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June, 2014:

Petition deadline coming

Jun 30th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
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Scott Braddock takes a look at the petition effort to repeal the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, which must turn in its homework this week.

Opponents led by longtime – and now former because he was recently ousted – Harris County Republican Party Chairman Jared Woodfill are working to turn in at least 17,000 signatures of Houston residents by next Monday. If they can do that and the signatures are verified, the issue will be on track to cause all kinds of additional heat in Houston with potential statewide implications.

On the surface, this would seem to be a classic liberal versus conservative argument playing out at the local level. But one possible statewide consequence has do with Woodfill’s role in the fight coupled with speculation that he’d like to be the next Republican Party of Texas chairman. Meantime, the placement of what’s been framed as a gay-rights issue on the November ballot could be used by Democrats to push their voters to the polls in the state’s largest city during a non-presidential year.

[…]

Woodfill and others ominously call it a “sexual predator act.” As he and other opponents put it on this website: “It will by government decree open thousands of women’s restrooms, showers and girls locker rooms in the city to biological males! Predators and peepers can use it as cover to violate our women and children!”

Now working alongside Steve Hotze’s Conservative Republicans of Texas, Woodfill told Quorum Report on Monday that his group is confident they’ll have enough signatures in time to meet the deadline. “We can’t afford to wait. Lives are at risk,” Woodfill said. “It’s about the safety of our wives and daughters and kids.”

See here and here for the background. According to TFN Insider, the due date is Thursday, July 3. The hate squad known as the Houston Area Pastors Council was ginning up one last Sunday effort; Woodfill had previously requested that petitions be returned by June 27, which was last Friday. I don’t know if that’s a sign they’re having trouble getting enough valid signatures or if they’re aiming to turn in an impressive amount of them. They need about 17,000 valid sigs, which isn’t that high a bar to clear, and pretty much everyone expects them to do so.

Woodfill declined to comment on growing speculation that he may be using the issue to position himself as the “conservative choice” for the next chairman of the Texas Republican Party. He stepped down as Harris County Chairman earlier this month after losing to challenger Paul Simpson. Voters in Houston could be forgiven, though, for not noticing Woodfill is no longer chairman given the amount of email blasts he is still sending out regularly about the ordinance. “This isn’t about anybody’s personality,” Woodfill said. “This is about the issue.”

For his part, Simpson said he supports the effort to overturn the ordinance and, he added, the county party leadership is in a state of transition. “I think repealing it is appropriate,” Simpson said.

Dear sweet baby Jesus, please let that incompetent boob Jared Woodfill be the next RPT Chair. It would be the best thing that could ever happen to them.

Some observers have said in a general election season when Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Ft Worth, needs to charge up her base in her bid for governor, this issue in Houston could give her specifically and Democrats broadly a boost. It is, of course, not likely that supporters of gay-rights would vote for Republicans if they do indeed show up at the polls this fall to make their voices heard about the ordinance.

“I think that’s right,” said University of Houston Political Scientist Brandon Rottinghaus. If Democrats are looking for ways to energize their base, the equal rights ordinance “would have to be on their list,” he said. Rottinghaus cautioned Democrats, however, that the issue is a double-edged sword. “They may want to use that as their tool to generate interest” but the problem is some reliably Democratic groups like many African-Americans and a significant percentage of Hispanics don’t have a traditional liberal view of gay rights, he said.

“There are opportunities for the Democrats to make this work and there’s also the potential there could be a serious backlash,” Rottinghaus said. Conservatives will also turn out with intensity to oppose the ordinance, he said.

Political Science Chair at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Jon Taylor, was more blunt in his assessment. He asked “Why give Democrats a reason to come out in November?” Taylor is a Republican and has long criticized Woodfill for his fiery brand of politics. “Do you really want to give extra ammunition to the opposition?” Taylor said. “Totally unnecessary. It is time to back off.”

PDiddie and I have talked about this before. I’ll say again, I don’t fear this fight. It sucks to have to engage in it, but if they want to bring it, then let’s get it on. I didn’t need any more motivation to vote and engage this fall, but I’m happy for there to be more. Let’s see what they’ve got for their signatures, and let’s get ready to rumble.

A step forward for Uptown BRT

Jun 30th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
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Progress.

Texas transportation officials Thursday kicked in $25 million to build a dedicated bus lane along Loop 610, ensuring the second piece of a planned bus rapid transit corridor in the Uptown area.

As part of a larger statewide transportation spending plan for the next decade, members of the Texas Transportation Commission added $25 million to the transit plan. Officials with the Uptown Management District and Metropolitan Transit Authority are working on the bus project.

The project along Loop 610 is specific for buses.

“We’ve had very open discussions that there is not contemplation it will be used for rail,” state transportation commissioner Jeff Moseley said.

The money is scheduled for the project in 2017.

Plans call for bus-only lanes along Post Oak and Loop 610 between the future Westpark Transit Center that Metro’s building and the Northwest Transit Center near Interstate 10.

“It really is a transformational project in Houston,” said Metro chairman Gilbert Garcia, noting it allows workers in the Uptown area to avoid some congested parts of their trip.

See here, here, here, and here for the background. I presume the rail restriction on these funds is just for these funds, and that if someday Metro wants to build the Uptown Line as originally envisioned it can do so. That’s not even close to the radar at this time, I just hope future options are being kept open. For now, I’m glad to see this move along.

Greg Abbott sure doesn’t like whistleblowers

Jun 30th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
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He sure does seem to have a lot of them, though.

You want to be the boss, you get to deal with boss problems

The office of Attorney General Greg Abbott — the Republican gubernatorial candidate — is appealing a whistleblower’s lawsuit and $1.2 million verdict, arguing that an El Paso jury was wrong when it decided that the agency fired an employee in retaliation for alerting supervisors to internal wrongdoing.

The jury awarded damages last year to Laura Rodriguez, a veteran employee of the agency who argued that she was fired after blowing the whistle on alleged insurance fraud by a coworker. Abbott’s office says there is a “complete lack of evidence” that she was fired in retaliation.

It is the second whistleblower lawsuit against the office of Abbott to grab recent headlines. It comes amid a pitched political battle between Abbott and state Sen. Wendy Davis, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, who has made the whistleblower cases a campaign issue.

In the El Paso case, an appeal that Abbott’s office filed last week outlines Rodriguez’s allegations. Rodriguez was working as an office manager in December 2008 in the attorney general’s El Paso Child Support Division when she discovered potential insurance fraud in her office, according to court documents. She learned that her executive assistant and longtime friend, Debra Galindo, was requesting to add a child as a dependent to her state-provided insurance plan. In her request, Galindo claimed that the child in question was her niece, but Rodriguez knew that the child was actually the girlfriend of Galindo’s son. Rodriguez reported the matter to an ethics adviser in the AG’s office on Jan. 5, 2009, and Galindo was suspended for five days, according to the legal filings.

Rodriguez was fired on April 8, 2010. Less than a month later, she filed a lawsuit against Abbott’s office under the Texas Whistleblower Act, arguing that she was terminated because she had reported her coworker’s misconduct. The AG’s office contended that Rodriguez was fired for many reasons, including a “significant backlog” in her office. The state lawyers argued that there was insufficient evidence to link the firing to Rodriguez’s whistleblowing.

A jury in El Paso, however, decided it had sufficient evidence of retaliation and awarded Rodriguez $1.2 million.

“This lady had been with the AG’s office for 29 years or so,” said Rosemary Morales Marin, Rodriguez’s lawyer. “She was an exemplary employee in every position that she held in the agency, even to the point that her supervisor had written a letter to her parents telling them what a fantastic employee she was.”

My, my. I will say that unlike the other case, there’s no immediately clear reason why there might have been retaliation against the whistleblower. There may well be something below the surface, but it’s not like the interests of the AG’s office itself were at stake here. Be that as it may, we now have a pattern of behavior, and I’d say it’s worth exploring in more detail. I wonder if there will be more shoes like this to drop.

On e-cigarettes

Jun 30th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

From the Rivard Report:

After a 2011 ordinance banned indoor smoking in public places around San Antonio, some smokers were left trying to find options to leave tobacco behind. In the ensuing three years, electronic cigarettes and vaporizers have seen exponential growth around the country, with several retail outlets popping up in and around San Antonio.

Monster Vape, co-founded by Christopher Zieg, opened its doors in 2012, and in two years expanded into two more San Antonio stores and a Corpus Christi franchise.

Zieg, a former U.S. Military medic, said he knew the dangers of smoking, but had trouble quitting until he attended a concert and saw the singer vaping onstage. His personal success with quitting smoking after switching to vaping five years ago inspired him to set up shop as he finished his military service in San Antonio.

“Being a medic and seeing what e-cigs have done for me, I wanted to pass that on to other people,” Zieg said, citing a number of benefits, including a lack of tobacco smells on clothing and vehicles, better energy levels, and perhaps most importantly the fewer number of chemicals found in the fluids used in vaporizers.

The health effects of e-cigarettes are currently unknown, and some early reports have mixed news so far. The new smokes are not yet regulated by the FDA, but I strongly suspect they will come under close scrutiny. I also suspect that local governments, which have been very active in banning tobacco use in public spaces, will not wait for a final word from the FDA to act on their own.

While the federal government works out new rules for electronic users, several city governments have started the push to include electronics in existing anti-smoking ordinances. In December, an ordinance passed by New York City Council added vaporizers to the city’s smoking ordinance, treating them as tobacco products and prohibiting their use indoors. Similar ordinances have passed in Chicago, Los Angeles, and King County, Washington, which includes several cities, most notably Seattle.

Cities in Texas have followed suit, including Georgetown, Soccoro, and Frisco, which – like New York – amended previous ordinances, and San Marcos, which made a last-minute inclusion of vaporizers to its first smoking ordinance during its final reading, drawing criticism from shop owners.

“I just don’t think they did their research before making that decision,” said Sharon Teal, owner of Ahh Vapors, LLC in San Marcos. She cited studies released by the Consumer Advocates for Smoke Free Alternatives Association, showing e-cigarettes to be far less harmful than cigarettes.

In cities where the jury is still out on the inclusion of electronics in smoking ordinances, several businesses have introduced their own bans shutting out vaporizers. To Zieg, this will cause vaporizer users to find other businesses where they can vape.

“If you have two coffee shops and one says ‘no’ and one says ‘yes,’ the vapers are going to go where they’re allowed to do what they love,” Zieg says.

That may be true, but it’s as likely that the non-vapers, of whom there are many more, will choose to stay away. Be that as it may, I don’t know how much this is on the radar of Texas cities yet. I admit I don’t get out much, but I think I’ve maybe seen one or two people vaping ever, whereas I still see plenty of the old-fashioned kind of smokers. On the one hand, it would probably be easy enough for most cities to simply amend their existing no-smoking ordinances to include e-cigs – at this time, I doubt there would be that much organized opposition, certainly not as much as there was when the ordinances were first passed. On the other hand, I doubt there’s much of an organized push to get those ordinances updated, either, so for now I’d say most city councils have bigger fish to fry. What do you think about this? Would you like to see Houston or your city act now on e-cigs, or maybe consider the matter later? Would you go even farther than that? Leave a comment and let us know.

Weekend link dump for June 29

Jun 29th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
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From the You Keep Using That Word – I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means department.

These are the people you should sit next to if you don’t want to get bitten by mosquitoes.

“If bad behavior—using the nation’s full faith and credit as a hostage to political demands, shutting down the government, attempting to undermine policies that have been lawfully enacted, blocking nominees not on the basis of their qualifications but to nullify the policies they would pursue, using filibusters as weapons of mass obstruction—is to be discouraged or abandoned, those who engage in it have to be held accountable. Saying both sides are equally responsible, insisting on equivalence as the mantra of mainstream journalism, leaves the average voter at sea, unable to identify and vote against those perpetrating the problem.”

“A recent scan of the Google Play market found that Android apps contained thousands of secret authentication keys that could be maliciously used to access private cloud accounts on Amazon or compromise end-user profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and a half-dozen other services.”

