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Carolyn Evans-Shabazz

January 2023 campaign finance reports: City of Houston

Jan 23rd, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

It’s late January, so you know what that means: It’s campaign finance report time again. The reports of the greatest interest will be for the city of Houston, but I’ll be checking in on HISD, HCC, and Harris County as well. The July 2022 reports are here, the January 2022 reports are here, and the July 2021 reports are here. 


Candidate     Raised      Spent     Loan     On Hand
====================================================
Hollins      547,027    469,141        0   1,062,754
Edwards      567,005    195,257        0   1,044,338
Whitmire   1,148,015    249,142        0  10,100,086
Kaplan       465,180    177,578  200,000   1,164,527

Peck          10,750     13,940        0      20,729
Jackson        2,500     14,965        0      14,971
Kamin         52,080     12,255        0     238,337
 Scarbrough        0          0        0      14,810   
E-Shabazz     
L Dixon            0        254      100         254
Thomas        43,996     11,310        0      89,042
Huffman        5,850      3,624        0      35,012
Castillo      37,448      1,037   10,000      41,935
G Lindner      4,503          0        0       4,503
Martinez      78,605      6,130        0      52,187
Pollard       17,350     15,412   40,000     718,379
 Sanchez      30,140      4,201   20,000      25,938
C-Tatum       14,250     13,687        0     155,691

Hellyar       65,854      6,772        0      44,710
Coryat         5,626      4,063        0       1,562
Bess               0          0        0           0
Carter        85,926      9,456    4,000      78,768
Cooper        23,977     17,631        0       9,189
Plummer        4,125     10,309        0      24,741
 Morales      12,900        417    5,534      18,016
Alcorn       155,301     28,187        0     306,273

Martin         8,250     12,493        0     161,851
Kubosh        22,900      3,612  196,000      54,289

Wolfthal      43,812     16,683        0      24,953
Flickinger         0      1,933   50,000           0

Turner       228,862    186,942        0     842,484

Cisneros         250      7,215        0      31,128
Gallegos      21,787     13,500        0     133,471

Knox          16,175     20,914        0      14,231
Robinson      44,894     27,296        0     271,624

Brown              0      5,404   75,000      29,316

Laster             0      3,254        0     147,138

I have collected all of the reports for the people listed above, and you can find them in this Google Drive folder. I decided not to link to all of them individually just because it was more work than I felt like doing. Omitting that means I don’t have a complete listing, with full names and the office they are seeking, of all the candidates. I’ll be sure to at least mention everyone of interest later in the post.

I’ve grouped everyone in the table above as follows: First are the Mayoral candidates, then the candidates for district Council offices, listed in alphabetical order by office – Amy Peck is District A, Tarsha Jackson is District B, and so on. The open offices are Districts E, H, and I. There are so far two challengers to incumbent Council members, and I have indented their names to indicate them – Daphne Scarbrough (yeah, the same person who was a leading opponent of light rail on Richmond Avenue, here to scourge us again) is running against CM Abbie Kamin in C, and Ivan Sanchez, who was a Democratic candidate for CD07 in 2018, is running against CM Ed Pollard in District J. Martina Lemond Dixon is running in E, Mario Castillo and Janette Garza Lindner (2021 candidate for HISD district I) are running in H (my district), and Joaquin Martinez is running in I. The one person that did not have a report filed as of Friday was District D incumbent Carolyn Evans-Shabazz.

The next group is for the At Large seats, of which #s 1, 2, and 3 are open. Nick Hellyar, who ran for At Large #4 in 2019, is running for #2, as are Marina Coryat and Danielle Bess (former candidate for HD147 in 2022), and Twila Carter and Dannell Cooper are running for #3. No one has yet filed a finance report saying they plan to run for At Large #1. You can be sure that will change, and that all of these fields will be much larger by the time the filing deadline rolls around. Indeed, they may already be larger, as there are two candidates who didn’t specify an office in their reports; I’ll get to them in a minute. As above, a candidate opposing an incumbent is indented. Yes, that’s our old buddy Roy Morales running against CM Letitia Plummer in At Large #4.

Next we have the two term-limited Council members who are now running for City Controller, and following them are two candidates who did not specify an office on their report, Leah Wolfthal and Fred Flickinger. I met Leah Wolfthal at the January CEC meeting for HCDP precinct chairs, and I thought she told me she is running in At Large #2. Her website just says “for At Large City Council”, so better not to make any assumptions. I’ve put her in this group for that reason.

Everyone after that is not running for anything, from Mayor Turner to the four CMs to Controller Chris Brown. Former CM Mike Laster, who termed out in 2019, still has a decent amount of cash on hand. I assume the four people in this grouping who remain with over $100K on hand have some plan, perhaps vague and unformed but still existent, to do something with it. What that may be is not known to me, and possibly to them, at this time.

The Chron picks a few highlights from the Mayoral portion of the reports. The one thing I will add to that is that I must have missed Lee Kaplan’s July 2022 report, because I was surprised by his cash on hand total. Kaplan raised about $850K in the last period, which combined with a small amount of spending gives him the cash on hand total he has now. I have included Kaplan’s July 2022 finance report in that Google Drive folder as well.

There are candidates now who have not yet filed a finance report, and there are people who will be candidates that have not yet formally announced their candidacies. The July finance reports will tell us a much more complete story, though even then there will be room for more, as the filing deadline is not until August. This is what we know now. If you have anything to add, by all means please do so.

July 2022 campaign finance reports: City of Houston

Jul 27th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

We’re still more than a year out from the 2023 election, but we are now up to three serious conteners for Mayor, plus two others in the wild, so the finance reports are beginning to generate some real interest. The January 2022 reports are here, the July 2021 reports are here. 


Candidate     Raised      Spent     Loan     On Hand
====================================================
Turner       209,950    129,870        0     802,194

Peck          19,100     19,457    5,000      24,057
Jackson       17,400     11,330        0      33,436
Kamin         86,461     14,691        0     193,807
E-Shabazz      8,000      5,591        0      17,691
Martin         2,500     18,138        0     151,767
Thomas         5,750      2,887        0      51,761
Huffman       45,350     45,284        0      30,697
Cisneros      13,500      1,164        0      38,094
Gallegos      27,050     14,126        0     127,933
Pollard      286,341     11,800   40,000     716,441
C-Tatum       51,950     16,089        0     154,697

Knox          18,425     10,266        0      37,185
Robinson      67,675     17,595        0     247,700
Kubosh        14,000     31,141  196,000      59,273
Plummer                   6,417    8,175      33,010
Alcorn        38,305     17,321        0     178,429

Brown            500      4,849   75,000      34,861

Hollins    1,123,316    138,079        0     941,155
Edwards      789,227     96,378        0     712,066

As a reminder, no links to individual reports here because the city’s system generates PDF downloads, and I don’t have the time to rename and upload and share them. Next year, when there are candidates, I’ll do that. Not this time.

All of the current officeholders submitted reports in a timely fashion this period. The only oddity was with the report for CM Letitia Plummer, which did not list an amount raised on either the summary or section totals pages. She clearly did raise some money, as a perusal of the rest of the report shows, but didn’t include a total for it anywhere. I didn’t feel like tallying it up myself, so I left the mystery in place. The only non-officeholders of interest to file reports are the two 2023 Mayoral candidates listed at the bottom, who made a decent splash with their unprecedented totals for this point in the cycle. While he did not file a city of Houston report yet, and while there is some uncertainty about how much he can move from his state account, Sen. John Whitmire had $9.7 million on hand as of July 15. Even if he can only transfer, say, 25% of that, it’s a lot of cash to start out with.

We must once again talk about the finance report for Ed Pollard, who I will say again must be planning something for his future because there is absolutely no need for this level of fundraising for his re-election campaign in District J. I had speculated that maybe he was aiming for a Mayoral campaign, but at this point that seems less likely – I can’t rule it out, but there’s already a big field of well-financed players, and Pollard would be the least known and tied for least-funded among them. Maybe next time, or maybe something in 2024? Or maybe he just really likes fundraising? Who knows.

Other than that, honestly kind of a boring set of reports. Things should start to get more interesting with the January 2023 reports – if nothing else, I’d expect to see a few new names. I’ll skip the HISD and HCC reports this cycle so look for those next January as well. I’ll round up a few state reports of interest for next time. Let me know what you think.

January 2022 campaign finance reports: City of Houston

Mar 6th, 2022
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

January finance reports are always worth a look, if only as a ritual to start the new year. We’re a year out from election season truly beginning for Houston, but as we now have two brand name contenders for Mayor already, we should check in and see how our current electeds are doing in the fundraising department. I last looked at these reports in July of 2021. Let’s see what folks have been up to since then.


Candidate     Raised      Spent     Loan     On Hand
====================================================
Turner       311,976    156,329        0     723,455

Peck          25,620     13,989    5,000      27,442
Jackson        2,775      8,725        0      27,367
Kamin         14,620      7,824        0     124,434
E-Shabazz      8,440     13,625        0      15,282
Martin        56,350     32,011        0     162,311
Thomas        
Huffman       21,550     24,921        0      27,040
Cisneros       9,495      2,033        0      25,758
Gallegos      50,355     16,218        0     114,905
Pollard      151,275     12,946   40,000     441,900
C-Tatum       10,000      8,576        0     118,827

Knox          13,385      5,227        0      17,884
Robinson      50,595     11,758        0     189,134
Kubosh        33,200     31,914  196,000      73,174
Plummer       14,191     22,440        0      25,473
Alcorn       153,700     26,652        0     158,067

Brown          3,000      6,067   75,000      38,887

As a reminder, no links to individual reports here because the city’s system generates PDF downloads, and I don’t have the time to rename and upload and share them. Next year, when there are candidates, I’ll do that. Not this time.

Mayor Turner is the biggest recipient of campaign cash, which is usually how it is. He won’t be on the 2023 ballot, but we will have at least two charter referenda in our future, and I’m sure he’ll want to be able to have some influence over them. As was the case with Mayor Parker and term limits in 2015, he might want to add one or two more to that list, on policy matters that have been discussed but not yet addressed. I’m thinking of the stupid revenue cap, and a second try at an equal rights ordinance, this time for the charter. I have no special insight on these matters, just a long memory and a searchable archive, both of which I endeavor to use for good and not evil.

The fact that we have two high-profile Mayoral candidates in place (well, as much as one can be at this early hour) doesn’t mean that there aren’t other potential Mayorals out there. Last time I noted CM Ed Pollard’s prodigious fundraising, in which he amassed an amount that far outstripped his possible need for re-election in his district, and noted that he has been on some people’s lips as a possible candidate for Mayor. His January finance report does nothing to turn that speculation down, though also as noted before he may have his eye on some other prizes as well.

On the other end of that spectrum is the one person I had felt most confident about as a 2023 Mayoral candidate, and that’s City Controller Chris Brown, who seemed a natural fit for the Mayoral candidate role and who has demonstrated fundraising prowess in the past. Not these past six months, though, and his cash on hand total is looking awfully paltry. Does that mean anything? It’s too early to say. But now that John Whitmire and Chris Hollins are out there doing Mayoral candidate things, the time to decide whether or not one wants to join them in that is not far off. Michael Kubosh, who is currently doing Michael Kubosh things, falls in between the two of them in fundraising action. He’ll be facing the same decision as well.

A person who turned it up several notches after a sedate second half of 2021 is CM Sallie Alcorn, who was a top fundraiser for her initial election and now seems to be preparing for her second race. Note that in recent years, the old “blackout” period for fundraising was eliminated, so incumbents can get a head start on building up their treasuries. Fewer of them have need to do that now, as about half of them are term-limited. Some of those term-limited folks will be leaving with a decent amount of cash in their kitties – I’m thinking Dave Martin, Robert Gallegos, and David Robinson. It’s not clear to me what if any office they might use those funds for in the future – maybe one of them has an eye on Controller – but they have them if they want them.

Not much else of note. Greg Travis is now filing state reports, so he’s been swapped out for Mary Nan Huffman, who still has a few bucks in her account. I did not find a report for Tiffany Thomas. I’ll do HISD and HCC next to finish this off. Let me know what you think.

July 2021 campaign finance reports: City of Houston

Aug 2nd, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

PREVIOUSLY: Congress, Harris County

As we know, this is not an election year for city of Houston offices. That usually makes for a pretty dull summary of finance reports, since it’s just incumbents and about half of them are term-limited and thus not really motivated to do much. But I had last checked on these in January 2020, which was the conclusion of the 2019 election cycle, and I didn’t want to wait till next year for a first look. And you never know what you might find.


Candidate     Raised      Spent     Loan     On Hand
====================================================
Turner       185,055     76,357        0     522,058
Peck          14,915     10,892    5,000      18,072
Jackson       19,700     14,126        0      33,317
Kamin         79,860     10,697        0     115,828
E-Shabazz     36,000     19,879        0      20,468
Martin             0      3,473        0     130,577
Thomas        
Travis        34,950      5,886   21,000      76,500
Cisneros       1,000        456        0      18,296
Gallegos       2,075      8,620        0      77,372
Pollard      280,908     11,371   40,000     303,572
C-Tatum       58,718      6,847        0     117,013
Knox          11,685      4,571        0      16,510
Robinson      58,983     16,085        0     149,046
Kubosh        60,910     24,318  206,010      65,667
Plummer       30,770      6,417    8,175      33,010
Alcorn         3,200      5,251        0      31,013
Brown         24,550      3,892   75,000      19,281

Edwards            0      2,580        0      45,081

Sorry, no links to individual reports this time – the city of Houston’s reporting system spits out downloaded PDFs, which I have to rename and upload to Google Drive to be able to provide links for them, and it ain’t worth the effort at this point. I’ll do that in 2023, when things heat up.

