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October, 2015:

Saturday video break: Home

I have five songs called “Home” in my library. I could find videos for four of them. First up is Ingrid Michaelson, from her latest album:

We got to see her on that tour at the House of Blues in Houston thanks to the handsome gentleman with the handlebar mustache playing bass behind her, who happens to be my second cousin Chris Kuffner. His dad Hap was one of the founders of Mandolin Brothers, one of the largest dealers in the world of vintage, new and used American fretted instruments. You could say music runs in that branch of the family.

Next up, Karla Bonoff:

I have this song on one of the KBCO in-studio collections. Beyond that, I know nothing of Ms. Bonoff. Up next, Los Lonely Boys:

I really like their sound and need to hunt out more of their stuff. Finally, here’s Sheryl Crow:

Another KBCO song for me. I guess songs called “Home” are particularly well-suited for the acoustic treatment. The fifth “Home” song I have is by the Asylum Street Spankers. Have you any tunes by this name that aren’t on my list?

The pessimism of the poli-sci profs

A trio of academic pundits thinks things aren’t going well for the pro-HERO forces.

HoustonUnites

Turnout is up sharply from previous Houston municipal elections, with the largest increases occurring in predominantly Republican and African-American precincts, where a majority of voters are likely to oppose HERO, according to Bob Stein, a political scientist at Rice University.

“I’ve actually looked at the scenario, and think [HERO] could go down, and go down by a big margin,” Stein said. “That’s the worst part. If it goes down closely, the council members and the mayor might try to amend it, but if it goes down by a big margin, it really becomes difficult to do much with.”

Mark Jones, another Rice political scientist, agreed that early voting returns, along with public opinion polls showing only a slim margin in favor of the ordinance, should be cause for concern for HERO supporters.

“If I had to do an even-money bet, I’d say it may not pass, but I think it really is too close to call,” Jones said.

Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political scientist, said the rare ballot presence of a viable Republican mayoral candidate, Bill King, is driving up GOP turnout. Meanwhile, well-known Democratic state Representative Sylvester Turner, the mayoral frontrunner, is fueling an increase among African-American voters, who polls show as less likely to support HERO than whites, or Hispanic or Latino voters.

“There are significant splits in communities that are otherwise inclined to vote more with Democrats or vote more liberally on HERO that create problems for its passage,” Rottinghaus said. “We’ve had kind of a perfect storm of alignment between conservative politics and conservative voters in a way we don’t normally see in Houston mayoral elections.”

[…]

HERO supporters suggest the increase in turnout is part of a historic trend toward more voters casting ballots early as opposed to on Election Day.

But Stein countered that much of the increase has been among “unexpected voters,” which he defines as those who haven’t cast ballots in at least two of the last three mayoral races. A significant number of those unexpected voters are from heavily GOP and black precincts.

[…]

“I just think the anti-HERO people have the right message, and I think the pro-HERO people may have the money, but like in the Spanish Civil War, having the right song might in this case be more valuable,” said Stein, who helped conduct the KHOU/KUHF poll. “Whether it’s true or not doesn’t really matter.”

Groups supporting the ordinance have raised more than $3 million, swamping opponents, but Rottinghaus said no amount of paid messaging can overcome an energized voter base.

Stein said Houston Unites should have done more to highlight the potential negative economic consequences of repealing HERO, an argument the KHOU/KUHF also found to be persuasive, rather than trying to humanize transgender people or characterize the ordinance as “the right thing to do.”

Jones said a lack of Spanish-language outreach to Hispanic voters could also contribute to HERO’s possible demise, pointing to the pro-HERO campaign’s failure to advertise on Univision or Telemundo.

Rottinghaus said the anti-HERO campaign simply beat supporters to the punch.

“They established early on the narrative about this being about public safety as opposed to being about discrimination, and that took hold and was difficult to undo,” he said.

I’ll stipulate up front that a lack of Spanish-language advertising is puzzling and disappointing (Campos pointed this out on Thursday). As far as the messaging goes, when one side of a campaign is completely unrestrained by any concern for the truth, they’re likely to have an advantage. It certainly would have been nice if the good guys could have gotten an earlier start, but campaigns don’t just materialize out of thin air, and all things considered I thought Houston Unites came together pretty quickly. I also think there’s been a fair amount of messaging by the pro-HERO side about economic consequences, but that’s a subjective evaluation and is likely colored by how you see the big picture.

My main complaint about this story is the lack of context. When I hear someone say that there’s a surge in “unexpected” voters, I want to know what the numbers are. I’ve already shown that 30 to 35% of voters in a given city election are “unexpected” by the “voted in at least two of the last three elections” definition, so when you say there’s a lot of these voters, give me a number. Forty percent? Fifty? More? The work I did was on the city as a whole – I didn’t break it down by geography, since the Council redistricting of 2011 makes that a much harder task for me – so even saying there’s fifty percent “unexpected” in this place or that, you’ve got to tell me what that number was in 2013 and/or 2009 so I can get a basis for comparison. If you yourself don’t know that answer, then maybe this isn’t a “surge” but something we see all the time but hadn’t thought to look for it before now. It would also help to know if you are distinguishing between people with no recent history and those who are regular even-year voters who are showing up for the first time in a city election. Show me your work and I’ll have more faith in it.

Another point that may be worth considering here is that Stein’s own poll showed that the opinions of African-American women were not set in stone on HERO. They were persuaded by both the reprehensible bathroom lie, and also by the economic argument; the latter actually moved their opinions more than the former. It would be nice to know what the last thing they heard about HERO before they voted was. Stein’s poll is the one being cited here, but of course there were two other polls that showed HERO leading, too. I don’t know what they had to say on this subject, though.

To be fair, my issues here may be a failing of the writer and not the quoted experts. Maybe the number of people like me who care about this stuff is small enough that no one thinks it’s worthwhile to put it in a general-interest story. I’m not disputing the overall points that are being made here – I do think this will be a closer vote than the polls have shown, and I am concerned about who is and isn’t voting – I’m just frustrated by not having my own questions answered.

One other thing:

LGBT advocates say if HERO is repealed, it could have far-reaching consequences, with HERO opponents’ strategy being replicated in other campaigns across the country. The HERO vote is the nation’s most significant referendum on LGBT equality since the United States Supreme Court’s June ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.

According to Rottinghaus, it’s also about the future of state politics.

“How much can the Democrats push Texas to be more liberal?” he said, pointing to an anti-HERO TV ad from GOP Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. “The fact that he’s put his own money behind this shows there’s a growing concern amongst Republicans that as the demographics in Texas change, that some of the politics will change, and the Republicans need to find ways to counteract this progressive movement before it starts.”

There is clearly a disconnect between what the people of Texas think and what the people who are elected by the people who show up to vote think. At some point, that becomes unsustainable. Along similar lines, there’s an increasingly obvious disconnect between business interests who have strongly supported HERO (and who oppose draconian immigration restrictions, among other things) and the Republican leadership they have also generally supported. Again, at some point that becomes unsustainable. I don’t know where that point is, and for all I know I won’t live long enough to see it. But it’s out there, and we may get to it when we least expect it.

A further look into anti-HERO financing

Regular commenter Mainstream has been investigating the complex money trail of the various anti-HERO factions and documenting it in the comments for the 8 day finance reports: Pro- and anti-HERO post. I’m putting his two most recent entries here to make sure everyone sees them; they were left late Thursday night:

BagOfMoney

The funding for the anti-HERO forces is much more complicated to analyze, because they formed multiple committees, and filed much of their reporting with the State Ethics Commission, rather than with the City of Houston.

All of the interrelated committees have Bart Standley as their treasurer, and the names of the groups include Conservative Republicans of Texas, Conservative Republicans of Harris County, Campaign for Texas Families, Citizens for Restoration (of theocracy).

Former Congressman Tom Delay is being paid by the Campaign for Texas Families about $1400 for travel associated with events, through his Sugar Land based First Principles LLC.

The Campaign for Texas Families gets its money from Conservative Republicans of Texas.

The Campaign for Houston is shown donating $79,000 to Conservative Republicans of Harris County, and the Conservative Republicans of Texas gave $2500 to the Conservative Republicans of Harris County.

Jeff Yates’ consulting company gets paid $80,000 for “advertising expense.”

Harris media in Austin is also being paid. Gulf Direct, which is Kevin Burnette, also in Austin, is also a consultant.

There is a separate statewide Campaign for Houston committee whose main donors are former failed congressional candidate Peter Wareing ($20,000), and Jack A. Cardwell ($25,000) a trucking executive from El Paso who has donated gobs of money to mostly Republicans, but even some Democrat officeholders.

I am not sure what to make of all the back and forth transfers between these committees, and the fact that the reporting is only being done in Austin, and not with the Houston filings.

And I see nothing on the Campaign for Houston filings to correlate with the reported donation of $79,000 to Conservative Republicans of Harris County.

[…]

Digging deeper, I found the $79,000 transfer from Campaign for Houston to Conservative Republicans of Harris County.

I also found $100K for TV to David Lenz Media and $120K to Big Bucks for TV and Radio.

Donors to the state PAC for Campaign for Houston include: County Commissioner Jack Cagle ($1000), city controller candidate Bill Frazer ($500), County Court at Law Judge Clyde Leuchtag ($50), State Sen. Lois Kolkhorst ($5000), voter registrar Mike Sullivan’s office employee Valoree Swanson ($100), former losing congressional candidate Ben Streusand ($2500), former losing judicial candidate Ric Ramos, a family lawyer whose wife is a judge ($15,000), former losing judicial candidate Don Self ($2000), Terry Lowry of the Link Letter publication ($1000), car dealer Mac Haik ($5000), and Alan Hartman ($100,000).

One needs to know who one’s enemies are. My sincere thanks to Mainstream for his diligence and persistence.

School finance ruling expected soon

Hold onto your hats.

BagOfMoney

For decades, the state’s 1,000-plus school districts vied against one another for a bigger piece of the financial pie. Now two-thirds of state districts have joined forces to say the system is unfair because it doesn’t provide adequate funding for all.

The state’s high court is expected to rule any day now on a lawsuit filed by those districts, which could force Texas lawmakers into a special session next summer. The districts hope the high court’s ruling will prompt lawmakers to overhaul the system as early as June 2016.

“School funding formulas in Texas are at least 30 years old,” said J. David Thompson, Houston-based attorney for the moderate-wealth districts, such as Dallas and Fort Worth. “Some of our formulas were determined when Ronald Reagan was president and before the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

[…]

Many say that the current case in front of the high court is the most far-reaching school finance lawsuit in state history because it represents the broadest coalition of state districts.

“Now, there are other problems with the system that are affecting all of us,” said Thompson, who represents moderate-wealth districts, like Fort Worth.

Randall “Buck” Wood is the longtime Austin attorney for property-poor districts that filed the initial set of school finance suits, which began in the 1980s and led to Edgewood IV. Three decades later, Wood said he never thought that he would be on the same side as property-wealthy districts.

“Everybody tried to support everybody else,” said Wood, whose group also represents the Arlington school district. “There wasn’t any backbiting.”

Houston’s Mark R. Trachtenberg, attorney for property-wealthy districts, says it’s no longer an adversarial situation.