Did you know that the US Supreme Court sometimes changes past opinions, without making any public announcements about it? Well, now you can be automatically notified when they do.

“He has been the best president for transgender rights, and nobody else is in second place”.

How to class up those trashy websites you like to visit.

The high value our culture places on two-parent families can be dangerous for domestic violence survivors.

On Samuel Beckett and Andre the Giant and the conversations they might have had.

You still be fired for being gay in most states, even though most people don’t realize that. This is why the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act and local non-discrimination ordinances are so important.

Baby elephants playing soccer. What more do you need?

Looking back on some Kodak moments in the courtroom, five years after the last roll of film was produced and developed.

“The Mormon church excommunicated the founder of a prominent women’s group Monday, a rare move that brings down the harshest punishment available on an adherent who created an organization and staged demonstrations in a push for women to join the faith’s priesthood.”

“In other words, Iraq is like the economy: it doesn’t really matter what the president is doing. If the economy is good, the public approves of his performance. It it’s bad, they disapprove. Likewise, if the world is peaceful, they think the president is doing a great job. If it’s not, they don’t—even if he’s pretty much doing everything they think he should be doing. Basically, we all want the president to wave a magic wand and make everything better. No wand, no approval.”

The Harlem Globetrotters drafted Johnny Manziel and Landon Donovan. Wait, the Globetrotters have a draft? With what other teams?

“It was at that point that the greater existential questions surrounding a Smart Crock-Pot began surfacing: When would I really need this? Is it worth the extra $50? And is it smart enough?”

Meet Jackie Mitchell, the woman who once struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, and the woman who may be her spiritual heir some day, Chelsea Baker, a/k/a the Knuckleball Princess.

The Heartbleed vulnerability is still a thing.

When tiger selfies are outlawed, only outlaws will take tiger selfies. Or something like that.

Those lucky duckies sure do have it easy.

“The ruling was such a sweeping embrace of digital privacy that it even reached remotely stored private information that can be reached by a hand-held device — as in the modern-day data storage “cloud.” And it implied that the tracking data that a cellphone may contain about the places that an individual visited also is entitled to the same shield of privacy.”

“In the process of ruling against Aereo, the Supreme Court has created a mess that will take lower courts years to clean up. Online services that are similar to Aereo in some respects and different in others are more likely to face lawsuits, and the lower courts will have to sort out which services are similar enough to Aereo to face copyright liability.”

RIP, Howard Baker, former Senate Majority Leader and Chief of Staff to President Reagan.

“Exactly one year after the Senate passed an immigration reform bill that built a compromise on an exchange of increased enforcement for legalization for the 11 million, Republicans have now officially abandoned any pretense of a willingness to participate in solving the immigration crisis. Instead, they have committed the party to a course premised on two intertwined notions: There are no apparent circumstances under which they can accept legalization of the 11 million; and as a result, the only broad response to the crisis they can countenance is maximum deportations.”

Turns out it’s not so easy now for companies to screw workers out of health insurance and deflect the blame for it.

Andy Murray, Amélie Mauresmo, and sexism at Wimbledon.

The Guardian critically reviews its coverage of the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which led to the start of World War I.

Convention coverage

Jun 29th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
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Wendy and Leticia and a whole host of others rally the crowd in Dallas.

Sen. Wendy Davis

Sen. Wendy Davis

Wendy Davis and Leticia Van de Putte shared the spotlight at the Texas Democratic Party convention on Friday night, promising to change the direction of the state, ripping their Republican opponents and imploring Democrats to break the GOP’s two-decade grip on state government.

Davis attacked her Republican opponent, matching his attacks at the GOP convention in Fort Worth earlier this month, and talked fighting insiders in Austin.

“I’m running because there’s a moderate majority that’s being ignored — commonsense, practical, hardworking Texans whose voices are being drowned out by insiders in Greg Abbott’s party, and it needs to stop,” she said.

Davis spoke about her background, her kids and her grandmother, all as a way of establishing her Texas roots and values.

She talked about what she would do if elected, promising full-day pre-K “for every eligible child,” less testing in public schools, less state interference with teaching, more affordable and accessible college. She also implied she would end property tax exemptions for country clubs as part of property tax reform, and end a sales tax discount for big retailers who pay on time.

She took some swipes at her opponent, too.

“Unlike Greg Abbott, I’m not afraid to share the stage with my party’s nominee for lieutenant governor, my colleague, mi hermana, Leticia Van de Putte,” she said. When the audience hooted, she cautioned them: “Now you guys don’t clap too much or Greg Abbott will sue you.”

The insider slam on Abbott was woven into Davis’ nine pages of prepared remarks. “You see, Mr. Abbott cut his teeth politically as part of the good old boys network that’s had their hands on the reins for decades,” she said. “He’s been in their service and their debt since he ran for office, and as a judge and a lawyer he’s spent his career defending insiders, protecting insiders, stacking the deck for insiders and making hardworking Texans pay the price.”

Davis said Abbott accepts large contributions from payday lenders “and then clears the way for them to charge unlimited interest rates and fees.” She blasted him for taking contributions from law firms that handle bond deals approved by the office of the attorney general, and for saying state law does not require chemical companies to reveal what they are storing in Texas communities.

“He isn’t working for you; he’s just another insider, working for insiders,” she said.

Sen. Leticia Van de Putte

Sen. Leticia Van de Putte

Van de Putte, who spoke immediately before Davis, promised not to back down from the fight against Dan Patrick, her opponent for lieutenant governor. She said she would instead fight to “put Texas first.”

When she ran for student council president in junior high, she said, she was told she could not run because she was a girl.

“Well I did, and I won,” she said.

She said that lesson remains relevant now. “I need to run, not just because I am a girl, but because I want the responsibility. Because I know what needs to get done. And I know I’m the right person for the job.”

I love it when they talk tough. I’m not up in Dallas, though several of my blogging colleagues are. So far the reports I’ve heard are positive – lots of energy and excitement. One person even compared it to 2008, which is music to the ear. Obviously, the folks who take the time to go to a party convention aren’t the ones that need to be inspired to go vote, but they are the ones that will be doing a lot of the work to inspire others, so the more enthusiastic they are, the better.

As I said on Friday, the best thing you can do is work to help get the message out and get the voters to the polls. The next best thing you can do is pitch in financially. Democrats have done phenomenally well in grassroots small-dollar fundraising of late, which is both great and necessary since the other guys have a lot more megalomaniac billionaires on their side. Monday is the last day for this fundraising period, and while we can’t do much about the polling narrative right now, we can at least make sure that one part of the story is that our candidates will be in good shape to take the fight to their opponents this fall. So with that in mind, here’s where you can park that loose change that’s burning a hole in your pocket:

Wendy Davis

Leticia Van de Putte

Sam Houston

Mike Collier

John Cook

Steve Brown

If you can only give to one, I would advise you to donate to Leticia Van de Putte. Wendy Davis has already demonstrated that she can raise a ton of money, but Leticia needs to post a big number in July to ensure that every story written about her doesn’t contain a disclaimer about her ability to get her message out. Sam Houston and then Mike Collier are next in line. Those two plus John Cook and Steve Brown will have less effect on the ultimate outcome than the ladies will, but they are still very important.

“You just work with what you have rather than complaining that you don’t have it,” said John Cook, the land commissioner candidate. “That’s what our campaign is all about.”

Cook said he will focus less on the General Land Office and home in on the GOP’s controversial platform on social issues, which touts reparative therapy for gays and lesbians, among other measures.

“My job now is to point out the shortcomings of the Republican Party and the inclusiveness of the Democratic Party,” he said.

Brown, running for a seat on the state board that regulates oil and gas, has campaigned on increasing the Railroad Commission’s environmental stewardship and improving the agency’s fairness. He said he would work on communicating that to delegates at the convention.

Houston, vying to become the state’s chief lawyer, said he wants to depoliticize the attorney general’s office, saying that under Greg Abbott it too often has focused on fighting the federal government rather than finding solutions.

Collier said he intends to paint the tea party – and the Texas GOP, by extension – as anti-business for failing to support fully funding key state programs, such as public education, that ultimately aid business.

“If you understand business, you understand that you’ve got to invest to plan for the future,” Collier said.

The badness of the Republican statewide ticket doesn’t end with Dan Patrick. It’s rotten all the way down. Don’t forget about these guys, who will be working as hard as Wendy and Leticia with far less attention being paid to them.

John Cook mentioned the party platform, so let’s talk about that.

Roughly 7,000 delegates have converged on the Big D this weekend, two weeks after Texas Republicans met at the Fort Worth end of the Metroplex to hammer out a platform that drew national attention for its controversial planks on immigration and support for so-called “reparative therapy” to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality.

“All they did was talk about hating people,” Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said at a Thursday night reception. “This week, we’re in Dallas, Texas, talking about love, right?”

The Democratic Party platform will reflect that feeling, said Garnet Coleman, the Houston state representative in charge of leading the drafting committee for the last decade.

“Our platform is designed to include, not exclude,” Coleman said on Friday, the day before the draft document is viewed, debated and voted on by the permanent platform committee. “And I think their (the Republicans’) platform is an expression of values that are, quite frankly, outside of the mainstream.”

Coleman predicted the Democrats’ platform will not spark the heated debates of the Republican convention, where delegates fought over planks on immigration, medical marijuana and homosexuality, because of a “set of values” the party approved in 2004 and on which they have been building since.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of change,” Coleman said of the 2014 draft compared with its 2012 predecessor. The party will remain opposed to a guest worker program in favor of comprehensive immigration reform and the issue of child detainees on the border likely will not be included in the platform.

[…]

The most significant departure from previous years’ platforms likely will be the inclusion of a new plank regarding women’s issues, said Coleman. The section will focus on issues that affect women beyond family planning and abortion, such as wage disparity and other workplace challenges.

The transportation section also will see some additions, addressing what Coleman called the “non-sexy” issues of toll roads and highway building and maintenance funds.

“There’s not enough money to just maintain the highways we have, so that affects the ability for Texas to grow,” Coleman said, adding he would like to see a gas tax. “(Gov. Rick) Perry has made Texas highways into franchises for toll roads.”

As I’ve said before, no candidate is bound by their party’s platform, but I doubt you’ll find too many Democrats trying to back away or distract from the TDP platform. That especially includes the provisions on immigration.

Contrasting the GOP positions to their own, Democrats said it boils down to matters of inclusion and respect.

Like the Republicans, Democrats see immigration as a key to motivating voter turnout for the November general election.

In speech after speech Friday, Democratic Party luminaries ranging from Van de Putte to U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro to party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa bashed the GOP platform for its tough-on-immigrants, secure-the-border stance.

And when the Democrats approve their platform on Saturday, party officials said the result will feature most everything the Republicans’ did not.

“We are very supportive of a path to citizenship because there are people who are here and are very productive and have committed no crime and are adding to our economy,” said state Rep. Garnet Coleman, chairman of the party’s platform committee. “We are not for a guest-worker program, because that can become a form of indentured servitude.”

Throughout caucuses and forums on Friday, Democrats spent time focusing on the GOP platform that calls for tightening immigration enforcement, a position underscored in recent weeks by an unprecedented influx of tens of thousands of unaccompanied apprehended after crossing the Mexican border.

“The Republicans have gone backward on immigration,” Castro told reporters. “You have a candidate in Wendy Davis that appreciates the contribution of immigrants throughout Texas history, and you have Republican candidates who use the border as a bogeyman. They use it to stoke fear. They use it to divide Texans, to turn Texans against each other and to win elections and the people of our state are tired of that.”

Stace seems to be pleased with developments so far, which makes me happy. There’s a lot more to come, but let’s stay focused on what’s important. Keep organizing, keep talking to the voters, and keep moving forward.

The enduring mystery of Lawrence Meyers

Jun 29th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
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People are still speculating about why the enigmatic CCA Judge switched parties.

