Off the Kuff | Knowledge Is Good

A longer look at why we don’t have hockey in Houston

Posted on May 12, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

“I think it’s surprising that if you look at the growth of the NHL and you see that Atlanta and Houston aren’t represented, that is sort of shocking given the size of those markets,” said Neil Smith, former general manager of the New York Rangers.

“I think (Houston has) got everything, but it doesn’t have an owner. That’s the only thing. I think it has everything you want in a major market with a building that’s got the revenue sources you need to support a major league team. I think it would be a great place.”

In December 1990, then-Quebec Nordiques owner Marcel Aubut said “San Diego, Miami, Houston, Seattle, Atlanta. The NHL believes our future is in these cities.”

In the years since, 17 markets have gotten new teams via expansion or relocation. But not Houston.

“Other (Sun Belt) markets like Dallas, Tampa Bay, Florida and even Carolina, those teams are all good, and their markets are great, but they don’t honestly compare to Houston,” former Aeros and NHL enforcer John Scott told the Chronicle in 2017. “I don’t know why there hasn’t been discussion of a team in Houston, because it’s kind of a no-brainer. If Dallas can support a team, Houston can obviously support a team.”

While Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta has expressed more interest of late in bringing an NHL team to Toyota Center, Houston has been passed by another market with the Arizona Coyotes’ move to Salt Lake City for next season made official Thursday.

[…]

When he bought the Rockets in October 2017, Fertitta said he “would put an NHL team here tomorrow.” Last fall, Rockets president of business operations Gretchen Sheirr said making Toyota Center “hockey ready” was part of the building’s future renovations.

While he’s been open to adding an NHL team, Fertitta — who bid $5.5 billion for the NFL’s Washington Commanders last year — has included caveats through the years such as “whatever we do has to make sense” and “it’s got to be good for both of us.”

This week, Fertitta told the Houston Business Journal that he was not allowed to bid for the Coyotes because “the NHL views Houston as an expansion target, removing the ability for us to purchase and relocate an existing team.” He added that he was still committed to bringing pro hockey to Houston in a partnership with real estate developer Ira Mitzner, the CEO of the Houston-based RIDA Development Corporation.

But given how quickly Smith moved to acquire an NHL franchise after buying the Jazz in December 2020, Fertitta’s interest in landing a team has been questioned by hockey insiders.

“Tilman Fertitta being interested in a hockey team, it’s almost passive aggressive, because does he really want a hockey team?” said John Shannon, a veteran Canadian analyst and sports television producer who also worked four seasons in the NHL office. “Maybe he does. He doesn’t want to pay what (commissioner Gary Bettman) wants him to pay, I’m sure, if it came to fruition. But he doesn’t want the competition for an arena, for sure.

“If Ryan Smith in Salt Lake City owned the Rockets, this might be a different discussion because he’s a huge hockey fan and wants a hockey team. … I don’t think there’s a huge advocate in Houston at this point other than Fertitta, who’s trying to probably make the best business move, as opposed to being a passionate hockey fan.”

[…]

While Houston might lack an outspoken in-market advocate, it does have an influential champion who has Bettman’s ear.

Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs, longtime chairman of the NHL’s board of governors, said in October 2018 that “clearly the one area that is missing is Houston, because that’s a great city.”

“Oh, Mr. Jacobs carries a lot of juice, absolutely,” Shannon said. “He’s one of Gary Bettman’s closest confidants.”

Former NHL player Nick Kypreos, a longtime analyst and radio host for Canadian cable network Sportsnet, said Jacobs’ influence shouldn’t be taken lightly.

“I think he carries a lot of weight, and if he’s in the corner of Houston, it’s just another reason to take Houston seriously,” Kypreos said.

But Jacobs’ support goes only so far.

“Until there’s a building to play in, they’re not going to Houston,” Dallas Stars chairman Jim Lites said. “I think Houston would be absolutely the best expansion market in the United States, but until the guy who controls the building there wants to have an NHL team, it isn’t going to happen.

“I’ve had people come to me and ask me about (who) would be interested in acquiring an expansion team or transferring a franchise there, and I know Gary doesn’t stand in its way. But he won’t give a franchise away just to get one there, nor should he.”

See here for the most recent entry in this saga. The bottom line is that if Tilman Fertitta, who controls the arena in which the hockey would be played, really wanted an NHL team, he’d be very likely to get one. If that’s what you want for Houston, now you know who to direct your pleas to.

Posted in Other sports | Tagged downtown, Gary Bettman, hockey, Houston, Houston Aeros, NHL, Phoenix Coyotes, Rockets, Texas, Tilman Fertitta, Toyota Center | 5 Comments

Election 3 of 4 for SD15 is up next

Posted on May 11, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Early voting for the primary runoffs starts May 20, which is to say a week from Monday. Are we not excited?

Molly Cook

Few voters paid attention to Saturday’s state Senate District 15 special election that saw emergency room nurse Molly Cook prevail over state Rep. Jarvis Johnson, a result the veteran Democrat blames on himself.

He and his supporters got complacent, Johnson admitted Monday.

Now, the four-term state rep has less than three weeks to reverse Saturday’s defeat. The pair face off again in a May 28 Democratic primary runoff.