“In this case, again, the Legislature cut $5.4 billion out of public education in 2011 and it impacted property-wealthy and property-poor districts,” said Trachtenberg, who represents the Carroll, Grapevine-Colleyville, Northwest, Plano and Highland Park school districts.

“It’s been a long time since Edgewood IV,” he said.

See here and here for the most recent updates. The story is a pretty good primer on How We Got Here that’s worth your time if you want a refresher, but the main news is what I highlighted. I should note that the predictions made in that last link for when we’d get a ruling were “January” and “springtime”, so if we really are in “any day now” mode, it’s going to hit a lot sooner than people expected. (This Trib story about Ken Paxton whining about school finance litigation contains a note that Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht suggested January as a likely time frame, though “any say now” was still possible.) If the Supremes throw the finance system out and basically force the Lege to come up with some number of billions of dollars to make things whole, that could have a significant effect on the upcoming Republican legislative primaries. I mean, that’s one reason why everyone figured the ruling would be later rather than sooner, to take the primaries out of the equation. We’ll know soon enough.

Landfilling

Really interesting story about a place most of us would not think to visit.

The open face of the Atascocita landfill in Humble slopes downward, where trucks unload the cast-off scraps of daily life. Bulldozers spread the debris to a depth of a few feet before trucks with spiked tires take turns compacting the heap, lumbering over the uneven surface.

Some 500 trucks dump garbage here each day and the mound keeps growing – but not as fast as it did just a decade ago, thanks to consumers’ recycling and composting habits and an effort by manufacturers to use lighter-weight materials for packaging. Population growth is what keeps the garbage pile growing now. Nationally, per-capita disposal rates have dropped close to the levels of the 1990s.

Houston-based Waste Management, the nation’s largest municipal waste company, said it lost $188 million in revenue last year, and $133 million the year before from lower volumes of all the materials it collects in trash and recycling. The company runs 247 solid waste landfills in the U.S. and Canada.

Its landfill management business, however, has fared better than collection and recycling, the company reported. Its landfills also accept waste from other collection companies that pay to drop the trash there. About 70 percent of the waste that comes in to Atascocita arrives on Waste Management trucks.

There, 25 employees process 4,500 tons of trash per day six days a week. Starting at 5 a.m. they’re screening for hazardous waste and taking trucks’ weight on scales. Others check the more than 30 pipes that gather gasses from completed landfill, herd trash trucks in and move screens around the open landfill to catch stray paper on windy days.

[…]

Nationally, in 2013 we sent 11 million fewer tons of trash to landfills than we did in 1990 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said.

Last year Texans each produced 6.58 pounds of waste per day. Though that’s higher than the last several years, the number didn’t drop below 7 pounds per person from 2000 until 2009, when the recession led to less consumption and less trash.

But according to the EPA, the amount of waste each American tosses reached its lowest point in 2013 since 1990. The agency estimates that about 2.89 pounds of trash per person each day actually ends up in a landfill.

Texas’ numbers are calculated differently to include some construction waste and don’t account for diversion to recycling and compost.

Recycling is cutting out a lot of the waste we now send to a sealed, compacted mound of trash.

The EPA reported that in 2013 more than a third of waste was recycled. Of the total 254 million tons of waste generated by American households and businesses last year, 87 million tons were diverted from landfills. We’re also using less paper, in the office and for the newspapers we read, reducing a lot of waste.

“Part of it is more aggressive recycling and part of it is from the packaging perspective there’s been a lot of light-weighting,” said Chuck Rivette, regional director of planning and project development for Waste Management.

Most packaging uses less material than it did several decades ago. Plastic water bottles use as much as 50 percent less plastic and thin plastic pouches have replaced bulkier plastic bottles and boxes.

“Even if you bought the same number of bottles an didn’t change your habits, your (trash) generation’s gone down,” said Anne Germain, director of waste and recycling technology for the National Waste & Recycling Association.

Like I said, a good read, and you’ll likely learn something from it as I did. The city’s goal needs to be to continue the downward trend of each person’s waste per day. More recycling – I was glad to hear multiple Mayoral candidates talk about bringing recycling to apartment complexes – and more composting would be good starts. If that means instituting a trash fee – to fund such activity and to help ease the current budget shortfall – then so be it. However we do it, that’s the destination we need to aim for – more recycling, more composting, less trash sent to landfills.

Friday random ten: Revisiting the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs list, part 18

Here’s their list.

1. Califonia Girls – The Beach Boys (#72)
2. Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag – James Brown (#71)
3. Walk On By – Dionne Warwick (#70)
4. Sunshine Of Your Love – Brian Tarquin (orig. Cream, #65)
5. She Loves You – The Beatles (#64)
6. For What It’s Worth – Black 47 (orig. Buffalo Springfield, #63)
7. Let’s Stay Together – Al Green (#60)
8. The Times They Are A-Changin’ – Billy Joel (orig. Bob Dylan, #59)
9. Billie Jean – Big Daddy (orig. Michael Jackson, #58)
10. Whiter Shade of Pale – Annie Lennox (orig. Procol Harem, #57)

Song I should have but don’t, part 1: “Crying”, Roy Orbison (#69). Roy Orbison singing for the lonely, hey that’s me and I want you only…Wrong song, I know, but those lyrics always come to me when I think of Roy Orbison.
Song I don’t have but should, part 2: “Bo Diddley”, Bo Diddley (#62). I do have a song called “The Story of Bo Diddley”, by Bo Diddley from an album of the same name, for what that’s worth.

Billy Joel’s version of “The Times They Are A-Changin'” is from the live album he did in Leningrad. I don’t love a lot of the renditions of his songs on that album – I’ve seen him live several times and I’ve always thought he sounded better than that – but it did include two rare covers by him, this and “Back In The USSR”. He also did a cover of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” twenty-some years ago when he toured with Elton John, but offhand I don’t know of an official recording of that. With the inclusion on this list of “Whiter Shade Of Pale”, here’s one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, “The Commitments”:

We could use more priests like that Father Molloy. And for those of you who also loved that movie but have not yet watched the awesome Orphan Black TV show yet, I give you three words: Maria Doyle Kennedy. You’re welcome.

Day 11 EV 2015 totals: So what do we think turnout will be, anyway?

One more day of early voting to go:


Year    Early    Mail    Total   Mailed
=======================================
2015  128,611  27,952  156,563   43,280
2013   68,803  20,491   89,294   30,572

The running 2015 totals are here, the full 2013 totals are here, and for completeness the full 2009 totals are here. As noted yesterday, we have exceeded the 2013 early voting totals for Harris County as of Tuesday, and are up about 75% overall. How big is this thing going to get? Mike Morris takes a stab at it:

With two days of early voting left, Houston voters already have outpaced total votes cast in the November 2011 election. Are we on pace for a huge spike in turnout this fall?

Not necessarily.

As the chart shows, the city has seen a steady increase in the share of votes being cast early, as more Houstonians figure out that it’s easier to go to any of the open locations and often avoid a line than it is to vote at your assigned polling place on Election Day with all of your neighbors.

From 2003 forward, the share of votes cast early has steadily risen from less than one-third to nearly two-thirds during the last cycle in 2013.

[…]

It’s not really my job to guess, but political scientists have been estimating that this year’s turnout could fall between 180,000 and 240,000. With the early votes likely to come in today and tomorrow, that would track with a continuing share of people voting early.

I will note, however, that at this point if we only see 180,000 total votes (as we did in 2009) that will mean almost no one shows up on Tuesday, so expect a higher number than that.

Most observers have assumed a higher turnout is bad news for the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, as city progressives already vote in high numbers. Thus, the next level of analysis is to see which early voting locations have seen spikes in turnout.

Actually, the next level is to get the daily rosters and figure it out at a more granular level, since as Morris notes you can’t go by EV locations except as a fairly rough estimate. Fortunately, Greg has done this work, and you should go look at his post. I’m going to take his main chart and add a little something to it:

============================================== Neighborhood 15EVTO% 13EVTO% 13TO% 13EV% ============================================== African-American Neighborhoods ---------------------------------------------- Southside AfrAm 9.7% 9.3% 18.9% 49.2% Northwest AfrAm 12.4% 9.6% 18.1% 53.0% Fifth Ward 8.9% 7.4% 16.2% 45.7% Hiram Clarke 10.2% 9.0% 17.8% 50.6% Hispanic/Latino Neighborhoods ---------------------------------------------- Lindale 8.7% 7.2% 16.4% 43.9% East End 6.2% 6.3% 15.2% 41.4% Anglo GOP Neighborhoods ---------------------------------------------- Kingwood 18.7% 11.8% 22.5% 52.4% Clear Lake 12.3% 11.6% 24.3% 47.7% West 14.3% 11.8% 27.1% 43.5% Anglo Dem/Swing Neighborhoods ---------------------------------------------- Sharpstown 9.9% 9.3% 19.9% 46.7% Meyerland 10.6% 12.5% 34.6% 36.1% Heights - C 9.0% 8.8% 25.3% 34.8% Montrose 12.3% 11.5% 27.6% 41.7%

My addition is that last column, which shows how much of the total vote in these locations (see Greg’s post for the exact precincts in question) comes early. For whatever the reason, the Heights and Meyerland seem to like voting on Election Day, or at least they did in 2013; in a subsequent post, Greg suggests Meyerland’s 2013 performance may have been an outlier. Regardless, this is especially noteworthy when you consider how much of the overall vote in 2013 came early. Here’s a look at that trend, based on the chart in Morris’ story:


Year    Early    E-Day    Total  Early%
=======================================
2003   93,868  204,242  298,110   31.5%
2009   81,516   98,261  179,777   45.3%
2011   58,345   63,123  121,468   48.0%
2013  109,370   65,250  174,620   62.6%

One of those things is not like the others. Certainly, as Morris says, some people will vote on Election Day. Let’s guess that the early vote total, which includes absentee ballots, is between 65 and 70% of the final amount. I’ll run some number for that after all of early voting is done, but whatever reasonable figure you choose, turnout will be up by some amount. What does this mean for HERO? The third level of analysis would be to look at voting history, and to focus on the people who don’t have any history of voting in city elections. Those folks can be broken into two groups. The first group is those with no voting history at all. They will predominantly be new arrivals to Harris County, with a few people who are newly of age and a few others who for whatever the reason had not been registered before. In the absence of any polling data specifically on that type of new voter, I’m not going to guess what their HERO preference may be. The second group is those that have voted in even year elections, but not odd year elections. These are the people who have come out specifically for this election, and it’s fair to say that HERO is the most likely reason for that. One may then reasonably guess based on where they live and what other elections they have voted in which way they probably lean. How many of these people are there? I have no idea, but I’m certain that the various campaigns do. You want to get a sense of how the wind is blowing, that’s where you should put up your weather vane.

Back to square one for ReBuild Houston

Here we go again.

A state district judge on Thursday voided the 2010 charter referendum that enabled the city to create the ReBuild Houston program, muddying the fate of the multi-billion-dollar funding scheme to dramatically improve Houston’s streets and drainage.

Visiting Judge Buddie Hahn ordered the city to hold a new election on the drainage fee, though that is unlikely to happen any time soon if the city appeals the decision. Hahn sided with a ruling issued by the Texas Supreme Court in June that said the city had obscured the ballot language surrounding the drainage fee, a major funding source for ReBuild Houston.

By omitting the drainage fee, the Supreme Court said, the city failed to adequately inform voters about the intent of the ballot measure.

