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July 17th, 2020:

Interview with Commissioner Rodney Ellis

Jul 17th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Commissioner Rodney Ellis

Normally, I do candidate interviews for elections, though I do branch out sometimes when there’s an issue or some election-adjacent matter I want to explore. It’s in that spirit that I bring you this conversation I had with Commissioner Rodney Ellis about Commissioners Court’s decision to hire an elections administrator, which was a move that caught some people by surprise and generated a fair amount of opposition, both from Harris County Tax Assessor Ann Harris Bennett and former Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman. The job of elections administrator would replace some current functions handled by those offices, which likely explains some of the dissent. It’s a big change for Harris County, but it’s a change to something that nearly every other big county in Texas already does, as do many large counties around the country. I had the chance to ask Commissioner Ellis a few questions about what this means, why we’re doing it, and what we should expect. Hopefully, this will help answer some of the questions you may have had as well. As Commissioner Ellis notes, this will be on the agenda for the next Court meeting on Tuesday, and you can make your voice heard to them by all the traditional means as well. Here’s what we talked about:

What do you think? Leave a comment and let me know.

Censuring Abbott

Jul 17th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

An amusing sideline, if nothing else.

Republicans in eight different Texas counties have now voted to censure Gov. Greg Abbott for his order requiring Texans to wear face coverings and take other protective measures as COVID-19 spreads throughout the state.

Over the weekend, the Henderson County Republican Party Executive Committee, just west of Tyler, held an emergency meeting to censure Abbott, a Republican, for not calling the Texas Legislature into a special session to help manage the COVID-19 emergency.

Since July 4, seven other county Republican Party Executive Committees around the state have approved censures of Abbott, including in Montgomery County, where they voted 40-0 on the censure.

The Montgomery County Republican Executive Committee’s censure resolution says Abbott has acted with “disregard to the Texas Constitution,” pointing to the mandated mask requirement for people in counties with at least 20 positive cases, limiting gatherings and the closing of bars across the state.

It’s similar to a censure resolution passed by Ector County Republicans in the Odessa-Midland area.

“The Ector County Republican Executive Board decided it would be a fitting day for us to send a clear message to Governor Abbott,” the party wrote on its Facebook page. “A message that we will no longer sit quietly while he over reaches his authority again, again, and again.”

I noted the Ector County resolution when it happened. Here’s the list so far, according to the sidebar:

Montgomery County
Ector County
Llano County
Harrison County
Denton County
Hood County
Eastland County
Henderson County

The ones who are arguing that Abbott needs to call a special session and involve the Legislature in some of these decisions are raising a fair point that deserves better elucidation than a Steven Hotze lawsuit. The ones that are basically an expression of “but I don’t wanna wear a mask!” can go pound sand, while wearing a mask. I think that about covers it.

Give reformers a seat at the police collective bargaining table

Jul 17th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

This is a clear path forward.

Chas Moore watched in shock one night in 2017 as Austin City Council voted on the city’s proposed police contract.

He and other criminal justice reformers had spent months observing contract negotiations and lobbying council members to reject a deal they said was too expensive and lacked crucial accountability measures.

The city’s 10 council members and mayor raised their hands to vote the deal down.

“I don’t think anyone thought that would happen,” said Moore, president of the Austin Justice Coalition. “Historically people fight police unions — and they do not win.”

The vote sent police back to the negotiating table, and the resulting contract included a slew of reforms — at half the cost of the previous version.

In Houston, that negotiating table is behind closed doors.

Activists here want to change that as the city and the police union negotiate a new contract this year. They are again seeking the right to observe deliberations and to try to change provisions they say protect officers accused of wrongdoing. But while other cities with similar bargaining rules allow residents to observe negotiations, Houston does not, aided by what critics say are gaps in the state’s government code that do not clearly require union contract negotiations to be open to the public.

Houston’s police budget in 2020 tallied about $911 million — by far the largest allocation in the city budget’s general fund. While other cities across the U.S. slashed police budgets, Houston’s City Council unanimously in June passed a budget with a $20 million increase for the police department.