One of these things is not like the others. I’ve been asking folks who they think will run for Mayor in 2023, partly to see how my own speculations have turned out. One name that has come up a lot is that of Ed Pollard, the first-term Council member in District J. Let’s just say his July report does nothing to temper that kind of talk. To put it mildly, one does not need $300K to run for re-election in a low-turnout district like J, and that’s more than two years out from the actual election. Pollard may have his eye on something else, of course – he ran for HD137 in 2016, and who knows what opportunities the next round of redistricting may present – but if one is being mentioned when the question of “who is thinking about running for Mayor” comes up, this is the kind of finance report that supports such talk.

Other names that come up when I bring up the question include Michael Kubosh, Chris Brown, and Amanda Edwards. Neither of the first two has raised all that much, though they both have the capability. Kubosh has knocked $60K off his loan total, which may have contributed to his lower cash-on-hand total. As for Edwards, she’s the opposite of Pollard at this point.

The one person who has been openly talked about as a candidate – by someone other than me, anyway – is Sen. John Whitmire, who has enough cash in his treasury to not sweat the small stuff. He recently announced his intent to run for re-election in 2022, which is completely unsurprising and not in conflict with any 2023 speculation. Mayor Turner ran for and won re-election in HD139 in 2014 before officially beginning his Mayoral campaign in 2015.

Beyond that, not a whole lot to report. Mayor Turner has some money on hand if he wants to influence a charter amendment or two. CM Tiffany Thomas did not have a report that I could find – sometimes, the system is a little wonky that way. The only other number of note was for term-limited CM David Robinson, who has added over $100K to his cash on hand since last January. Maybe that’s a sign that he has his eye on another race, and maybe that just means that some people are good at fundraising. I’ll leave that to you. Next up, HISD and HCC. Let me know what you think.

City’s budget passes

Jun 4th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

There was a little bit of drama, but nothing too big.

Mayor Sylvester Turner

Houston’s City Council voted Wednesday to approve a $5.1 billion budget for the next fiscal year that relies heavily on a massive infusion of federal aid to close a $201 million budget hole and give firefighters their biggest raise in years.

Council members also banded together to rebuke the mayor by increasing the money given to district offices to spend on neighborhood projects for their constituents.

The council voted 16-1 to approve the spending plan after a lengthy meeting in which council members proposed nearly 100 amendments to Mayor Sylvester Turner’s budget.

At-Large Councilmember Mike Knox voted against the budget. At-Large Councilmember Letitia Plummer later said she intended to vote no and tried to get the council to reconsider the vote, but her motion failed.

The body met in person for the first time in a year, with the members — most of whom are vaccinated — discussing the budget unmasked around the dais in City Hall chambers.

[…]

Most district council members joined forces to raise the amount their offices receive in a program that lets them spend money on neighborhood priorities. The 11 districts currently receive $750,000, and the council voted to hike that to $1 million each, at a total cost of $2.75 million. District J Councilmember Edward Pollard proposed the amendment, ultimately using money from the city’s reserve funds, prompting visible disappointment from the mayor.

The amendment passed, 10-7, with the mayor opposed. Turner said it could take money from city services like Solid Waste and risked depleting reserves ahead of an uncertain year.

“I was going to insist on a roll call vote, because you’re going to have to justify it,” Turner said before members cast their votes. Those supporting the amendment were Pollard, Amy Peck (District A), Tarsha Jackson (District B), Abbie Kamin (District C), Carolyn Evans-Shabazz (District D), Tiffany Thomas (District F), Greg Travis (District G), Robert Gallegos (District I), Martha Castex-Tatum (District K), and Michael Kubosh (At-Large).

It is exceedingly rare in Houston’s strong mayor form of government for the mayor to lose a vote, though Wednesday’s motion marked the third time in seven years council members have aligned themselves to expand the district funds during a budget vote.

See here for the background. The “Council members add money to their budgets” thing has been done before, though as the story notes it may not actually result in that money going to them. This is money that is already being spent, it was just a matter of shifting it from one line item to another. I’d actually be in favor of Council members having some more funds at their discretion, though there’s not likely to be room for that most years. A chunk of the federal money available for this year’s budget was set aside for now, pending fuller guidance from the feds as to what it can and can’t be used on. Not much else to say here.

In related news, from earlier in the week:

People caught illegally dumping in Houston now will face a steeper fine, after City Council approved a measure doubling the penalty.

The council unanimously approved hiking the fine to $4,000, the maximum amount allowed under the law.

“This is to make people pay for illegally dumping,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said. “It makes things far, far worse, it’s unattractive, it’s not safe. It’s a public health problem.”

Turner, who characterized the city’s efforts against illegal dumping as an “all-out attack,” also encouraged judges to enforce the law sternly.

Illegal dumping can range from a Class C misdemeanor — akin to a parking ticket — to a state jail felony, depending on the weight of the trash and whether the person previously has been caught dumping. Most cases involve Class B misdemeanors, or between five and 500 pounds. Enforcement is somewhat rare as it is difficult to identify perpetrators if they are not caught on camera.

The measure received wide acclaim from council members, who have noted anecdotal increases in dumping of late.

“It should be more,” Councilmember Tarsha Jackson said of the fine hike.

Illegal dumpers are scum who deserve to be fined heavily, no doubt about it. The problem is catching them in the act, because that’s about the only way this ever gets enforced. The city has deployed more cameras at frequent dump sites and that has helped some, but there’s a lot more of it going on. We have a ways to go to really make a dent in this.

Let’s please find more opportunities to avoid using unpaid prison labor

Nov 30th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

More like this, in other words.

CM Abbie Kamin

As Houston officials hashed out the budget last spring, City Council members Abbie Kamin and Carolyn Evans-Shabazz quietly asked to send a routine contract back to the Turner administration.

The $4.2 million deal was needed to replace tire treading on the city’s commercial trucks and tractor-trailers. The city was about to award the contract on May 12 to the lowest bidder, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which offered to complete the work for some $750,000 less than the only private bidder, Southern Tire Mart.

The state agency was able to offer a lower price in part because it does not pay its workers. The agency relies on the labor of prisoners, who do not earn wages when they work in Texas, one of a few states that do not pay workers in correctional facilities.

At the council members’ request, Mayor Sylvester Turner’s administration put out a new request for bids, this time including language that required compensation for workers. Three private vendors applied — TDCJ did not — and on Oct. 27 the city selected Southern Tire Mart for the $4.6 million contract.

CM Carolyn Evans-Shabazz

Kamin and Evans-Shabazz said the change was necessary to ensure the city does not funnel money into what they described as an amoral and unjust system. They hope the city will continue to bypass the state agency in future contracts while they lobby state legislators to address the pay issue.

“Our hope is that we can have a citywide policy,” said Kamin, who chairs the council’s Public Safety Committee. “The important thing out of this example is that sometimes it’s the little things that may not be really exciting, but that can have a profound change on the systemic and lingering effects of racial discrimination in our criminal justice system.”

Evans-Shabazz, like other critics of the state’s no-pay practice, likened such prison labor to slavery. If they earned wages, the workers could use that money for phone calls or commissary items, she said.

TDCJ “told me they use the money for their employees. Well, that just doesn’t sit well with me and it seems more like ‘slave labor,’” Evans-Shabazz said. “Being an African American, that certainly doesn’t sit well with me. … I just think that’s dehumanizing.”

[…]

Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson for the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research institute, said work is relatively fundamental in prisons across the country. The group estimates half of all prisoners have a job of some kind. Much of that work involves prison operations, from janitorial duties to laundry.

It’s also common for prisoners to do work for state agencies, but Texas is among several states that do not pay prisoners for such work, Bertram said. Prisoners in the El Paso County Jail were recently enlisted to transport the bodies of people killed by COVID-19. They refused to work for free and are being paid $2 an hour, according to the Texas Tribune.

Even in states that do pay, Bertram said, the wages often are not enough to cover phone calls, commissary items and costly payments for health care. Job-training benefits often are also lacking, she said.

“When you look at the jobs people are getting offered and you think, ‘Does any job like that exist on the outside?’ you start to think this training might not amount to anything,” Bertram said. “It’s never been a better time to realize that people who are incarcerated are very much part of the economy and deserve to be supported.”

There’s a lot of history and other backstory to this that I skipped over in the article, so go read the whole thing. Suffice it to say that people – all people, prisoners included – should be paid a fair wage for their labor. If you must, consider that a firm like Southern Tire Mart was unable to compete with the sub-minimum wages that the TDCJ was able to get by with, until CMs Kamin and Evans-Shabazz stepped in and altered the calculus. They’re now seeking to get a bill passed in the Lege that would mandate pay standards for prisoners, which Reps. Ron Reynolds and Alma Allen will carry and which I fully support. Sorry, but there’s no moral argument for taking advantage of the artificially cheap labor of an involuntary workforce. I’m happy for the city of Houston to show some leadership on this, and I hope other cities and counties will take notice.

Five things we could do now for police reform in Houston

Sep 2nd, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
12 comments

Seems like a good list to me.

Five city council members on Monday sent a letter to Mayor Sylvester Turner outlining police reforms they said Houston can implement immediately, including a “complete overhaul” of the Independent Police Oversight Board, a cite-and-release ordinance and incentive pay for officers who live within city limits.

In the letter, Councilmembers Edward Pollard, Tiffany Thomas, Jerry Davis, Martha Castex-Tatum, and Carolyn Evans-Shabazz say the oversight board, which reviews probes by the Houston Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division, needs a reboot.

“We are convinced there must be a complete overhaul of the Independent Police Oversight Board (IPOB),” the letter says. “We have no confidence in the current format. We must create a structure of guidelines that governs the function of the new board to restore public trust with public input.”

They recommended the board have complete autonomy and investigative authority, with full access to all unclassified information from HPD.

The council members also say the city could implement an online, independently-maintained dashboard showing complaints of police misconduct, HPD policies, guidelines, “and other relevant information.”

“This platform will be an innovative measure to not only hold officers accountable for misconduct, but will increase police community relations by being transparent in a data driven fashion,” the letter said.

The letter outlines 25 items they asked be included in the next contract between the city and the Houston Police Officers’ Union.

See here and here for some background. There’s a copy of the letter embedded in the story, or you can see it here. The letter does not mention any budget items and also does not contain the signature of CM Letitia Plummer, who unsuccessfully introduced an amendment to this fiscal year’s budget to redirect some funding for HPD to other services, as well as other reforms. I honestly don’t know what capacity exists to amend the city’s budget during the fiscal year, so it may be that that’s a moot point. As for who did and didn’t sign this letter, in the absence of any Council members commenting on it all we can do is speculate.

As we know, individual Council members cannot introduce an ordinance for debate on their own, so whether or not anything happens here is up to Mayor Turner. We are due to get the vaunted Task Force recommendations in the next week or two, and I’m guessing Mayor Turner will prefer to use that as a starting point for whatever he wants to achieve. You can always call his office, as well as your district Council member and the five At Larges to let them know what you think.

Budget amendments and a fight over police reform

Jun 10th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

That’s your City Council agenda for today.

City council members have authored more than four dozen amendments to Mayor Sylvester Turner’s proposed budget to trim spending, create new sources of revenue and expand police accountability measures.

Council members will take up the proposals Wednesday when they consider the mayor’s $5.1 billion budget plan, which is coming forward at an especially fraught moment. The city’s usual budget challenges have been aggravated by the economic crisis tied to COVID-19, while activists are gaining traction around the country in their calls to defund or scale back police departments after the death of Houston native George Floyd.

Many of the 50 budget amendments are a direct response to those topics, including one from Councilwoman Amy Peck that would establish a group to audit all city departments and programs, then recommend whether they should be continued with certain changes, folded into another program or dissolved altogether.

The process would in some ways parallel the zero-based budgeting process used for Turner’s spending plan, which required department heads to analyze every function and justify each dollar spent rather than adding to existing budgets. Peck said Turner’s administration never showed council members the detailed results of zero-based budgeting — and her so-called sunset review commission has a broader scope.

“With the sunset review, it’s looking at every line item, but it goes past that,” she said. “It involves citizens and stakeholders and really gets into whether (the program is) serving the constituents, whether there are ways to consolidate, if there are technology advances to make. There could be some program within a department that’s just not needed anymore.”

Other cost-cutting amendments include Councilwoman Sallie Alcorn’s proposal to study where Houston and Harris County can join forces instead of providing duplicate services, and a program suggested by Peck and Councilman Robert Gallegos that would allow city workers to voluntarily take unpaid time off. Councilman Greg Travis also proposed letting private firms compete with city departments for certain contracts, or studying whether it would save money to do so.

