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April 4th, 2013:

An early look at At Large #3

Apr 4th, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
6 comments

A little while back, Campos listed all of the people who had filed designations of treasurer for city office, which is the step you need to take before you can raise any money for a campaign. As expected, the field for City Council At Large #3, the only open At Large seat, is already crowded. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the six candidates who have already expressed their intent to run for this seat. Here they are:

Chris Carmona

Chris Carmona – Facebook – Twitter

Carmona is making his second run for At Large #3. He was one of two opponents to CM Melissa Noriega in 2011, receiving 26.20% of the vote. Carmona is a Republican, was involved in the petition drive to overturn the homeless feeding ordinance, and would undoubtedly be an antagonist of Mayor Parker if both were to win this November. He’s also not a fan of Metro, as the entry on his blog-like campaign website would indicate. I wanted to note that particular entry, in which he grouses about the city not being prepared for the NBA All-Star Game this past February, since subsequent events and post-weekend reviews proved him to be quite spectacularly wrong. Predicting the future is hard, y’all.

Roland Chavez

Roland Chavez – Facebook – Twitter

Chavez is a first-time candidate, who announced his retirement from the Houston Fire Department after 34 years at the same time as he announced his candidacy. His treasurer is the former chief of staff for the late Sen. Mario Gallegos, which will undoubtedly be a good connection for him to have for his campaign. He does not yet have a campaign website or Twitter account that I could find. Chavez is a Democrat but as we know the firefighters and the Mayor do not have a good relationship, so it will be interesting to see how that plays out.

UPDATE: The Chavez campaign has informed me that he does have a Twitter account, which is now listed above. My thanks to Priscilla for the feedback.

Michael Kubosh

Michael Kubosh – Facebook

One of the Fighting Kubosh Brothers, Michael Kubosh ran as a Democrat against Sen. Dan Patrick in 2006, but is more readily identified as a Republican. He does not yet have a campaign webpage, and in what may just be an oddity there is a – Twitter account in his name, but it has had no activity. I noted Kubosh’s announcement here. He’s best known for being a leader in the effort to ban red light cameras in Houston, and his brother Paul was the plaintiff in the now-dropped lawsuit against the city over the homeless feeding ordinance. Kubosh was at Ben Hall’s campaign announcement event, not that there was any question about what his relationship with Mayor Parker would be like.

Roy Morales

Roy Morales

It’s like old times having Roy run for city office again, isn’t it? He ran for At Large #3 in the special election in May, 2007, losing to CM Noriega in the June runoff, then again in a November rematch. He ran for Mayor in 2009, coming in fourth, and ran for CD29 in 2010. He finished serving a six-year term as HCDE Trustee at the end of last year. He doesn’t have a campaign Facebook page or a Twitter account that I could find, but he has used his personal Facebook page to make campaign announcements. He is a Republican, having run for HCDE and CD29 on the GOP ticket. While Morales has been an actual opponent of Mayor Parker from the 2009 campaign, it’s not quite clear what his relationship with her would be if he were elected to Council, since he’s largely been quiet about city issues since then. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Rogene Calvert

Rogene Calvert

Campos notes that Calvert did not list what office she was running for on her form, but I know this is the office she has in mind. She is a first time candidate, is on the UH Center for Public Policy Advisory Board and is a past President of the Asian Chamber of Commerce for Houston. She is a Democrat. I don’t know for sure but I would expect that she would be mostly an ally of Mayor Parker. If elected, she would be the first Asian-American to serve At Large since Gordon Quan.

Jenifer Pool

Jenifer Rene Pool – Facebook – Twitter

Pool ran for At Large #2 in 2011, finishing 7th in the field of nine with 7.06% of the vote. You can listen to the interview I did with her for that race here. She is a Democrat and a past President of the Houston GLBT Political Caucus, and is an ally of Mayor Parker. She was as far as I can tell the first entrant in this race.

That’s what I know right now. I expect there will be more entrants into this race – seems like the magic number has been nine candidates for open seat At Large races recently. Nancy Sims notes this KUHF story on At Large #3 that says there are eight candidates so far. I emailed Nancy to ask who else she knew about, and she replied by saying Laurie Robinson, who ran against Jolanda Jones in At Large #5 last year, has sent out an announcement of her intent to run; Nancy also mentioned that former State Rep. Al Edwards has been rumored to be looking at the race. Robinson’s Facebook page has no mention of her running for anything – for what it’s worth, the rumor I’d heard was that she’s looking at At Large #2 – and her campaign webpage is currently inactive. I’m going to file her as tentative and Edwards (Lord help us) as speculative for now.

