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January 25th, 2011:

Voter ID 2011

The debate is going on in the Senate today over voter ID – it will be taken up by the House later, after committee hearings that are sure to be a freak show. You can follow the ins and outs at places like the Chron’s Texas Politics blog and the Statesman’s Postcards from the Lege; be sure to read this Seinfeldian classic so you can fully appreciate the deep unseriousness of the whole shebang. I do want to highlight one bit from this Chron preview story, helpfully flagged by TexasChick in the comments:

“This year’s Senate Bill 14, however, allows a person to vote only with a Texas driver’s license or state identification card, a valid military ID or a federal document such as a passport that proves citizenship and contains a photograph. The bill also includes $2 million for voter education and requires the Texas Department of Public Safety to issue a free photo ID card to any citizen who wants it for voting.”

Now I firmly believe that if the state is going to put conditions on citizens’ ability to exercise their rights, the very least they can do is to try to accommodate the citizens who need help meeting those conditions. As such, I’m not going to criticize the $2 million that’s to be allocated (from federal HAVA funds, mind you) to accomplish that, other than to note that it’s not a whole lot of money though it is greater than zero. I just want to point out that what this shows is that if the people in charge really want to do something, they will find a way to pay for it. So, two million bucks to help disenfranchise marginally fewer people (some people, anyway) than strictly necessary, we can do that. Public education, on the other hand, that’s gonna get cut somewhere between 9.3 and 9.8 billion dollars. Priorities, you know. Abby Rapoport, who notes that this version of the voter ID bill is more stringent than any currently out there, and as such may not survive scrutiny from the Justice Department (we can only hope), has more.

UPDATE: How could I possibly forget about the devious nuns? Gotta watch those nuns, they sure are tricky.

The Ainbinder traffic impact analysis for the Height Wal-Mart

When last we discussed the Heights Wal-Mart development, we were awaiting a traffic impact analysis (TIA) on the roads around the site, which was to be done on behalf of Ainbinder, the developer of the project. For your perusal, here is the TIA of the Wal-Mart development. I want to quote you a paragraph from the executive summary:

The results of this traffic engineering study indicate that the construction of IH-10 frontage roads and resulting changes in traffic patterns will impact both mobility and traffic operations within the study area on a much greater scale than the new trips generated by the proposed Washington Heights development. Furthermore, it was found that the addition of the proposed retail development is not expected to cause a significant reduction in LOS beyond what is expected for year 2012 No Build conditions.

“LOS” is “level of service”, and it refers to the congestion and wait-time conditions at intersections; they are given grades from A (always smooth flow, no problems at all) to F (“Unstable traffic flow. Heavy congestion. Traffic moves in forced flow condition. Average delays of greater than one minute highly probable. Total breakdown.”) based on what is observed or projected. What Kimley-Horn, the firm that conducted the TIA for Ainbinder, is saying is that the intersection of Yale and the under-construction I-10 service roads will start off as an F even if the Wal-Mart site is still an empty lot in 2012.

Does that sound credible to you? It doesn’t to me. I used to take Height Boulevard south past I-10, for several years after dropping my kids off at preschool. It was not unusual for me to have to sit through one light cycle on Heights, but that was because the duration of the green light for the southbound approach at I-10 West was only about 15 seconds. (Believe me, I timed it myself out of frustration more than once.) The folks coming from the I-10 West service road, who were the bulk of the traffic and were mostly turning left (south) onto Heights had a nice long light, and had no trouble. (A corollary to this was that the green light for the southbound approach at I-10 East, which included a protected left, was much longer. This was the only way onto I-10 East between Yale and Studemont, so a fair number of vehicles turning left from the I-10 West service road turned again onto the eastbound service road.)

The point I’m making is that before the current construction, the traffic at this intersection wasn’t bad. Most of it was for vehicles getting on and off the freeway. On Yale, traffic was even less of an issue, as there was only one light, where the westbound service road dead-ended into Yale. A few people going south on Yale would turn left at the un-signaled intersection onto the eastbound service road, but my observation was that most people heading south on Yale were aiming for either Washington Avenue, or points south, where Yale merged into Waugh Drive. This was also the only way to get onto Memorial Drive west, as that entrance is inaccessible from Heights/Waugh southbound.

What would make traffic at Yale/I-10 so much worse once there’s a service road there to connect to points west, or to handle people now exiting at Yale? Obviously, people will use this to get onto I-10, but one presumes these people are currently using either the entrance at Studemont or the entrance at Durham/Shepherd. The people who will some day exit at Yale are presumably now exiting at Studemont, making the U-turn, then turning left at either Heights or Yale. We’ve already established that pre-construction this was no big deal. Where’s all that extra traffic going to come from? Other than some reshuffling from Studemont and Durham/Shepherd, it’s not obvious to me. It’s not like there will be more residences or businesses putting traffic onto Yale by 2012.

Well, except for the one factor that this TIA wants you to think won’t be much of one, that being the Wal-Mart development. But if Yale at I-10 was going to be a nightmare anyway, then it’s not their fault, is it? How fortunate for them that TxDOT is there to take the hit for this.