[…]

The mayor has expressed opposition, meanwhile, to a sweeping police reform amendment introduced by Councilwoman Letitia Plummer that would eliminate nearly 200 vacant positions in the Houston Police Department. The funds saved by getting rid of the positions and a cadet class would go toward beefing up de-escalation training and the police oversight board, among other proposals sought by those pushing for police department reform around the country.

Turner repeatedly said during last year’s mayoral campaign that he wants to grow the police department by several hundred officers, and he rejected the idea of reducing the police department’s budget during an appearance on CNN last week.

With a budget of over $900 million that is devoted almost entirely to personnel, HPD is by far the city’s largest department and would have little room to cut spending without diminishing the police force. The police union previously negotiated a 3 percent pay bump from July 1 through the end of the year, accounting for much of the department’s proposed budget increase.

On Monday, five black Houston council members released a series of proposed HPD reforms that include many of the measures contained in Plummer’s plan, but without the spending cuts. The letter included every black member of council — Martha Castex-Tatum, Jerry Davis, Carolyn Evans-Shabazz, Edward Pollard and Tiffany Thomas — except Plummer.

In a statement, Plummer said, “After reading my colleagues’ open letter, it appears we all want the same things. I look forward to having their support for my amendments on Wednesday.”

See here for some background, and here for the five Council members’ proposals. Here it must be noted that the police union was a big supporter of Mayor Turner, and they were the instigators of the lawsuit that killed the firefighter pay parity referendum. He campaigned on hiring more police, and that’s where he is. That said, nine votes on Council can pass a budget amendment, and in addition to those six black Council members there are five other Democrats – Abbie Kamin, Robert Gallegos, Karla Cisneros, David Robinson, and Sallie Alcorn – who should be open to persuasion on this matter. Maybe some of the Republican Council members might be willing to trim some budget as well – CM Dave Martin received no money from the HPOU PAC in 2019, for instance. Point being, there’s plenty of room to get at least the group of five amendments passed, if not the Plummer amendment. There’s a rally this morning at City Hall to build support for that. There won’t be any better opportunities anytime soon.

Time for a task force

Jun 7th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

A good step, but it needs to be followed by real action.

Mayor Sylvester Turner

Mayor Sylvester Turner plans to appoint a task force to review Houston Police Department policies amid growing calls for reform following local and nationwide protests over the death of former Houston resident George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.

Turner’s office said the task force would focus on ensuring accountability and transparency within the department. He announced the task force Thursday night during an hourlong ABC13 town hall on police and community relations.

“It’s so important to hold onto the trust between the community and police because the two have to work together, not be against one another,” Turner said. “Establishing that confidence and that trust is a critical component. That’s why it’s important for all of us to listen, to listen to what people are saying, to listen to the reforms that people want to see put in place, and then to act on those reforms. And we’re going to seek to do that.”

It was not clear Friday when the mayor would appoint people to the task force or when it would begin meeting.

Turner publicly has not endorsed any specific reform, though he consistently has emphasized the importance of police training in television appearances this week.

[…]

Conversations about potential reforms began before Floyd’s death, Councilwoman Tiffany Thomas said. After a string of six fatal police shootings here in Houston, several council members met privately with Police Chief Art Acevedo to address the deaths.

Thomas said she would favor strengthening the oversight board; ensuring there are public and readily available records of complaints made by both citizens and officers against their colleagues; and having some sort of research arm — either within the city or with an external partner, such as Texas Southern University — that could parse through data to illuminate other options.

Councilman Ed Pollard has offered a budget amendment to create an online database where residents can view complaints made to the police department. Pollard said the information would boost transparency and give the public and policymakers data to inform future reforms. His amendment calls for building off an existing platform, called Project Comport, that is free and already used in other cities, though Pollard said it would carry some costs to set up.

“We (would) have a public, online platform that is able to compile the data and put it out in real time on different complaints,” Pollard said.

Councilwoman Letitia Plummer has proposed the furthest-reaching budget amendment. It would eliminate 199 vacant HPD positions in the budget and one of five planned police cadet classes. Plummer seeks to redirect about $11.8 million of the proposed police funding toward a package of reforms, including subpoena-empowered oversight board probes; increased spending on re-entry and My Brother’s Keeper programs; and creation of a mental health unit to respond to some low-risk calls instead of regular patrol officers.

See here for more about CM Plummer’s budget amendment and plenty of other reform ideas, some of which are within Councils’ power and others of which are not. The formation of a task force or blue ribbon committee is always the first thing done when there’s a serious problem that demands actions that some people are very much going to not like. It buys time, it diverts energy, and if you’re not careful the formation of the task force can end up being the sum total of action taken. Look to see who’s on the task force (and how long it takes for it to be named), what their timeline and mandate are, and who does or does not commit to take specific actions based on their recommendations. Then remember that it exists, and that we’re waiting for it to do its job, and that the longer it takes the less momentum there is.

January 2020 campaign finance reports: City of Houston

Feb 8th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

We’re done with the 2019 Houston election cycle, but there are still things we can learn from the January 2020 campaign finance reports that city of Houston candidates and officeholders have to file. Other finance report posts: My two-part look at the State House was here and here, Harris County offices were here, statewide races were here, and SBOE/State Senate races were here.


Candidate     Raised      Spent     Loan     On Hand
====================================================
Turner       359,567    780,735        0     293,503
Peck           1,075     17,435    5,000          72
Davis          4,000     14,164        0     139,068
Kamin         24,158     93,810        0      18,717
E-Shabazz     14,394     18,965        0       2,145
Martin        14,600     48,754        0     148,989
Thomas        20,263     21,642        0      11,675
Travis         9,850     70,904   21,000      51,484
Cisneros      15,050     44,687        0      24,169
Gallegos      16,850     46,055        0      76,776
Pollard        4,525     25,007   40,000       1,882
C-Tatum       16,250      8,520        0      71,747
Knox           6,900     29,075        0       4,302
Robinson      11,625     82,515        0      40,735
Kubosh        14,770     31,570  276,000      94,540
Plummer       71,168     83,491   21,900      11,068
Alcorn        21,535     76,313        0      16,374
Brown          1,650    102,340   75,000      14,128

Bailey             0      2,400    2,600          70
Jackson       43,845     18,338        0      28,343

Buzbee         1,903    460,888        0      63,531
King          29,925    161,047  420,000      11,567
Parker             0     38,750        0      26,184
Laster             0     12,579        0     162,209
Salhotra      24,010     75,837        0       9,060
Sanchez       40,056     92,678        0      10,636
Edwards          499    109,812        0      89,987

HouStrongPAC       0     10,000        0      51,717

Nominally, this period covers from the 8 day report before the November election (which would be October 27) to the end of the year, but for most of these folks it actually covers the 8 day runoff report to the end of the year, so basically just the month of December. In either case, this is the time when candidates don’t raise much but do spend down their accounts, as part of their GOTV efforts. For those who can run for re-election in 2023, they will have plenty of time to build their treasuries back up.

Mayor Turner will not be running for re-election again, but it’s not hard to imagine some uses for his existing (and future) campaign cash, such as the HERO 2.0 effort or the next round of city bonds. He can also use it to support other candidates – I’m sure he’ll contribute to legislative candidates, if nothing else – or PACs. That’s what former Mayor Parker has done with what remains of her campaign account. Nearly all of the $38,750 she spent this cycle went to the LGBTQ Victory fund, plus a couple of smaller contributionss to Sri Kulkarni, Eliz Markowitz, and one or two other campaigns. Tony Buzbee has restaurant bills to pay, and those endless emails Bill King spams out have to cost something.

Others who have campaign accounts of interest: As we know, Jerry Davis has transferred his city account to his State Rep campaign account. I’ve been assuming Mike Laster is going to run for something for years now. The change to four-year Council terms may have frozen him out of the 2018 election, when he might have run for County Clerk. I could see him challenging a Democratic incumbent in 2022 for one of the countywide offices, maybe County Clerk, maybe County Judge, who knows. It’s always a little uncomfortable to talk about primary challenges, but that’s what happens when there are no more Republicans to knock out.

Other hypothetical political futures: Dave Martin could make a run for HD129 in 2022 or 2024, or he could try to win (or win back) Commissioners Court Precinct 3 in 2024. If Sen. Carol Alvarado takes my advice and runs for Mayor in 2023, then maybe State Rep. Christina Morales will run to succeed her in SD06. If that happens, Robert Gallegos would be in a strong position to succeed Morales in HD145. Michael Kubosh wasn’t on my list of potential Mayoral candidates in 2023, but maybe that was a failure of imagination on my part. As for Orlando Sanchez, well, we know he’s going to run for something again, right?

You may be wondering, as I was, what’s in Amanda Edwards’ finance report. Her activity is from July 1, since she wasn’t in a city race and thus had no 30-day or 8-day report to file. Her single biggest expenditure was $27K to Houston Civic Events for an event expense, and there were multiple expenditures categorized as “Loan Repayment/Reimbusement” to various people. Perhaps she has transferred the balance of her account to her Senate campaign by this time, I didn’t check.

Most of the unsuccessful candidates’ reports were not interesting to me, but I did want to include Raj Salhotra here because I feel reasonably confident that he’ll be on another ballot in the short-term future. The HISD and HCC Boards of Trustees are both places I could see him turn to.

Last but not least, the Keep Houston Strong PAC, whose treasurer is former Mayor Bill White, gave $10K to Move to the Future PAC. That’s all I know about that.

Council results

Dec 15th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

With one race still up in the air as I draft this:

With early voting tallies and most of Saturday’s Election Day results posted, Houston’s three incumbent at-large council members facing runoffs had won, while District H incumbent Karla Cisneros held the slimmest of leads over challenger Isabel Longoria. Four other incumbents already have reclaimed their seats, having won outright on Nov. 5: Dave Martin (District E), Greg Travis (District G), Robert Gallegos (District I) and Martha Castex-Tatum (District K).

At least half of the 16-member council will be new — five current members are term-limited and three vacated their seats: Dwight Boykins (District D) made a failed bid for mayor, Amanda Edwards (At-Large 4) is seeking the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, and Steve Le (District F) decided not to seek re-election.

One council race will not be decided Saturday: The third-place finisher in District B has filed lawsuits contesting the election and challenging the second-place finisher’s eligibility, citing her 2007 felony theft conviction and a state law that appears to bar candidates with such convictions from running for office. No election date has been set.

The simplest way to summarize what happened is this tweet:

With 367 of 385 voting centers reporting, Karla Cisneros had a 25-vote lead over Isabel Longoria. It had been a 14-vote lead with 323 centers reporting. Longoria had chipped away at Cisneros’ lead all evening. I have to think this one is going to get recounted, so whatever the final numbers are, expect this to remain an unsettled question for a little longer.

The At Large results could have been better, but they were sufficiently close in #4 and #5 that they also could have been a lot worse. When Mayor Turner puts forward a new version of HERO, he should have ten of sixteen Council votes in his favor. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime, congratulations to all the winners.

HISD and HCC results

Dec 15th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

From the HISD runoffs:

Early election results showed Houston ISD school board candidates Kathy Blueford-Daniels and Patricia Allen with comfortable leads in their runoff races Saturday, as they aim to fill the final two seats on the district’s closely watched governance team.

With absentee and early votes counted, as well as 38 percent of precincts reporting, Blueford-Daniels, a retired postal manager, led City Council aide John C. Gibbs by a wide margin, mirroring her strong showing in the November general election.

Allen, a retired HISD administrator, appeared poised to break away from management consultant Matt Barnes after the pair each earned about 30 percent of the general election.

The two victors Saturday will join two newcomers who defeated incumbents in November’s general election. Judith Cruz and Dani Hernandez easily topped Diana Dávila and Sergio Lira, respectively, each earning about 64 percent of the vote.

Blueford-Daniels was leading by about 25 points as most voting centers had reported. Allen was up by about nine points. Congratulations to them both, and all the best in what should be a very challenging next few years.

And some very good news from the HCC races.

Monica Flores Richart

Early results in two Houston Community College Board of Trustees runoff races show Rhonda Skillern-Jones with a commanding lead, while Monica Flores Richart and Dave Wilson are locked in a tight battle.

With absentee and early-voting results tallied, as well as 38 percent of precincts reporting, Skillern-Jones, who has served on the Houston ISD school board for the past eight years, comfortably led longtime educator Kathy Lynch-Gunter in the race for District II. Skillern-Jones entered as a clear favorite after taking 45 percent of the general election vote to Lynch-Gunter’s 25 percent.

In District I, Flores Richart, a lawyer, held a slight lead over Wilson, who resigned from his HCC trustee seat in August and switched districts ahead of the race. Flores Richart nearly emerged from the general election with an outright victory, earning 48 percent of the vote to Wilson’s 32 percent.

[…]

The two winners will join newcomer Cynthia Lenton-Gary, who ran unopposed, on the nine-member board. A fourth new trustee will join the board next year if current HCC Board chair Carolyn Evans-Shabazz were to maintain her strong early lead Saturday in her Houston City Council race. Evans-Shabazz will have to resign her seat to join the council.

Flores Richart built on her lead on Election Day. May we never be cursed with Dave Wilson again.

Carolyn Evans-Shabazz is on her way to winning in District D, so we’ll have a new Trustee in her place early next year. With Neeta Sane running for Fort Bend County tax Assessor, we could have two new HCC Trustees before the 2021 election.