For the other six candidates, all have a plausible case for making it to the runoff, though if we’ve learned anything from recent elections it’s that no one should overestimate their name ID, and in the absence of clear information voters can and will make random selections. Having said that, if there is one candidate in this race who can claim some name ID, it’s Roy Morales, and if this election were to be held tomorrow I’d put my chips on him making it to the runoff. Kubosh is probably the runnerup in the name ID department, but he and Carmona will be fishing from basically the same pool of voters as Morales, and I have a hard time seeing more than one of them emerge from the pack as a finalist. Kubosh has some inroads into the African American community from his anti-red light camera advocacy, but I don’t know how much that might add up to if someone like Robinson or Edwards gets into this race. In many open At Large races there has been a single dominant Democratic candidate – Peter Brown, Melissa Noriega, Jolanda Jones, Brad Bradford – but that doesn’t appear to be the case here. As always it will be interesting to see where the money and the institutional endorsements go. Finally, after all the recent concern about the lack of Latino representation on City Council, it’s good to see three viable Latino candidates running, even if two of them are not to my taste. No guarantees any of them will win, of course, but as they say about the lottery, you can’t win it if you’re not in it.

UPDATE: Laurie Robinson posted the letter she sent to supporters on my Facebook wall, in which she said she will not be a candidate in 2013, though she may run for something in the future. So take her off the list for this year.

Williams’ “Medicaid” plan

Apr 4th, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

I’m really not sure what to make of this.

It’s constitutional – deal with it

State Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, is crafting a Medicaid reform plan that would use premium tax revenue to subsidize private health plans for uninsured Texans, his office confirmed on Tuesday night.

Gary Scharrer, a spokesman for Williams, said the proposal is “still a concept,” one that is designed to “buy some time” as Texas debates how to overhaul Medicaid in the midst of pressure from the federal government to embrace elements of the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare.”

According to early details, Williams’ plan would scrape premium tax revenue from newly insured Texans who sign up for coverage under the state’s health insurance exchange — an online insurance marketplace that is mandatory under federal health reform — and use it to subsidize private coverage for poor, uninsured Texans starting in late 2015.

Scharrer cautioned that Williams’ proposal does not call for expanding Medicaid, which the state’s top Republican leaders adamantly oppose. Nor does it call for raising taxes; the premium tax revenue will be a side effect of more Texans being forced to buy insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

Williams is “really emphatic that Texas will not extend or expand the current Medicaid system,” Scharrer said.

I can’t tell what the goal of this is. Is it to help provide health care coverage to people who otherwise wouldn’t have it? In particular, is it intended as a way to provide some kind of health care coverage to people who would be eligible for Medicaid if Texas would agree to expand it? The Express News suggests that this is indeed the case.

Williams said the money from the extra premium taxes could be used to pay for Texas’ cost of expanding health care coverage to those who would otherwise qualify for Medicaid expansion.

His preference would be to add them to the insurance exchange and help them to buy coverage, although he said it also could be done by putting them in a revised Medicaid program.

He would like to wait until September 2015. That would give lawmakers another regular legislative session in 2015 to examine the program.

“And so I don’t want us to get committed to any program that we can’t pay for and that the federal government is not going to pay for,” Williams said.

Of course, the federal government is paying for it, assuming that Williams’ Republican colleagues in Washington don’t succeed in figuring out some way to cripple it. One must admit there is some risk to that, however perverse the whole thing is. Be that as it may, I’d like to know how much revenue Williams thinks he can “scrape” this way, and how many people it would help. I’m going to step out on a limb and guess that the number is smaller than the number of people who would be eligible for expanded Medicaid. More importantly, why this for a revenue source and not the billions of dollars of federal money available? Back to the Trib for that:

State Rep. John Zerwas, R-Simonton, confirmed Wednesday that he will incorporate into his own Medicaid reform bill a proposal by Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, to use premium tax revenue to subsidize private health policies for the uninsured.

“It fits very well with Texas’ attempt to find a unique solution that would be sustainable,” Zerwas said. He said the measure would allow Texas to embrace some parts of federal health reform “earlier versus later,” and would “hopefully bring insurance policies to these people that otherwise wouldn’t have them.”

But the two lawmakers diverge on a key point — whether or not to draw down billions of federal dollars to expand the state’s Medicaid-eligible population under the Affordable Care Act.