Judge Larry Meyers

Judge Larry Meyers

Lawrence “Larry” Meyers did something last year that no other politician in Texas has done in nearly two decades: He became a statewide Democratic officeholder.

As Democrats gather in Dallas this week for their state convention, Meyers — a Court of Criminal Appeals Judge who left the GOP to run for a seat on the Texas Supreme Court as a Democrat this year — may be a name frequently mentioned.

“It was an unusual move,” said Jim Riddlesperger, a political science professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, said of Meyers’ party switching.

“He’s either a maverick, reacting based upon his personal assessments and personal beliefs, or he sees a long-term political trend, a change in Texas politics coming.”

[…]

Demographers predict that Texas, now solidly Republican, will shift back to the left at some point.

As that occurs, they foresee that Democrats will slowly begin reclaiming posts they haven’t held in years — since John Sharp was comptroller, Dan Morales was attorney general, Bob Bullock was lieutenant governor, Pete Laney was House Speaker and Ann Richards was governor.

The question is when that will happen.

If Meyers made the right decision, and switched to the Democratic Party as it readies for a revolution, he could ride the wave and be considered a leader in the party.

But his switch alone doesn’t signify that the Democratic revolution is near.

“Democrats are going to have to win statewide before they can say they’ve turned that tide,” [Mike Hailey, editor and publisher of Capitol Inside] said. “They haven’t done that yet.”

We’ve speculated before about Meyers’ motives, but he still hasn’t said anything so your guess and mine continue to be all we’ve got. My guess, for what it’s worth, is that he’s looking for something different. He was planning to challenge Sharon Keller for Presiding Judge of the CCA in the 2012 GOP primary, but apparently decided against it, perhaps because it would have been too contentious or he became convinced he couldn’t win. At least this way he gets to be on the ballot in November, and if he loses he’ll get another shot in 2016. If my guess is right, perhaps he’ll file for a Supreme Court bench again. It’s not crazy to think he might have a better shot winning as a Dem than he did winning a GOP primary against a colleague, even if you don’t think much about his chances as a D. Anyway, that’s my guess. There may be other reasons, in addition to or instead of the ones I’ve suggested, but until he decides to talk about it, that’s the best we can do.

Grits on the HPD staffing debate

Jun 29th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Grits weighs in on the HPD no-investigations story with some suggestions for how to proceed.

Here’s how to boost the number of police officers available on patrol while freeing up officers to work as detectives in the burglary and other backlogged divisions:

  • Implement verified response for burglar alarm calls, requiring alarm companies to verify a crime was committed before dispatching police. These alarms are 98-99% false, almost never result in arrests, and account for 10-12% of most departments’ patrol calls. This one reform would be the equivalent of increasing patrol staffing by ten percent.
  • Begin to use discretion given police by the Legislature in 2007 to write citations instead of making arrests for driving with a suspended license and possession of marijuana.
  • Follow Texas’ other large cities by issuing paraphernalia citations for crack pipes instead of sending them to the crime lab to scrape traces off for state-jail felony possession prosecution. (See Harris County District Judge Mike McSpadden’s letter to the Legislature urging this reform.)

Those three changes would free up many thousands of police hours without costing the city a dime – certainly enough to allow HPD to adjust staffing levels to create a few dozen new detective slots. Indeed, the last couple of bulleted items would probably save the county money, too.

I agree with what he says, all of which has been said before but bears repeating. I hope everyone who wants more police at least asks about these things. They’re good ideas even if we didn’t have a debate about staffing levels going on.

Saturday video break: Casey Jones

Jun 28th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
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And we go back even farther, to the early 70s and one of the enduring hits of the Grateful Dead:

I figure with all the bootlegs out there, there are probably more live recordings of songs like “Casey Jones” than almost anything else. Here’s a version by Warren Zevon and David Lindley from the great tribute album “Deadicated”:

Even if you’re not a fan of the Dead I’d recommend you check out “Deadicated”. Awesome lineup of artists, and some truly innovative arrangements. If you liked this, you’ll like a lot of the other songs on the album.

Three new judges coming

Jun 28th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
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Nice.

Robert Pitman

Breaking a longstanding logjam, President Obama announced nominees for three vacant Texas federal court benches late Thursday.

If confirmed, U.S. Attorney Robert Pitman of San Antonio, Texarkana lawyer Robert Schroeder III, and Sherman Magistrate Judge Amos Mazzant III will all get lifetime jobs as U.S. district court judges.

“Any nominations are critically important, as Texas desperately needs to have as many of its nine district and two circuit vacancies filled,” said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor who tracks nominations. “The judges are overwhelmed by crushing case loads and too few judicial resources.”

Pitman’s appointment would be “historic,” Tobias added, because he would be the first openly gay federal judge in the state.

Pitman is used to breaking ground. He became Texas’ first openly gay U.S. attorney, and one of the first anywhere. Before his appointment in 2011 as the top federal prosecutor for the Western District of Texas, he served as a magistrate judge.

Pitman, nominated for a seat in San Antonio, earned his law degree from the University of Texas. If confirmed by the Senate, he will take the bench formerly filled by W. Royal Furgeson Jr., dean of the University of North Texas Dallas College of Law that is set to open this fall.

Furgeson, reached Thursday night, called him “an outstanding choice. His career covers a wide range of experience. At every juncture, he has performed brilliantly. He works hard. He is very balanced and has excellent temperament. And he is a very decent, honorable and humble person.”

To say the least, it has been a struggle to get judges – and for that matter, US Attorneys – nominated for Texas. President Obama got off to a slow start in making nominations overall, but the resistance he’s encountered has been a much bigger obstacle. I hope he can get this job finished before his term ends. In the meantime, congrats and best of luck with the confirmation process to all the nominees. PDiddie has more.

City exploring new pension for new firefighters?

Jun 28th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
6 comments

Maybe.

Mayor Annise Parker

Mayor Annise Parker

Long concerned about the cost of Houston’s pensions and stymied in her attempts at reform, Mayor Annise Parker is considering a dramatic step to place new firefighters into a separate, less generous pension plan, sources with knowledge of the discussions said.

Officials acknowledge the existing Houston Firefighters Relief and Retirement Fund likely would sue the city over the idea, which has not yet been formally proposed.

[…]

Houston Firefighters Relief and Retirement Fund chairman Todd Clark said he had not heard of the idea. He was not receptive.

“We would have to look at it and see exactly what it is they’re talking about,” Clark said. “If that’s the case, the pension fund will defend the firefighters and the pension system. That will be a fight that we will definitely get into. We won’t support changing our system for the new hires.”

[…]

Councilman Stephen Costello said the idea of a separate pension fund for new hires arose after the city sued the firefighters pension system in January, claiming it was unconstitutional for Houston to be on the hook for payments over which it had no control.

Lawyers for the pension fund, sources said, argued the Legislature’s control was not absolute, and that the city could create a new pension system if it wished.

The city lost a ruling at the state district court level in that case and is appealing. Costello said the current idea appears designed to invite another lawsuit as a legal test.

“You never know until you ask, so I think that’s what the city is going to try to accomplish,” said Costello, who chairs the council’s budget committee and long has advocated pension reforms. “I think the city is testing the water in terms of the constitutionality of the state regulating our pension system.”

The benefit structure of the new pension plan under discussion, Costello and other sources said, would mirror the pension new police officers get, but without automatic cost-of-living adjustments. That benefit is the single most expensive portion of the city’s pension plans.

See here for the background on the city’s lawsuit. I got a press release from the HFRRF about the ruling in May but never saw a news story about it. There never was one as far as a Google search can find, but you can find the press release here. Not much to say about this since it’s basically vaporware, but I do agree with CM Ed Gonzalez in the story that if you’re going to reduce pension payouts to future firefighters, you’re going to have to pay them more up front, Beyond that, we’ll see what if anything happens.

Construction of joint processing center and forensics facility approved to begin

Jun 28th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Good.

I want one of these

DNA robot pictures never get old

Several major building projects – including a state-of-the-art facility for the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences and a voter-approved jail inmate processing center – officially are in the pipeline after Commissioners Court on Tuesday approved a $305 million capital improvement program.

[…]

At the top of the list is the $100 million city-county inmate processing center, which will be built across the street from the main county jail. The 254,000-square-foot facility is expected to help expedite inmate booking by allowing some to bypass certain time-consuming processes.

The county and city of Houston are splitting the cost to build the facility, which will allow the city to shutter its two aging jails when it opens in about three years. The county will contribute $70 million with a bond issue narrowly approved by voters last November; the city will provide $30 million.

Construction will begin this fall.

A $65 million building for the Institute of Forensic Sciences, which will break ground this fall, will house the county medical examiner and the county’s crime lab. Construction is expected to take two and a half years, said John Blount, director of architecture and engineering.

See here, here, and here for the background on the processing center. One of those links mentions that construction for the processing center is expected to take about three years. The Institute of Forensics Science is the county’s new crime lab facility. It was approved for construction back in 2012, and a separate DNA forensics lab is already open.

A poison plan for feral hogs?

Jun 28th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

It could work, though probably not any time soon.

A preservative used to cure bacon is being tested as poison for the nation’s estimated 5 million feral hogs.

[…]

The USDA program that began in April includes $1.5 million for the research center headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado. Its scientists have made sodium nitrite studies a top priority.

Sodium nitrite, used as a salt to preserve meat, can keep red blood cells from grabbing oxygen in live animals. Unlike people and tested domestic animals, pigs make very low levels of an enzyme that counteracts the chemical. Swine that eat enough sodium nitrite at once show symptoms akin to carbon dioxide poisoning: They become uncoordinated, lose consciousness and die.

But baits so far haven’t hit the 90 percent kill rate on penned pigs (feral or domestic, they’re all the same species) needed for EPA consideration. Once it does, approval could take up to five years, Cunningham said.

One problem is creating baits in which pigs will eat a lethal dose. Sodium nitrite tastes nasty and breaks down quickly in the presence of air or water, making it easier for pigs to smell and avoid, said Fred Vercauteren, project leader in Fort Collins.

Microencapsulating the powder masks its smell and keeps it stable longer.

“We’ll work on that throughout the summer,” Vercauteren said.

There are other issues, including keeping the bait away from other animals. The story refers to a solar-powered “Hog Annihilation Machine” that is supposed to open only when it hears hog noises, while delivering a shock to other animals. Is science great or what? We’ll see how this goes.

Friday random ten: F that

Jun 27th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

No single name dominates the Fs like it did the Ds and Es, but there are plenty of interesting names.

1. One’s Too Many – Fabulous Thunderbirds
2. Love Is Expensive And Free – Fastball
3. Man On The Moon – Ferraby Lionheart
4. Suspicious Minds – Fine Young Cannibals
5. Criminal – Fiona Apple
6. Everyday Sunshine – Fishbone
7. Landslide – Fleetwood Mac
8. Ladies Of The World – Flight Of The Conchords
9. Two Tribes – Frankie Goes To Hollywood
10. Bizarre Love Triangle – Frente!

I find it interesting that the only name above that my spellchecker seems to have an issue with is “Frente”, which turns out to be independent of the presence of the exclamation point. I don’t know what to make of that, I just find it interesting.

The fire still burns

Jun 27th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

As an addition to my own response to Lisa Falkenberg’s column about the one-year anniversary of Sen. Wendy Davis’s historic filibuster and the popular uprising around it, I want to call your attention to Andrea Grime’ piece in RHRealityCheck. It’s not a response to Falkenberg or anyone in particular, it’s her recollection of the events of last year as she lived them, and what has happened with her and others that were involved since then. I include it here because it’s a compelling read and it does address some of the things Falkenberg wrote about.

