up letter urging her to step in.

“More than 9 months have passed since HUD issued the (discrimination finding) and yet GLO and the State of Texas, to our knowledge, have taken no steps to come into compliance,” Turner wrote. “…It is imperative, now, more than ever, that HUD immediately exercise its enforcement authority and compel GLO to come into compliance with” the findings.

I don’t have the energy to catalog the entire Story So Far, but the two most recent entries are here and here. While I can believe that the city may have performed poorly with the housing recovery program, the GLO has no credibility with me and doesn’t deserve anyone’s benefit of the doubt. I would be delighted to see HUD hand their files over to the Justice Department for a full on investigation of their discriminatory practices; indeed, I will be deeply annoyed if that doesn’t happen given their continued non-responsiveness to HUD’s demands. In the meantime, I continue to fantasize about a time when Harris County and the city of Houston are not targeted for harm by our state government. I hope to live long enough to see it.

Are we emotionally prepared for the oncoming freeze?

Dec 20th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

That’s the real question at this point.

ERCOT on Friday notified power generators in Texas that they need to be online and ready to provide power during an expected wave of cold air that could drop overnight temperatures into the 20s late next week.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s nonprofit grid operator, issued the notice effective Dec. 22-26, though officials said they expect there will be enough power to meet demand.

The state’s power grid has been bolstered since a February 2021 winter storm knocked out power to large parts of Texas for several days and was linked to about 200 deaths. During that storm, demand for power soared while power generation equipment froze, knocking several producers offline.

“As we monitor weather conditions, we want to assure Texans that the grid is resilient and reliable,” said Pablo Vegas, ERCOT President and CEO. “We will keep the public informed as weather conditions change throughout the coming week.”

The coming burst of cold isn’t expected to be as strong as what was seen during the 2021 freeze, according to Space City Weather.

“While we will continue to watch this forecast very closely, we do not believe that the intensity, duration, or impacts of the cold will rival what we saw in 2021, which saw mid or low teens for lows,” wrote Space City Weather meteorologist Matt Lanza.

In the wake of the historic storm almost two years ago, state officials forced ERCOT to improve the power grid and make it less likely to falter in severe weather.

[…]

Ed Hirs, an energy fellow with the University of Houston, said those changes still fall short of larger market concepts he said could strengthen the grid’s reliability. The Public Utility Commission, which oversees ERCOT, is reviewing proposals for doing that and is expected to vote on a proposal recommendation at its Jan. 12 meeting. The Texas Legislature will debate the recommendation and other options during the 2023 legislative session.

“It takes more than 20 months to fix something broken over 12 years of underinvestment,” he said. “We’ll find out if the Band-Aids the PUC put in place will hold.”

That’s where I am right now, as I remember the forty-plus hours that we went without power in February of 2021. My family was pretty well equipped to handle the cold – not “fuck off to Cancun” privileged, but we were never in any real danger. Even with that, it was very unpleasant. We had our pipes bust in 13 places – thankfully, we were able to get a plumber out quickly to fix that – we lost a Meyer lemon tree that had produced a lot of fruit over the years, and it was just damn traumatic on the girls. I’m a little in denial about this freeze coming in, for reasons I can’t quite grasp other than I’m an idiot and this is how I cope with stuff like this. If the grid does fail in spectacular fashion again, the one thing we have learned is that there won’t be any political consequences for it. There’s never an election around when you really need one. Anyway, I hope we all manage to stay warm this time, with the exception of Greg Abbott and everyone on his campaign staff. The rest of you, bundle up and hope for the best. TPR, Reform Austin, and the Trib have more.

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