8 Day runoff 2019 campaign finance reports

Dec 10th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
5 comments

We start with a Chron story.

Mayor Sylvester Turner raked in more than $1.7 million from late October through early December and spent roughly the same amount, leaving him with almost $600,000 for the final days of the runoff, according to a campaign finance report filed Friday.

The total marked a fundraising surge for Turner, who was aided by newly reset donor contribution limits for the runoff, though he still was outspent by Tony Buzbee, a millionaire trial lawyer and the mayor’s opponent in the Dec. 14 contest.

Buzbee, who is self-financing his campaign and refusing all campaign contributions, put $2.3 million of his own money into the campaign last month and spent almost $3.1 million between Oct. 27 and Wednesday, leaving him with about $524,000.

With a week to go in the election, Buzbee and Turner have now combined to spend about $19 million in what has become easily the most expensive Houston mayoral race yet. Buzbee has spent $11.8 million of the $12.3 million he has put into his campaign account, while Turner has spent $7.2 million since the middle of 2018.

As an earlier story notes, self-funding has only occasionally been a winning strategy in Houston. I don’t expect it to be any different this time, but I do note that Buzbee’s basic strategy has changed. I still haven’t seen a Buzbee TV ad since November, but we’ve gotten a couple of mailers (someone needs to clean up his database if he’s mailing to me), I’ve seen a bunch of web ads, and he’s been littering the streets with signs. Gotta spend that money on something.

Here’s a summary of the 8 day reports for the runoff:


Race   Candidate     Raised      Spent     Loan     On Hand
===========================================================
Mayor  Turner     1,741,906  1,722,625        0     597,624
Mayor  Buzbee     2,300,000  3,076,360        0     524,420

A      Peck          38,075     39,252    5,000      15,373
A      Zoes           6,600      7,562    4,000       3,723

B      Jackson
B      Bailey           355        284      200          70

C      Kamin        180,528    137,396        0     173,370
C      Kennedy       35,160     18,343        0      25,995

D      Shabazz       31,490     28,575        0       5,009
D      Jordan        28,190     11,688        0      53,724

F      Thomas        
F      Huynh         

H      Cisneros      54,700     75,012        0      41,632
H      Longoria      36,945     32,906        0      20,946

J      Rodriguez
J      Pollard       38,016     47,147   40,000      22,864

AL1    Knox          69,710     49,857        0      16,073
AL1    Salhotra     128,672    121,736        0      64,150

AL2    Robinson     111,280    199,791        0     189,649
AL2    Davis         27,725     10,367        0      19,816

AL3    Kubosh        72,215     69,164  276,000     113,500
AL3    Carmouche     17,570     11,757        0       5,812

AL4    Plummer       41,915     44,501   21,900      12,443
AL4    Dolcefino     19,215     17,482        0       6,478

AL5    Alcorn       195,105    154,757        0      49,463
AL5    Dick           1,100     65,205   75,000       2,545

I think there must be some reports that have not been uploaded – the Chron story mentions Sandra Rodriguez’s numbers, but there was no report visible on Saturday. It and the others may be there on Monday. In the Council races, what we see here is a continuation of what we had seen before. Big fundraisers raised big money, others didn’t. Eric Dick did his spend-his-own-money-and-file-weird-reports thing. Most of the spending has not been particularly visible to me – I’ve gotten a mailer from Robinson and Turner, and that’s about it.

How much any of this moves the needle remains to be seen. As we know from the Keir Murray reports, the runoff electorate is very similar in nature to the November electorate. That’s obviously better for some candidates than for others. If you think of fundraising in runoffs as being like the betting markets to some extent, then we’re probably headed towards the expected results. We’ll see if there are any surprises in store.

Runoff endorsement watch: Revisiting races

Nov 29th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

Most of the candidates that the Chron endorsed for November either won their races or made it to the runoff. A few fell short, which leaves a bit of unfinished business for them. They have since addressed that, in the three races where they needed to pick a new favorite. In District D, they went with Brad Jordan.

Brad Jordan

Twenty-five years ago, when Brad Jordan was making hits as a rapper called “Scarface,” it’s unlikely that he ever thought about being in a runoff election for Houston City Council. Celebrity alone didn’t bring Jordan this far. The longtime community activist has proved his concern for the District D neighborhoods where he grew up is genuine.

The editorial board didn’t recommend Jordan, 48, in the general election. Our choice was Rashad Cave, whose experience as the city Department of Neighborhood’s liaison to City Council was an asset. Jordan, though, has his own intangibles. He hasn’t just lived in District D, which stretches south from Midtown to Beltway 8; he has sincerely tried to improve it.

[…]

Also making the runoff to replace current District Councilman Dwight Boykins is Carolyn Evans-Shabazz, chairwoman of the Houston Community College Board of Trustees. Boykins ran unsuccessfully for mayor instead of seeking reelection.

Evans-Shabazz’s work on the trustee board could be helpful on another deliberative body like City Council. Jordan’s grassroots work in District D, however, suggests he would speak louder for voices that too often get lost when competing in a district that also includes tony neighborhoods, the Texas Medical Center, the University of Houston and Texas Southern University.

My interview with Brad Jordan is here, my interview with Carolyn Evans-Shabazz is here, and my comment on the original endorsement is here. The Chron usually leans towards the establishment, so this choice is a little unexpected, but it’s easy enough to understand.

In At Large #4, they went with Letitia Plummer.

Letitia Plummer

In many ways, Letitia Plummer embodies the diversity of Houston.

She hails from ground-breakers in the African American community. Her grandfather was one of the first African American judges in Texas, her grandmother a long-time educator at Wheatley High School, and her mother is an immigrant from Yemeni, reflecting the demographics of a city where one in four residents is foreign-born.

That gives the Houston native and candidate for City Council At-Large Position 4 valuable insight into the needs of Houston communities that often lack a voice at the table.

Plummer’s 20 years as a private-practice dentist also helps her understand the challenges facing Houston’s small business owners and the role entrepreneurs play in the city’s economy.

Plummer, 49, has also worked on political campaigns and successfully lobbied the Texas Legislature regarding adoption and surrogacy rights and was on the small business task force of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Her experience and her connections to the community give her a considerable edge over opponent Anthony Dolcefino, a 22-year-old college student and the son of former TV investigative reporter Wayne Dolcefino. Her candidacy promises to give Houston’s diverse communities a representative on City Council.

They had endorsed Nick Hellyar the first time around. I didn’t interview Plummer for this race, but I did interview her in 2018 when she ran for CD22. I had expected several of the candidates who didn’t make it through the Congressional races from that cycle to take a look at Houston City Council this year, but Plummer was the only one who did, and look at her now. She’s the clear choice in this race.

And in HISD II, they went with Kathy Blueford Daniels.

Kathy Blueford Daniels

Blueford-Daniels is running to represent District II on the HISD board. She is our choice in the runoff election against candidate John Curtis Gibbs, currently the outreach coordinator for City Councilman Michael Kubosh.

The 62-year-old former postal worker and community activist is a graduate of Wheatley and understands the opportunities a quality education provides. She also understands the perils that come when kids fall through the cracks.

Her community activism and desire to make a difference in the lives of Houston’s children were forged by the pain of her son’s death in 2006.

“The person who killed my son was a dropout,” she said. “He was on drugs; he saw no way out. We can’t let our kids go that way.”

If elected, Blueford-Daniels said she will do what’s right for students and make sure the community’s voice is represented on the board of trustees. If the state appoints a board of managers — a move that will strip the board of trustees’ of its authority — she said she will use her elected position to advocate for students and the community before the board of managers.

Here was the original endorsement. I’ve interviewed Blueford Daniels twice before, both times when she ran for District B – here’s 2011 and here’s 2013. She’s a good person and especially given her opponent’s cheearleading of the TEA takeover she’d be a good advocate on the HISD Board.

Chron overview of the District D runoff

Nov 27th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

The story headline about it as a “friendly runoff” between two very different candidates is a good summary.

Carolyn Evans-Shabazz

Standing beneath a papier-mâché toucan earlier this month, Carolyn Evans-Shabazz told a handful of potential voters about her aspirations to be a bus

Both she and her Houston City Council District D opponent, Brad “Scarface” Jordan, want to be vessels for change, but understand that doing so requires getting as many perspectives as possible — hence, Evans-Shabazz’s talk of being a bus.

“A vehicle has more than one passenger,” Evans-Shabazz said. “And I wanna be a bus. I. Want. To. Be. A. Bus.”

Just outside the wood-paneled room, hip-hop icon Jordan sipped soda and munched on finger foods. He had not expected to be there, and was still “stunned” to have made the runoff days earlier.

His stump speech, delivered a few minutes later, reflected that shock. “These are good cookies,” he said before telling the group of mostly senior citizens about the 30 million-plus records he has sold and his desire to better his childhood neighborhood.

“I want to give back to a city that has given so much to me and allowed me to do what I do,” he continued.

[…]

Brad Jordan

Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said he believes Evans-Shabazz is the front-runner in the race. She has been a longtime trustee for Houston Community College, he said, and as an African-American woman in her 50s, is reflective of many District D voters.

Jones has not entirely ruled out Jordan, who unexpectedly made it to the runoff after getting the second-highest number of votes of the 16-candidate field Nov. 5.

Jordan’s name recognition may not help as much in a head-to-head race, Jones said. With his stature in the international Hip Hop community, however, his election to council would be “national news” and could change the district long-term.

“District D has always been one of those that’s last at the table in terms of getting resources,” Jones said. “One advantage that Jordan has is his unique perspective… He can make the claim that he can not only work better with marginalized groups because he’s walked in their shoes, but also that, because of his celebrity status, he might be able to get more things for the district.”

You can listen to my interview with Carolyn Evans-Shabazz here, and my interview with Brad Jordan here. I included Mark Jones’ commentary because I basically agree with it. I said myself in a recent Chron profile of Brad Jordan that the bulk of his name ID is likely to be with people who are younger than the typical voter. He did do better than expected – better than he expected, anyway – in Round One, so who knows. The voters have two good choices here.

Interview with Carolyn Evans-Shabazz

Nov 20th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Carolyn Evans-Shabazz

We weren’t supposed to have an open seat election in District D, but then Dwight Boykins got it in his head to run for Mayor, and the next thing you know there are fifteen candidates plus a write-in on the ballot. Two of them survived to go on to Round 2, and I have interviews with both of them to present to you. First up is Dr. Carolyn Evans-Shabazz, who led the field when all the votes were counted. She is currently serving as a Trustee on the HCC board, including as the Board Chair this year, having first been appointed in 2017 to fill the term remaining when Carroll Robinson resigned, then elected that November to a full term. Evans-Shabazz has been a teacher and Lead Evaluation Specialist with HISD, an educational diagnostician with both Aldine and Fort Bend ISDs, and an adjunct professor at Texas Southern University. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the NAACP-Houston branch where she serves as Chair of the Education Committee. Here’s what we talked about:

You can still refer to the Erik Manning spreadsheet for your race and candidate information. The July finance reports that include District D are here, and the 30 day finance reports are here. My 2017 interview with Carolyn Evans-Shabazz from when she was running for HCC Trustee is here.

About those Council runoffs

Nov 10th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
9 comments

All of a sudden there’s many fewer candidates to keep track of.

Tiffany Thomas

Some candidates said they were happy simply to have made it to a runoff. Several races had more than a dozen people vying for the top two vote counts, resulting in razor-thin margins that decided who moved forward.

Brad “Scarface” Jordan said he was still in shock Wednesday. The former member of the Geto Boys hip hop group hadn’t expected to advance, but ultimately took second in a 16-candidate field for District D.

“This is unbelievable bro,” he said. “I’m just as shocked as you are.”

Others, like incumbent Michael Kubosh in At-Large 3 (47.8 percent), Amy Peck in District A (45.4 percent) and Tiffany Thomas in District F (38.9 percent), enter their runoffs with commanding leads.

“We could have won outright last night if those clowns weren’t on the ballot,” Thomas said of the candidates eliminated Tuesday, most of whom polled in the single digits. “They didn’t work at the polls, they weren’t at early voting.”

Peck said her level of support indicated that voters want a continuation of the service they have seen under incumbent Brenda Stardig. Peck is Stardig’s chief of staff, and she has pledged to work towards finishing drainage and infrastructure projects already underway.

“Being that far ahead, it’s a clear message of what the voters want,” Peck said.

[…]

Thomas, the top vote-getter in District F, raised questions that her opponent, Van Huynh, has faced about his residency. He is incumbent Steve Le’s chief of staff.

Three of the last four District F council members, including Le, have faced questions about whether they live in the southwestern district, as required by city charter and state law.

“I don’t run nasty races, but I do think it’s a valid point that I’m in a runoff with someone who doesn’t live here,” Thomas said.

Huynh, who did not return calls for comment Wednesday, listed his address in campaign filings as a house he rents just off Brays Bayou, but he and his wife claim a homestead exemption on a home they have owned for two decades that sits outside District F.

The council aide has said he stays in the rental he listed on his filing form two to three nights a week, and last month provided a copy of his lease that lists his “main address” at his home outside the district.

Huynh said he and his family are in the process of moving to a new home in the district, but they did not purchase that home until July of this year. City rules require candidates to live in the district they hope to represent for 12 months before election day, but experts say the dictate is hard to enforce.