Anyway. There’s a lot more to the TIA, but a couple of other points need to be mentioned. One is that the 380 agreement the city signed with Ainbinder doesn’t mention the service roads, or the intersections at Yale and Heights. The stuff that Ainbinder agreed to do as part of the 380 involve widening Yale between the train bridge and Koehler so as to allow a left turn lane into the development, and adding a left turn lane from Heights onto Koehler once the apartments in between have been torn down. The TIA suggests adding as mitigations a right turn lane from Yale onto I-10 service road westbound, and a left turn lane from Heights to I-10 westbound, but as neither of the 380, it’s not clear who would pay for them. With the TIA claiming that Ainbinder’s development would not be responsible for this traffic, don’t expect them to make any offers. Oh, and the TIA doesn’t include their full data sets, and this report apparently differs from a previous one. We’re taking their word for it on this.

Another point, separate from the traffic issues, is that the bridge on Yale between Koehler and I-10, the one that goes over the bayou, has a gross weight limit of 40,000 pounds. This wasn’t discussed before because the sign indicating this weight limit isn’t easily visible from the street. Here’s a photo so you can see what I mean. The tare weight, which is to say the empty weight, of a typical 18-wheeler is 30,000 to 36,000 pounds, and the legal maximum is 80,000 pounds. That would seem to be a problem, given the limitations of that bridge. How many 18-wheelers a day come into a Wal-Mart facility?

All of the documents linked in this post, as well as this summary doc, which notes these and other issues, came to me via RUDH. There will be a public meeting tomorrow, January 26, to discuss these items:

PUBLIC MEETING
WEDNESDAY JAN. 26th
6:30 to 7:30 PM
Council on Alcohol & Drugs
303 Jackson Hill Street
Houston, TX 77007

Here’s a map to the location. See you there.

Higher enrollment, fewer resources

I just have one question about this.

At a time of record enrollment in Texas’ colleges and universities, a state budget proposal released this week would see these institutions suffer a 7.6 percent funding cut from the last biennial budget.

University presidents called the proposed cuts, which total $1.7 billion, “dramatic” and “drastic.” The current budget was balanced on the back of higher education, which absorbed 41.5 percent of the cuts despite comprising just 12.5 percent of the budget.

This proposal for the 2010-2011 biennium, rolled out Tuesday by Texas Rep. Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie, would see far less of the overall cut come from colleges and universities — but the cuts still are disproportionate, said University of Houston system president Renu Khator.

Khator and other Texas university presidents must serve rising numbers of students on falling revenue. Universities saw their combined enrollment jump 35 percent, to 557,550 students, from fall 2000 to last fall. Community colleges saw a 67 percent enrollment leap over the same period, to 720,379 students.

In what universe does this make sense? Everyone says – even the Republicans – that higher education is important, that it fuels growth, that we need to get more kids in college and more kids to graduate from college if we want Texas to be economically competitive in the future. If we actually believe that, then what the hell are we doing?

Can we please get back to the basics?

The ongoing saga of the Texas Forensic Science Commission:

Adding an unexpected twist to its investigation of the science used to convict and execute Cameron Todd Willingham for arson murder, the Texas Forensic Science Commission voted Friday to seek an attorney general opinion on the limits of its jurisdiction.

The commission is examining allegations, made by fire scientists and the Innocence Project of New York, that investigators relied on bad science and poor techniques to conclude that Willingham intentionally set fire to his Corsicana home in 1991, killing his three young daughters.

The City of Corsicana and the state fire marshal’s office, however, have long complained that the commission lacks the authority to examine their investigators’ actions and conclusions.

On Friday, as they contemplated drafting a final report in the Willingham matter, the nine commission members voted unanimously to ask Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office to determine whether Corsicana and the fire marshal are correct.

“It’s been the elephant in the room the entire time,” Commissioner Lance Evans said after the meeting in downtown Austin. Evans made the motion to seek Abbott’s opinion.

In the meantime, commissioners vowed to continue working toward a final report.

“I certainly think we could make findings … on the state of fire investigation back at that time, the evolution of fire investigation up to the present day and where mistakes might have been made,” said Evans, a Fort Worth defense lawyer.

To the best of my recollection, the FSC was created for two purposes. First and foremost, to evaluate the forensic techniques being used by Texas law enforcement agencies, to see if they were sufficiently modern and grounded in scientific principles for use in a courtroom. Second, if the answer to question 1 was “No” for something, to recommend standards that would then be adopted voluntarily or via legislative coercion if necessary. In the case of arson investigations, the clear and overwhelming answer to question 1 is “No”. If we had a commission chair, or a governor that’s responsible for appointing the commission chair, that cared about anything other than politics, we might be able to get to part two. But we don’t, so we’ll just keep wasting everybody’s time until either the Lege steps in (for good or for ill) or we all get too bored and frustrated with the process to give a damn about it. Grits has more.

South Padre Island joins the bag banning brigade

That didn’t take long.

Buoyed by a weeks-old law in nearby Brownsville, South Padre Island leaders Wednesday made the vacation hot spot the next Texas town to restrict the use of single-use plastic bags.

The unanimously approved prohibition against using plastic bags at points of sale becomes mandatory Jan. 1, 2012. Between Feb. 1 and then, merchants are asked to comply with a voluntary ban.

The measure was championed by a group of surfer-activists, said Alita Bagley, the city councilwoman who introduced it early last year.

“Living on an island with the Laguna Madre bay on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other side — we’re a very sensitive environment,” Bagley said. “This really seemed like sort of a natural step. The statistics are out there (on) what problems the amount of plastic causes, particularly in the marine environment.”

“Surfer-activists”. Who knew we had such things in Texas? Unlike the Brownsville ordinance, this one allows for compostable plastic bags, which if nothing else should make life a little easier for folks who use their grocery bags to clean up after their dogs. Kudos to South Padre for taking this step. We’ll see who follows next.