In a brief court hearing Thursday, Hahn said he had little discretion because the “Supreme Court has just about said as a matter of law” that the election should be voided.

[…]

Mayor Annise Parker said the city has no plans to stop collecting the fee. She echoed City Attorney Donna Edmundson, who said during the summer that the lawsuit targets the charter amendment, not the ordinance City Council later passed to begin collecting the fee.

In a written statement, Parker said the city is “disappointed with the court’s ruling and are considering our legal options,” but “the ordinance remains valid and in effect.”

Voters approved a ballot measure in 2010 that did not make specific mention of the monthly fee, asking instead if the city charter should “be amended to provide for the enhancement, improvement and ongoing renewal of Houston’s drainage and streets by creating a Dedicated Pay-As-You-Go Fund for Drainage and Streets?”

Then, in spring 2011, City Council approved an ordinance that set the fee and authorized its collection.

See here, here, and here for the background, and here for the Mayor’s statement. This is going to be tied up in court for awhile, and the question of whether or not the fee is in fact still in effect will be front and center in that fight. You know my opinion on this, but it’s not like that counts for much. As Bob Stein says later in the story, this ought to be a focal point of the Mayoral runoff, since the next Mayor will have to decide how to handle this – fight to the bitter end, seek to settle, surrender unconditionally, etc. I asked all the Mayoral candidates about ReBuild Houston – heck, I asked all of the At Large Council and Controller candidates about it as well – so go back and listen to some interviews on my 2015 Election page if you want to review their answers. Texas Leftist has more.

Feds warn Texas about Planned Parenthood

We’ll see what happens.

Right there with them

Right there with them

The Obama administration has warned state officials that pushing Planned Parenthood out of the state’s Medicaid program could put Texas at odds with federal law.

Officials with the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services contacted the state Medicaid director on Tuesday to give notice that removing Planned Parenthood from the program “may be in conflict with federal law” because poor women who obtain family planning services through Medicaid would be limited from receiving health care from the qualified provider of their choice.

“Longstanding Medicaid law prohibits states from restricting individuals with Medicaid coverage from receiving their care from any qualified provider,” a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services representative said in a statement. “Every year, millions of women benefit from critical preventive services, such as cancer screenings, that Planned Parenthood provides. State efforts to restrict women from using qualified providers puts these important health care services at risk.”

The feds’ intervention comes a week after Texas health officials announced they were working to boot Planned Parenthood from Medicaid, the joint state-federal insurer of the very poor and disabled. This would cut off taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood clinics that provide well-woman care, like cancer screenings, birth control and pregnancy tests. Planned Parenthood clinics that accept Medicaid dollars are already barred from performing abortions.

A spokesman for the Texas Office of Inspector General, which is handling the Planned Parenthood investigation, said state officials on Tuesday “had a very productive call” with the feds about the Medicaid announcement.

“Some concerns were voiced, and the state was able to responsively address them,” said OIG spokesman Chris Cutrone.

See here and here for some background. Hard to know what to make of this. Stuart Bowen recently dropped hints about a whistleblower being the basis of the state’s actions, which could be something or could be more smoke. At the same time this was happening, US Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell was taking a conciliatory tone about the state expanding Medicaid, which may have played into that “very productive call” or may be completely separate. I personally think the feds should continue to play on this, but I suppose someone has to be the good cop. Meanwhile, another state that has tried to follow the same path that Texas is taking lost in court, as a federal judge blocked efforts in Alabama to kick Planned Parenthood affiliates out of the state Medicaid program. Until the state puts its cards on the table, who can say what if any actual evidence they’ve got?

What you can say is this.

“Everyone is entitled to due process under the law. As a former judge, I recognize this is the first step in a lengthy process and will respect that process as it moves forward.”

—Gov. Greg Abbott

The quote is Abbott’s response to the criminal indictment accusing Attorney General Ken Paxton of having deceived investors, some of whom lost tens of thousands of dollars they risked because they trusted him. Abbott of all people should know about due process, having served as attorney general for 13 years in addition to having been a Texas Supreme Court justice.

But Abbott had no qualms about abandoning his ethical-lawyer respect for due process when it came to the current case the state has trumped up against Planned Parenthood. The state moved last week to end Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding based on the propagandic video snippets that have been making the rounds nationwide from anti-Planned Parenthood zealots purporting to show illegal deal-making for aborted fetal tissue.

Abbott declared Planned Parenthood guilty without benefit of an investigation, much less a trial. “The gruesome harvesting of baby body parts by Planned Parenthood will not be allowed in Texas and the barbaric practice must be brought to an end,” he said in a statement from his office issued under the headline “Texas eliminates taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood providers.” See how the sentencing in this case appears to precede all else?

[…]

This foray against Planned Parenthood is a staged event to disrupt an organization whose Medicaid reimbursements primarily are for basic health services to low-income patients, including cancer screenings and testing for socially transmitted diseases. That is a wrong thing to interrupt just to make a political show of opposing abortion.

An objective review of the state’s actions and Abbott’s utterances against Planned Parenthood by a high-ranking law school would be interesting to see. We fear that Texas wouldn’t come off any better than the government of Iran. We wish that weren’t hyperbole.

Well, at some point we’ll get an objective review by a judge, and that will tell us a lot. The Chron and BOR have more.

Chron overview of the Montgomery County bond referendum

The voters there are engaged in this issue, that much is for sure.

Life is on hold in the parking lot that is Rayford Road, 4 miles of too many cars squeezing into too few lanes. Even when it isn’t so busy, which isn’t often, there is a chance a passing train can bring traffic to a halt.

It is just the sort of bottleneck Montgomery County leaders intend to unplug with a $280 million bond measure to build new and wider roadways that voters will decide on Nov. 3.

The measure would set aside the biggest chunk of money – $60 million – for improvements along Rayford Road, one of the county’s most congested streets. While the project could bring needed relief to traffic-weary drivers, the roadway represents only a small part of the rapidly growing county’s mobility problems.

That’s because there are far more projects across the county than could be covered by a one-time burst of cash. A new study estimated road needs to be about $1.6 billion over the next quarter-century for just south county, roughly the area from the Harris County line to FM 1488 and Texas 242, including The Woodlands.

“The bond issue is only the start of the process,” said retired Montgomery County Judge Alan Sadler, who backs the measure. “The county has billions of dollars of road needs.”

If voters approve the borrowing, those funds could generate hundreds of millions more in state and federal aid for road projects, Sadler said. But voters have rejected the last two requests for new transportation money.

[…]

Sadler, the former judge, said he expects the county to ask voters to approve more borrowing within next four or five years.

While H-GAC’s study made recommendations with cost estimates, it’s not a comprehensive mobility plan, said Carlene Mullins, a transportation planner for the regional council.

“It’s a concept,” she said. “It’s going to be up to local officials on how to implement a plan.”

But Mullins said they need to act. “Doing what you can with the funds you have would be better than nothing at all,” she said. “If you don’t build any roads, the people are still going to come. It’s just going to get more congested.”

See here, here, and here for some background. I have no dog in this fight and don’t really care what happens with this referendum, I just continue to be amused by it all. It’s a lovely combination of parochial self-interest, severe dislike of spending money, and utter lack of planning, which is ironic given the super-master=planned status of The Woodlands, with a dash of back-room dealmaking thrown in for good measure. I’ve wondered before what Montgomery County will do if they continue being unable to pass these bonds, but it’s also worth wondering if they can solve their problems even with a compliant electorate. There’s an awful lot of demand on their roads, with a rapidly growing population and few if any other tricks in their bag beyond building more roads. What does Montgomery County look like in 20 or 30 years if can’t ever get anywhere in a timely fashion? I’m glad that’s not my problem.

8 day finance reports: Controller candidates

How about a look at the 8 day finance reports for Controller candidates? I figure if you’re reading this blog you won’t look at me funny when I say things like that, so here we go:


Candidate    Raised      Spent      Loans   On Hand
===================================================
Brown        46,375    151,848     30,000    12,067
Frazer       58,953    146,767     32,500    38,072
Khan         44,965    351,902    215,000    32,986
Robinson      6,375          0          0     1,151

Candidate    Advertising     Print/Mail
=======================================
Brown             99,600         34,600
Frazer            76,500         53,000
Khan             307,500         24,000

BagOfMoney

A few comments:

– Neither Dwight Jefferson nor Jew Don Boney have 8 day reports, or for that matter 30 day reports. I have no idea why this is the case. Carroll Robinson’s 8 day report does not list a total for expenses, and it has no itemization of contributions or expenses; there’s basically nothing after the initial cover page.

– Bill Frazer had $16,450 in in-kind contributions listed as “pro-rata share of mailer”, from the C Club and Houston Realty Business Coalition. $69,215 of his expenses were from personal funds, including $50,250 for advertising, $7,490 for “GOTV mailout printing”, and $9,747 for postage.

– 22 off MJ Khan’s 44 contributors gave non-Houston addresses. I think I’ve seen his circa-2009 ad and Chris Brown’s “high school swim team” ad more than any Mayoral candidate’s ads except for maybe Costello. Khan also spent $825 on Facebook ads, because why not?

I have not had the time or energy to do the same scrutiny on Council reports, but this Chron story provides a few highlights.

1. At-large 1: Candidates competing to replace term-limited Stephen Costello, who is running for mayor, dropped nearly $299,00 during the past month. The biggest spender was Tom McCasland, former CEO of the Harris County Housing Authority, whose political action committee dropped nearly $155,000. Mike Knox, who has positioned himself as the conservative candidate, spent $57,000 and Lane Lewis, chair of the Harris County Democratic Party, spent $44,000.

2. At-large 4: In another competitive at-large race, seven candidates combined spent $252,000. Amanda Edwards, a municipal finance lawyer, has significantly outpaced competitors in spending, dropping $208,000.

4. At-large 2: Incumbent David Robinson and four contenders spent a combined $147,000. Challenger Eric Dick, a lawyer and former mayoral candidate, shelled out the most, spending almost $75,000. Robinson spent more than $47,000.

Since they didn’t go into it, I will note that in At Large #3, CM Kubosh spent about $28K, while Doug Peterson and John LaRue combined to spend about $12K; in At Large #5, CM Christie spent $60K, while Philippe Nassif spent $13K. I know I’ve received some mail from Amanda Edwards (and also received a mailer yesterday from Chris Brown), as well as two robocalls from Eric Dick and – this is the strangest thing I’ve experienced this campaign – a robocall from “former Houston Rocket Robert Reid on behalf of [his] good friend Griff Griffin”. Who knew Griff even did campaigning? Not that this appeared anywhere on his finance report, as either an expense or an in-kind donation, of course. Let’s not go overboard, you know. Anyway, if you look at the 2015 Election page, you will see that as with the Controllers, several At Large candidates have not filed 8 day reports. James Partsch-Galvan and Joe McElligott have filed no reports; Moe Rivera and Jonathan Hansen have not filed 30 Day or 8 Day reports; Jenifer Pool filed an 8 day but not a 30 day; and Larry Blackmon and Brad Batteau filed 30 day reports but not 8 day reports. It’s possible some of these may turn up later, so I’ll keep looking for them. I’m working on the district reports as well and will list them as I can.

Ground broken on the joint processing center

Good.