I must say, I appreciate Tiffany Thomas bringing a little spice to the conversation. She’s also right – an awful lot of those 124 candidates never bothered filing a campaign finance report, which is a pretty minimal Serious Candidate Thing to do. Now that we’re down to two candidates per race, we can get some focus. As I said before, all of the At Large races involve one Democrat and one Republican, which allows for some clarity of choice. Some of the candidates still on the ballot have done interviews with me, either this cycle or a previous one, and others I will try to get to between now and the start of December. Everyone will have either six or seven city candidates on their runoff ballot, depending on what happened in their district, so everyone has plenty of reason to vote again. Figure out who you want to support and make sure you show up.

Final results are in

Nov 6th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
9 comments

Here they are. Refer to my previous post for the initial recap, I’m going to be very minimalist. Let’s do this PowerPoint-style, it’s already been a long day:

Mayor – Turner fell short of 50%, landing up a bit below 47%. He and Buzbee will be in a runoff. Which, if nothing else, means a much higher turnout for the runoff.

Controller: Chris Brown wins.

District A: Peck versus Zoes.
District B: Jackson versus Bailey.
District C: Kamin versus Kennedy. Gotta say, it’s a little surprising, but quite nice, for it to be an all-Dem runoff. Meyers came close to catching Kennedy, but she hung on to second place.
District D: Brad Jordan had a late surge, and will face Carolyn Evans-Shabazz in the runoff. If Evans-Shabazz wins, she’ll need to resign her spot on the HCC Board, so there would be another new Trustee if that happens.
District F: Thomas versus Huynh. Other than the two years we had of Richard Nguyen, this seat has pretty much always been held by a Republican. Tiffany Thomas has a chance to change that.
District H: Cisneros verusus Longoria.
District J: Pollard versus Rodriguez. Sandra Rodriguez had a late surge and nearly finished ahead of Pollard. Very evenly matched in Round One.

At Large #1: Knox versus Salhotra. Both candidates will benefit from the Mayoral runoff, though I think Raj may be helped more.
At Large #2: Robinson versus Davis, a rerun from 2015.
At Large #3: Kubosh slipped below 50% and will face Janaeya Carmouche in overtime.
At Large #4: Dolcefino versus Plummer. We will have somewhere between zero and four Republicans in At Large seats, in case anyone needs some non-Mayoral incentive for December.
At Large #5: Alcorn versus Eric Dick. Lord, please spare me Eric Dick. I don’t ask for much.

HISD: Dani Hernandez and Judith Cruz ousted incumbents Sergio Lira and Diana Davila. Maybe that will make the TEA look just a teeny bit more favorably on HISD. Kathy Blueford Daniels will face John Curtis Gibbs, and Matt Barnes had a late surge to make it into the runoff against Patricia Allen.

HCC: Monica Flores Richart inched up but did not make it to fifty percent, so we’re not quite rid of Dave Wilson yet. Rhonda Skillern-Jones will face Kathy Lynch-Gunter in that runoff.

HD148: A late surge by Anna Eastman gives her some distance between her and Luis La Rotta – Eastman got 20.34%, La Rotta 15.84%. The Republican share of the vote fell from 34% to 32%, right on what they got in this district in 2018.

Now you are up to date. Go get some sleep.

2019 election results: Houston and Metro

Nov 6th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

Unfortunately, we have to start with this:

Results of Tuesday’s election could take until 2 a.m. Wednesday after the Texas Secretary of State issued a new regulation that upended plans by the Harris County Clerk’s Office to speed vote counting.

The first tubs containing electronic ballot cards from across Harris County arrived at central count just before 9:30 p.m., where election judges and poll watchers waited to see the vote count in action.

Dr. Diane Trautman said she had hoped to have votes come in from 10 countywide drop-off locations, fed in through a secured intranet site, leading to faster results on election night.

Instead, Secretary Ruth R. Hughs ordered on Oct. 23 that law enforcement officers would instead escort the ballot box memory cards from each of the 757 polling sites to the central counting station.

That change, made nearly two weeks before Election Day, led to a major delay that left voters wondering for hours how races up and down ballot would turn out.

Early election results trickled in shortly after 7 p.m., but remained virtually unchanged for hours Tuesday.

Here’s the County Clerk’s statement about that order. I don’t know what was behind it, but it sure did gum things up. In the end, final results were not available till quite late, with no more partial results after midnight because producing those was slowing down the input process. Here’s the later statement on when results would be expected. Suffice to say, this was a mess, and no one is happy about it all. Expect there to be an extended fight between the County Clerk and SOS offices.

Anyway. I’m still groggy from a late night, so I’m going to hit the highlights, and we’ll get final results later. Here we go.

Mayor: Turner leads, is close to a majority.

Mayor Sylvester Turner held a wide lead over Tony Buzbee in limited early returns late Tuesday and was within striking distance of an outright re-election win, though it was unclear at press time if he would secure enough votes to avoid a runoff.

Buzbee, a millionaire trial lawyer, jumped out to an early second-place lead that he appeared likely to retain over Bill King, an attorney and businessman who narrowly lost a 2015 runoff to Turner but struggled this time to compete financially with Buzbee, his main rival for conservative votes.

With a small share of Election Day precincts reporting, Turner remained a shade under the majority vote share he would need to avoid a December runoff against Buzbee.

Councilman Dwight Boykins, who competed with Turner for the support of Democratic and black voters, trailed in fourth place, while former councilwoman Sue Lovell was further behind in fifth. Seven other candidates combined for the remaining share of the vote.

Adding in the Fort Bend results, and we get the following:


Turner     63,359  47.28%
Buzbee     39,361  29.37%
King       17,878  13.34%
Boykins     7,848   5.86%
Lovell      1,433   1.07%
The Rest    4,121   3.08%

Three things to think about: One, Turner has at this point more votes than Buzbee and King combined, so if we do go to a runoff that’s not a bad position to start with. Two, the Election Day results reported so far came mostly from Districts A, C, E, and G, so they would be more favorable to Buzbee and King than the city as a whole. And three, the election polling was pretty accurate, especially at pegging the support levels for Boykins and Lovell.

Oh, and a fourth thing: Tony Buzbee’s drunken Election Night speech. Yowza.

Controller: Incumbent Chris Brown leads

It’s Brown 62,297 and Sanchez 54,864 adding in Fort Bend, and again with mostly Republican votes from yesterday (Sanchez led the Election Day tally by about 1,700 votes). Barring a big surprise, Brown has won.

City Council: Most incumbents have big leads, and there’s gonna be a lot of runoffs. To sum up:

District A: Amy Peck has 44.3%, George Zoes 16.8%
District B: Tarsha Jackson 21.0%, Renee Jefferson Smith 15.1%, Cynthia Bailey 13.7%, Alvin Byrd 10.7%
District C: Abbie Kamin 30.8%, Shelley Kennedy 15.8%, Greg Meyers 14.4%, Mary Jane Smith 14.0%
District D: Carolyn Evans-Shabazz 19.0%, Carla Brailey 12.3%, Brad Jordan 11.9%, Rashad Cave 11.4%, Jerome Provost 10.4%, Andrew Burks 10.3%
District E: Dave Martin easily wins
District F: Tiffany Thomas 39%, Van Huynh 24%, Richard Nguyen 18%
District G: Greg Travis easily wins
District H: Karla Cisneros 38.9%, Isabel Longoria 27.5%, Cynthia Reyes-Revilla 24.0%
District I: Robert Gallegos easily wins
District J: Edward Pollard 32.4%, Sandra Rodriguez 26.4%, Barry Curtis 19.7%
District K: MArtha Castex-Tatum easily wins

At Large #1: Mike Knox 38.1%, Raj Salhotra 21.1%, Yolanda Navarro Flores 16.3%, Georgia Provost 14.7%
At Large #2: Davis Robinson 38.9%, Willie Davis 28.8%, Emily DeToto 18.8%
At Large #3: Michael Kubosh 50.8%, Janaeya Carmouche 20.6%
At Large #4: Anthony Dolcefino 22.9%, Letitia Plummer 16.4%, Nick Hellyar 12.8%, Ericka McCrutcheon 11.3%, Bill Baldwin 10.5%
At Large #5: Sallie Alcorn 23.2%, Eric Dick 22.0%, no one else above 10

Some of the runoff positions are still very much up in the air. Michael Kubosh may or may not win outright – he was only at 46% on Election Day. Name recognition worth a lot (Dolcefino, Dick) but not everything (both Provosts, Burks). Not much else to say but stay tuned.

HISD: Davila and Lira are going to lose

Dani Hernandez leads Sergio Lira 62-38, Judith Cruz leads Diana Davila 64-36. Kathy Blueford Daniels is close to fifty percent in II but will likely be in a runoff with John Curtis Gibbs. Patricia Allen, Reagan Flowers, and Matt Barnes in that order are in a tight battle in IV.

HCC: No story link on the Chron front page. Monica Flores Richart leads the execrable Dave Wilson 47-34 in HCC1, Rhonda Skillern-Jones leads with 45% in HCC2 with Kathy Lynch-Gunter at 26%, and Cynthia Lenton-Gary won HCC7 unopposed.

Metro: Headed to easy passage, with about 68% so far.

That’s all I got for now. Come back later for more.

Endorsement watch: Let’s get this thing started

Oct 5th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Endorsement Season has begun at the Chronicle, and while the number of elections to cover isn’t really higher than usual, the sheer number of candidates to bring in for interviews is massive and had to have been a logistical nightmare. They’ve now published their first three endorsements, so let’s have a look.

In District I, they endorsed incumbent Robert Gallegos.

Robert Gallegos

Early in Houston’s fight against SB 4 two years ago, Robert Gallegos was one of the leaders in the charge to stop the bill targeting so-called sanctuary cities.

Weeks before Mayor Sylvester Turner said he planned to join a lawsuit challenging SB 4, Gallegos denounced the bill as “an open door for racial profiling.” During contentious debate in Houston City Council, Gallegos spoke out forcefully in favor of joining other cities in legal action against the controversial bill.

“You ask why the city should join?” the Houston City Council member said. “Because the city of Houston is the largest city in the state of Texas and the most diverse in the nation.”

Taking a stand on a state law may seem outside the purview of a city council member, but Gallegos’ advocacy on the issue shows that he is in tune with the needs of his constituents in District I, which is 77 percent Latino.

Gallegos, who is running for his third and last term, has also proven himself adept at bringing in private investments to preserve green spaces in the rapidly evolving district, which encompasses the historic East End neighborhood, new development in EaDo, the Houston Ship Channel and areas running along Interstate 45 from downtown to Hobby Airport.

Here’s the interview I did with CM Gallegos back in 2013, when he was a candidate for the first time. I agree with the Chron’s assessment of him.

The next two are open seats. In District J, they went with Sandra Rodriguez.

Sandra Rodriguez

Councilman Mike Laster has served three terms and is ineligible to run again. Of the seven candidates running to replace him, Sandra Rodriguez’s background and community involvement make her best prepared to address the concerns facing this vibrant but struggling district extending from the 610 South Loop to Beltway 8 and includes Gulfton and Sharpstown.

Rodriguez, 40, works in the city Health Department’s Bureau of Youth and Adolescent Health. She has lived in Gufton since she was 6 and currently is president of the Gufton Super Neighborhood Council. Rodriguez, who says she once witnessed a drive-by shooting, worked in the Mayor’s Anti-Gang Office. She told the editorial board she wants to improve the relationship between District J residents and law enforcement because too many crimes go unreported.

That’s often a reflection of the language barriers faced by the district’s large immigrant population, Rodriguez said. “Since I’m the oldest in my family, I have always been there to translate, to complete forms, and I think that’s what makes me so passionate now,” she said. “I have experienced the discrimination from different providers as we would seek services.”

[…]

The other candidates for the District J seat are Edward Pollard, an attorney; Nelvin Adriatico, CEO of Core Realty; Barry Curtis, a retired Houston police officer; Freddie Cuellar, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 1039; Andrew Patterson, a retired insurance claims adjuster; and Rafael Gavan, an Allstate insurance agent.

Here’s the interview I did with Sandra Rodriguez. I did one other interview in J, with Nelvin Adriatrico. I moderated a District J candidate forum a couple of weeks ago, at which all of the candidates other than Ed Pollard attended. You can see a Facebook video of the whole thing here if you want to get a sense of the other candidates.

And in District D, they went with Rashad Cave.

Rashad Cave

The district’s representative on Council must meld the concerns of more affluent communities with those of challenged neighborhoods struggling with crime and grime. Several candidates appear capable of that task, including community activist Travis McGee, who says better community policing will reduce crime; Texas Southern University professor Carla Brailey, who believes Sunnyside and South Park have been neglected; local attorney Ken Moore, who wants more economic development in the district; and Houston Community College board chairwoman Carolyn Evans-Shabazz, who wants to fix the city’s shrinking General Fund.

One candidate, however, has experience working in City Hall that would allow him to hit the ground running to serve a district that doesn’t have a lot of time for a novice to grow into the job. That’s Rashad Cave, 37, who for the past four years has served as the city Department of Neighborhood’s liaison to City Council.