The pressure for reform rose around the country in the wake of the killing of former Houston resident George Floyd in police custody, and organizers say it’s overdue here.

Not long after that Austin contract rejection, community organizers in Houston sought to observe police contract deliberations here.

Local criminal justice advocate Tarsha Jackson said she approached City Hall in 2018 to try to share community concerns — but the criminal justice reformer with the Texas Organizing Project said she found an opaque process.

“It was not public. It was like a guessing game,” Jackson said.

The contract was settled behind closed doors without them getting a chance to see it or offer their input.

“As we’re having these conversations around police accountability and reform, how can we have these conversations without the community?” Moore asked regarding the efforts around the country to get a seat at the table during contract negotiations.

We all recognize that a big piece of police reform must be done via the collective bargaining process. Given that, and given the action items that the reformers are seeking, they need a seat at the table or those items will not be addressed. The Lege can and should address some items as well, but they already have a lot on their plate, and it’s never a good idea to depend on a particular bill making it through the Lege, because so many things can happen to knock it off course. This is something we can do now, because the new CBA is coming up soon.

The GOP convention is off to a great start

Jul 17th, 2020
by Charles Kuffner.
10 comments

Ain’t technology great?

Getting the virtual state convention up and running “has not been a walk in the park,” said Republican Party of Texas Chair James Dickey in a Facebook Live chat Wednesday evening.

Glitches related to credentialing had yet to be ironed out Thursday, preventing the party from initiating the business at hand. The live feed displayed text stating “We are at ease” and that everyone would be notified when the credentialing emails had been sent.

The frustration was evident in the social media comments.

“Has anyone received their credentials,” asked one person.

“We didn’t get ANYTHING after the registration confirmation. Feeling shut out & silenced,” posted another person.

“Still no credentials … This is crazy,” wrote a third delegate.

And yet another participant had words of blame for the party’s executive committee, writing, “If you weren’t watching during the last couple of SREC meetings, you should watch them. It is the failure to act that has brought us to this online meeting. Three and a half hour meeting to decide nothing. See which SREC were driving the train off the cliff by their interruptions and antics. If SREC members can’t remember parliamentary procedure, Heaven help us when it comes to the meeting of the convention. If SREC can’t properly use the system, who will thousands of others. Like always, in was not everyone’s fault. See if you were happy with your SREC’s interruptions and actions. Maybe yours were good ones … maybe yours needs to be changed. Make that decision while we wait.”

Never wanting to miss an opportunity to poke at the competition, the Democratic Party of Texas sent out a news release encouraging reporters to watch reruns of last month’s Democratic state convention while waiting for the GOP to fix its technical glitches.

Maybe should have spent more time preparing, and less time in court? Just a thought.

Ah, well, at least Greg Abbott got a warm reception for his keynote speech.

Gov. Greg Abbott delivered a firm defense Thursday of his coronavirus response to delegates at the Texas GOP convention who even he acknowledged have grown agitated with him.

Abbott addressed the discontent head-on as the virtual convention got underway Thursday afternoon, starting with the statewide mask requirement that he issued earlier this month. Since then, several Republican county leaders, including in some of the state’s biggest red counties, have voted to censure the governor.

“Now I know that many of all you are frustrated — so am I,” Abbott said in a video message to the delegates. “I know that many of you do not like the mask requirement — I don’t either. It is the last thing that I wanted to do.

“Actually the next to the last,” Abbott added. “The last thing that any of us want is to lock Texas back down again.”

Coronavirus has surged in recent weeks across the state, and Abbott sought to impress upon the delegates how dire the situation has become.

“Each day the facts get worse,” he said. “If we don’t slow this disease quickly, our hospitals will get overrun, and I fear it will even inflict some of the people that I’m talking to right now.”

Why the facts have gotten worse each day is left as an exercise for the reader.

UPDATE: The state GOP is gonna take today to try to fix stuff, and then resume the convention tomorrow.