The majority of suspects arrested by Houston police get booked at one of two city jails, and within 48 hours they are transferred and booked in all over again at the Harris County Jail.

Two years from now, officials say, this duplication will be a thing of the past. The central and southeast police lockups will close, freeing up 100 police officers who were assigned to jail duty. And individuals arrested by city or county law enforcement will enter one building where they will be booked into one unified system and be able to tap into various services based on their needs.

For years, local officials have been trying to drum up support for a joint city-county processing center, a model that has existed for decades in Travis County and elsewhere around the country. On Tuesday, they broke ground – at what is now a parking lot across from the Baker Street Jail – on a 246,000 square foot facility to be built with $70 million in county and $30 million in city bonds.

The Joint Processing Center promises to save money, eliminate duplication of tasks and speed up processing. Through a centralized process, a person who needs detox, dialysis or psychotropic medication will be steered in that direction at the start. This plan takes into consideration both the fact that the majority of incoming suspects are held for a short time and that the Harris County Jail treats more mental health patients than any facility in the state.

[…]

One goal of the center is to better manage and care for the so-called frequent fliers, many of whom have a confirmed mental health diagnosis and may be homeless, who revolve in and out of the jails on low-level offenses, sometimes without the chance to connect with a social worker or a psychiatrist who could prescribemedicine.

County Judge Ed Emmett said once the jail facility is in place, it should offer an alternative for “people who are not criminals, they are mental health patients.”

Mayor Annise Parker said the new center will save the city $4 million a year in elimination of redundant processes.

“We have been laboring in an old and outmoded system, with old and outmoded jails, for a number of years,” said Parker. “The plans for this have been dusted off five or six times. For whatever reason, we don’t finish the conversation to get to a resolution and a contract agreement. Well, we finally made it to the finish line” she said Tuesday, through cooperation of a number of city and county agencies.

See here, here, and here for the background. Voters approved funds for this in 2013, so it’s good to see it finally get off the ground. I expect it will make a big difference in how the system works.

Another view of the Temple case

The Press devotes a cover story to the David Temple case and the allegations that then-Assistant DA Kelly Siegler withheld evidence from the defense.

Kelly Siegler

In July 2015, visiting Judge Larry Gist issued his damning decree: 36 findings of prosecutorial misconduct in which Siegler either suppressed evidence or disclosed it too late, depriving Temple of a fair trial. He also accused Siegler of interfering with developments in the case four years after she left office, saying she worked in concert with a detective to intimidate a witness who came forward with information pointing to the real killer.

Ultimately, Gist recommended to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that Temple’s conviction be overturned and that he receive a new trial. The appeals court decision is pending. When contacted by the Houston Press, Gist declined comment.

Siegler stands by her work on the case. As she told the Press, “David Temple was convicted by a fair and impartial jury after a long and hard-fought six-week trial. Nothing improper was done by anyone with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, the DA’s office or by me on this case. Dick DeGuerin and his team have done everything they can to mislead…and manipulate the press and the system in their attempts to blame a 16-year-old teenage boy instead of Temple as being the murderer of Belinda and Erin. We believe in the system and that the truth will prevail.”

After Gist issued his findings, local media pounced on Siegler with a stinging rebuke of her performance in the Temple case. A tough-as-nails former prosecutor with a cable TV show was the perfect target, especially in Texas, which had recently witnessed the exoneration of Michael Morton, an innocent man who, like Temple, was convicted of killing his wife, and who spent 25 years in prison because an overzealous district attorney sat on exculpatory evidence.

The Houston Chronicle excoriated Siegler in an editorial: “While Temple has been sitting behind bars for eight years, Siegler has climbed the ladder to D-list celebrity status. That’s not the payoff the public should expect for prosecutors.” The editorial board stated, “For someone who built a career playing to juries, perhaps there should be little surprise that Siegler tried to pull the strings on the entire courtroom.”

Siegler’s career was tarnished overnight. Held to the highest standards — and rightly so — prosecutors can be accused of nothing worse than railroading an innocent defendant. And the proof seemed to be right there in Gist’s findings, just as Temple’s attorneys had promised.

But in the rush to persecute Siegler and make a martyr of Temple, the media neglected to compare Gist’s findings to the trial record. If they had, they would have seen that the findings don’t stand up to scrutiny — they’re a flawed and often contradictory assessment of what actually occurred at trial. A closer look doesn’t suggest proof of a reckless prosecutor caught in her tracks but of shrewd defense attorneys able to kick up enough dust to cloud a judge’s vision.

Gist’s findings state that witnesses said things they never said; they misstate when DeGuerin was given access to certain records; and they mischaracterize dubious statements as material and exculpatory.

Ultimately, the findings tell a misleading story of yet another innocent man sacrificed on the altar of prosecutorial ego. They don’t tell the story of what really happened at trial, or what happened on a January night in 1999, when Belinda Temple was killed with a shotgun blast to the back of her head, on her knees and in cold blood.

See here, here, and here for the background. The story is very skeptical of the allegations made against Siegler – it’s basically a fuller version of this post – and it does a good job of making Judge Gist’s findings seem shaky. Read the whole thing and see what you think. I can’t wait to see what the Court of Criminal Appeals does with this.

Texas blog roundup for the week of October 26

The Texas Progressive Alliance is scouting out pumpkin patches as it brings you this week’s roundup.

(more…)

Day 10 EV 2015 totals: City versus county

The Day 9 totals came in too late for me to post them yesterday, but the Day 10 reports came in early, so let’s skip ahead to those:


Year    Early    Mail    Total   Mailed
=======================================
2015  107,086  26,608  133,594   43,280
2013   61,391  19,350   80,741   30,572

EarlyVoting

The running 2015 totals are here, the full 2013 totals are here, and for completeness the full 2009 totals are here. As of Tuesday, the early in person total for 2015 had already exceeded the early in person total for all of 2013. It’s still not clear to me how much of this is behavior shifting and how much is a genuine increase in turnout. Don’t get me wrong, I do expect and have expected all along that turnout would be up, I’m just saying there’s little to indicate this is anything historic. The numbers that get tossed around in stories range from 180,000 to 230,000, and that all sounds about right to me.

The other piece of data I’ve seen so far suggests that the age range for voters is more or less in line with what we have seen in recent elections. Young voters are at their usually low levels, while the over 65 crowd is up a bit, but that could be partially reflective of the increase in absentee ballots. One thing I was curious about was if there’s been any indication of a higher level of Houston voting, as remember that all these numbers you see are for all of Harris County. In 2013, Houston voters were 67.0% of the Harris County total; in 2011 it was 73.6%; and in 2009 it was 69.5%. It wouldn’t be crazy to think that the Houston share of the vote would be higher this year, between the open Mayor’s race and the HERO referendum. I don’t have the daily rosters, but one way to approximate this is to look at the relative shares of the Houston and non-Houston early voting locations. Basically, HDs 126, 128, 130, 132, 135, 144, and 150 are wholly or mostly outside city limits, so the share of the vote in those locations is a (very) rough approximation of the city and non-city share of the overall vote so far. How does the 9 day total for 2015 compare to 2013 in that regard?


Year    Votes   Harris  Houston  Hou %
======================================
2015   89,599   18,795   70,804  79.0%
2013   87,944   17,076   70,868  80.6%

The Houston share by this method is higher than the actual amount because you can vote anywhere during early voting. My guess is that if you vote in one of those outer locations, you’re probably from there, but voting in the city doesn’t mean you’re from the city – if you work in, say, downtown or the Medical Center, there are convenient EV locations for you. The one thing I would conclude from this is that there’s no clear evidence from this that the Houston share of the vote is higher than usual. I’m sure Greg or someone else with access to the rosters can confirm or deny this, but that’s what it looks like to me.

8 day finance reports: Mayoral candidates

Here’s the story:

BagOfMoney

Adrian Garcia outspent his chief rivals in the Houston mayor’s race over the last month, hoping to hold what polls suggest is his slipping grip on a spot in the likely December runoff.

The final round of campaign finance filings before the Nov. 3 election, covering the period from late September through last Saturday, showed Garcia’s $1.1 million outlay made up a third of all six top campaigns’ spending for the period.

About $860,000 of the former Harris County sheriff’s expenditures were for advertising, double that of what some polls show is his closest rival, former mayor of Kemah Bill King.

[…]

City Councilman Steve Costello, who has been a strong fundraiser but trails Garcia and King in most polls, posted the second-highest outlay for the period, at $732,000. Of that, he spent $652,000 on advertising, and was helped by another $251,000 in ad spending by a political action committee organized to support him, Houstonians for the Future.

King spent $572,700 in the period, about $429,000 of it on advertising. He stopped running TV ads in the middle of last week but was to resume them on Tuesday, campaign spokesman Jim McGrath said. That gap is not concerning, McGrath said, pointing to consistent radio buys, key endorsements and strong early turnout from conservative areas.

“We like where we are,” McGrath said. “We could spend a good chunk of money on broadcast, but it’s all about getting the most bang for your buck. We like cable.”

State Rep. Sylvester Turner, who remains the presumed frontrunner, raised nearly $400,000 in the period, spent the third-highest amount at $626,000 and entered this week with $285,000 on hand – roughly the same amount as Garcia and Costello. King entered the week with $123,350 banked.

Former Congressman Chris Bell, who has lagged in fundraising, spent $106,000 in the period and entered the final week with $60,500 on hand. Former City Attorney Ben Hall, who loaned his campaign $850,000 earlier in the year, continued to post low fundraising totals and spent $134,000 in the period, leaving himself nearly $694,000 on hand.

Eight day reports for Mayoral candidates and some others (still working on it) are on my 2015 Election page. Here’s my breakdown of the reports:


Candidate    Raised      Spent      Loans   On Hand
===================================================
Bell         96,167    106,155          0    60,564
Costello    294,033    731,861     90,000   278,987
Garcia      440,941  1,079,308          0   278,434
Hall         69,260    134,142    850,000   693,755
King        317,919    572,737    650,000   123,349
McVey         4,800     87,216  1,075,000   954,729
Turner      394,323    626,106          0   285,648

Candidate    Advertising     Print/Mail
=======================================
Bell               3,600         30,620
Costello         631,000         20,300
Garcia           860,000              0
Hall             137,500          1,750
King             430,000         15,000
McVey              2,750         10,262
Turner           160,000         60,000

“Advertising” and “printing” can be vague categories, and some reports are more organized and sensible than others. These are add-them-in-my-head totals, and I’m pretty good at addition, but don’t make any bar bets based on them because I may not have always been consistent in how I categorized things. A few comments:

– Chris Bell mentioned in the interview I did with him that he was a regular user of Uber, and his finance report bears that out.

– Steve Costello had some polling expenses in there, and was the only candidate who listed an expense for phone calls. He classified that as “advertising” on the report, but I didn’t include it in my total. The report for that “Houstonians For The Future” PAC is here.

– Remember how Adrian Garcia had fairly low expenses for consultants and staff in his July report because of his later entry into the race? He made up for that in this report, in addition to the buttload he spent on ads. He was the only one who didn’t have any obvious expenses for mailers that I could see.

– How is it that Ben Hall listed $134K in expenses yet I show him as having $137,500 in ads? He had $25,000 in in-kind donations listed as “Television/Univision”, plus $9,000 in one in-kind donation for “commercials”. Of the rest, there was a single $100,000 expense for “Media”, whatever that means, and a few bits and pieces besides. His “print/mail” total is all in-kind contributions for mail ballots. I feel like these in-kind contributions are somehow un-kosher, but I can’t say for sure.