FightBackTX

I woke up on the morning of July 13—a Saturday—feeling broken, enraged, helpless. Even after a few hours’ sleep, I was more exhausted than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. Days before, I’d made the mistake of telling my husband I’d have brunch with his father-in-law and some of his work colleagues. When it came time to get out of bed, I didn’t even bother. I don’t know what I told my husband to tell the guys. I didn’t really give a fuck. I wanted to sleep, I wanted to cry, I wanted to fall through the mattress, through the floor, through the crawlspace, through the dirt, down deep into the Texas soil beneath our house and nest there, hide where no one could tell me it was time to go to another meeting, time to file another story, time to gather up my shit and move to another hearing room, time to plead with lawmakers who couldn’t even be bothered to pretend to half-listen to reason, lawmakers who played on their phones and passed notes while my fellow Texans broke their hearts open between pink limestone walls, telling stories they’d never even whispered aloud before that summer.

So I slept, and then I ate some Lipton instant rice with about half a tub of sour cream on top. That’s what I eat when I’m sad. Lipton instant Spanish rice. Daisy Light sour cream. I think I Instagrammed it before I went back to sleep, grudgingly setting my alarm for 4 p.m. Because I had another thing to do: drink beer. And I dreaded it.

Which is, uh, unusual for me. Let’s say that. Unusual. “Dread” and “drink beer” are about as far apart as two things can get on my emotional spectrum. But the Saturday after HB 2 finally passed was the same Saturday I’d scheduled our usual Austin feminist meet-up—really, more of a “drink up” group that’d been meeting monthly since November 2011. We called it #ATXFem, most of us knew each other from Twitter, and it had come to be sort of a thing. We’d wear name tags, drink beers, do feminist coloring projects, talk shit, organize. And for the first time in more than 18 months, I didn’t want to go hang out and get drunk with a bunch of feminists.

But #ATXFem is sort of my baby. So I dragged my ass out of bed, threw on my “Wendy F’N Davis” tank top, and arrived late to my own Internet nerd party.

When I walked into the bar, all I could see was orange. The Dog & Duck, a malty-smelling pub just a few blocks from the state capitol building, was packed from, well, dog to duck with people wearing orange t-shirts. I didn’t make it to the beer line for ten minutes—there were too many hugs, too many tears. That Saturday was our biggest #ATXFem meeting yet, and we closed down the bar making plans for what to do next: where to donate, who to call, who to write.

Since that day, I have seen nothing that looks like a loss of passion or a surrender to the inevitable, though GOP pundits and mainstream Texas newspapers seem to love the narrative that progressive, liberal and moderate Texans forgot everything they learned last summer as soon as they were home safe, tucked in their beds.

What I have seen is an incredible outpouring of time, of money, of soul. Because the knowledge that Texans gained last summer—how to testify in front of a committee hearing, how to contact their legislators, hell, how to just know the names of their representatives—can’t be taken away from them. They now see how the system works, and how the system has been manipulated by right-wing lawmakers who have grown lazy and self-satisfied, comfortable with their bully pulpit.

There’s a lot more, including stuff about Battleground Texas, but I want to encourage you to click over and read the whole thing. The point again is that rallies and public events like the anniversary commemoration very much have their place, but if they’re not being backed up by the hard and unglamorous work of organizing, they’re more for show than anything else. And if you find yourself complaining about feeling uninspired after the public events have faded away, maybe you need to check out some of those unsexy but deeply vital organizing events. I guarantee, there’s plenty of inspiration to be found at those.

What would you have done differently?

Jun 27th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Lisa Falkenberg remembers the Wendy Davis filibuster and complains about what has and hasn’t happened between then and the one-year commemoration of it.

Sen. Wendy Davis

Sen. Wendy Davis

You don’t just dust off a social movement because a year has passed and you need to raise money. The fire Davis lit has to be fed and tended if it’s going to spread. The Fort Worth senator may take for granted votes of those who already joined her cause. But what about the social liberals and moderates who haven’t joined Davis’ cause? What about the sympathetic but distracted voters who need to be deeply moved to get to the polls in November?

Some of her supporters agree with me and think Davis ought to dance with the ones that brung her. Others don’t. State Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, a veteran advocate for women’s rights, says the movement hasn’t lost momentum. It’s just spread out.

“At some point, people want to see the results on bread and butter issues that affect their lives every day, like equal pay and minimum wage,” she added.

Thompson is right in saying abortion isn’t an everyday issue for most Texans. But neither is gay marriage or gun control. Reproductive liberty gets under our skin in the same way. We’re talking about constitutional rights.

Other Davis supporters say she has done enough talking about the issue. Indeed, who has talked more?

“There’s not a Texan alive who isn’t clear on her position on a woman’s right to choose,” Democratic consultant Harold Cook told me awhile back. “What more could she say?”

The problem, though, isn’t that we’re unclear. The problem is that we’re unmoved. And that’s no way to lead a movement.

I get the complaint about fundraising. I’ve heard it from other folks, too. Not to state the obvious here, but 1) Wendy is going to need a lot of money to have a chance against Greg Abbott, who is already mounting plans to carpet-bomb the airwaves this fall, and 2) if those emails weren’t effective, she’d have stopped sending them. Any mail client worth its salt has filtering options. No one has to see these emails if they don’t want to.

Falkenberg’s complaint comes in two parts. First, she thinks Davis should be talking more about abortion since it was her passionate defense of abortion rights that led directly to the amazing events of a year ago and ultimately to Davis’ gubernatorial campaign. Again, I get the complaint and have heard it from others. But honestly, what is there to say? One of the problems here is that Governor Wendy Davis can’t actually do anything to undo the harmful legislation that was passed last summer and in the sessions before that. She can’t roll back any of the provisions of HB2, she can’t do anything about stuff like the kneecapping of Planned Parenthood and the Women’s Health Program, and she has no authority to force the Attorney General to not defend the law in court. Politicians get into trouble when they promise things they don’t have the power to deliver. The former two require legislative action, and that ain’t happening. The one thing she can do is promise to veto new restrictions on abortion. I’m not sure how much value there is in this – I mean, everyone does know where she stands on that, and I at least find a lot of talk about the need to draw lines in the sand and stand firm in defense of what we have left to be more grim than inspiring. YMMV, I guess.

Falkenberg, to her credit, recognizes the political calculations behind all this. Campaigns are choices, and we can always disagree about which choices will be the most effective. My complaint with Falkenberg’s column comes in two parts. One, she never acknowledges that leading a movement is about much more than just talking about an issue. Davis is very much trying to reach out to and connect with those sympathetic but distracted voters – it’s the keystone of her whole campaign! – she’s just doing it by doing the grunt work of organizing, block walking, phone banking, and so forth. Maybe that’s not what inspires Lisa Falkenberg, but as the Battleground Texas folks can attest from their experiences with the Obama campaign, it works pretty well for getting people to the polls. No guarantees, of course – maybe it won’t be as effective here, and even if it is it may not be enough. But it’s a pretty well-established way to lead a movement, and if you think otherwise, I’d like to know the reasons that aren’t about your own preferences.

And two, if you were inspired by Wendy Davis a year ago and you’ve been sitting around waiting for her to inspire you again, I’m sorry but you’re part of the problem. That grunt work of organizing I mentioned? It doesn’t happen by itself. Michael Li of the great Texas Redistricting blog has posted to his Facebook wall many times about how some Democratic activists seem to prefer carping about campaigns than participating in them, and how a lot of us tend to spend our time talking to each other instead of talking to the Presidential-year-only voters (I’ll say it again: Roughly half of the people that voted for Barack Obama in Texas in 2008 did not cast a vote in 2010) and the people who aren’t registered but could be. Now that’s no way to lead a movement, because a successful movement has many, many leaders in it. Disagree all you want about the choices Wendy Davis is making, but if you’re sitting on the sidelines, you need to ask yourself why you’re not involved.

I’m going to close with a bit from this Ross Ramsey article in the Trib, which I thought was one of the better analyses of the filibuster and the celebration of it.

The filibuster was a big deal, whether you were delighted by it or dismayed.

It added to efforts that were already underway — from Battleground Texas and others — to rebuild the state’s patchy network of liberal voters, and now it is a rallying point for Democrats. And it got conservatives calling for changes in the way the Senate does its business.

The Republicans got their law. The Democrats found their candidate for governor after her filibuster triggered an invigorating public display of the power of crowds.

[…]

The real measure of the anniversary will come in the general election in November.

The people who assembled at the Capitol a year ago learned at least as much as the Senate did. They came, they made noise, they had an impact, and they found out that they were not alone in a political environment that is dominated by people they disagree with.

Sustaining that kind of passion is difficult, but so is getting it started in the first place. That’s why they’re celebrating.

Amen to that. I understand why a journalist like Lisa Falkenberg might be reluctant to participate in a BGTX phone bank or block walk. But as both a journalist and a voter, I think Lisa Falkenberg should check a couple of them out to see what inspiration looks like to the people participating and the people they’re talking to. Who knows, maybe she’ll find a little of it for herself, too.

The bricks of Freedmen’s Town

Jun 27th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Surely we can do something about this.

Most in the Fourth Ward community know the lore – that freed slaves and descendants first laid the bricks on the streets 100 years ago.

Now most agree the roads need repairs, but residents and preservationists worry a recently approved city plan to remove the bricks to fix piping underneath will ruin the original streets, a key element of Freedmen’s Town designation as a National Historic District. Some activists also say the process to approve the project violated federal laws intended to preserve national historic districts.

“I’m appalled that the mayor wants to disturb those bricks like that,” resident Terrance Williams said.

More than 100 years ago, Fourth Ward residents paid $1 per brick to have the streets paved in front of their houses, said Catherine Roberts, co-founder of the Rutherford B.H. Yates Museum in Freedmen’s Town, and a major force for the area’s conservation. Not only are the bricks themselves significant, but the patterns they form tell a story. The designs at some intersections can be traced back to African crossroads – which pointed the way to safehouses for the black community – or religious traditions of the Yoruba people of West Africa.

“This is an in-the-ground cultural resource,” Roberts said. “You don’t take them out.”

Their inability to stop construction has made the community feel powerless – a community once considered the heartbeat of black Houston. Doctors, lawyers, dentists and ministers populated the area until the 1920s, when the Third and Fifth wards became more popular.

[…]

After decades of discussion and planning to install new utilities in the neighborhood, City Council approved a $5 million plan this month to repipe portions of Andrews and Wilson streets. Work is scheduled to start by early August, said Mike Cordova, project manager for the city.

Water and sewer pipes will be replaced, and then the salvageable bricks – estimated to be just one-third of those there now – will be cleaned and put back, but likely not in their original designs.

Texas Department of Transportation architect Mario Sanchez said the bricks will be regrouped at intersections rather than in their original locations. “It was determined infeasible to re-install them in their original locations, specifically because there would be a lack of continuity based on the number of salvageable bricks,” Sanchez wrote in the email to the Houston Chronicle.

That’s heartbreaking news to residents and historians, who believed that years ago they had reached a solution on upgrading the Freedmen’s Town streets. They pleaded with the city to tunnel underneath the bricks instead of moving them, and in 2007 former Mayor Bill White reached an agreement with U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee to do just that.

In a letter sent to the Chronicle from Jackson Lee to White, the congresswoman discusses the agreed-upon plan: using a combination of trenching and tunneling to put the water and sewer lines beneath the sidewalks instead of under the bricks, leaving them undisturbed.

City officials now say the streets are too narrow for tunneling, and construction costs could quadruple.

“It just wasn’t a practical way to move forward,” said council member Ellen Cohen, whose district includes Freedmen’s Town.

It always comes down to money, doesn’t it? There’s a lot more in the story about the historic preservation process and whether it’s being followed correctly, and you should read the whole thing. What it comes down to is that these bricks and these streets are a unique and very important piece of culture and history in a neighborhood that has lost so much of that culture and history to the demands of modern times. We really need to find a way to improve these streets without losing or damaging what they’re all about.

Get ready to go inspection sticker-free

Jun 27th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Things are gonna be different next year.

Texas drivers will have a little less clutter on their windshield next year when the familiar green inspection sticker goes away, but it comes at the price of requiring inspections in order to renew vehicle registrations.

