A bit of high quality snark from the floor of the House:
See here for more.
March 19th, 2011:
Taco trucks and city regulations
Lisa Gray writes about the food truck craze in Houston, and the obstacles that these foodie entrepreneurs must overcome.
Food trucks can be a serious urban amenity, a quick way to bring life to a street, parking lot or underused park. But some of Houston’s rules seem hellbent on preventing such outbreaks of civility.
Consider, for instance, the weird sanitation rule that prevents mobile food vendors from operating within 100 feet of outdoor seating – never mind setting up their own tables, chairs and umbrellas. Nobody seems to know why sanitation officials would consider tables near a truck less sanitary than a restaurant’s outdoor seating or a park’s picnic area. But there you have it: a law that not only discourages one of the great pleasures of urban life, but actually encourages people to get back in their cars and eat while driving. That’s supposed to make us safer and healthier?
The Boys also complain that they can’t set up shop in either downtown or the Medical Center, the two pedestrian-dense places in Houston. City rules make it prohibitively expensive for food trucks to get a license to use propane tanks in either the Medical Center or downtown. Never mind that New York and Chicago haven’t had much trouble with exploding hot-dog vendors.
You’d think that Houston would be eager to bring food trucks to its neighborhood parks. As a slew of renewal projects have proven – think Market Square Park, Discovery Green, Hermann Park – food is a powerful people magnet, able to draw people to what might otherwise be a spooky, underused place. But yet another city rule prevents food trucks from parking on a street for more than an hour while they do business. For the Eatsie Boys, that’s a serious barrier: Before the trailer can roll, they have to spend 20 minutes bungee-cording all the loose stuff in the kitchen. And it’s not worth it if they can only stay in a spot for an hour.
[…]
Instead, every day that they operate, they have to tow the trailer to a city-approved “commissary” – essentially, a big car wash – where they hose the truck down, then receive a green inspection sticker that says they’re good for that day. The process, including bungee-cording anything in the rolling kitchen that might fall, as well as the round-trip drive, takes about two hours out of their business day. It’d be way more efficient, Alex says, just to hook up water at their own site and wash the trailer down there.
As it happens, I recently attended a presentation by a lawyer from the Institute for Justice, which bills itself as “the nation’s only libertarian, civil liberties, public interest law firm”, on the subject of the city’s regulatory environment and its effect on entrepreneurs. You can see the booklet he handed out with the talk here. The subject of food trucks, in particular taco trucks, was covered in the lecture – that material starts on page 6 of the document. It should be noted that a number of these onerous regulations, in particular the daily trek to the city’s commissary, were imposed on the city by the Legislature, thanks to a bill passed by Rep. Dwayne Bohac at the request of then-Council Member Toni Lawrence. There was a lawsuit filed in 2007 after the legislation was enacted by some of the taco truck owners.
State Rep. Dwayne Bohac says he was protecting the public’s health when he co-authored two new state laws to tighten regulation of taco wagons in Houston and Harris County.
But more than 60 Hispanic owners of mobile taquerias have challenged the new state laws in federal court, contending they are more about racial intolerance than food safety. Their attorney says there has not been a single report of someone getting sick from eating at a taco wagon.
“Certain legislators don’t like these Hispanic-run businesses in their neighborhoods — they think they’re too low class,” said Houston attorney David Mestemaker, who is representing the taco truck owners suing the city, county and state over the new regulations.
The city ordinances that were required by Bohac’s law were allowed to go into effect, and as far as I know the litigation is still pending. I was thinking as I listened to the Institute for Justice fellow speak that there sure were a lot of food trucks popping up around town despite the regulatory muddle. You have to wonder how many more there might be without that 2007 law.
Historic Houston closing its salvage warehouse
LOCAL NONPROFIT Historic Houston is no longer accepting donations of building materials, and is closing its salvage warehouse and ending its salvage program, reports the organization’s founder and executive director, Lynn Edmundson. The organization stored and sold donated historic building materials reclaimed from doomed houses at a leased warehouse and yard at 1307 W. Clay and a separate “overflow” facility across the street at 1214 Joe Annie. Historic Houston’s 9-year-old salvage program typically removed and saved doors, windows, flooring, shiplap, siding, stair rails treads, and plumbing and lighting fixtures from old houses slated for demolition.