– Unlike Hall and his monolithic “Media” expense, Bill King itemized all of his media buys, which were multiple ones for the local TV stations and some radio. He also did a fair amount of online advertising – he had several $500 expenses to Google for that, plus a couple other line items. A few other candidates had online ad buys as well.

– Marty McVey bought some Facebook ads, and had one mailer. I don’t know why you loan yourself a million bucks then don’t spend it, but whatever. Most of his expenses for consultants and other campaign services were listed under “Unpaid Incurred Obligations”.

– Sylvester Turner had less advertising expenditures than the fighting-for-second-place candidates, but he also had over $145K listed for “get out the vote” services. He also spent some money on polling.

With all that, I’ve still mostly seen Costello ads – they tend to run on cable, during sporting events – with a handful of Turners and Garcias thrown in. I’ve not yet seen a King ad, nor a Hall ad if one exists. It’s times like these that I’m glad to listen to non-commercial radio – satellite, HD radio, and college station KACC. I will try to summarize the other citywide race 8 day reports in the next day or two.

An Election 2015 threefer

Three links of interest that weren’t quite worth a post on their own.

Cort McMurray deconstructs Bob McNair:

It’s not easy, being Bob McNair. Back in the old days, being a Houston billionaire was fun: Whether you made your fortune in the oil patch or, like McNair, you cashed in your Enron stock at exactly the right time, just before the soufflé imploded, life was lunch at the Petroleum Club and dinnertime ribeyes at Confederate House, and doing pretty much whatever you pleased.

You made deals. You attended charity galas. You bought a football team. And you basked in the grateful approbation of your NFL-deprived city. Those were the days, my friend, when you could step in front of a microphone and ask, “Are you ready for some football?” and have an ocean of Houstonians cheering and lining up to buy official Tony Boselli replica jerseys.

You were a community pillar, the Great Philanthropist, the Teflon Billionaire. You negotiated a stadium deal that would have made Bud Adams blush, and the fans chanted your name. You gave your team the most lunkheaded name this side of “Shelbyville Shelbyvillians,” and they lined up to buy licensed merchandise. You drafted David Carr, and Amobi Okoye, and Jadeveon Clowney, and it was someone else’s fault. McNair was the Billionaire Philanthropist, and Billionaire Philanthropists made no apologies.

That’s what makes this whole anti-HERO mess such a shock.

[…]

NFL football is more than a business. The Texans don’t belong to us, but they’re ours. Sports teams are the last unifying institution, the binding agent in a city that’s diffuse and diverse and in so many ways, divided. And while we’re glad the Rockets and the Astros are around, we only care about them when they’re winning. The Texans are different. The Texans are our football team.

McNair’s anti-HERO donation, despite his press release protestations that the contribution was a sincere attempt to encourage “a thoughtful rewrite” of problematic wording in the legislation, an effort to craft an ordinance that “would be less divisive of our city,” was a reminder that the Texans aren’t really Houston’s team; they belong to a Philanthropist Billionaire, who does what he pleases.

There is a surprised, hurt tone to the McNair’s press statement. From the pretzel logic opening — McNair argues that he made the anti-HERO donation so the city could craft an even better HERO ordinance — to the non sequitur Robert Kennedy quotation about ordinary folks changing history at the close, McNair sounds like a guy who can’t understand the fuss: He knows people are mad; he can’t figure out why. If dogs who were caught pawing through the kitchen garbage pail could write press releases, they would all sound like McNair’s statement on HERO.

Any relationship between McNair’s behavior and his team’s recent performance is strictly coincidental, I’m sure.

Jef Rouner says what a lot of people I know have been thinking:

This is the scenario people opposed to the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance want me to believe is going to happen: my little girl, all pink eyeglasses, blond curls, and a sass level over 9,000, will need to use a public restroom at the park or a restaurant. Once in there she will be at the mercy of a transwoman, maybe even one with a penis, who will use the rights protected by HERO to… what? Pee within a certain amount of feet from her? Expose herself? Molest her? What diabolical she-penis monstrosity has the City unleashed on our powerless womenfolk?

I’ve got to tell you I know a fair amount of trans folks, and the idea of any of them in the bathroom with my daughter scares me way less than the thought of someone who honestly holds these beliefs being in there with her does.

For once, I can honestly advise you to read the comments following the story. The couple of idiots who snuck in got roundly knocked down by everyone else. It’s almost enough to restore your faith.

And finally, the Trib covers the Mayor’s race.

Adrian Garcia, once a solid frontrunner and potentially the city’s first Hispanic mayor, has seen his support slip amid increased scrutiny of his tenure as Harris County sheriff. Former Kemah Mayor Bill King appears to be consolidating Republican support that had been splintered among a number of hopefuls. And the whole field — including Sylvester Turner, who appears guaranteed a berth in a runoff — are starting to sense a No. 2 spot on the second-round ballot that is increasingly up for grabs.

“It’s going to be Turner and,” local political analyst Nancy Sims said, pausing for effect. “It’s the ‘and’ we don’t know the answer to right now.”

A batch of recent polls show Garcia and King neck-and-neck, finishing second in the race to replace term-limited Annise Parker, whose 2009 election made Houston the largest U.S. city with an openly gay mayor. Yet the surveys have found at least two other candidates bunched near Garcia and King within the margins of error, and election watchers are urging caution with nearly half the respondents undecided in one poll.

Watching the battle for No. 2 unfold has been Turner, the 26-year state representative who is making his third bid for City Hall. Armed with high name recognition and a reliable African-American base, he is seen as a lock for the runoff, and analysts say such inevitability has persuaded rivals not to waste their time attacking him, letting him float above the fray — for now.

Yeah, the runoff will be very different, and I agree with Nancy Sims that at this point no one is willing to stick their neck out and predict who will join Turner in the December race. Choose which Election Night watch party you go to carefully, there’s a good chance that it could be a bummer for your host.

The Prop 7 funds are already being claimed

Get ready for a lot more road construction in the near future.

Voters have a little more than a week to decide whether to give Texas highways a $2.75 billion annual funding boost, but Houston-area officials are already making plans to spend the money.

In the event Proposition 7 passes – the proposal has silent, token opposition – officials with the Houston-Galveston Area Council on Friday approved a revised 10-year spending plan that reflects when area road projects could begin, using the new money.

“Readiness will be the name of the game,” said David Wurdlow, program manager for short-range transportation planning at H-GAC. “We are going to be real aggressive to move projects forward.”

Without Proposition 7 the amount of money available for regional transportation projects is roughly $2.1 billion for the next decade, according to the current 10-year plan. Though not the only source of highway money, the funds directed by H-GAC’s Transportation Policy Council are among the most significant to build or rebuild highways.

Adding Proposition 7, officials estimate, increases that total to more than $4.6 billion, taking long-sought projects and moving them much closer to reality much sooner. In fiscal year 2018, for example, Proposition 7 would increase highway spending in the Houston area from $211 million to $696 million.

In 2018 alone, Proposition 7 means an earlier start to two segments of widening Interstate 45 near NASA Bypass 1 in Webster and earlier construction on FM 2100 east of Atascocita.

Another project accelerated by planners is a long-sought widening of Texas 36. Though the road isn’t a major commuting bottleneck, widening it is a major focus Freeport and Waller County officials who contend the highway is a natural truck bypass for the Houston area.

[…]

Like Proposition 1, the money comes with some conditions. Officials cannot pay off any of Texas’ highway debt, which is how many previous transportation programs were paid. All of the funds must be used on state highways – meaning no tollways, transit or alternative modes such as bicycling can benefit.

Some non-highway projects, however, could benefit, if regional officials approve. The transportation council is made up of local elected leaders and the heads of transportation agencies such as the Metropolitan Transit Authority and TxDOT’s Beaumont and Houston offices. Council members use a formula that divides the federal and state funds spent by the agency, which caps spending on non-highway projects, called alternative modes, to between 18 percent and 25 percent of total funds.

If the Proposition 7 windfall gives officials hundreds of millions of dollars more for highways, they could restructure.

“We might be able to move those (highway projects) to the proposition side and move some of those funds to alternative modes,” Wurdlow said.

Prop 7 isn’t raising any new money to spend on transportation, because we don’t do that sort of thing in Texas. It simply mandates that $2.5 billion of sales and use tax revenues in Texas specifically to transportation – in other words, it takes money from one pocket of the budget and puts it in the other. If you’re wondering why legislators who have been writing the state’s budget over the pasty few years were unable to allocate extra funds for transportation on their own, or thinking that this is just another band-aid that doesn’t actually solve anything, you would not be alone. Streetsblog and the Rivard Report present a more comprehensive case against Prop 7, but I doubt it will have much effect. Like it or not, we’re going to see a lot more highway construction in the near future. Better get used to it.

Who can pay for Ken Paxton’s defense?

Paxton himself would like to know, though he doesn’t want you to know that he wants to know.

Best mugshot ever

In mid-July, a law firm representing an unnamed state official asked the Texas Ethics Commission whether it would be legal under state gift-giving laws for its client to receive a “benefit” from a donor if the official “has no reason to believe” the donor is subject to his agency’s oversight.

The firm’s name was redacted from the opinion request, and the anonymous official was described simply as “a public servant who works, in a leadership capacity, for an agency that performs regulatory functions, conducts inspections, and conducts investigations.”

According to the request, the donor has signed a written statement saying he is not subject to the agency’s oversight in any way.

“In addition, the public servant has no actual knowledge that the donor is subject to the regulation, inspection, or investigation by the public servant,” the request said.

Under state law, an official at a regulatory agency that conducts inspections and investigations is forbidden from asking for, accepting or agreeing to accept a benefit if the official knows the giver is subject to the agency’s authority.

Earlier this month, the eight-member ethics commission discussed, but did not adopt, a draft opinion in response to the request. Commissioners said they did not have enough information to determine exactly what the state official knows about the donor.

“This requestor just needs to do it again with more facts and circumstances,” Commission Chairman Paul Hobby said.

[…]

As it relates to Paxton’s specific case, ethics experts said how the commission will respond is complicated by the scope of the office of the attorney general, which handles everything from lawsuits defending the state, antitrust cases targeting illegal business practices and unpaid child support. In effect, virtually every Texan could be subject to the attorney general’s regulation or investigation at some point.

All of Paxton’s biggest donors are wealthy Texans with substantial business interests in the state.

Renea Hicks, an Austin-based lawyer who practices election and ethics law, and former assistant attorney general Fred Lewis, a state ethics expert, said the issue was problematic.

The commission could create a “huge loophole” if it allowed officials to accept donor money to pay for non-campaign related expenses like legal fees, Hicks said.

The attorney general, Lewis said, would need to be careful to show there is not even the appearance of a conflict of interest by refraining from taking money for his legal defense from people with pending or likely business before his office.

“An AG’s desire to collect private donations to pay legal bills and to hire good lawyers to avoid jail might tempt an AG to temper his judgment on his clients’ behalf,” Lewis said. “That is morally wrong, a violation of legal duties, and potentially bribery.”