As of March 2015, vehicles registered in Texas will no longer need separate vehicle inspection and registration stickers. Inspections and registrations will continue, but the single registration sticker will act as proof of both, Texas DMV director Whitney Brewster told a state senate committee on Monday. The deadline for passing state vehicle safety and emissions tests shifts to sometime in the 90 days before the vehicle’s registration expires.

“This is a big impact on customers,” Brewster told state senators, citing the need for an aggressive public awareness campaign.

[…]

The rules and costs for vehicle owners do not change, though when the payments occur will. Owners in the Houston area will pay the station $25.50 when the inspection is done. The remaining $14.25 associated with Texas clean air programs and inspection oversight is paid when the person renews the vehicle registration.

The owner will get a printout when they submit for the inspection, then that information is relayed into the state database. The owner can go online prior to their registration expiring and renew. Officials can check the insurance and inspection databases for the information and issue the registration renewal.

For in-person renewals, the owner can take the proper insurance and inspection certificates and present them to the county tax assessor.

The change means a break from annual inspections for some drivers, because of the timing for inspections and registrations expiring. If someone’s registration expires in May and their inspection tag expires in June, for example, they will not have to get their car tested until prior to renewing their registration in May 2016.

See here for the background. This is the result of a bill passed last year by the Lege, and the idea is to cut down on inspection fraud. It will be a big change for pretty much everyone, so that public awareness campaign does need to be aggressive and pervasive. For now, be aware that a change is coming, and be prepared to look for the new procedures next year when inspection and registration time roll around.

Environmental impact studies can begin for Texas high speed rail

Jun 26th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Another step forward.

The Federal Railroad Administration published a document on its website Wednesday officially kicking off a highly anticipated environmental review of a proposed high speed rail line between Dallas and Houston.

The document, called a Notice Of Intent To Prepare An Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), marks the start of a process that will involve public input on Texas Central High-Speed Railway’s ambitious endeavor, which aims to connect travelers between Dallas and Houston in 90 minutes or less. The company has said it plans to operate the country’s fastest and only profitable high-speed rail line without public subsidies. Company officials have been preparing for the federal review for more than a year and have quietly worked on the logistics of it with federal officials in advance, according to people involved in the discussions.

The EIS, which could take more than a year, will examine possible routes for the rail line and how each scenario would impact the region’s environment, including agricultural land, streams, floodplains and wildlife, as well as various federal regulations including the National Historic Preservation Act. The review will also investigate “the potential impacts of stations, power facilities, and maintenance facilities to support HSR operations,” according to the federal notice.

Local entities as well as the public have 90 days to submit written comments on the scope of the EIS to ensure “that all issues are addressed related to this proposal and any significant impacts are identified.”

The doc is here. As you may recall from the light rail process here in Houston, there will be public meetings, in this case organized by TxDOT and held in the affected area, which is more or less the I-45 corridor between Houston and Dallas, to present information about the project and allow for further feedback. This process will take some time and will if all goes well lead to a Draft Environmental Impact Statement, a Final Environmental Statement, and a Record of Decision. How long that takes is at least somewhat proportional to how contentious or smooth the process is.

The Chron had a preview story from the morning before the Notice of Intent was published.

“It is now more than just talk,” said Maureen Crocker, executive director of the Gulf Coast Rail District, which is supportive of passenger rail projects in the Houston area. “When they do this, it’ll give everyone a much clearer idea of what this is going to be, and lay out the plan that so far has been private.”

Robert Eckels, president of Texas Central Railway, the company proposing the line, said in a statement that the notice begins a process, “which, true to our overall philosophy, will be funded with private dollars.”

[…]

Initiation of the environmental process doesn’t lock public or private officials into anything, or set specific deadlines.

“Timelines for these kinds of projects vary widely,” said Mike England, spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration.

Public agencies, notably the railroad administration and Texas Department of Transportation, must conduct the review – including soliciting public comment and holding meetings in areas affected by the plan.

Crocker said the local rail district currently has a study examining how to bring passenger trains into downtown Houston.

“We’ve kind of kept the high-speed rail line in mind when we’re doing that,” Crocker said.

See here for my previous blogging on this, plus PDiddie and Texas Leftist for reports on a recent meeting some of us bloggers had with the TCR folks. The optimistic time frame for the start of construction is 2016. TCR will undoubtedly have a few wish list items for the Legislature next year as well, mostly to smooth out the state regulatory process, but nothing that is likely to be a big deal. I’ll keep my eyes open for announcement about the public meetings and will let you know when I know more about them. Dallas Transportation has more.

Tenth Circuit upholds same-sex marriage

Jun 26th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
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A huge step forward.

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that states outlawing same-sex marriage are in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

By upholding a Utah judge’s decision, the a three-member panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver became the first appeals court to rule on the issue, setting a historic precedent that voter-approved bans on same-sex marriage violate the Fourteenth Amendment rights of same-sex couples to equal protection and due process.

But the court stayed the implementation of its decision, pending an anticipated appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the state can ask the 10th Circuit Court to re-hear the matter before the full court, according to legal experts.

University of Utah law professor Clifford Rosky called Wednesday’s ruling, “the most important victory of the entire gay rights movement.”

It’s the first time a federal appeals court has recognized that same-sex couples have the same fundamental right to marry as all Americans, said Rosky, chairman of Equality Utah’s board of directors.

“Very few courts have embraced the fundamental rights argument and this court seems to have completely embraced it and applied ‘strict scrutiny,’ the highest standard recognized under constitutional law,” Rosky said.

If the state asks the 10th Circuit Court to re-hear the matter before the full court, Rosky said he doubts they’ll get a different result, and the request may not even be granted.

The appeals court upheld U.S. Judge Robert Shelby’s December decision, which struck down Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage and prompted more than a 1,000 same-sex couples to marry during a 17-day window before the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay, halting all such weddings.

[…]

The 10th Circuit Court focused their ruling on the 14th Amendment, which gives equal protection to American citizens, and their reading of the Constitution that the legal rights of married couples has nothing to do with the gender of those in the union.

“A state may not deny the issuance of a marriage license to two persons, or refuse to recognize their marriage, based solely upon the sex of the persons in the marriage union,” the 10th Circuit Court ruled.

“We hold that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the fundamental right to marry, establish a family, raise children, and enjoy the full protection of a state’s marital laws. A state may not deny the issuance of a marriage license to two persons, or refuse to recognize their marriage, based solely upon the sex of the persons in the marriage union,” the appellate court said.

The decision is here. As TPM notes, there’s a separate case before the 10th Circuit on Oklahoma’s gay marriage ban. It’s hard to imagine a different ruling in that case. This decision affects multiple states that fall within the 10th Circuit’s purview, all of which have their own litigation pending. See Freedom to Marry’s litigation page for an overview of the legal cases elsewhere. One that is being watched closely is in the Fifth Circuit, where the appeal of the ruling in the Texas case will be heard; appellants’ opening briefs are due July 9, with responses due 30 days later, no schedule yet for oral arguments. The belief is that if any court is going to stop the winning streak for same sex marriage, it’ll be the Fifth Circuit, because they suck like that. But we’ll see. It’s not completely out of the question that SCOTUS won’t have to rule on this at all, if the lower and appeals courts keep agreeing with each other; by the way, another judge, this on in Indiana, also struck down a state ban on same sex marriage on the same day. We’re a long way from the end of this story, though we’re definitely getting closer. Freedom to Marry, the Deseret News, dKos, the Human Rights Campaign, the Dallas Voice, TPM, the Slacktivist, Texas Leftist, and no doubt many others have more.

The people who signed up for insurance via Obamacare got themselves a pretty good deal

Jun 26th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

It worked the way it was supposed to work, in other words.

It's constitutional - deal with it

It’s constitutional – deal with it

Texans who received financial assistance to purchase health coverage through the federal insurance exchange are paying less in monthly premiums than individuals in most other states using that online marketplace, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Texas, like dozens of other states with Republican leadership, declined to create its own state-based insurance exchange under the Affordable Care Act, relying on a federally managed marketplace instead.

Texans who receive tax credits to help them purchase health coverage through the federal marketplace pay $72 on average in monthly premiums for their plans — the seventh-lowest monthly premium among the 36 states using the federal marketplace.

The national average for subsidized enrollees in the federal marketplace is $82 a month, with individuals in states like New Mexico, Wyoming and New Jersey paying more than $100 a month on average.

[…]

On average, subsidized enrollees — who make up 84 percent of Texans who purchased coverage through the federal marketplace — have received $233 in monthly tax credits in Texas.

You can see the report here – the breakdown of subsidy amounts by state is on page 23. There are still things that need to be fixed with Obamacare, as with any large new program, but they’re all doable given a non-insane Congress and some time. The best news so far is that premium increases will be modest for next year, and more insurers want in. As Kevin Drum says, it’s time to acknowledge that it’s working pretty well overall.

Not that this will make any of the usual suspects shut up already, of course.

Opponents of the health reform law have attributed low overall enrollment rates to the fact that low premiums often mean high deductibles. Despite the subsidies offered by the federal government, Texas’ total enrollment numbers have not made a big dent in the state’s sky-high rate of uninsured.

John Davidson, a health policy analyst at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, has said that Texans’ reluctance to purchase insurance through the marketplace in bigger numbers stems from the cost of the health plans, even subsidized ones.

He added that individuals are also apprehensive about accepting the subsidies because they might be faced with paying them back if their annual income increases.

I look forward to the day when a story about Obamacare can be written without reporters feeling compelled to include some “on the other hand” quotes by shills like John Davidson. He has no useful insights or criticisms to offer, he’s just here for the FUD. If you must quote a hack like Davidson, then the least you should do is make it clear that his objections have nothing to do with numbers and everything to do with plain old politics. Matt Yglesias lays out what the argument really is.

One of America’s political parties doesn’t like that idea in any non-health context and they don’t like it for health care either. They think the money it costs to provide those subsidies should be taken away, and it should be given to high-income households in the form of tax cuts.

This is an excellent and important policy debate to have. One of the great ideological issues not just of our time and place, but of democratic politics across eras and countries. Should economic resources be distributed more equally or less equally?

But thus far to an amazing extent we haven’t been having that debate. Instead we’ve been having a debate over whether Obamacare works, over death panels, over enrollment numbers, over income verification procedures, and over the minutia of premiums and payments. It’s time to put that debate behind us. It’s clear — as it always should have been — that if you offer people large subsidies to go buy health insurance, lots of people will happily take the money and go buy some health insurance.

It’s time to start debating the real issue: should we do that, or is it more important to keep taxes on high-earners low than to give low-earners comprehensive health insurance?

So to be clear, John Davidson and his overlords absolutely support cutting their taxes so they don’t have to help pay for anyone to get health insurance. That’s what you should read when you see someone like him quoted in one of these stories.

Texas blog roundup for the week of June 23

Jun 26th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
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The Texas Progressive Alliance managed to tear itself away from watching the World Cup just long enough to bring you this week’s roundup.

(more…)

The filibuster one year later

Jun 25th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

It still resonates. And I believe it will continue to resonate for a lot longer.

The thousands of Texans whose screaming protest of anti-abortion legislation brought the Capitol to a standstill June 25 will mark the one-year anniversary much more quietly this week, yielding to the reality of abortion as a political issue in the most scarlet of red states.

The activists say they are as dedicated as ever to defending abortion rights, and Democrats certainly are working to raise money off of the “People’s Filibuster” of House Bill 2, with a commemorative website and an anniversary fundraiser in Austin featuring their nominees for governor and lieutenant governor – state Sens. Wendy Davis and Leticia Van de Putte – two players in last year’s nationally watched drama.

The strategy illustrates how the anniversary is a double-edged sword for Davis, the filibuster’s face, but also for Van de Putte and the rest of a Democratic Party eager to reignite the passion of last summer but unable to afford to alienate moderates in a state that still opposes abortion.