[…]

Medicaid expansion is “completely off the table — what I’m interested in is a reform program,” Williams said Wednesday morning.

Zerwas said he authored House Bill 3791 to craft a “Texas solution” to Medicaid reform that would allow the state to draw down federal Medicaid expansion financing while implementing cost containment reforms. So far, Zerwas has suggested those reforms include co-payments and wellness incentives, but the details of his plan remain thin.

Still not clear what, other than straight up antipathy to Medicaid and the ACA, is driving Williams’ refusal to draw down federal funds. The sad thing is that even this baby step, two years out, would be a big improvement over anything the Republicans have done to health care in Texas. It’s ridiculously limited and needlessly complicated, which gives you some idea of just how bad the status quo is, but it’s still a tiny nudge forward. I just hope Rep. Zerwas’ perspective wins out in the end.

New bike share kiosks now open

Apr 4th, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

Woo hoo!

Organizers of Houston’s bike-sharing program are excited about an increase in use of the community bicycles since 18 new kiosks around downtown and Midtown opened.

After slow-going last year for the B-Cycle program, use of the bikes increased since the weekend, when word that many of the new stations were open spread on social media sites.

“We have skyrocketed in checkouts,” said Laura Spanjian, Houston’s sustainability director. “Like a 300 percent increase in the last 72 hours.”

[…]

The recent additions expanded Houston’s bike sharing network from three stations and 18 bikes in February to 21 stations and 175 bikes as of Wednesday. Three more stations and more bikes are planned next month, completing the second phase. A $750,000 deal with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas paid for the expansion and operations.

See here for the announcement of the expansion, here for the Mayor’s press release, and here for a map of the kiosk locations. According to Laura Spanjian, who responded to an email question I sent, the Week of March 18, with only 5 stations live, there were 150 checkouts and 84 memberships. The week of March 25, with 21 stations live, there were 500 checkouts and 312 memberships. This week has been even busier, with more than 75 new memberships sold at the weekly farmer’s market downtown. I bought my membership yesterday, too – my office is moving downtown in May, and there’s a kiosk a block from where my office will be. I’m very much looking forward to having non-car options for getting to lunch. As I said in my previous post, there are lots of good options for where to expand next, but let’s see some good numbers here first. I’m encouraged by how it’s going so far.

Somewhat improved payday lending bill passes Senate committee

Apr 4th, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
4 comments

I still don’t think it’s good enough.

Breathing new life into a proposal that was doomed by the opposition of consumer groups only last week, a Texas Senate committee approved strengthened legislation Tuesday that imposes restrictions on the payday loan industry that could save desperate Texas consumers some $220 million a year.

Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, said his proposal would end the cycle of debt that entraps thousands of Texans each year by curtailing the kinds of credit products offered, limiting loan amounts based on a borrower’s income and capping the number of times a loan can be refinanced.

Acknowledging that some consumer groups still opposed the bill as insufficiently restrictive, Carona cautioned that a politically powerful industry would kill legislation that reached too far. “In the eyes of none of you is this a perfect bill,” he said at a Senate Business and Commerce Committee hearing Tuesday. “But this is the only version that will pass this session. I am convinced the industry has given as far as it intends to go.”

Carona noted that according to the state’s consumer credit commissioner, the bill’s provisions would limit extensions of loans, saving Texas borrowers as much as $221 million a year. “If that’s not progress, then I am not sure what progress is,” he said.

Only last week the proposal appeared dead when every consumer group involved in negotiations testified against it. On Tuesday, however, representatives of Texas Impact, the Center for Public Policy Priorities and Goodwill Industries gave their blessings. “This will meaningfully benefit more than 300,000 borrowers and will save real money,” said Bee Moorhead of Texas Impact.

See here and here for the background. The bill in question is SB1247. Rep. Mike Villarreal says he is now prepared to move forward with his companion bill after Sen. Carona’s modifications. Others, such as the AARP, Texas Appleseed, and Sen. Letitia Van de Putte, who cast the sole No vote in committee, remain opposed. The modified bill still preempts local ordinances, which to me is a deal-breaker. I believe cities should not be prevented from addressing whatever shortcomings they see in the statewide regulations on these parasites. Until that provision is taken out, I can’t support this bill.

Texas blog roundup for the week of April 1

Apr 4th, 2013
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

The Texas Progressive Alliance believes strongly in marriage equality as it brings you this week’s roundup.

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