Yes, please, Mister Anonymous Requester, ask again with some more information so we can better answer your question. The difference between Paxton and Rick Perry, in case you were wondering, is that Perry was indicted for acts that occurred in the course of his duties as Governor. As such, he is allowed by law to use campaign funds to pay his attorneys. Paxton allegedly did what he was indicted for as a private citizen, so pending a friendly TEC ruling he’s on his own. Not that there aren’t people who’d like to help him out, it’s just that right now they can’t. And honestly, I think it ought to stay that way, but we’ll see what the TEC says when and if that “anonymous requester” asks again. Trail Blazers has more.

The animus that drives HERO opposition

I have often spoken of my contempt for the leaders of the HERO opposition, for their lying and their willingness to demonize their fellow man. There are a number of people who deserve that scorn, but this guy belongs up at the top.

When conservative firebrand Dr. Steven Hotze unsheathed a sword in August while speaking at a conservative rally that doubled as a campaign launch against Houston’s nondiscrimination ordinance, even some politically aligned with the longtime anti-gay activist were taken aback.

In an incendiary, lengthy address, Hotze went on to link America’s war against Nazi Germany to the war on gay rights, urging all gay Houstonians to flee to San Francisco. The sword, he said, was meant to represent God’s word, the strongest weapon against the gay community.

“The homosexuals are hate-mongers,” Hotze said at the time. “They hate God, they hate God’s word, they hate Christ, they hate anything that’s good and wholesome and right. They want to pervert everything.”

But since the speech, which played out on Twitter and drew media attention, Hotze largely has dulled his rhetoric against gay rights, at least when it comes to the equal rights ordinance now before voters. Instead, Hotze quietly has bankrolled opponents and stuck to the campaign’s biggest talking point: that the law would allow men, including sexual predators, into women’s restrooms.

This message is notable for its stridency and for what ordinance supporters say is its fear-mongering inaccuracy, but also because it shunts aside Hotze’s decades-long war against gays and lesbians. The campaign instead aims only at transgender residents, and in particular transgender women, who were born male but identify as female.

Evidence suggests the strategy is a politically savvy one.

Despite recent social and legal victories for gays and lesbians – from growing public acceptance to earning the right last June to marry in any state – research and polling data show transgender residents are starting from nearly scratch. Supporters say that makes the protections extended to transgender residents under the law even more crucial.

“Transgender people are at least 20 years behind the larger gay and lesbian community in terms of public understanding and acceptance,” said Michael Silverman, director of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund. “The vast majority of Americans still report that they do not know anyone who is openly transgender. That lack of knowledge and lack of acceptance creates a gap that our opponents attempt to fill with misleading information designed to scare people.”

[…]

Opponents’ targeted approach is the one they must take, said ACLU of Texas director Terri Burke, having been forced by growing acceptance to abandon anti-gay rhetoric.

That Hotze has been relatively muted on the issue of sexual orientation in recent months is in stark contrast to his approach when City Council passed the law 11-6 last year. While opponents were gathering thousands of signatures in an effort to force a repeal referendum, Hotze emailed conservative Steven Baer and cast the law as part of a “tide of homosexual perversion sweeping over the country,” according to emails obtained by the Chronicle.

Hotze, through Woodfill, declined to be interviewed for this story.

“Let’s collaborate and join forces. Houston, Texas is ground zero on this issue,” he wrote. “We will repeal the pro-homosexual ordinance here and breath fire into the hearts of our brethren across Texas and the nation.”

See also this story, which looks at this from the perspective of being transgender. People who oppose HERO have a variety of reasons for doing so. I don’t find any of those reasons meritorious, but some of them are more respectable than others. But whatever one’s reason may be for opposing HERO, this is what the rest of the country will hear and internalize if HERO is defeated. I don’t know about you, but if I opposed HERO for some technical reason that had nothing to do with Steve Hotze’s seething hatred, the fact that I was nonetheless on the same side as Steve Hotze would make me awfully uncomfortable. You may say that it’s not fair for you and your reasonable objections to HERO to be lumped with a raving maniac like Hotze. Well, last I checked life wasn’t fair, and so unless you’re out there publicly denouncing the likes of Hotze and his hate, how is anyone who doesn’t know you to tell the difference? I guarantee you, there are only two possible post-referendum narratives that will appear in the media. One is that Houston beat back an effort to repeal its equal rights ordinance. The other is that anti-gay groups prevailed in their effort to repeal said ordinance, with the likes of Hotze and Jared Woodfill and Dave Wilson out there in the spotlight getting the attention and becoming for at least a little while the public face of our town. If you don’t like that idea, then the one thing you can do about it is not be on their side when you go vote. Because if you are on their side when you vote, your own reasons for doing so won’t matter. No one’s going to hear you when you try to explain.

8 day finance reports: Pro- and anti-HERO

First, from the inbox:

HoustonUnites

Houston Unites has raised nearly $3 million in support of Proposition 1 from late August through last Saturday, according to the campaign’s finance report submitted to the city today. Almost 75 percent of all donors were from Houston.

“Compared to the handful of wealthy opponents funding the rollback of needed protections for African-Americans, Latinos, women and veterans, we have put together a massive, diverse grassroots coalition backing Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance,” said Richard Carlbom, campaign manager of Houston Unites. “We anticipate this to be the closest of races, so these final days are critical for HERO supporters to keep investing in the campaign.”

Highlights of the finance report include:

  • More than 85 percent of the total donors to Houston Unites were from Texas.
  • More than 1,100 of the 1,500 total donors were from Houston.
  • Total raised was $2,971,491.
  • More than $100,000 was raised online from more than 1,000 donors.

Here’s their report. Here also are the reports for the Human Rights Campaign for HERO PAC, the Business Coalition for Prop 1 PAC, and the anti-HERO Campaign for Houston PAC. In case you’re wondering, the name Bob McNair does not appear anywhere in that report. I assume this is because he had merely pledged to give $10K before having his mind changed, so with no money actually changing hands there’s nothing to report. Those of you who are more in tune with the legal requirements, please correct me if I’m wrong on that. There’s also the No On Prop 1 PAC, but they had not reported as of yesterday, so the antis do have more than this, we just don’t have all the details yet.

I did not scan through the Houston Unites report last night – I may do so later, and we have their summary, so we’ll go with that for now. The Business Coalition has four donors – cash donations from Bret Scholtes ($500) and Haynes & Boone LLP ($5,000), and pledges from the Greater Houston Partnership ($71,760) and United Airlines ($10,000). They spent all their money on print ads – $77,500 in the Chronicle, $9,760 in the Houston Business Journal – which may sound weird until you remember that the average age of a Houston voter in this election is expected to be about 69. Newspaper print ads seems like a reasonable way to reach that demographic.

As for the Campaign for Houston, they listed 45 contributions, for a total of $62,495 raised. Forty-one came from individual donors, 21 of whom were non-Houston residents (one Houston person gave twice), with two familiar names: Andrew (son of Phyllis) Schlafly, and former HCC Trustee Yolanda Flores (no middle name given, but the ZIP code points to her). One donor listed in this group rather than the “corporations or labor unions” line item on the subtotals cover sheet page 3, was TriStar Freight, which gave $2,500. Don’t ask me why they did that, I couldn’t tell you. What I can tell you is the names of the three corporate donors:


Contributor Name             Amount
===================================
Trinity Equity Partners LLP  50,000
Texas Outhouse Inc            5,000
The Education Valet Inc         250

I shit you not (sorry not sorry) about that middle one. They list $88,195 in expenses, of which a bit less than $45K is for media buys. They’re running that disgusting bathroom ad during the evening news, or at least they did last night on KPRC at 6. I have no idea how many of those spots that kind of money can buy. This Chron story documents the ad wars; I can confirm that the pro-HERO folks have mail going out as well, one of which landed in my box yesterday. Campaign for Houston also lists a $50K outstanding loan, which isn’t detailed on this form but is presumably the same Hotze loan from their 30 day report.

Other 8 day reports are coming in as well – you can find them here and by searching here. I’ll do my best to update the Election 2015 page as we go this week.

Perry appeal briefs

The latest update on the appeals before the CCA in the Rick Perry matter.

Corndogs make bad news go down easier

Corndogs, nothing but corndogs

The 3rd Court of Appeals this summer tossed one of two counts against Perry, saying the coercion law underlying it violates the First Amendment. The 3rd Court agreed with Judge Bert Richardson, however, that Perry must face the charge of abuse of official capacity because it’s too early in the case to decide upon the issues he raised.

Perry’s legal team disagreed with the 3rd Court on the remaining charge, arguing in a brief filed with the Court of Criminal Appeals and released Thursday that the count could be thrown out under existing legal precedent before a trial.

And if that’s not so, said the team led by Houston lawyer Anthony Buzbee, the case should be tossed before trial anyway given the issues at stake and to prevent “the irremediable loss of constitutional rights.”

The briefs were filed as a precursor to oral arguments scheduled for Nov. 18 before the state’s highest criminal court.

Among its points, Perry’s defense team cited the separation of powers and argued that allowing “a criminal prosecution of a political decision where there is no allegation of bribery or demonstrable corruption undermines the basic structure of state government.”

The prosecution disagreed, saying the issues raised by Perry can’t be decided at this point in the case.

The defense brief said that even assuming for the sake of argument that Perry’s claims “were not of the type that this Court has already recognized as cognizable, the Court should clarify the law to permit immediate resolution of the merits of his challenges.”

“Governor Perry’s constitutional claims pose fundamental questions about any governor’s authority to exercise one of that office’s core constitutional responsibilities—the review of legislative acts, including the possibility of veto,” said the defense brief.

[…]

State Prosecuting Attorney Lisa C. McMinn said it’s clear that the claims raised by Perry would properly be decided in a trial.

“Whether Appellant’s conduct satisfies the elements of a penal statute is a question of sufficiency of the evidence to be decided at trial, not a pretrial determination that this issue cannot be decided or that he is immune from prosecution because a political question might arise at trial,” she wrote.

“Neither the constitutional separation of powers doctrine nor the political question theory of nonjusticiability creates a right not to stand trial or shields a member of the executive or legislative branch from criminal prosecution,” McMinn wrote.

McMinn also filed a brief urging the state’s high criminal court to rescind the 3rd Court’s decision that the coercion law, at least as applied to public servants, violates First Amendment protections.

She said that “there is no evidence that in the years since the coercion statute was enacted, any public servant … has abstained from any of the valid speech the court of appeals maintains is covered by the statute.”

See here, here, and here for the background. Both sides’ briefs are embedded at the link above – the State Prosecuting Attorney’s brief follows the defense brief and begins on page 127 – so go read them if you are so inclined. I have no idea how the CCA will rule, but I feel pretty confident saying that we won’t get a ruling till some time next year.

Day 8 EV 2015 totals: Breaking it down to districts

Day One of Week Two:


Year    Early    Mail   Total   Mailed
======================================
2015   73,903  23,560  97,553   43,279
2013   45,571  16,076  61,647   30,548

EarlyVoting

The running 2015 totals are here, the full 2013 totals are here, and for completeness the full 2009 totals are here. The second Monday in person totals for this year (12,895) are greater than for 2013 (7,643), but some of that may be leftover demand from the weekend. In addition, both this Monday and the second Monday of 2013 are just a smidge higher than the previous Fridays (11,705 this year, 7,110 in 2013). We continue to run well ahead of 2013, but I continue to wonder if we’ll peak. That remains to be seen.