“At the end of the day, elections are about turning out your base and winning over swing voters,” said Mark Jones, chair of the political science department at Rice University. “The anniversary is going to mobilize the base, but it’s not going to persuade swing voters, and it’s not an issue on which a Democrat is going to win.”

“Effectively,” Jones said, “Davis (and other Democrats) need to walk a tightrope.”

With all due respect, now is not the time to worry about swing voters. Now, and all the way through November, is the time to ensure as many Democratic voters and would-be Democratic voters are fully engaged and involved. I fully agree that Dems will need some number of people to split their vote if we want to have a chance to win one or more statewide elections, but if the base level isn’t high enough it just won’t matter. I mention this to everyone I talk to – only about one half of the people that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 came out to vote for Democrats in 2010. This is a big part of the reason why Bill White is described today as “former Houston Mayor Bill White” and not “Governor Bill White” despite his greatly impressive crossover performance. We can worry about the people who find some or all of the Republican statewide slate scary on a variety of issues but just can’t get past the abortion thing, however many of those people there may be, at a later time. For right now, if we’re not talking to the Presidential-year-only Democratic voters and unregistered people who would vote Democratic if they were registered, we’re doing it wrong.

To be very clear, I’m not dismissing the importance of swing voters. We’re going to need all of them we can get. All I’m saying is let’s not put the cart before the horse. If Dems get the same 1.7 to 1.8 million base vote they’ve been getting for the past three non-Presidential elections, it’s just not going to matter how well Davis or Leticia Van de Putte does among swing voters. There won’t be enough of them to matter.

So the celebrations and commemorations this week are really important. The energy we had one year ago was real and it was incredible. You can’t sustain that level over that long a period of time without burning out, but there’s been a good simmer all along, and you can see it in the work that’s being done by the Davis and Van de Putte and other statewide campaigns and by Battleground Texas and many other grassroots organizations that were there that day and that night. For a fantastic oral history of what all went down at the Capitol that week, go visit Fight Back Texas and read the stories. Remember what happened, feel again what you felt one year ago, attend an event if you can, and then channel that into some kind of outreach. Go find a BGTx phonebank or block walk event and join in. That’s what we need, for the next five months and beyond. Let the pros worry about this demographic or that. Take the time now to talk to our people, and make sure they know what’s at stake.

Motion to recuse Judge Dietz denied

Jun 25th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Good.

Denied

State District Judge John Dietz will not be forced off Texas’ ongoing school finance case, a San Antonio judge ruled Monday, handing a victory to school districts suing the state over what they call an unconstitutional lack of adequate funding for public education.

Earlier this month, Attorney General Greg Abbott sought to have Dietz removed, citing evidence that he said showed the jurist improperly coached and encouraged plaintiffs’ attorneys in emails they exchanged earlier this year. After a hearing last week, Fourth Administrative District Judge David Peeples late Monday denied Abbott’s recusal request.

“It appears that the parties and the judge had different understandings on whether there would be back-and-forth discussions between the judge and the prevailing parties on the issues they won,” Peeples said in his ruling.

But he added, “Judge Dietz’s understanding was reasonable, and he acted in good faith.”

“The circumstances shown by the evidence do not justify recusal. The state’s motion to recuse Judge Dietz is respectfully denied,” Peeples concluded.

David Thompson, plaintiffs’ counsel who represents school districts in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston, including Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, said he was “very pleased” with the ruling.

“I thought it was about as strong a decision as Judge Peeples could have written and we appreciate his very thoughtful consideration of this important issue.”

See here, here, and here for the background, and here for a copy of Judge Peeples’ ruling denying the motion. It’s clear in his decision that he found no reason to question Judge Dietz’ impartiality, though he did suggest that in cases like this it might be better to do a periodic check to make sure everyone still remembers and agrees to what they originally agreed to. But because there was agreement, and because there was plenty of evidence that the state did not object at any point to it, there was no reason to question Judge Dietz’s actions.

More from the DMN:

“This court emphatically rejects any suggestion that Judge Dietz intentionally or knowingly engaged in ex parte discussions without thinking that [all] the parties had agreed to allow this,” Peeples said in his nine-page ruling.

It is common practice in civil suits for a judge to receive input from attorneys on the prevailing side in writing a final judgment in the case.

Dietz is now expected to resume work on his estimated 350-page decision on whether the current Texas school finance system is constitutional.

[…]

Dietz has already ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in a preliminary decision in early 2013, but he withheld his final judgment after the Legislature increased state funding for education in its 2013 session.

The motion by Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office to remove Dietz was seen by many as a last-ditch effort to head off a decision against the state.

Judge Peeples’ ruling can be appealed, but as I understand it only as part of the main appeal to the Supreme Court after final judgment is entered, so the delaying tactics available to Greg Abbott at this point are pretty limited. I look forward to seeing Judge Dietz’s final ruling and for the appeal to get underway so we can get moving on the inevitable solution. PDiddie, the AusChron, and Burka have more.

If Louisiana can do it…

Jun 25th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
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By “it” I mean expand Medicaid. What’s Texas’ excuse if that happens?

It's constitutional - deal with it

It’s constitutional – deal with it

Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter on Monday left open the possibility of expanding Louisiana’s Medicaid program to cover more of the working poor.

Vitter, a candidate for governor and ardent critic of the health overhaul championed by President Barack Obama, said he’s not opposed to accepting the billions of federal dollars if Louisiana can improve the performance of its Medicaid program rather than expand “a pretty broken system.”

“We need to improve and reform Medicaid, and I want to look at everything that could be brought to bear to do that. Now, could more federal resources help to do that? They could, if it’s done right and if it’s done in a constructive way,” he told the Press Club of Baton Rouge.

He said the expansion must not draw state resources away from other spending priorities like higher education, nor build “disincentives for able-bodied folks to work.”

“We welcome the senator to the conversation about covering more than 240,000 uninsured Louisianians. It’s a shame that he waited until after (the legislative) session to make his opinions known,” state Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, chairwoman of the Louisiana Democratic Party, said in a written statement.

Vitter’s willingness to consider Medicaid expansion stands in contrast to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s staunch opposition to the idea. The state’s current Republican governor has refused to consider any such proposals, and lawmakers recently killed several expansion bills.

To be clear, I have no reason to believe in David Vitter, who has done very little of merit in his legislative career. Lord only knows what conditions he might impose on accepting those filthy federal funds, and Lord only knows what kind of dealmaking might be needed to get this through Louisiana’s legislature. Even if one believes that Vitter is sincere, we’re a long, long way from anything happening. But just the fact that he’s willing to talk about it means something, and this will be very much worth watching. If this does eventually happen, three of the four states that border Texas will have taken the plunge. One can only hope that it will eventually be contagious. dKos has more.

Billboards above the trees

Jun 25th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Is this really necessary?

In the latest conflict, billboard opponents are objecting to a proposed policy change that would allow billboards as high as 65 feet – taller than a typical six-story building – in spots along Texas highways.

The provision would increase the maximum allowable height of billboards along interstates and primary roads – such as U.S. 290 and Texas 71 – from 42.5 feet to 65 feet. The change would apply only to places where local law allows increasing the height of signs. Houston forbids signs higher than 42.5 feet.

Billboard critics say the height increase would have dire consequences for unincorporated and rural areas.

“When you are out in rural Texas, we already get a lot of complaints about lighting,” said Margaret Lloyd, vice president of Scenic Texas, which monitors state sign rules. The group is a frequent opponent of sign proliferation in Texas.

[…]

In a report on the proposed changes, state transportation officials said the height increase would improve visibility and allow billboards in places where they might be blocked by trees. The Texas Transportation Commission will consider the proposed height increase, along with two other regulation changes, later this year; a public hearing is scheduled next week in Austin.

“It comports with scientific studies indicating that to have a functional viewing distance at 60-70 mph a sign should have approximately 65 feet of vertical offset,” officials said in the report.

The analysis came from two studies, Texas Department of Transportation spokeswoman Veronica Beyer said. The studies were based on best practices for making signs legible to drivers, taking into account motorists’ ability to read a sign as they drove toward it at various speeds.

The reports were written by researchers at the International Sign Association and United States Sign Council – both industry-sponsored groups. The reports also found readability is reliant on the amount and size of text.

According to the story, there’s going to be a public hearing about this at TxDOT’s headquarters in Austin today, but I’ll be damned if I can find anything about it on TxDOT’s webpage. I can accept the existence of billboards on the highways – honestly, they can be useful if you’re trying to find the kind of attraction that advertises on billboards that you’ve not been to before – but I’m hard-pressed to see the value in top-of-the-treetops advertising. Unless we’re talking billboards with Gertrude Stein quotes, in which case I’m willing to be flexible. But beyond that, let’s leave at least one public space intentionally blank, shall we? Thanks.

Another win for the EPA at the Supreme Court

Jun 24th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

And thus another loss for Greg Abbott and Rick Perry.

Greg Abbott approves of this picture

The Supreme Court on Monday mostly validated the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to regulate power plant and factory emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming while imposing some limits on the agency’s reach.

The justices said the EPA could not rewrite specific standards written into the law, but they still handed the Obama administration and environmentalists a big victory by agreeing there was another way for the EPA to carry out its program.

“EPA is getting almost everything it wanted in this case,” Justice Antonin Scalia said from the bench, in announcing the decision. “It sought to regulate sources that it said were responsible for 86 percent of all the greenhouse gases emitted from stationary sources nationwide. Under our holdings, EPA will be able to regulate sources responsible for 83 percent of those emissions.”

[…]

The legal battle in part results from the failure of the administration and Congress to find common ground on the issue of global warming.

The court ruled in the 2007 case, Massachusetts v. EPA , that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act. That case, which was brought by states that said the EPA under President George W. Bush was not doing enough to fight global warming, concerned regulating motor vehicles.

The Obama administration later reasoned that “stationary sources” — factories, power plants and other structures — were also subject to the permitting requirements in certain parts of the act.

A unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with that view. It said that court precedents made the agency’s readings of its powers “unambiguously correct.”

But the EPA has acknowledged that the permitting thresholds set by the Clean Air Act do not fit well with something like carbon dioxide, which is ubiquitous in the environment. While the law said pollution limits of 100 to 250 tons per year triggered permitting requirements, the EPA had to raise those to 75,000 to 100,000 tons per year for greenhouse gases to identify the facilities most in need of regulation.

The Trib and Vox have pretty good explainers of the case and the ruling, so go check them out. It’s not a complete win for the EPA, but it’s still a solid ruling for them. Texas was of course one of the lead plaintiffs in this action, but as has been the case before, they lost. There’s no other litigation pending currently, but I’m sure there will be more in the future. TPM, dKos, and the EDF have more.

Medicaid expansion: Still a great deal, especially for cities

Jun 24th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

So many uninsured people could get covered if Medicaid expansion were universal instead of just here and there.

It's constitutional - deal with it

It’s constitutional – deal with it

Expanding Medicaid under the new health care law would do a lot to slash the number of uninsured people, at least in some of the nation’s largest cities, according to a new report.

A review of 14 diverse big cities finds that the cities in states that are expanding the low-income health care program under the Affordable Care Act will see roughly twice the decline in the number of insured compared to cities in states not opting for the expansion, according to an analysis by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute.

Three states are still debating whether to implement the expansion, while 21 have declined it, according to a count from last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The seven cities in states expanding the program will likely see the number of uninsured drop an average 57 percent, while the remaining seven cities will see an average 30 percent drop, the report finds. The projected declines range from 25 percent in Atlanta, Ga., which isn’t expanding, to 66 percent in Detroit, Mich., which is.

Medicaid expansion would affect large portions of each city reviewed, but it would have an especially huge impact on four of the 14. More than half the population in Detroit, Memphis, Miami and Philadelphia, would be eligible for Medicaid after expansion, but only Detroit is in a state opting for expansion.

Medicaid is just one aspect of the law. Combine its impact with the law’s subsidies, and more than half the population in all but one city would be eligible for some kind of insurance assistance, the report’s authors find. The resulting flow of revenue to the cities would be a boon to their economies, the authors argue.

