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November 29th, 2022:

The boil notice

Nov 29th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your periodic reminder that Ken Paxton’s vote fraud claims are bullshit

Nov 29th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

A long Chron story that documents the bullshit.

The only criminal involved

The first of the big cases to fizzle was in Gregg County.

Prosecutors and local politicians announced an investigation soon after county commissioner candidate Shannon Brown won the March 2018 Precinct 4 primary by only five votes. But it wasn’t until six weeks before the 2020 general election that Paxton unveiled a 134-count indictment charging Brown, his wife and two election workers with illegally rounding up mail ballots.

“We have a county commissioner under indictment for mail ballot fraud,” Sen. Bryan] Hughes said last year at a signing ceremony for his elections bill in nearby Tyler. “Anybody who tells you there is no voter fraud in Texas is telling you a very big lie.”

Early this year, however, the case quietly and dramatically shriveled. Each defendant admitted to a single misdemeanor infraction. Brown, who apologized for one technical election code violation, stayed in office. (He lost re-election in this spring’s Democratic primary.)

Officials have repeatedly refused to explain how a 134-felony indictment deflated to a four-misdemeanor violation. District Attorney Tom Watson, who is leaving office at the end of the year, did not return calls.

Another signature case took a hit this summer when a Hidalgo County jury acquitted former Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina of 12 counts of election fraud.

Molina was arrested in 2019 for “orchestrating an organized illegal voting scheme,” according to an attorney general’s office news release. Prosecutors said he tried to persuade voters to change their addresses — in some cases to an apartment complex he owned — so they could vote for him.

Molina, who won the 2017 race by more than 1,200 votes, said the case was instigated by a political opponent. At his August trial, he said he had relied on published opinions from the Texas Secretary of State and attorney general to try to decipher a vague state law describing where a person could claim to live for voting purposes. He noted the Legislature changed the law in 2021 to include more precise language.

“Nobody tried to hide anything,” added his lawyer, Jaime Pena.

It is unclear how Molina’s verdict will affect the still-pending cases of his wife and more than a dozen residents alleged to have reported moving into Edinburg to vote for him.

There’s more, but you get the idea. One key point that the story makes is that Paxton will pile on the charges – for example, including an individual charge for each alleged illegal vote – even though there’s no legal advantage in doing so, as any punishment would be concurrent and not consecutive, meaning that 100 convictions would result in the same jail time as one conviction. But by doing so he can make the claim that there are “hundreds” of pending cases, even if the reality is a handful of defendants each with a bunch of charges for the same alleged offense. It’s the oldest play in the book, one he inherited from Greg Abbott back when it was Abbott’s job to pursue vindictive yet utterly baseless charges against people who for the most part did nothing criminal. The fear and the screaming headlines are the point.

To be fair, this sort of bullshit is happening in plenty of other places. It’s just that the primary effect is to ruin people’s lives and to scare others into not voting. We’re not dealing with rational actors here, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do real damage. And we’re in for another at least two years of it here.

It’s legislative bullying time

Nov 29th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Here we go again.

Republican lawmakers in Texas and Washington D.C. are threatening some of the nation’s largest corporate law firms if they provide what the lawmakers consider to be improper advice on issues such as climate change, diversity and abortion.

The Texas legislators have even threatened business lawyers with criminal prosecution and disbarment.

In letters sent Nov. 3, five GOP senators on the Judiciary Committee told 51 of the nation’s largest law firms, including 33 with offices and lawyers in Texas, that they have a “duty to inform clients of the risks they incur by participating in climate cartels and other ill-advised ESG schemes.”

The memo doesn’t describe what a “scheme” involving environmental, social and governance principles might look like. Nor does it say what is objectionable about efforts to defend the environment or democratize corporate capitalism.

In July, 11 members of the politically conservative Texas Freedom Caucus sent a letter to Sidley Austin Dallas partner and chair Yvette Ostalaza, threatening her and other corporate law firms operating in Texas with criminal prosecution, civil sanctions and a ban on practicing law if they help their employees in the state to get an abortion in another state.

The three-page letter to Sidley Austin, which has nearly 200 lawyers in Houston and Dallas, accused the firm of being “complicit in illegal abortions.” The Freedom Caucus members posted the letter on its website and sent a copy to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The letters, legal experts say, show that conservative Republican lawmakers believe they can score political favor with their base by attacking corporate lawyers, which they see as facilitating more liberal causes.

“Corporate law firms, especially in Texas because of the political environment, are taking these letters very serious,” said Kent Zimmermann, a consultant who works with several Texas law firms. “These are pure political hit jobs, but the law firms do not want to give any of these threats oxygen by responding.”

“It puts law firms in an unfair position in what amounts to a play to the (GOP) base,” Zimmerman said.

Zimmermann said law firm leaders need to respect the lawmakers even if the demands are not legally sound.

[…]

“It’s a stupid letter; a totally stupid letter,” Dallas legal ethics expert Randy Johnston said. “It’s kind of offensive in concept. “Some of the authors are also lawyers and are flirting with an ethical violation by this attempt to intimidate other lawyers in connection with those lawyers’ representation of advice to clients.”

Dru Stevenson, a professor at the South Texas School of Law in Houston, describes the letter as “mostly political theater,” but he cautions that it needs to be taken seriously.

Stevenson, who studies the legal issues associated with the ESG movement, says antitrust litigation may prove to be the only real weapon to curb increasingly popular trends toward climate change mitigation and, more specifically, energy transition and decreased use of carbon-based fuels like oil, natural gas and coal.

“The senators can’t sue, only threaten legislation,” Stevenson said. “For now, they are stuck (with the Biden administration), but the issue is worth keeping in mind. The political pendulum goes back and forth.”

We’ve seen this before, and as we get closer to the start of the legislative session we’ll see much more of it. Unfortunately, the voter backlash to Dobbs and the rejection of efforts to further limit abortion via referendum all happened outside of Texas. The fanatics have every reason to believe they’ve been vindicated, and they will act accordingly. The best part, as far as they’re concerned, is that the bluster is often enough to get what they want, because large firms are risk averse and would rather placate than fight. But if it comes down to it, or just because it’s what they want, they’ll still push forward with plenty of unhinged legislation aimed at criminalizing abortion and various forms of dissent. Some of this may wind up in court, and Lord help us if that happens. You know what I’m going to say about nothing changing until election results start to change. This is our motivation for next time. There’s no other choice.