I don’t get the daily rosters, but Greg does, and he provides a breakdown of the vote as of Sunday by Council district. Go look for yourself, but the takeaway is that as of the end of the first full week, the share of the vote coming from Districts B and E was higher than it was in 2013, and the share of the vote coming from District C is down. See this post of mine from 2013 to see how things shook out per district in 2013. Note that the 2013 totals Greg cites are final, end of voting numbers, whereas what we have now is just a week of early voting. It is entirely possible that C is just a little slower to get to the polls than some other districts – it’s what the numbers are at the end that counts, after all – but this is worth watching. District B overlaps HD139, so it’s fair to say this represents a bump from the Turner campaign. District E is likely to be more motivated by HERO than anything else, and not in the way I’d prefer. Note that even with these trends, the overall numbers from C and E are nearly identical, and history suggests the voters in C will show up. So we’ll see.

If you really want to improve turnout in city elections

This is a plan that would do it.

vote-button

Councilman Ron Nirenberg [recently] called for a major change to local elections that he says would boost voter turnout and bolster public participation.

The councilman said he’s spent years considering ways to address abysmal turnout in municipal elections, which are held in May of odd-numbered years. His solution is to move local elections to November of even-numbered years, coinciding with state and federal elections. There would be either a presidential or gubernatorial race on the ballot, driving far better turnout than what municipal elections tend to garner.

“I’m alarmed and astounded by how few people have their voices heard in municipal elections,” Nirenberg said. “That should concern everyone.”

Voter turnout in the May municipal elections is starkly different from that of the November elections. In recent years, for example, the 2005 city election pulled the highest percentage of registered voters, 18 percent. That ballot included an election for an open mayoral seat, pitting Phil Hardberger against a young Julián Castro. Since then, voter turnout peaked in May with 11.89 percent. That included the mayoral race involving Mayor Ivy Taylor, Leticia Van de Putte, Mike Villarreal and Tommy Adkisson.

In the interim period, turnout dropped to a low of 6.94 percent, or about 53,000 of more than 764,500 voters.

Meanwhile, November elections in even-numbered years have drawn between 31.7 percent and almost 57 percent of registered voters since 2008.

[…]

For Nirenberg’s plan to come to fruition, a couple of things have to happen. The Legislature must amend the Local Election Code, and the City Council would have to vote to call a charter amendment election, no sooner than May 2017, wherein voters would ultimately decide whether to move city elections to November of even-numbered years.

On Monday, Nirenberg called on the city to move its elections to coincide with state and federal elections. He sent letters to the city’s Charter Review Commission and to state Rep. Lyle Larson, who he hopes will sponsor a bill that would allow such a change.

The numbers are clear, and so would be the effect. You would also likely get a younger and more diverse electorate, especially in the Presidential years. I could swear Greg looked at what the effect would be like in Houston if we did that here, but I couldn’t find it; this post about having the HERO referendum last year instead of this year touches on the theme. That effect might be lesser in San Antonio than in Houston, but it would likely still be there. For purposes of comparison, let’s take a look at city turnout in the last two even-numbered years, as there were city issues on each ballot. In 2014, there were 398,337 votes cast and 40.90% turnout in Harris County. Those numbers ought to be good enough to make even Mimi Swartz smile.

The fly in the ointment here is that many of our elections aren’t settled in November. Let’s use Austin as an example, since CM Nirenberg cited it and since they just had a contested city election there last November. The November election drew 209,140 total votes, for 40.40% turnout. But then there were the runoffs, as we have in Houston and as they would have in San Antonio, in our often multi-candidate races. The 2014 Austin runoffs attracted only 78,868 total votes, which is 15.58% turnout. Not exactly the same universe there, and for sure not exactly the same voter demographic.

Of course, you can’t have everything, and you shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Boosting November turnout may be reward enough, and who knows, maybe once people adjust to that then December races would be better than they have been. There’s another potential downside, however. Like Harris County, the various independent school districts and community college districts in Bexar County hold their elections at the same time as the big (and small) city races. Separating the city elections from the school and community college board elections would likely have a negative effect on their turnout. How much of an effect might that be? I don’t know, and I don’t know what the school/CC districts might think about it. One way or the other, it’s a conversation that would need to be had.

What about moving the school/CC elections to November of even years along with the city races? That’s certainly an option. The argument that I have always heard for keeping school board elections in odd numbered years is that it keeps from from being too politicized, as they would maintain some distance from the even-year partisan races. For that reason, back in the days of House Speaker Tom Craddick, there was a move afoot by some nefarious characters to force school board elections to November of even years, the thinking being that making such elections more partisan would benefit Republicans. That effort went nowhere, and I don’t know that the old thinking still applies. For better or worse, all elections are more partisan now, and higher turnout is generally seen as benefiting Democrats. The politics of this in the Legislature, if Nirenberg’s proposal makes it that far, ought to be fascinating. The Current and the Rivard Report have more.

What about the trans men?

ThinkProgress asks a good question.

Opponents of HERO, identifying themselves as the “Campaign for Houston,” have blanketed the city with billboards, radio ads, television ads, and other forms of messaging, all of which focus on the singular message: “No men in women’s bathrooms!” The “men” refers to a distorted understanding of transgender women, individuals who were assigned male at birth but who have the inherent gender identity of a woman and would find protection from discrimination for that identity under HERO.

One ad misleadingly claims, “Any man at any time could enter a women’s bathroom simply by claiming to be a woman that day.” The campaign has also referenced “gender-confused men,” whose use of women’s facilities is, as one ad described it, “filthy, disgusting, and unsafe.”

As trans editor and writer Mitch Kellaway explained to ThinkProgress, these tactics “are actively intended to attack trans women, who they see as the primary ‘threat’ to womanhood.” They erase and stigmatize transgender women’s identities, disregarding the fact that they even are, in fact, women — all the time. They also ignore the fact that, as HERO’s supporters have pointed out in their commercials, “indecent exposure, harassment, and assault in bathrooms is already illegal.” Most importantly, transgender women are not predators; they are individuals who, like everybody else, simply want to pee in peace.

But Kellaway is also concerned that these ads highlight “the passive transphobia that follows trans men in our society: our erasure from existence. We aren’t even fathomable to most people.” Masen Davis, co-director of Global Action for Trans Equality, echoed that sentiment to ThinkProgress. “So many of the arguments against HERO are based on fear and misunderstanding of transgender people,” he explained, but “they also depend on a lack of visibility of transgender men.”

Indeed, none of HERO’s opponents could provide ThinkProgress with the answer to a simple question: when it comes to bathrooms, what about transgender men?

They have no answer to that question, because as the story suggests, they’re in denial about the existence of transgender men. If trans men belong in the men’s room – and they do – then trans women belong in the women’s room, which is the exact opposite of what HERO opponents say. And if not, well, then read the story to see who will be forced to use the ladies’ room. Does that make any sense? What doesn’t make sense is trying to wish trans men out of existence, any more than telling lies about trans women does.

The inevitable latest lawsuit against the EPA

As night follows the day.

ERCOT

As promised, Texas is suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over President Obama’s plan to combat climate change, Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Friday, just after the new regulation had been finalized.

The state is suing as part of a bipartisan coalition of 24 states — including Missouri and Kentucky, which are led by Democrats — that will jointly request a stay on the plan Friday afternoon.

The regulation, known as the Clean Power Plan, requires states to cut carbon emissions by shifting from coal power to natural gas and renewables over the next 15 years.

Paxton has warned that the Clean Power Plan would dramatically inflate the cost of electricity for consumers and imperil the state’s power grid, describing the regulation as a federal “power grab.”

[…]

The coalition will argue that the EPA “cannot force the states to regulate where the EPA doesn’t have authority to regulate itself,” Morrisey explained.

It filed a petition for review of the regulation Friday morning with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

“Petitioners will show that the final rule is in excess of the agency’s statutory authority, goes beyond the bounds set by the United States Constitution, and otherwise is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with law,” the petition says. “Accordingly, the petitioners ask the court to hold unlawful and set aside the rule, and to order other such relief as may be appropriate.”

See here for the background, and here for the AG’s complaint. ERCOT has actually confirmed that Texas is well-positioned to comply with the Clean Power Plan, but what fun would that be? The ritual must be observed, like the playing of the National Anthem before a sporting event. Round and round we go, and when the Supreme Court ultimately settles it, nobody knows.

Day 7 EV 2015 totals

One week in:


Year    Early    Mail   Total   Mailed
======================================
2015   61,008  21,141  82,149   42,938
2013   37,928  14,342  52,270   30,544

EarlyVoting

The running 2015 totals are here, the full 2013 totals are here, and for completeness the full 2009 totals are here. Sunday is the low volume day for early voting, as EV hours are only 1 to 6. Despite the weather, there were 800 more votes cast this year than in 2013, an increase of about 31%. That’s a smaller rate of increase than we’ve been seeing, but it’s still an uptick, so whatever the effect of the weather was, it probably wasn’t that much.

Week two of early voting tends to be busier – in 2013, there were 50,000 in-person votes cast in the last five days. If that happens this year, then either Election Day will be rather quiet, or we’ll have a healthy increase in turnout overall. Remember that these numbers are all Harris County, not just Houston – historically, about 70% of the vote in odd numbered years comes from Houston – and that there are city of Houston voters in Fort Bend and Montgomery Counties as well. I’ll take a stab at guessing turnout later this week, once we see if historic trends hold or if the flame has burned out a bit. Have you voted yet?

Weekend link dump for October 25

I’m not saying it’s aliens, but I’m not saying it’s not aliens, either.

The buildings that used to be Pizza Huts, and the people who love to photograph them.

“A former meerkat expert at London Zoo has been ordered to pay compensation to a monkey handler she attacked with a wine glass in a love spat over a llama-keeper.” How can you not want to read the rest?

“It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories.”

Yeah, I have cable and don’t see that changing any time soon. Cutting the cord feels like way too much work, and as a sports fan there’s no way I’m going to do without access to live events on my TV. I agree that the market for these services sucks, but right now for me the other choices are not even close to being an improvement.

“We may come to see Pope Francis as the Will & Grace of climate change.”

“This provided an excellent opportunity for a longitudinal study of balloon evolution, as measured by lifting capacity.”

Is the right to transport big-game carcasses an inviolable one?

“Still, as I wrote in May when Hersh’s story first appeared, his account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense.”

On the Geoff Marcy scandal.

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven”.

“The Democratic Party, in other words, is facing an apocalypse if the Supreme Court moves further to the right, and the only way for them to stop this apocalypse is to hold on to the White House.”

“With the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau becoming the next prime minister, a significant roadblock to an international climate agreement in Paris in December is now clear.”

“If this were a problem with, say, American Airlines mileage awards, it would have gotten about as much attention as the Space Shuttle exploding or the Obamacare website melting down. That’s because lots of upper-middle-class folks use these miles, and so do lots of journalists. But RushCard is mostly used by the invisible poor. It turns out that RushCard’s problems have been big news for the past week in a few places that cater to either the hip hop community or looking out for the poor, but in the mainstream press it’s been mostly ignored. That’s probably because very few mainstream journalists either use RushCard or know a lot of people who do.”

Det er helt texas, as they say in Norway.