You can see the report here. The Chron mentions this in passing but doesn’t bother going into any details. Not really surprising that big cities would do disproportionately well under Medicaid expansion, but of course only those cities lucky enough to be in the states that chose the rational and compassionate path will benefit that way, even as the states that have rejected Medicaid expansion could really use it. More here from Think Progress.

Meanwhile, a related story from the Trib, even if it didn’t realize it was related.

The sheriff of the state’s largest county is peeved with the Texas Department of State Health Services, the agency that runs the state’s mental health hospitals.

The agency is not offering the care that it is required to provide, the Harris County sheriff, Adrian Garcia, said. Given proper treatment, the sheriff argues, some patients would not be committing the crimes of which they are accused. Instead, they end up in Harris County’s jails, where they are a health care and financial burden to the county.

Sheriff Garcia has allies, and might even get some help. The state agency is being reviewed by the Legislature’s Sunset Advisory Commission, which will hold hearings later this month on a report from its staff that calls the system a mess. “Resolving the current crisis in the state mental health hospital system requires action, starting now,” the first recommendation states.

The report is remarkably clear, as these things go, detailing changes in organization and programs that would reboot the agency. It has floundered since undergoing a reorganization ordered by lawmakers who were trying to create “a truly integrated health services organization” in 2003.

“The state mental health hospital system is dealing with enormous pressure from increased commitments from the courts, and the review found that a lack of communication and collaboration between DSHS and the judiciary only exacerbates the problem,” the staff analysts wrote. They added that out-of-date facilities, “critical shortages” of clinical staff and the agency’s struggles with organization and new legislative initiatives have added to the troubles. The agency did not offer much resistance in its formal response, saying the report “captures the challenges we face” and that agency officials “understand and support the intent and direction of the recommendations.”

In other words, the system is not working. The recommendations include increasing staff for the hospitals and expanding capacity by contracting with local providers whenever possible.

I say it’s related because jail inmates and people with chronic mental illnesses are two more populations that would greatly benefit from Medicaid expansion, as we’ve discussed before. Wouldn’t it be nice to have the federal government pick up some of this tab, as they are ready and willing to do, unlike the state? Yeah, sorry about that. We’ll need to have a better state government first, then we can see about that.

Great moments in false equivalence

Jun 24th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

The headline reads Money from disputed tax bills flowing to candidates for top tax chief, and then the story tells us that more than 99% of that money is going to one of those candidates.

BagOfMoney

Business entities and taxpayers are pumping thousands of dollars into the campaign coffers of candidates who, if elected state comptroller, would receive their tax-bill complaints.

The Texas Comptroller’s Office is charged with collecting state tax revenue and implementing state tax law. And even though the state auditor sought a ban on business contributions to comptroller candidates nine years ago, the Texas Legislature did not act and the practice prevails.

In this election cycle, businesses and lawyers with clients before the comptroller’s office have thrown more than $200,000 into the campaigns of two candidates seeking to replace Susan Combs: Republican state Sen. Glenn Hegar of Katy and Houston-area accountant Mike Collier, a Democrat.

Public watchdog groups see a potential conflict of interest.

“As long as we’re going to have comptrollers running on partisan political tickets, it’s almost impossible to filter out which contributions might not have an interest in the comptroller’s office,” said Craig McDonald, head of Texans for Public Justice.

Collier hasn’t received a lot of cash from entities with a stake in tax cases. Of the $200,000 he’s raised, only $1,500 comes from employees of ExxonMobil and BP, two energy firms with disputes before the Comptroller’s Office. He said he’d be open to legislative action barring contributions from donors with active cases with the office, but wouldn’t cut those donations out of his coffers.

“Because I’m the underdog and I’m trying to throw out the trench politicians, I’ll take money from anybody who’ll give it to me,” Collier said.

Hegar has snagged more than 10 percent of the more than $2 million he’s raised from businesses or firms with clients with active tax cases.

So in other words, of the “more than $200,000” that has been raised by the Comptroller candidates from people and firms that have business before the Comptroller’s office, at least $200,000 of it went to Glenn Hegar, while all of $1,500 went to Mike Collier. This is like saying that the Aaron brothers, Hank and Tommie, combined to hit 768 home runs in their career. One of the two contributed a lot more to the bottom line than the other. Oh, and well done on the “more than 10 percent of the more than $2 million” bit, which not only obscures the actual total (how much more than ten percent? how much more than $2 million?) it also surely confuses the more math-phobic readers about how much Hegar collected to the point where they have no idea that it’s way, way more than Collier. An impressive performance all around.

By the way, companies like BP and ExxonMobil have lots and lots of employees. Very few of those employees would have any role in or influence over the dispute process with the Comptroller’s office. Unless the BP and ExxonMobil employees cited above that donated to Mike Collier are among that small group, then the whole premise that “both candidates” are benefiting from contributions of entities and their representatives that have business before the Comptroller’s office is shot. Details, details.

The point of the story is that in 2005, a report by the Texas State Auditor showed that 750 taxpayers received $461 million in tax credits and refunds from the comptroller’s office less than a year after they or their representatives had made a contribution to then-Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn. This was a key attack point by Rick Perry against Strayhorn in the 2006 campaign. That auditor’s report recommended that legislation be passed to the Comptroller or candidates for Comptroller from receiving campaign contributions from anyone that had a dispute pending with the office. Needless to say, nothing happened then, and nothing will happen in 2015. But at least now we’ve been reminded of the issue, and the Chronicle figured out a way to make numbers that are two orders of magnitude apart sound similar. So there’s that.

Teacher health insurance costs

Jun 24th, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Another thing on the list of things the Legislature needs to deal with but won’t.

Health care insurance costs for hundreds of thousands of Texas teachers and other public school employees are scheduled to go up again this fall, prompting renewed calls from educator groups for the state to pick up more of the cost of employee premiums.

The biggest increase will be experienced by those seeking basic coverage for themselves and family members. Their monthly premiums will jump $85 to a high of $1,145 a month, nearly two and a half times the national average of $472 a month. Similar coverage in the private sector would cost around $407 a month, according to a recent Bush Institute study on teacher health care costs.

“The current policy of imposing ever-greater costs on employees is not sustainable,” said Ted Melina Raab, spokesman for the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. “It is putting decent, affordable coverage out of reach for growing numbers of school personnel.”

More than 280,000 public school employees – roughly three in four teachers, principals, administrators and other staff – receive health insurance through the Teacher Retirement System of Texas. The insurance program, called TRS-ActiveCare, was created to provide a health care option to working teachers whose districts did not offer their own plans.

Last Friday, the TRS board agreed to increase monthly premiums across most TRS-ActiveCare plans.

Since 2002, the state’s share of premiums has remained at $75 a month. During that same period, some educators seeking coverage for just themselves have seen their premiums increase 238 percent.

Even with the state’s monthly contribution of $75 and a $150 base contribution required from school districts, some employees still will pay upwards of $920 a month for basic family coverage.

“These increases amount to pay cuts,” Clay Robison of the Texas State Teachers Association said, noting the average teacher in the Lone Star State makes under $50,000 a year. “It really has become a burden for some of these teachers.”

This is a feature and a bug of the employer-subsidized insurance model. As we know, employers that provide health insurance plans for their employees pay a significant fraction of the cost of the premiums. This makes health insurance a lot more affordable for many people, but it means many of them have no idea how much their insurance really costs, and it means that an ever-increasing percentage of their total compensation is going to health insurance and not to, you know, salary. But that’s the world we live in, and Robison is exactly right – if the state is not upping its share of the payments, then it is like a pay cut for the teachers, since they’re bearing the full brunt of it. That’s just not right.

The solution, educator groups and districts agree, lies with the legislature. Teacher groups point to the fact that lawmakers and other state employees are covered by the Employees Retirement System of Texas health insurance plan, which pays 100 percent of monthly premiums for individuals and half of dependent coverage.

“School district employees are conveniently thought of as state employees for some things, not thought of as state employees for other things,” said Texas AFT President Linda Bridges, citing increasing performance benchmarks placed on public teachers by state officials. “We think school employees should have health care as good as the governor.”

[…]

State Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, said state lawmakers have a clear role to play in reducing health care costs for teachers.

“Here is an area where clearly the state has a role to play,” said Villarreal. “Clearly, the legislature can take actions to reduce the costs for our teachers in a way that doesn’t interfere with the authority of superintendents and principals.”

State Sen. Bob Deuell, the Greenville Republican ousted by tea party candidate Bob Hall, thinks this will be a hard sell in a legislature keen on budget cuts.

“If you increase the premiums, you have essentially cut the salaries of teachers at a time when they’re not being paid enough already,” said Deuell. “I doubt very seriously the teachers are successful in getting this issue – or any other issue – through next year.”

This is where I point out that Texas’ revenue collections are going gangbusters, meaning the Legislature will have plenty of money to work with. The combination we have of unmet needs, neglected infrastructure, and available cash is one you’d think would be amenable to actually finding solutions to the problems we face. Unfortunately, that requires a level of rationality in the Legislature that doesn’t exist. Can’t do much about the Legislature but we can change direction at the top of the state. It’s the best hope we have.

We need more context to the HPD no-investigations issue

Jun 23rd, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Regular commenter Steven Houston left this feedback on my “More reaction to the HPD no-investigations report” post. It raises some good points and helped me focus my thinking on a couple of things, so I wanted to reproduce it and react to it here.

I’ve commented on this issue for years, including a number of comments on this very blog, but here is a quick attempt to answer a few points raised above.

1) A proper investigation, one that can ultimately lead to prosecution, can take dozens of hours. Unlike television shows written by those who have never served in a law enforcement capacity, no big city police departments throw unlimited resources to solve the latest crime within an hour TV slot. As I read it, the mentioned staffing report cites a need for a small number of additional investigators simply to review the cases coming in, not actually investigating them. Divide those 20k cases up by the 27 more employees cited and tell me you really thought they were to be solving actual crimes… (and hint: unlike the rape kits left untested, this number of cases left un-investigated was not the sum total of years, but simply those coming in during a small period of time).

2) Contrary to the assertion, patrol officers do solve a lot of cases simply by being out in the field as things happen. Who eventually takes credit for the collar/bust can be an interesting display of politics but many crimes come down to both parties still present at the crime scene which allows the street officer to make an arrest (subject to approval by the ADA working the intake phones). HPD even initiated a group of street officers allowed to delve further into investigating crimes “in the now” to great success with a small number of officers but office politics have kept the unit small since many councilmen demand better response times over real efforts to solve crimes.

3) A case can have a limited solvability factor like a suspect wearing a white t-shirt and blue jeans, black hair, and Latino features which might help limit the suspects in a crime occurring in River Oaks but does little to narrow down the field in the Gulfton area. Further, while anything at all in the suspect field of a report might come across as a solvability factor for an official report, many victims appear to have superior mental telepathy abilities as they “know” the crime was committed by a certain person yet cannot come up with any reason why (or simply refuse to disclose said reason).

4) If you want HPD to handle every level of service thrown upon it, you are going to need to triple their staffing. They are not particularly effective as social workers yet many calls for help amount to just that. Others call them because they see ghosts, hear noises in the attic, think a particular man looks suspicious simply because of his race, and a myriad of other things like people calling for rides, civil disputes, or even matters that many major departments stopped investigating years ago like minor fender benders. The idea behind “neighborhood oriented policing” (NOP) requires tremendous amounts of manpower establishing and maintaining community relationships, a large number of local politicians and police command staff expecting such as written in their own documents.

5) Unlike other major cities, Houston drastically cut civilian support positions some years back to save money, requiring much of the red tape and paperwork to be handled by classified officers at far greater expense. This was because no one was willing to lay off police or firemen, the kiss of death for any statewide run for office. Since term limits were put into effect, most city politicians have felt a greater need to look to their personal future in a higher office; amazing that the biggest and most vocal backers of term limits live in the county but failed to press their program any further. In any case, it makes no sense to stick a uniformed officer in the role of desk clerk for 3x the pay (even if both are vastly underpaid compared to peers in other cities) but the natural result of offering minor rate cuts and kicking debt loads into the future.