That’s not a political post. The Department of Neighborhoods is on the front line helping communities deal with overgrown lots, dangerous buildings and abandoned buildings, enforces codes to reduce neighborhood blight, and includes both the Mayor’s Anti-Gang Task Force and the city’s Office of New Americans and Immigrant Communities.

“I work with Council members day in and day out, so I know what’s working and what’s not,” Cave told the editorial board. “I can truly be effective on Day One.”

He said calls to the city’s 311 help line show the most frequent complaint by District D residents is illegal dumping. “District B and District K have hot teams they call in to pick up trash; I want our district to have a hot team,” said Cave. The teams of two to four people would be employees of the city’s Solid Waste Management department paid overtime using District D funds to clean up the worst neighborhoods.

Kind of ironic that the district whose incumbent has advocated for a trash fee, to be used for things other than trash pickup, doesn’t already have something like this, but never mind that for now. I confess, I don’t know a lot of these candidates, and hadn’t noticed Rashad Cave before now. This is the first endorsement he’s racked up, according to the Erik Manning spreadsheet; Carla Brailey and Brad “Scarface” Jordan each have some, and that’s all so far. Most of these candidates didn’t enter the race in time to file a July finance report, either, but at least we’ll get a peek at that very soon. This is one of the races that are on my radar to do interviews for the runoff.

Previous interviews with current candidates

Aug 11th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

I’ve said a few times that I’m going to be doing just a few interviews this fall. I will start publishing them tomorrow. I may pick up some more for the runoffs, but for now my schedule just does not accommodate anything more than that. But! That doesn’t mean you can’t listen to past interviews with some of the people on your November ballot. Many of the people running now have run for something before, and in many of those cases I interviewed them. Here then is a list of those past interviews. The office listed next to some of them is the office they now seek, and the year in parentheses is when I spoke to them. Note that a few of these people have been interviewed more than once; in those cases, I went with the most recent conversation. Enjoy!

Mayor:

Sylvester Turner (2015)
Bill King (2015)
Dwight Boykins (2013)
Sue Lovell (2009)

Council:

Amy Peck – District A (2013)
Alvin Byrd – District B (2011)
Kendra Yarbrough Camarena – District C (2010)
Carolyn Evans-Shabazz – District D (2017)
Richard Nguyen – District F (2015)
Greg Travis – District G (2015)
Karla Cisneros – District H (2015)
Robert Gallegos – District I (2015)
Jim Bigham – District J (2015)
Edward Pollard – District J (2016)

Mike Knox – At Large #1 (2013)
Georgia Provost – At Large #1 (2013)
David Robinson – At Large #2 (2015)
Michael Kubosh – At Large #3 (2013)
Letitia Plummer – At Large #4 (2018)

Controller:

Chris Brown – City Controller (2015)

HISD:

Sergio Lira – District III (2015)
Jolanda Jones – District IV (2015)
Judith Cruz – District VIII

HCC:

Monica Flores Richart – District 1 (2017)
Rhonda Skillern-Jones – District 2 (2015)

July 2019 campaign finance reports: Open City Council seats, part 2

Jul 30th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

We come down to the last three open Council seats to examine, all the result of term-limited incumbents. The first post, with Districts A, B, and C, is here, and the rest of the non-Mayoral races is here. As before, my look at the January 2019 finance reports for Houston candidates is here, and all of the finance reports that I have downloaded and reviewed are in this Google folder. Except for the reports that were filed non-electronically, which you can find here. Erik Manning’s invaluable spreadsheet remains my source for who’s in what race.

Anthony Allen – District D
Rashad Cave – District D
Marlon Christian – District D
Jeremy Darby – District D
Carolyn Evans-Shabazz – District D
Dennis Griffin – District D
Nissi Hamilton – District D
Brad Jordan – District D
Travis McGee – District D
Dontrell Montgomery – District D
Kenyon Moore – District D
Jerome Provost – District D

Van Huynh – District F
Anthony Nelson – District F
Giang “John” Nguyen – District F
Richard Nguyen – District F
Tiffany Thomas – District F
Jesus Zamora – District F

Nelvin Adriatico – District J
Barry Curtis – District J
Jim Bigham – District J
Federico “Freddie” Cuellar – District J
Edward Pollard – District J
Sandra Rodriguez – District J

Sallie Alcorn – At Large #5
Brad Batteau – At Large #5
Jamaal Boone – At Large #5
Catherine Flowers – At Large #5
Ralph Garcia – At Large #5
Marvin McNeese – At Large #5
Sonia Rivera – At Large #5
Ashton Woods – At Large #5


Candidate     Raised      Spent     Loan     On Hand
====================================================
Allen
Cave
Christian
Darby
E-Shabazz     4,000       3,715        0       1,468
Griffin         500         125        0         375
Hamilton        320         120        0         200
Jordan       37,804       2,703        0      35,100
McGee
Montgomery
Moore
Provost

Huynh
Nelson         3,845      1,451        0       2,393
G Nguyen      20,250          8        0      20,241
R Nguyen
Thomas        23,441      2,381        0      21,059
Zamora           323        426        0           0

Adriatico     31,807     30,079        0      10,108
Curtis           505          0        0         505
Bigham
Cuellar       19,880      9,351   18,437      10,628
Pollard       66,208     30,774   20,000      45,406
Rodriguez     12,997      3,272        0       9,608

Alcorn       204,247     75,393        0     252,366
Batteau
Boone              0          0        0           0
Flowers       13,543      9,918        0       3,700
Garcia             0          0        0           0
McNeese       23,100     45,893   30,000       7,206
Rivera         2,260      3,895    1,695           0
Woods

Most of the District D contenders entered the race after Dwight Boykins announced his candidacy for Mayor, so it’s not too surprising that many of them have no report filed. As such, and given that they’re almost all first-time candidates, it’s hard to guess who may be viable. If you dangled me off a bridge I’d pick HCC Trustee Carolyn Evans-Shabazz and former Geto Boy Brad Jordan as the two most likely to make it to a runoff, but that’s in the absence of a lot of information. Ask me again when the 30 day reports are posted, especially if Boykins has not retreated back to this race. Jordan got a lot of press when he announced his entry into the race, and did this interview in June (which I have to say doesn’t raise my esteem for him), and has a domain with a placeholder webpage at this time.

Districts F and J are racially diverse, low-turnout places where it can be hard to get a handle on who’s actually a contender. The last four Council members in F have all been Asian Americans, with the three most recent being Vietnamese, but there’s no reason why that has to be the case. Money is a weak indicator as well, with Richard Nguyen coming out of nowhere to beat then-incumbent Al Hoang, who supplemented his own fundraising, in 2013. He was then defeated by Steve Le in 2015. Tiffany Thomas is a former Alief ISD Trustee, making her the most successful of the candidates with past experience running for office. Jim Bigham ran against term-limited incumbent Mike Laster in 2015, while Edward Pollard unsuccessfully challenged State Rep. Gene Wu in the 2016 Democratic primary. (If you click that link, you will see that there was some ugliness in that race.) Nelvin Adriatico, who filed a report in January, was one of the first candidates for any office to appear on the scene, while Anthony Nelson is among the multitude of younger candidates on the ballot this year.

For At Large #5, it sure looks like it’s Sallie Alcorn and everyone else. She put up big numbers in January as well. Money is less of an issue in district races, where you can knock on a bunch of doors and visit all the civic clubs and neighborhood associations and whatnot and put yourself in front of most of your voters that way. For At Large you need other ways to let people know that you exist as a candidate, and nearly all of them require money. The other way is to run for something every election so that people eventually recognize your name even though you don’t do any actual campaigning. This is the Brad Batteau strategy, and much like the maybe-absent (but don’t say that out loud till the filing deadline) Griff Griffin it will get you some votes. Activist Ashton Woods, the only other AL5 candidate I’m familiar with, filed a correction affidavit on July 23 attesting that server issues on July 15 caused an error the submission of his finance report. I presume that means another report will be posted, but as yet I don’t see it. Alcorn is former Chief of Staff to Steve Costello and has done a lot of other things with the city as well.

Lastly, in searching for a website relating to Carolyn Evans-Shabazz’s Council candidacy (she has a Facebook page but not a website as far as I could tell), I stumbled across this delightful interview she did with four young children when she was a candidate for At Large #5 in 2013. There are other such interviews running through the 2015 election. The BigKidSmallCity domain those were a part of is now redirecting here, so I’m guessing there won’t be more of these conversations, but let me just say that if there is one thing that we could really use right now, it’s this. Please, Jill B. Jarvis, do this again. Thanks very much.

An update on the races in HISD and HCC

Jul 20th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
7 comments

As you know, there’s been a lot of action not just in the Houston City Council races but also in the 2020 election races. That doesn’t mean things have been dull in HISD and HCC, which of course have elections this November as well. I’m going to bring you up to date on who’s doing what in HISD and HCC, which as always deserve more attention than they usually get. We will refer to the Erik Manning spreadsheet for the names, though there will be some detours and some plot twists. Settle in and let’s get started.

There are four HISD Trustees up for election this cycle: Rhonda Skillern-Jones (district II), Sergio Lira (III), Jolanda Jones (IV), and Diana Davila (VIII). Lira, running for his first full term after winning in 2017 to succeed the late Manuel Rodriguez. He has no declared opponent at this time.

Rhonda Skillern-Jones has decided to step down from HISD and is now running for HCC Trustee in District 2. That’s the district currently held by the execrable Dave Wilson. (Hold that thought for a moment.) Her jump to HCC has been known for about a week, but as yet no candidate has emerged to announce a run in HISD II. I’m sure that will happen soon.

Diana Davila is being challenged by Judith Cruz, who ran for this same seat in 2010 after Davila’s abrupt departure when she was first an HISD Trustee; Cruz lost the Juliet Stipeche, who was then defeated by Davila in a return engagement in 2015. Davila has been at the center of much of the recent chaos on the Board, especially the disputes over interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan. I would expect that to be part of this campaign.

Jolanda Jones has two challengers for what would be her second term on the Board. One is perennial candidate Larry McKinzie, the other is Matt Barnes, a career educator with some charter school experience that I’m sure won’t cause any issues at all for anyone in this election. Ahem. A possible complicating factor here (we do love complicating factors) is that there has been chatter about Jones running for City Council again, this time in District D. It’s not the first time that this possibility has arisen. To be clear, as far as I know and unlike that other time, Jolanda Jones herself has not said anything about running for Council. This is 100% speculation based on other people talking about it, which I as an irresponsible non-journalist am mentioning without bothering to check for myself. I do that in part because it allows me to dredge up the past discussion we had about whether the term limits law that existed in 2012 would have allowed Jones to run for Council again, and from there to pivot to whether the same questions apply to the updated term limits law. Jones served two two-year terms and would hypothetically be running for a third and final term, which would be for four years. Council members who were first elected in 2011, such as Jack Christie, got to serve a total of eight years via this mechanism, and because the updated term limits law that was ratified by voters in 2015 was written to exempt current Council members who were not on their third terms. Would that also cover a former Council member who had served two terms? I have no idea, but if the question became relevant, I feel confident that lawyers and courtrooms would quickly become involved, and we’d eventually get an answer. See why this was irresistible to me? Anyway, all of this is probably for nothing, but I had fun talking about it and I hope you did, too.

Now for HCC. There are three HCC Trustees whose terms are up: Zeph Capo (District 1), the aforementioned Dave Wilson (District 2), and Neeta Sane (District 7). We’ll start with Sane, whose district covers part of Fort Bend County. She is running for Fort Bend County Tax Assessor in 2020 (she had previously run for FBC Treasurer in 2006, before winning her first term on the HCC Board), and while she could run for re-election in HCC first, she appears to not be doing so. Erik’s spreadsheet has no candidate in this slot at this time.

Zeph Capo is also not running for re-election. His job with the Texas AFT will be taking him to Austin, so he is stepping down. In his place is Monica Flores Richart, who had run for HISD Trustee in my district in 2017. Capo is Richart’s campaign treasurer, so that’s all very nice and good.

And that’s where this gets complicated. Dave Wilson is the lone Trustee of these three who is running in 2019. He is not, however, running for re-election in District 2. He is instead running in District 1, where I’m guessing he thinks he’ll have a chance of winning now that the voters in District 2 are aware he’s a conservative white Republican and not a black man or the cousin of former State Rep. Ron Wilson. I’m sure Rhonda Skillern-Jones would have wiped the floor with him, but now he’s running for an open seat. He won’t have the same cover of stealth this time, though. You can help by supporting Monica Flores Richart and by making sure everyone you know knows about this race and what a turd Dave Wilson is. Don’t let him get away with this.

(Hey, remember the big legal fight over Wilson’s residency following his fluke 2013 election, and how he insisted that the warehouse he moved into was his real home? So much for that. I assume he has another warehouse to occupy, which is totally fine because our state residency laws are basically meaningless.)

Finally, while their terms are not up, there are two other HCC Trustees who are seeking other offices and thus may cause further vacancies. Eva Loredo, the trustee in District 8, has filed a designation of treasurer to run for Justice of the Peace in Precinct 6 next March, while current Board chair Carolyn Evans-Shabazz in District 4 is now a candidate for City Council District D. If Wilson loses (please, please, please) and these two win theirs we could have five new members within the next year and a half, which would be a majority of the nine-member Board. The Board would appoint replacements for Evans-Shabazz and/or Loredo if they resign following a victory in their other elections, and there would then be an election for the remainder of their terms. I will of course keep an eye on that. In the meantime, if you can fill in any of the blanks we’ve discussed here, please leave a comment.