After 14 seasons and hundreds of explosions, Mythbusters is coming to an end. I’m bummed, though not nearly as bummed as my daughters are.

“So they’re willing to let $20 billion go down a black hole and pay $2 billion extra in order to prevent Obamacare from helping the needy. It’s hard to fathom, isn’t it?”

RIP, Cory Wells, singer for Three Dog Night.

“Well, now we’ve got the Benghazi hearings and my mother said that the Republicans grilling Hillary reminder her of her ex-husband. All of those 60’s and 70’s grudges against upper-class feminists have been set aside, courtesy of the House Benghazi Committee.”

RIP, Maureen O’Hara, star of movies like Miracle on 34th Street and The Quiet Man.

Day 6 EV 2015 totals: Rain, rain, go away

Here are your rain-soaked Day Six totals:


Year    Early    Mail   Total   Mailed
======================================
2015   57,657  21,141  78,798   42,938
2013   35,376  14,342  49,728   30,544

EarlyVoting

The running 2015 totals are here, the full 2013 totals are here, and for completeness the full 2009 totals are here. No mail ballots sent or received today or tomorrow, and I believe the deadline to request a mail ballot is Tuesday, so that last column above isn’t going to change much. It’s unclear if today’s rains had any effect on the totals or not. I had expected the first Saturday numbers to be higher under good conditions, so at first blush I’d guess that today was slower than expected since there were two thousand fewer votes than there were yesterday, but a look back at 2009 and 2013 suggests that’s not necessarily the case – 2013’s Saturday was nearly identical to its first Friday, and 2009’s Saturday was up just a bit from its day before. We’ll never know what we might have had if yesterday had been a sunny day.

As far as today goes, Sunday is the short day for early voting – EV hours are from 1 to 6, so voting doesn’t interfere with church-going. An accompanying press release from the County Clerk’s office assures me that “As of this time, all Early Voting polling locations are scheduled to be open on Sunday, October 25th”, so go vote today if you planned to and if the weather allows it. EV hours are 7 AM to 7 PM Monday through Friday this week, so there will be other chances. Stay safe and wait till another day if the weather is bad.

Chron overview of HISD Trustee races

Little late in the game for this sort of thing, but better late than never.

Terry Grier

Terry Grier

With Superintendent Terry Grier leaving in March, the HISD board faces a big decision in choosing his replacement.

Voters can help to determine who makes that decision, with four of nine trustee seats on the Nov. 3 ballot.

At least one trustee will be new, as Paula Harris is not seeking re-election. Yet some familiar faces – a former trustee, a past city councilwoman and three repeat candidates – are vying to help govern the nation’s seventh-largest school district.

Grier, by announcing in September that he would resign six months later, removed his future in the district as the top campaign issue. However, his rapid rollout of programs and high staff turnover loom on the trail with candidates calling for more stability in the Houston Independent School District.

HISD’s reliance on student test scores to award bonuses and to evaluate teachers also could be at risk. Several candidates said they oppose the statistical measure used in both, and the board’s decision last week to continue the $10 million bonus program was narrowly split – a 5-4 vote.

At a recent forum sponsored by the research and advocacy group Children at Risk, chief executive Bob Sanborn noted that HISD won the top prize for urban school districts under Grier and asked whether the candidates would rehire him if they could. None of the candidates in attendance said they would do so.

You can see the interviews I did with several of the candidates here. I asked all of them if they would vote to give Grier a new contract or not – all these interviews were done before Grier announced his intent to step down – and with the exception of Rhonda Skillern-Jones, who declined to discuss the matter, they all said No. If I’d have known that Grier was not coming back, I would have asked what qualities they were looking for in a new Superintendent. That’s the question, and the challenge, for the next Board.

Commissioners Court to get deposed

This ought to be interesting.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett and all four county commissioners are scheduled to be deposed Monday in a federal lawsuit filed by former Houston Police Department crime lab supervisors who said they experienced retaliation after exposing problems with a mobile DUI testing program.

Amanda Culbertson and Jorge Wong say the Harris County District Attorney’s Office and county commissioners colluded in having them fired after they revealed problems in HPD’s breath-alcohol testing vehicles, known as “BAT vans.”

At the time of the terminations, Culbertson and Wong were working at a Lone Star College laboratory that supervised under-the-influence testing for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. They say they lost their jobs when commissioners voted to cancel the Lone Star contract.

While working as analysts for HPD, Culbertson and Wong exposed problems with the BAT vans that complicated DUI prosecutions.

In retaliation, their 2012 lawsuit says, former Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos and Assistant District Attorney Rachel Palmer lobbied commissioners to cancel the county’s long-standing contract with their employer, Lone Star. The county subsequently signed a more costly deal for lab work with the Texas Department of Public Safety.

In September, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes authorized the depositions of commissioners El Franco Lee, Jack Morman, Steve Radack and Jack Cagle as well as Emmett and his criminal justice adviser Doug Adkinson. The judge also limited each inquiry to one hour.

[…]

HPD began using the BAT vans in 2008. Into early 2011, Culbertson reported temperature and electrical irregularities with instruments that could influence the integrity of tests, the lawsuit said.

In May 2011, Culbertson testified in a DUI trial that she could not verify a device had been working properly during a test. In July 2011 testimony, she said she could not trust the accuracy of a van analysis. That same month, Palmer, the assistant district attorney, wrote a memo to a supervisor in which she concluded that Culbertson “could not be trusted to testify in a breath test” and that she was “gravely concerned” about Culbertson’s ability to “testify fairly” in the future.

Culbertson and Wong resigned from HPD in 2011 to become technical supervisors at Lone Star.

In the fall of 2011, the college’s contract of nearly three decades with the county – which had been renewed annually – was terminated in favor of a more expensive DPS deal. Culbertson and Wong were fired by Lone Star in October 2011, shortly after the commissioners transferred the testing business.

Hughes dismissed the lawsuit in August 2013, but that decision was reversed by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in June. All claims against Lykos have been dismissed or settled, and all claims against Palmer have been tossed.

See here and here for some background. As I’ve said before, I haven’t followed this story closely enough to have a firm about about it, but as having all five members of the Court deposed in a lawsuit is an unprecedented situation, I figured it was worth noting. The Press has more.

The (mostly) high speed rail extension to Fort Worth

I hope they can make this happen.

A proposed high-speed rail route cutting through Dallas-Fort Worth would go slower than previously planned but would include a station south of DFW Airport, according to a newly unveiled plan.

The proposal, which is being studied by a state-appointed commission, would bring passengers from downtown Fort Worth to Arlington along the Interstate 30 corridor, then cut north roughly along the Texas 360 corridor to the CentrePort-Dallas/Fort Worth Airport area. From there, rail passengers could connect with other transportation to the airport to catch flights.

The line would then follow the Trinity Railway Express commuter line from CentrePort to downtown Dallas, according to a conceptual map made public Monday. TRE would keep operating on its tracks, and a second set of tracks — possibly elevated — would be built in the same right of way or adjacent property for the futuristic bullet trains.

The top speed would be around 125 mph — far below the 220 mph that the trains are capable of traveling — partly because of the serpentine shape of the route and the relatively short distance between stations.

But the new route would make high-speed rail accessible to more people in North Texas, a region of about 7 million people that’s expected to grow to 10.7 million by 2040.

“Certainly with the proximity to DFW Airport in this option, I think it’s important to note there is an opportunity there,” said Bill Meadows, chairman of the Commission for High-Speed Rail in the Dallas/Fort Worth Region.

[…]

Although the commission’s main purpose is to provide planning for the Metroplex, Meadows maintains that its work is actually the initial steps in setting up high-speed rail that will connect Houston, Dallas, Arlington, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio and other cities.

There is even interest in extending the lines north to Oklahoma City and south to Monterrey, Mexico, although that would likely take years to materialize, if not decades.

See here and here for the background. As the Dallas Observer notes, there are some questions about how effective this extension may be, given that it can’t go as fast as the Dallas to Houston portion of the line and that driving isn’t exactly burdensome. Still, if Houston and Fort Worth are your endpoints, this would be a very nice option, and there are all those possible expansion plans as well.

Saturday video break: Holiday

Let’s go back to the 80s, when Madonna was taking over the world, and listen to one of her early hits:

I hope I live long enough to see what future historians – those who didn’t actually live through the 80s – have to say about this era. And for a definitive not-a-cover of “Holiday”, here’s Green Day:

Yeah, the Dubya era. I can explain the 80s – sort of, anyway. That decade, geez. At least there was some good music.

Day 5 EV 2015 totals: Early voting is up (almost) everywhere

Here are your Day Five totals:


Year    Early    Mail   Total   Mailed
======================================
2015   48,027  21,141  69,168   42,938
2013   28,303  14,342  42,645   30,544

EarlyVoting

The running 2015 totals are here, the full 2013 totals are here, and for completeness the full 2009 totals are here. With one work week in the bag, it’s clear that early voting is a lot brisker than it was two years ago. You might think that it portends a much higher level of turnout this year. You might be right, though as you know I have been cautioning against reading too much into these numbers. More people are voting early now than they used to, and some of what we are seeing is merely the result of regular voters getting out earlier than usual and/or shifting to early voting from voting on Election Day.

Now to be sure, we do expect some higher level of turnout this year, thanks to the contested Mayor’s race and the HERO referendum. Indications I’ve gotten from people who have access to the daily voter rosters suggests that about 40% of the voters so far are not from the “at least two out of the last three elections” group. That’s actually not much higher than what we saw in 2009, when 36.1% of voters had not participated in either 2005 or 2007. It’s way too early to place your bets on what final turnout might be, but if I had to guess I’d lean more towards a modest increase, say from 180,000 to 200,000. Ask me again when the final early voting totals are in and I’ll take another guess then.

There’s another factor to consider here, and that’s that the increase in early voting in Harris County is not unique. Take a look at the four-day early voting totals from this year and from 2013 for the state’s biggest counties. The SOS is always a day behind on this, so all we have is the numbers through Thursday, but they tell the same basic story as in Harris County:


County   In person    Mail    Total    2013
===========================================
Harris      36,316  19,789   56,105  34,412
Dallas      10,558   1,570   12,128   5,649
Tarrant     10,713   2,601   13,314   6,939
Bexar       11,285   2,865   14,150   9,117
Travis       7,231     164    7,395   9,880
Collin       7,374     168    7,542   4,546
El Paso      3,081     968    4,049   1,583
Denton       4,388     315    4,703   3,455
Fort Bend    4,780     691    5,471   2,890
Hidalgo      3,456     211    3,667   4,661
Montgomery   5,779     429    6,208   1,483
Williamson   4,192     116    4,308   3,402
Galveston    2,222      58    2,280   1,264
Nueces       1,072      51    1,123   4,978

Total      112,447  29,996  142,433  94,239

As Harris County’s EV totals are up 62% over the five day period, the top 14 counties have seen their four-day EV totals climb 51%. There’s some variation in there – I’m not sure what is causing the dip in Travis County, and the huge increase in Montgomery County is surely the result of their second contentious road bond proposal of the year – but still, that’s pretty sturdy. Harris County is up more than the overall total, and its increase is relatively larger if we take it out of the state total – the rest of the state’s EV total is up only 24% – but it remains the case that more people are voting early everywhere, not just here. And as always, the lesson is to not read too much into what’s happening in one place till we have more data.