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February 2nd, 2021:

Castro says he’s not likely to run in 2022

Feb 2nd, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
5 comments

Bummer.

Julian Castro

Julián Castro — formerly a presidential candidate, secretary of the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, and mayor of San Antonio — told KXAN this week that it’s “very unlikely” that he will seek any elected office in 2022.

Castro said he is focused on helping elect Democratic candidates through his political action committee, People First Future.

“Right now, I don’t plan to run in 2022,” Castro said. “I feel like I just went through the marathon of 2020 and then supported candidates and so, right now, I don’t have a target in mind in terms of when I’m going to run again.”

[…]

Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said the political window could soon close for candidates like O’Rourke and Castro, if they don’t win races soon.

“There’s a real shelf life for a political career if you can’t strike while the iron is hot,” Rottinghaus told KXAN. “The likelihood is that activists are going to move on, donors are going to consider new people, and people are going to forget you.”

As we know, Beto is thinking about running, so we’ve got that going for us. I don’t speak for Julián Castro, I have no sway over him, I have no business telling him what to do, but I basically agree with Brandon Rottinghaus about political shelf lives. One reason for that is that the Democratic bench is a little deeper than it used to be – remember when every article that speculated about which Dem might run for a statewide position mentioned John Sharp, mostly because there were so few obvious possibilities to mention? I will remind everyone, myself included, that it is still early, though given the short runway to the filing deadline and the need to raise a gazillion dollars against Abbott and his war chest, it gets late real quickly. My request to Julián Castro, if he really isn’t going to run, is to make that clear to other potential candidates so they don’t have to factor him into their thinking, and maybe encourage – and promise to support – other potential candidates that he thinks would do well. We do need to start forming a lineup, so that we can speak with a more unified voice against Abbott and his myriad screwups and failures as quickly as possible.

There’s a real lack of consensus about the I-45 project

Feb 2nd, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

It seems unlikely that TxDOT could just throw up its hands and walk away from this, but it’s at least a possible scenario.

A proposed agreement devised to bring planners and critics of a massive redesign of Interstate 45 together has left officials in many ways further apart and opponents with a chance to convince more people the $8 billion project is stuck in the past.

No one is pulling the plug on the freeway rebuild or its design, but transportation officials said the lack of consensus between the Texas Department of Transportation, Harris County, Houston and the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s Transportation Policy Council has the region’s largest-ever freeway rebuild at a crossroads. It is a hurdle a proposed memorandum of understanding was intended to clear, but the various agencies could not even agree on the agreement.

Transportation Policy Council members tabled a resolution last Friday after TxDOT said that even voting on an agreement that had no legally binding effect could complicate the project. That left some officials struggling to understand how various concerns about the project can even be addressed.

“I think it is a huge black mark on TPC and H-GAC that after all of this work and all of this community involvement nothing happens,” said Carrin Patman, chairwoman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority and a member of the committee that worked on the now-scuttled agreement. “I just can’t imagine this thing foundering at this point and how it will affect the public’s perception.”

[…]

The Transportation Policy Council, which doles out federal money for highways and must include the project in its spending plans for the next decade, brought TxDOT and others together in June 2020 to create an agreement outlining what each hoped to gain from the project and some outline of the design’s goals. A committee was formed to develop a memorandum of understanding, an agreement between the entities outlining what they jointly commit to and who is responsible for certain particulars. The committee was headed by Carol Lewis, director of Texas Southern University’s Center for Transportation Training and Research.

Lewis said the various groups achieved a lot, developing what she called a framework from which to build consensus even with “extremes of positions” among TxDOT and the project’s critics.

“The opinions were not necessarily all aligned but we got to a good place,” Lewis said.

TxDOT’s legal review, however, called for sweeping changes, eliminating any part of the proposed agreement that conflicted with the current environmental plan. Otherwise, lawyers concluded, TxDOT would not able to sign a deal that differs with what it proposed to federal officials.

Unable to get a firm, binding agreement, Lewis said the committee sought a resolution that would go to H-GAC’s transportation council. The reasoning was that a resolution could at least serve as a guidepost of what everyone wanted to achieve.

Even that ran into opposition from TxDOT. The concern, state officials said, is a resolution would send mixed signals that the project did not have regional support, although the transportation council’s 10-year plan has set aside money for it.

In a statement some said boded ominously, [TxDOT Houston District Engineer Eliza] Paul noted if the Houston area slowed or stopped its support of the project, it could lose its place in line for state funding.

“I know TxDOT is not going to let the $8 billion sit around until we know what we are going to do,” Paul said.

I don’t know what to make of that, so go read the rest. As noted in the last update, Harris County and the city of Houston oppose the design as it is now but still want to see the project work. Other groups like LINK Houston, Air Alliance Houston, and Stop I-45 are firmly in opposition, and there’s some hope among them that this could be a way to kill the project. I have a hard time believing that, but given how long this idea has been in the works, I could imagine it being delayed for another few years, with the current pot of money being re-apportioned. The TPC has another meeting in late February to try again with this resolution, so we’ll see if they’ve made any progress on it by then.

The second shot portal

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

People are going to need this, too.

Houston officials plan to launch a website this week that will let people schedule appointments for their second doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Health Director Stephen Williams on Monday said officials plan to send out that link to people who got their first shot from the city “later this week, and maybe even as soon as tomorrow.”

The new process would be welcome news to people waiting on their second doses, many of whom have grown uneasy as their windows for the booster shot approach. Currently, city health workers call vaccinees to schedule their shots in the week before the 28-day window when the second dose is recommended.

The city has cited new guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that the second Moderna dose should be given as close to 28 days as possible after the first, but can be given as far out as 42 days. The Health Department has said it anticipates everyone who gets a shot from the city should be able to get their second one within 28 days. The city has asked residents to avoid calling the city unless they are less than 48 hours from their 28-day window.

Mayor Sylvester Turner said the city has given out more than 2,300 second shots already and has scheduled another 11,971. He said the city has received 18,600 doses for second shots. That is in addition to 41,950 doses for first shots, of which the city has administered 33,839 — about 80 percent of its supply.

The city closed its senior wait list — operated by the Harris County Area Agency on Aging — on Friday after more than 70,000 people called to enroll. Williams said it is “hard to discern” when the city will reopen that portal. It is separate from Harris County’s wait list, which launched last week, and has grown to more than 165,000 people.

I’ve seen chatter on Twitter and Facebook from people who have gotten the first shot (or helped a family member get it) and been confused about how to schedule the second one. Hopefully this will help with that, because obviously people will need to get that in a timely and orderly manner. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the volume of second shots will need to ramp up to meet the volume of first shots in short order. The first shot volume is starting to accelerate, but it will need to increase well beyond that. Help is coming, we’ve got to do the best we can until then.