Judge tosses Dave Wilson’s lawsuit against HCC

Mar 29th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Sorry, Dave.

Dave Wilson

A judge has dismissed a lawsuit against Houston Community College that had been filed by one of the Board of Trustee’s controversial members.

Dave Wilson claimed in a lawsuit that the college violated his First and 14th Amendment rights. But in a ruling issued Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth Hoyt said Wilson “failed to demonstrate any injury-in-fact.”

Wilson claimed in the lawsuit that the college’s board violated his free speech and due process rights when they voted to publicly censure him in January 2018. The board’s censure said Wilson’s conduct was “detrimental to Houston Community College Systems and its mission.” The board members also said Wilson violated the college’s bylaws, failed to engage and respect the board’s decision-making process and their differing opinions, and that he did not interact with trustees in a “mutually respectful manner.”

[…]

Wilson, a District II trustee, called Hoyt’s decision a “bad ruling” and said that he was disappointed that the judge didn’t address the fact that he could be censured again.

He and his lawyer are considering an appeal, he said. “We’re still thinking about it, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I didn’t appeal it,” he said.

When he was censured last year, the trustees also decided that Wilson was not eligible for travel-related expense reimbursements and would need board approval when requesting funding for community affairs programs for the 2017-2018 college year. They also determined he could not be elected for a board officer position in 2018, all of which Wilson said violated his rights, according to court documents.

But Hoyt concluded that the board’s resolution did not infringe upon Wilson’s First or 14th Amendment rights because Wilson could freely speak in public and could attend and express his views at board meetings, according to a court document.

See here and here for the background. The facts alleged in the suit seemed awfully thin and un-actionable, but Dave Wilson does what he does, and that’s all there is to it. Which means he’s considering an appeal, because what else does he have to do with his time? Well, there is one thing:

Despite Wilson’s volatile relationship with the HCC board, he has no intention of giving up his position as a board member and said he plans to run for re-election in November. He was elected to the board in 2013.

“I love Houston Community College and what they can do for this community, but I hate the way special interest groups are eating away at it and the students aren’t the main focus,” Wilson said.

“Trump wanted to drain the swamp. I’m going to drain the cesspool at Houston Community College,” Wilson said. “I got on the board to clean this place up, and I’m going to continue to work.”

Yes, he’s running for re-election. At least this time, we can see him coming. And we damn well better send him packing.

July 2018 campaign finance reports: HCC

Aug 22nd, 2018
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

We come to the end of the campaign finance reports for July. I’ll try to do the 30 day finance reports for Congress and the Lege, but in the meantime here are reports for the HCC Trustees:

Adriana Tamez
Carolyn Evans-Shabazz
Dave Wilson
Eva Loredo
John Hansen
Neeta Sane
Pretta VanDible Stallworth
Robert Glaser
Zeph Capo


Dist  Name             Raised    Spent    Loans   On Hand
=========================================================
3     Tamez                 0      267        0     5,701
4     Evans-Shabazz     5,600    4,134        0     1,653
2     Wilson                0        0   12,782         0
8     Loredo              700       70        0       255
6     Hansen                2        0    5,000     8,928
7     Sane                  0    3,823        0    11,319
9     Stallworth       14,175    2,758        0         0
5     Glaser                0        0    5,000     1,125
1     Capo                  0        0        0     2,064

The weird order to the reports is due to the idiosyncratic way that one accesses HCC finance reports – basically, things are sorted in alphabetical order by first name, so that’s how I prepared this. Sorry, even I have limits. As was the case with the HISD reports, there hasn’t been much fundraising activity for HCC, which isn’t that surprising given that there usually isn’t that much fundraising activity even when there are elections coming up. The main thing you need to know is that 2019 is the year we get the chance to rid ourselves of the stain that is Dave Wilson. Zeph Capo and Neeta Sane will also be on the ballot, but the race that matters is in District 2. Wilson spends his own money on his political endeavors, so pay no attention to his Raised and On Hand totals. Just be prepared to support his eventual opponent (hopefully there will be just one), and never forget this lesson in Why Every Election Matters.

2017 results: HISD and HCC

Nov 8th, 2017
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

There were still precincts to be counted as I was writing this so there are a couple of races where I’ll have to equivocate, but here’s what happened in the local races that had actual candidates in them. Let’s start with the easier one, the HCC races:

– Trustees Carolyn Evans-Shabazz (73%) and Robert Glaser (58%) led from the get go and cruised to easy wins.

– In District 9, Gene Pack (42%) and Pretta VanDible Stallworth (37%) will head into a runoff for the right to succeed Chris Oliver.

In HISD, there are a couple of clear results, and a couple that I’ll have to update in the morning:

– Incumbent Trustees Wanda Adams (68%) and Anne Sung (60%) were easily re-elected.

– Jesse Rodriguez (41%) and Sergio Lira (32%) were going into overtime in Distric III, while Elizabeth Santos (45%) and Gretchen Himsl (33%) were doing the same in I. Given how the District I race has gone so far, I expect it to get a little nasty for the runoff.

– Sue Deigaard (53%) appeared to be headed for a clear win in her four-way race. As of this drafting, 37 of 56 precincts had reported, but Deigaard had 4,502 votes out of 8,446 total. If the remaining 19 precincts have a proportional amount of votes in them as the first 37, a little back-of-the-envelope math suggests she’d need about 43.4% of those votes to stay in the majority and win outright. I’d say those are pretty good odds, but we’ll see.

– The race that will have everyone up way past their bedtimes is in District VI, where with 35 of 40 precincts counted, incumbent Holly Flynn Vilaseca had 50.04% of the vote – she had 3,119 out of 6,233, which puts her five votes into a majority. Either she squeaks out a clean win – she was a pinch over 50% in early and absentee voting and a slightly smaller pinch under it on Tuesday – or she goes into a runoff with a substantial lead. Good position to be in, but boy I know what I’d prefer.

UPDATE: At 12:46 AM, the final results were posted, and Holly Flynn Vilaseca wound up with 50.38% of the vote, putting her back in office without a runoff. Here’s the Chron story.

30 day campaign finance reports – HCC

Oct 22nd, 2017
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

One more time with the 30 day reports. July reports are here.

Carolyn Evans-Shabazz
Robert Glaser
Pretta VanDible Stallworth
David Jaroszewski


Dist  Name             Raised    Spent    Loans   On Hand
=========================================================
4     Evans-Shabazz     1,148      527        0     3,079
5     Glaser                0      200    5,000     8,239
9     Stallworth            0      713        0         0
9     Jaroszewski       1,000       84        0         0

Aaaaaaaand that’s it. Again, only people who are running for office must file 30 day reports, so all the incumbents other than Evans-Shabazz and Glaser are off the hook. I don’t know why Manny Barrera, DC Caldwell, Victoria Bryant, and Gene Pack don’t have reports available – perhaps they didn’t file one for whatever the reason, and perhaps they did but the system doesn’t reflect it. These puny numbers are not surprising, as these races seldom draw much in the way of fundraising, but they highlight the main issue with HCC elections in general: Nobody knows anything about the candidates, in part because the candidates don’t have the resources to communicate with the voters. We need to be prepared for the possibility of random results when all is said and done here.

Endorsement watch: HCC

Oct 20th, 2017
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

The Chron wraps up their endorsements for November.

Carolyn Evans-Shabazz

HCCS, Trustee, District IV: Carolyn Evans-Shabazz

The ideal candidate for this seat would be someone with a bold vision for HCC who is capable of collaborating with existing board members. It would be a candidate free from controversy. That candidate is not in this race. So instead we encourage voters to find the best candidate via the process of elimination.

That should lead voters, however reluctantly, to incumbent Carolyn Evans-Shabazz.

Appointed to the Board of Trustees in May 2015 to represent District IV, which includes Sunnyside and the Third Ward, Evans-Shabazz has carved out a leadership role on the board, chairing the success committee, which works on issues such as homelessness and food insecurity on campus. Off the board, she serves on the NAACP-Houston branch executive committee.

[…]

Robert Glaser

HCCS, Trustee, District V: Robert Glaser

Incumbent Robert Glaser deserves a second term representing this diverse district that extends from West University to Bellaire to Memorial to Beltway 8.

Glaser, 56, points to HCC’s progress during the past four years. The community college has hired a new chancellor, reduced its overall bond debt and kept taxes level. In addition, tuition rates have been frozen for the last three years while faculty and staff have received raises. Still, the businessman sees room for much improvement.

[…]

HCCS, Trustee, District IX: David Jaroszewski

A lawyer and interim dean of academic studies at Lee College in Baytown, David Jaroszewski stands out as one of the few candidates for HCC with a clear vision about the role that community colleges should play, and how properly run boards help them achieve those goals.

The former PTO president has extensive experience in community college systems and understands the difference between governing and managing. He also expressed a dedicated focus on boosting HCC’s retention rate.

But Jaroszewski, 64, earned our endorsement when he said: “The board should not be inserting themselves into the procurement process.”

That’s what voters should want to hear.

Pretta VanDible Stallworth previously served on the HCC board from 1989-1993 and has been a adjunct professor at Bellhaven College and guest professor at DeVry University. Well-positioned to reflect the values of the community, the chaplain for Senate 13 District PAC would have likely earned our endorsement except for her position on a key point: Stallworth believes that the board should be better trained and then given more responsibility with respect to reviewing contracts for compliance with HCC policies.

My interview with Carolyn Evans-Shabazz is here, and my interview with Robert Glaser is here. I’ve taken my guesses at turnout for HISD, but with six-year cycles and frequently unopposed incumbents, there’s not much data there to try the same thing for HCC. I suspect these numbers will be pretty low, with more undervotes than in HISD. I hope people are paying attention, that’s all I can say.

Interview with Carolyn Evans-Shabazz

Oct 17th, 2017
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Carolyn Evans-Shabazz

HCC Trustee races never get the attention they deserve. That’s on me too, as I could spend more time with them, but it’s a systemic problem as much as anything. What I can do about it right now is bring you this interview with Trustee Carolyn Evans-Shabazz, running for a full term in District 4 after being appointed to fill the vacancy left by the resignation of Carroll Robinson. Evans-Shabazz has been a teacher and Lead Evaluation Specialist with HISD, an educational diagnostician with both Aldine and Fort Bend ISDs, and an adjunct professor at Texas Southern University. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the NAACP-Houston branch where she serves as Chair of the Education Committee. Here’s what we talked about:

You can see all the interviews I’ve done as well as information about candidates and races at my Election 2017 page.

Wilson sues HCC

Oct 13th, 2017
by Charles Kuffner.
5 comments

It’s a thing with him.

Dave Wilson

Dave Wilson, a District II trustee, is accusing Carolyn Evans-Shabazz, the board’s vice chair, of improperly voting remotely during a September trustee meeting.

Board bylaws say that only trustees present in person can vote, though absent trustees can listen to the proceedings electronically.

Wilson’s lawsuit says the meeting in question took place on Sept. 21. HCC trustees did not meet that day, but at the Sept. 22 meeting, the board was scheduled to elect a secretary for the remainder of 2017, authorize HCC’s chancellor to execute a facilities maintenance contract and define how vendors who violate the board’s ethics code should be disciplined, among other items.

“If the court finds that participating by video chat in the board meetings violates (board bylaws), then the court should declare her vote illegal and void,” his lawsuit reads. “The court should order a recount of each agenda item for the board meeting.”

I have a copy of Wilson’s complaint here. It’s quite short and to the point, so go ahead and read it. I can sum it up as follows:

– In 2010, the HCC Board voted to amend its bylaws to state that only Trustees who attend meetings in person may vote. A Trustee who is not present may view the meeting electronically may not vote, and proxy votes are not allowed.

– Trustee Carolyn Evans-Shabazz was not present for the September 21 meeting, but attended via video conference. She voted on agenda items, over Wilson’s objection, and her votes were counted.

– Wilson wants the court to require the Board to enforce its bylaws, and void all the votes taken on September 21.

And that’s it. What struck me is that Wilson cites no laws in his suit, just the Board bylaws. I agree that Trustees should follow their own rules, but I’m kind of perplexed that a court would consider itself to have the jurisdiction to step in and enforce that. Any attorneys out there want to comment on this? By the way, Wilson never alleges that any of Evans-Shabazz’s votes were decisive, nor that the Board would have lacked a quorum without her. As such, I’m not sure what the point is, beyond the principle involved. Which, much as I deplore Dave Wilson I can kind of understand. Still, the two PTA boards I’ve served on had bylaws, too, but I don’t think it would have occurred to me to file a lawsuit if I’d thought those bylaws were not being followed. Was there no other way to resolve this?