They were not making enough money to cover their costs in this down economy. The plan was to have a big sale for everything that’s currently in stock, give away whatever doesn’t sell to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, and then close up shop. That would be a big loss for everyone who might want to find this kind of stuff at a decent price, but it may not be the end of the story just yet. Here’s an update they posted to the site after the news broke.
We have been overwhelmed with the outpouring of support from the Houston community.
Five hundred donations of $100 each will allow us the ability to re-organize. While it will only offer a temporary solution, we ask that you help in any way you can. To donate, please see the “Support HH” section of this website.
We are entertaining all questions, ideas and donations. Please contact Lynn Edmundson at 713-522-0542 or [email protected]
Go here to learn more. I’d really like to see them make it, so if this is important to you, please consider helping them out. Thanks.
Republican legislators want SBOE do over on social studies
Texas House Appropriations Chairman Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie; Public Education Chairman Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands; and House Administration Chairman Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth; criticized the new [social studies] standards.
Various civil rights and minority advocacy organizations have opposed the standards, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education think tank, gave the standards a harsh review last month, saying they offered “misrepresentations at every turn.”
“When groups like the Fordham Institute call our standards ‘a politicized distortion of history’ and ‘an unwieldy tangle of social studies categories,’ we have a problem,” Eissler said.
Critics fault the State Board of Education for considering nearly 200 last-hour amendments before taking a final vote last year.
“These standards and the way they were developed just don’t pass the common-sense test,” Geren said. “The law has a process laid out for how to write our state’s curriculum, and they thumbed their nose at it and wrote standards themselves..”
See here for more on the Fordham Institute criticism of the social studies curriculum. I’m glad to see this, and I hope they have a lot more company. The nutjob wing of the SBOE would feel a lot more constrained in what it could do if it were subject to more criticism and oversight from the Lege, especially from fellow Republicans. It’s a lot easier being crazy when no one is paying attention. It also doesn’t hurt for folks like Pitts to remind the SBOE that it’s the Lege that allocates money to buy the textbooks needed to teach these new standards, and putting that expenditure off for a little while would save a ton of money at a time when we need all the savings we can get. I don’t know how much effect this will have, but it’s the right thing to do and a very welcome development.
One more thing:
David Bradley, R-Beaumont, a leader of the board’s social conservatives who championed the new curriculum standards, said he doubted a majority of the 15-member board would be willing to reopen the process.
The board has already started the curriculum rewrite for math standards, with health education to follow.
You may now commence making jokes about their intent to require that the Biblical value of pi be taught in math classes.
The Willingham arson investigator
The Statesman has a good story about former Deputy State Fire Marshal Manuel Vasquez, whose testimony helped convict Cameron Todd Willingham, and the status of the Willingham case with the Forensic Science Commission.
Spurred by John Bradley, the Williamson County prosecutor who was appointed chairman by Gov. Rick Perry midway through the case, the commission has asked Attorney General Greg Abbott to determine whether it has jurisdiction to investigate the Willingham case. Legal briefs were due last week, and Abbott’s opinion is due by July 30.
If Abbott gives the green light, the commission’s next step will be to draft a final report on its Willingham findings. Commission members declined to discuss the report or its contents, but judging by their earlier statements, there are two essential questions:
• Was the arson finding based on valid science?
• Were fire officials negligent in their investigation and trial testimony?
In the spotlight is Vasquez, who had 30 years of firefighting experience, including 17 years as an investigator, when he told jurors that he had discovered numerous signs of arson at Willingham’s house.
But thanks to improved scientific understanding of fire behavior, it is now known that Vasquez was wrong about several key points.
Those two questions have always been what the Forensic Science Commission is all about. We can’t fix problems that we don’t acknowledge that we have. By now it’s clear that the answer to question 1 is no, not at all. The answer to 2 is less clear, but I for one would feel better about absolving the State Fire Marshall of any blame for their ruling at the time if they would quit defending the original ruling of arson and admit that they know more now than they did then. How can we have any faith they’re not still doing it wrong if they won’t own up to it?
Anyway. If the Bradley nomination truly is dead, then he will be off the Commission by the time AG Abbott makes his ruling. If so, and if Abbott doesn’t continue the hatchet job for Bradley, we may finally be able to put this matter to rest. It never should have taken this long, but better late than never.