6) Studies by outside firms are used when no one wants to take responsibility for practices established long ago. It also lends credibility to the drive to change something as outside “experts” supposedly know more than those walking the walk (the Dilbert cartoon routinely pokes a lot of holes in this theory for good reason). If some officer bounces from call to call his entire shift five days a week most of the year, he can tell you the same thing for free but no one listens because he has a personal stake in the matter. On any given day in Houston, there are any number of geographic “beats” that do not have a single assigned officer because staffing is so bad, officers from other parts of town are expected to answer calls in them when they get around to it.

7) The use of organizations such as Crime Stoppers is a great idea except that there are not enough employees to generate the information needed. It’s just fine for Rania to suggest investigators drop everything to provide her group with information but every week sees a big new pile of cases assigned to each investigator that has to be gone over. There is no overtime available to spend a day or two combing cases for those that her group might help with so other than high profile work, it won’t happen unless those investigators are allowed to (and credited for) doing so. Under current staffing, most investigative divisions are like assembly lines and the tremendous responses generated by Crime Stoppers typically involve a huge noise to signal ratio that can make the best of intentions fall far short.

8) The budget increases of the past ten years are largely attributable to the raises of the late 1990′s that were supposed to bring the department closer to their peers in other major cities. As HPD went on a hiring spree in the early 1990′s, those officers are now hitting their peak earning years, most direct compensation pushed to their later years. They are still woefully underpaid compared to peers in other cities, especially in terms of pensions and salaries, but as in everything else, there is a delay factor at work here. As those officers die off or retire, the total cost of officers will decline since their union sold out newer employees much like their pension system did ten years ago; newer employees getting fewer days off for less total compensation.

Need more???

I greatly appreciate the feedback. There are two things I want to focus on here. One is the “crimes with workable leads that were not investigated” number that has gotten so much attention. Obviously, even crimes with workable leads require time and resources to pursue, and in the absence of sufficient amounts of one or the other, some investigations will get prioritized over others. I don’t think any reasonable person will have trouble grasping that or coming to terms with it. The real problem here is that we have a number – “20,000 burglary, theft, assault and hit-and-run cases with workable leads [that] were not investigated in 2013” – that currently exists in a vacuum. Have we always had this number of workable but uninvestigated crimes? What was that number in 2012, 2011, and so on, back to let’s say 2003? Has it gone up, gone down, or stayed about the same? Even that isn’t sufficient, since we know that population has increased and crime overall has decreased. What’s the ratio of workable but uninvestigated crimes to population and to the number of those crimes committed? Has that gone up, gone down, or stayed the same?

If there is some background level of workable but uninvestigated crimes in Houston and we’ve always lived with it – even if we perhaps weren’t fully aware of it – then that changes the nature of this issue. But even if we find that this background level has stayed the same or gone down in recent years, that still doesn’t tell us enough. Do other cities of comparable size to Houston have the same problem? If we find that our level is significantly higher than in other cities, then even if our level has been coming down, there’s still a problem and we need to figure out how to do better. Whether that means more cops, better management, better investigative procedures, something else, or some combination is what we’ll need to decide.

Now it may be that we won’t have accurate data for this. I have no idea if “workable but uninvestigated crimes” is a thing that police departments routinely track. It may be that the only reason we know that number for this year is because there was a study going on. If we don’t have solid data, we’ll have to make our best guess based on data we do have available to us. The bottom line is that I think we can all agree that police departments would ideally investigate all of the crimes for which they have some information on which to go. Is the fact that this did not happen in Houston in 2013 “normal” based on our history and the experiences of similar cities, or not? If it is, then we need to accept that, and if we want to change that we’ll need to accept that it will cost some money. If it’s not, then we need to understand why. But we can’t do either of these until we know if it’s “normal” or not. That’s the real question we need to answer about those “workable but uninvestigated crimes”.

The other item I want to focus on is one for which there had better be accurate data, and that has to do with payroll and the increasing size of the HPD budget. I have no doubt, as Steven asserts, that some of the increase in HPD’s budget comes from the raises and hirings of the 1990s. Surely we can do better than saying it’s “largely attributable” to those factors, however. How much of it is attributable to that? We should absolutely have this data available going back ten years or more, so let’s see it. To whatever extent that it’s true, we need to accept that and deal with it. To whatever extent that it’s not, we need to understand what the other factors are, and deal with them. This should be easy enough for an HPD budget analyst to produce – maybe they can have it ready for when Chief McClelland makes his staffing recommendations to Mayor Parker. I don’t think that’s asking for too much.

Equality is about more than marriage

Jun 23rd, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

It’s about families, and lots of other things, too.

RedEquality

Joe Riggs and Jason Hanna never expected to make national news after a surrogate mom gave birth to their twins.

Riggs, 33, and Hanna, 37, have been together almost four years. They’re best known in the community for collecting teddy bears at Christmas for Children’s Hospital to donate to children going through chemotherapy or other serious procedure. They’ve donated about 1,000 bears so far. At their Christmas parties, they also collect money to divide between the Family Equality Council and Stand Up to Cancer.

“I always wanted a family,” Hanna said. “We both grew up in loving households.”

[…]

Last summer, the couple married in D.C. and in August had their religious ceremony at Cathedral of Hope. Riggs parents walked him down the aisle. His grandparents flew in for the ceremony as well.

But what would make the family complete for them was children. So last year, they enlisted the services of a surrogate to give birth to their biological children. Because Riggs had fertilized one of the eggs and Hanna the other egg that was implanted in the surrogate, they didn’t know which baby was biologically which dad’s when the boys were born. The eggs came from an anonymous out-of-state donor. So neither father’s name went on the birth certificate in the hospital.

So they went to court to end the surrogate’s parental rights and get their names on the birth certificates. The surrogate had signed the paperwork to relinquish her rights. (The woman who carried the babies had acted as surrogate before, but this was the first time she had done so for a gay couple.)

But the judge turned them down.

“The judge stated she couldn’t grant the adoptions with the petition in front of her,” Hanna said.

They had DNA tests and presented those tests as part of the petition. It didn’t matter. Not only did the judge turn down the surrogate’s request to end parental rights and have her name removed from the birth certificate, the judge refused to place the name of the biological dads on the birth certificates.

Finally, the judge turned down a request for each of the dads to adopt the other’s baby. So legally, the boys have one unrelated surrogate listed as their mother and no father.

“There are issues with these documents,” the judge said, without indicating what those issues were, according to Hanna.

I can’t begin to think of a valid reason for something like this. Surrogacy, demonstrating paternity, cross-adopting – these are all standard, not-the-least-bit-unusual things. What makes this even more exasperating is that as the story notes, filing this paperwork in a different county – Dallas, Bexar, Travis, Harris – would have led to it being routinely processed. Riggs and Hanna can refile in another county to get this mess straightened out, but they shouldn’t have to do that. This is just wrong, and it deserves a lot more attention than it’s getting – a Google News search on “Joe Riggs Jason Hanna” found no mainstream Texas news stories; the closest was this post in the Morning News LGBTQ Insider blog. The story has gone national, so maybe it will get some coverage here as well. It sure would be nice. Thanks to Texas Leftist for the heads up.

UPDATE: I got the impression from the Dallas Voice story above that Harris County would be a viable place to file for a second parent adoption, but the feedback I’ve received in the comments below and on the Facebook page say otherwise. As such, I’ve edited accordingly. Thanks for the correction!

Perry grand jury may be winding down

Jun 23rd, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

We are getting close to some action on this.

Corndogs make bad news go down easier

This corndog has no comment

A grand jury looking into whether Gov. Rick Perry abused his power with a veto threat appears closer to wrapping up after current and former Perry staffers were behind closed doors with the panel Friday.

“It’s getting to the point where we’ll have talked to all the people that we need to talk to. It’s getting closer to that point,” said special prosecutor Michael McCrum, a San Antonio lawyer.

McCrum said he hadn’t talked to Perry, who is considering a second presidential run in 2016. He said two weeks ago that he had no plans at that point to call the governor to testify.

The grand jury next is scheduled to meet July 11.

A member of the Public Utility Commission, Brandy Marty, on Friday entered the room where the grand jury is meeting. Marty is Perry’s former chief of staff and was policy director for his 2010 primary campaign for governor. He named her to the PUC last August.

See here, here, and here for the most recent of my updates. I’ve missed a couple of newer stories, like this one about other Perry aides being called, and this one about Chron reporter Mike Ward, who had broken a story about the Perry/Lehmberg saga while working for the Statesman, being called. Not really much more to add here, since the proceedings are secret. We may know more when the jurors reconvene on July 11.

North Line ridership continues to be strong

Jun 23rd, 2014
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Awesome!

Nearly six months since trains began rumbling north of the central business district along Main and Fulton on the north side, residents and community leaders said the train is becoming a valued part of the neighborhood and a critical link for many transit travelers, even as it contributes to record-setting use of the rail line.

“I’ll be honest, it wasn’t an easy construction time,” said Rebecca Reyna, executive director of the Greater Northside Management District. “No construction is easy. Now that it’s there, it is slowly becoming a part of the fabric of the north side.”

After adding 5.3 miles of track from the University of Houston Downtown to Northline Commons outside Loop 610, the Red Line posted more trips for the first three months of 2014 than in any three-month period in the light rail system’s history. Based on ridership data compiled by the American Public Transit Association, more than 3.5 million trips were logged on the Red Line from January to March.

What’s harder to calculate is how many of those rides were skimmed from the bus system. Route 15, which largely followed Fulton, was discontinued when the northern extension opened. Two lines that run a similar north-south path along nearby streets, Route 78 and Route 24, have experienced slight decreases in ridership.

When the bus and rail routes are all compared, overall ridership on the Red Line, Route 24 and Route 78 was 4.7 percent higher for the first four months of 2014 than the same lines – and the discontinued Route 15 – during January through April of 2013.

We knew that the first month’s ridership numbers were strong, so this is just a continuation of that. It should’t be a surprise – the Main Street Line has far exceeded its initial ridership projections from the beginning, and the North Line is an extension of the Main Street Line. It would be weird if its ridership numbers weren’t strong. But since one of the criticisms that the anti-rail crowd has long made – and continues to make, despite all the evidence to the contrary – is that nobody really uses the train, it’s important to highlight the fact that they are still wrong.

Speaking of which:

Skeptics point to the $756 million cost ­­- $142.6 million per mile ­­- for the north line and suggest the money could have been better spent adding bus service. Federal funds awarded solely to rail projects covered $450 million of the cost.

I was going to start this sentence by saying “I’d take our local rail skeptics more seriously if…” but the honest truth is that I don’t take them seriously because they’ve never given any reason to be taken seriously. They’ve never been about anything more than hocking spitballs at light rail. Oh sure, they’d occasionally intone somberly about how Metro really should pay more attention to its bus service. And that’s the tell, because as we know Metro recently completed a vast, overarching redesign of its bus network that will simplify routes, provide a lot more service, and have a goal of increasing ridership up to 20%, all without adding any cost to the system, yet the silence from the anti-rail peanut gallery has been deafening. Bill King still hasn’t written a single word about this, for crying out loud. So yeah, I don’t see any point in mistaking them for people with a constructive role to play.

As for the cost, I mean, look, we’ve spent countless billions on widening highways, and we still have terrible traffic. All that widening ultimately does is shift the mess to other parts of the highway and the surface streets. We’re already at a point where simply adding more lanes to existing highways isn’t practical or in some cases even possible, so the solutions being put forth are esoteric, to say the least. Light rail is scalable and sustainable in a way that highway construction just isn’t, and it has other benefits besides. As I’ve argued before, there are no single solutions. There’s a suite of ways to improve access and mobility, and light rail is a key part of that. It’s definitely doing its part, and we should be glad for that. The Highwayman has more.

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