Endorsement watch: HGLBT Political Caucus, CVPE, and GPS

Sep 13th, 2017
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

From the inbox:

The Houston GLBT Political Caucus PAC met on September 9, 2017. At the meeting the membership voted to endorse the following candidates:

Kara DeRocha for HISD School Board Trustee – District V

Holly Maria Flynn Vilaseca for HISD School Board Trustee – District VI

Anne Sung for HISD School Board Trustee – District VII

Dr. Carolyn Evans-Shabazz for HCC Trustee – District IV

Pretta Vandible Stallworth for HCC Trustee – District IX

We also voted to endorse the following propositions:

Propositions A, B, C, D and E

The Houston GLBT Political Caucus PAC will hold a public forum on September 22, 2017 at 7pm at Bering Memorial United Methodist Church in Montrose, Room 217A & B. (Enter through the North Entrance on Hawthorne Street where the parking lot is located.) The public forum will highlight Elizabeth Santos, Gretchen Himsl and Monica Flores Richart, candidates for HISD School Board Trustee – District I. The membership will take an endorsement vote at the end of the public forum. The Membership will also vote on the recommendation of the screening committee in the HISD School Board race for District III.

I was just saying that we are only now beginning to see campaign activity again post-Harvey, and a part of that is the group endorsement process. The GLBT Caucus endorsements hit my mailbox late on Sunday, and on Monday I found out about a couple of others that have come out. Here’s Community Voices for Public Education:

Elizabeth Santos in HISD District 1
Kara DeRocha in HISD District 5
Holly Flynn Vilaseca in HISD District 6
Anne Sung in HISD District 7

CVPE members voted to not endorse in District 9 and will screen HISD District 3 candidates in the near future.

Yes, everyone is going to have to go over this again once the filing deadline comes for District III, which was extended to allow people enough time to make the decision to run following Manuel Rodriguez’s death. I am aware of one candidate in District III so far, and I am sure there will be others.

One more set of endorsements, from Houstonians for Great Public Schools:

District I – Gretchen Himsl

District V – Sue Deigaard

District VI – Holly Maria Flynn Vilaseca

District VII – Anne Sung

District IX – Wanda Adams

I’ll post more as I see them. I suppose it’s well past time for me to create an Election 2017 page to track all this, too.

The HCC lineup

Sep 12th, 2017
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

When I published the July finance reports for HCC trustees, I noted that the only reports available were for incumbents. There was no way to tell who might be challenging the two trustees up for re-election (Carolyn Evans-Shabazz and Robert Glaser) or who might be vying to succeed the convicted Chris Oliver. Thankfully, the Board Information – Trustee Elections page now has all of the candidates listed, so let’s take a look at who’s running for what.

District IV

Carolyn Evans-Shabazz
Manny Barrera
Daniel “DC” Caldwell, I

Evans-Shabazz is the incumbent. She was appointed to the seat in 2015 to fill in for Carroll Robinson, who had stepped down to run for Houston City Controller. She was unopposed that November for the rest of that term, so this is her first election for a full term. She also ran for City Council At Large #5 in 2013 and received about 31% of the vote in a three-way race against CM Jack Christie.

Barrera you know from his comments here. He ran for City Council in District J against CM Mike Laster, finishing third in a field of four. He previously ran for the HCC Board in 2007 for position VII, finishing third against eventual winner Neeta Sane. He’s an attorney and longtime watchdog/critic of HCC, as a bit of Googling will tell you. I couldn’t find a campaign webpage for him.

According to that LinkedIn profile I found, Daniel Caldwell is a former GOP precinct chair in Tarrant County who ran for Dallas City Council in 2015. Going from his LinkedIn profile, I found this website for him and his HCC campaign. I doubt he can get elected in this African-American district, but if Dave Wilson can (dishonestly) do it, I suppose anything is possible.

District V

Victoria Bryant‌‌
Robert Glaser‌

Glaser is the incumbent here. He won in 2013 to fill out the term of Richard Schechter, who had resigned. I didn’t do interviews for HCC that year, but he did fill out a Q&A for Texas Leftist that year. I’ve corresponded with him quite a bit, and he’s been helpful answering various questions I’ve had about what goes on at HCC.

Bryant ran for HISD in the 2016 special election to fill Harvin Moore’s seat; she finished third behind eventual winner Anne Sung and John Luman. Here’s the interview I did with her for that race. Bryant is a Republican, Glaser is a Democrat. This seat has been Democratic since at least Schechter’s election in 2005 – I can’t find results from 1999, the previous time this seat would have been up – but this is a weird year, with likely very low turnout, so it is very much the case that anything can happen.

District IX

Eugene “Gene” Pack
David Jaroszewski
Pretta Vandible Stallworth

Eugene Pack appears to have three different profiles on Facebook. I have no idea what’s up with that. He also appears to be a Republican – in fact, he’s listed as the Vice Chairman of the Texas Federation for Republican Outreach (warning: autoplay Trump video), which is a group I’d never heard of before googling around for this guy. You have to search for “Gene Pack” to find that page; I found it before I found that Facebook photo, so I’m pretty sure this is the same guy.

David Jaroszewski is as far as I can tell an attorney with an office in Baytown, who also teaches at Lee College; he’s the Director of the Paralegal Studies Program. He has no clearly identifying web presence that I can find, but you can see him doing some lectures on YouTube.

Pretta Stallworth is the co-President of a 501(c)3 called Parents for Public Schools Houston; here’s their webpage. I can’t say I’ve heard of this group – the one name I recognize on their board is Hugo Mojica, who has run unsuccessfully for Houston City Council and HISD in District I. All things being equal, I’d say she has the kind of profile to be the favorite in this district, but again, this is a weird year and I have no idea how many people will have a clue about who any of these people are. I sure hope the Chron and black media like The Defender and KCOH do some reporting on this race. It would suck to go from Chris Oliver to a complete cipher for the next six years.

July 2017 campaign finance reports – HCC

Aug 14th, 2017
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Welcome to the last and least interesting of these campaign finance report posts. This one is about the HCC Trustees, and there’s not much to see. Take a look at what there is – you can find all available reports here – and we’ll discuss it below.

Carolyn Evans-Shabazz
Robert Glaser

Adriana Tamez
Dave Wilson
Eva Loredo
John Hansen
Neeta Sane
Zeph Capo


Name            Raised    Spent     Loans     On Hand
=====================================================
Evans-Shabazz    3,125    1,027         0       2,812
Glaser               0        0     5,000       8,439

Tamez                0    3,533         0       6,247
Wilson               0        0    12,782           0
Loredo               0      881         0       1,109
Hansen               0        0     5,000       8,925
Sane                 0    6,043         0      20,803
Capo                 0    1,100         0       2,064

First, let me just say how far the HCC webpage has come from the days when I had to file an open records request to get my hands on these things. They’re easy to find now, and all reports are available for everyone who has a report. The only downside is that you can’t tell at a glance who is and isn’t a candidate – you have to look at everyone to see who has a current report – but I can live with that. Kudos for getting this right, y’all.

And so, what you see above, is everyone who has filed a July 2017 report, which is to say the eight non-felonious incumbents, and no one else. Neither Carolyn Evans-Shabazz nor Robert Glaser has an opponent as yet, and there’s a giant void in District 9, where there is neither an incumbent nor a candidate for the position. Someone will be appointed to fill the seat soon enough, and from there we’ll get some idea as to who may be in the running for November, but for now this is all we have.

As you can also see, no one is exactly burning up the phone lines hitting up donors. Again, this may change when and if someone gets opposed, but until then there appears to be no rush.

A look ahead to Houston’s 2017 elections

Jan 3rd, 2017
by Charles Kuffner.
9 comments

I want to return to something in that story about Mayor Turner’s 2017 agenda, which was near the bottom but which is a very big deal for the coming year:

A lawsuit over the ballot language used last year to extend terms to a maximum of two four-year terms, from three two-year terms, hovers in the background.

A state district judge ruled in March that the language was “inartful” but legal, and the case now is under appeal.

At stake in the near term is whether Turner and members of City Council must run for re-election in 2017 or wait until 2019.

See here for the background. Usually around this time I’m writing about the upcoming election year and what we have to look forward to. Thanks to this lawsuit, we could have a year with no city elections, or a year in which nobody knows we have city elections until April or May and everyone operates on an insanely accelerated schedule from there. With that in mind, let’s look at our Year of Elections 2017 with a frame of The Elections We Will Have, The Elections We May Have, and The Elections We Could Have.

The Elections We Will Have

Whatever else happens with the term limits lawsuit, there will be elections in HISD and HCC. The following trustees for each board are up for election this year:

HISD – Anna Eastman (District I), Mike Lunceford (District V), Greg Meyers (District VI), Anne Sung (District VII), Wanda Adams (District IX)
HCC – Carolyn Evans-Shabazz (District 4), Robert Glaser (District 5), Chris Oliver (District 9)

Mike Lunceford is not running for re-election, so his seat will be open. Greg Meyers has already submitted his resignation, and a replacement Trustee will be selected by the Board in January. It is not clear if the Board will prefer a caretaker who will not run for election in November or if the new member will try to stake a claim. Anne Sung of course won the special election to succeed Harvin Moore a couple of weeks ago. Whatever happens in November, the Board will have three different members in the traditionally Republican districts than it had at the start of 2016. That has some negative potential, as all three were devoted to public schools in a way that is not necessarily characteristic of modern Republicans, meaning that whoever wins in November could be more antagonistic than what we are used to seeing. We’ll have a better idea when we know who is selected to replace Meyers, and who emerges to run for these seats. As for Eastman, she is my Trustee and as far as I know she is in for another term, but I haven’t spoken to her in the last few weeks, and she has not made any formal announcements. I’m not aware of any reason why Adams would not run for another term.

In HCC, both Shabazz-Evans and Glaser won elections to complete the unexpired terms for trustees who had resigned following their 2011 campaigns. Evans-Shabazz was appointed to replace Carroll Robinson in District 4 in May of 2015, and then was unopposed for election. Glaser won a contested race to succeed Richard Schechter in 2013; appointed replacement Leila Feldman did not run for the seat. Oliver is a multi-term incumbent who easily defeated a challenger in 2011. Sometimes there are interesting things to say or look forward to in these races. This is not one of those times.

There will also be some number of constitutional amendments on the ballot in November, but we won’t know what they are until May or so when the Legislature finishes its business. If the term limits lawsuit goes down, preserving the new four-year terms for city officeholders, these referenda will be the only guaranteed items on your ballot this year.

The most interesting race in the area that is not in Houston will be in Pasadena, where Mayor Johnny Isbell is term-limited out and where the City Council lines may or may not be redrawn, pending the ruling in the voting rights lawsuit that is currently in the judge’s hands. That election will be in May. Other area cities such as Bellaire, West U, Sugar Land, and Rosenberg, also have elections in May. I hope to have some more information about some of these races in a subsequent post. Also of interest in May will be the San Antonio elections, where Mayor Ivy Taylor has some competition for a second full term. I’m sure I’ll do some writing about that as well.

The Elections We May Have

In addition to the statewide ballot propositions, there are two local ones that could be on your November eSlate machine, both of which could be quite contentious. Mayor Turner has stated his intention to put a referendum about the revenue cap on the ballot this year, though one presumes that could change if his pension reform bills do not pass. You can be sure that the opposition to this, mostly from the likes of Paul Bettencourt and no doubt with the help of the statewide Republican cabal, will be ferocious and very well-funded. Which in a way will be good for Mayor Turner, because if he can successfully cast this as a partisan issue, especially a “statewide Republicans meddling in our business AGAIN” issue, he ought to at least begin with the larger share of the vote. Getting those people to vote, whether or not there are other city elections to draw them out, will be the challenge. I suspect Mayor Turner doesn’t do anything without planning out how it will go, so I sure hope he has a plan for this one.

The other possible ballot item we might have is an updated Metro Solutions plan, which may include more rail construction projects, possibly including another shot at the Universities Line. This has been floated as an option by Metro Chair Carrin Patman, but it is not yet clear that it would be on the ballot, and if it would be there this year if so, and it is not yet clear what the scope of it would be. Needless to say, any rail component would generate some opposition, with a new Universities Line plan bringing out the usual suspects, some of whom would already be fully engaged in a revenue cap fight. It’s an interesting question whether you’d rather have this item on the ballot by itself, or in the same space as a revenue cap item. I’m glad that’s not my call to make.

The Elections We Could Have

This is the one that is entirely contingent on the Supreme Court, which as we know has not hesitated to stick its collective nose in our electoral business. If the 2015 term limits referendum is thrown out for having insufficiently clear wording, then the people who will be the most affected are the Council members who are in their last terms: Brenda Stardig, Jerry Davis, Ellen Cohen, Mike Laster, Larry Green, and Jack Christie. Cohen’s District C and Laster’s District J represent challenges for Democrats, as Bill King carried both districts in the 2015 Mayoral runoff. The ideal District C candidate is in the Anne Clutterbuck-Ellen Cohen spectrum, while the low turnout District J will always be a bit of a wild card. Against that, Dems will have opportunities in both Christie’s At Large #5 and first-term CM Mike Knox’s AL #1, though as we have discussed before, cattle call races with lots of similarly-profiled Democrats have benefited Republican citywide candidates in the recent past. The ideal here is for a candidate who begins with a lot of backing to get in and largely hoover up all the support – think Melissa Noriega in 2007, or Amanda Edwards in 2015.

I don’t want to spend too much time on this, as it’s even more speculative than usual, but I do want to at least put a marker on it, since if these elections do happen they may happen all at once, with little warning and not much time to prepare. I’ll be keeping an eye on this, and will be ready for either a busier or more relaxed interview season this fall.

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