“It’s time to take the gloves off,” Johnson said, taking aim at Cook. “Obviously, your tricks have worked. Your lies invigorated your people. It engaged them and enraged them and they went to the polls.”

[…]

Johnson blamed his defeat on “poli-tricks,” pointing the finger at a series of mailers sent to voters by the Cook campaign that claimed Johnson is not trustworthy enough to defend Democratic values in the Senate.

One of the mailers claims Johnson has “caved to Greg Abbott too many times” and details perceived shortcomings in Johnson’s record on the issues of gun control, abortion rights, healthcare expansion and public school funding.

He also said he expects further political attacks in the weeks leading up to the primary runoff, specifically targeting his family life.

“I underestimated the impact,” Johnson said. “Sometimes when you tell a lie enough, in some peoples’ heads, it becomes the truth.”

Cook denied Johnson’s claim that her campaign is planning to roll out any negative campaigning about his family. A primary race is the most appropriate time for a “thoughtful and deliberate review” of Johnson’s record of service in the House, she added.

[…]

For months, Johnson has been framing himself as the race’s frontrunner, touting a long record of service on Houston City Council and in the state House of Representatives. He largely has avoided engaging in direct back-and-forth with Cook apart from an April 17 debate.

Now, he promises to confront the negative campaigning head on, teeing up what could be a contentious final few weeks leading to the runoff.

Cook, for her part, said she intends to continue the strategy that delivered Saturday’s victory and the title of senator-elect, striking a tone as the new frontrunner in declining to respond to Johnson’s comments.

“We are not taking a single thing for granted,” Cook said. “The district has placed a lot of trust in us, but that means they also trust me to go out and win on May 28.”

The win may give Cook a small boost in fundraising and enthusiasm among her supporters, although it is unlikely to have a large impact on the runoff, said Michael Adams, a professor of public affairs at Texas Southern University.

Johnson’s strategy prior to the special election was to present himself in the mold of Whitmire, a moderate Democrat known for dealmaking in a Republican-controlled Senate, Adams said.

“He started running a more centrist campaign thinking he could draw from the well of Whitmire’s supporters, and that wasn’t the case,” Adams said.

Adams also credited Cook’s multiple strong campaigns in the district, first running in 2022 running against Whitmire in the Democratic primary, for boosting her name ID despite not previously holding elected office.

I think there’s something to Johnson’s statement that he “got complacent” for the special election, which to be fair had mostly low stakes. I’m aware of quite a bit of canvassing done by the Cook campaign – which, again to be fair, is what you’d expect the candidate that trailed by 15 points in the previous election to do – as well as quite a bit of mail, including a number of attack mailers. Johnson’s campaign sent some mail, including some hits on Cook, as well, just not as much. I have no doubt that this sprint to the finish line will be loud and messy.

How loud and messy it gets will depend in part on how much each campaign has to spend. The most recent campaign finance reports we have – for Johnson and for Cook – are the 8 day reports for the special election. Here’s where they stand:


Candidate    Raised    Spent    Loan   On Hand
==============================================
Cook        291,236  239,404       0    88,079
Johnson     227,983  108,336  35,000    94,491

There will be an 8 day report for the primary runoff, which should drop on May 20, so we’ll see how busy they’ve been in the meantime. I agree with Professor Adams that the win on the 4th gives Cook a bit of momentum but not that much. It’s a different race and a different electorate, and while turnout won’t be as high as it was in March (49,603 total votes out of 53,083 cast ballots) it will be higher than it just was in the special. Cook needs her supporters and she needs to win over some of the folks who voted for a different candidate before. Johnson in theory just needs his own voters. The HD139 runoff should help Johnson; there’s no analogous race that ought to boost Cook. We’ll see how it goes.

As a reminder, my interview from the primary with Molly Cook is here and my interview with Jarvis Johnson is here. Go listen to them (again) and get ready to vote soon. Early voting for this one is strictly a five day Monday-to-Friday affair, so make sure you get right on it.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged campaign finance reports, Democratic primary, early voting, Election 2024, Jarvis Johnson, Molly Cook, runoff, SD15, Senate, special election, Texas, turnout | Comments Off

More on the coming HISD cuts

Posted on May 11, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I repeat, this is going to suck.

An undisclosed number of Houston ISD teachers and principals received notices this week that they will be out of a job, state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles said Thursday.

Miles said principals have begun making decisions about which teachers to hire back based on certain data points, such as spot observations, performance on the Texas Teacher Evaluation and Support System professionalism domain and performance on the Measures of Academic Progress Growth assessment and other student achievement data.

“We are using data maybe for the first time,” Miles said during a media conference. “At this time of year, when principals assess whether or not a teacher will return, they’re looking not just at the anecdotal information, but they’re also looking at data of all sorts to assess. So that’s what principals have been doing. They’ve been looking at data.”

Miles said he did not know the specific number of teachers or principals who would not be keeping their jobs, but the district would have that information in a few weeks. Multiple teachers reported receiving notices this week to attend a Zoom call to discuss their “future employment for the district” Friday, although the exact nature of the call was not made clear.

Miles said although several teachers will not have their contracts renewed, the district was not cutting the number of teacher positions. He said the district has been hiring people to replace the teachers who would not be renewed, and HISD students would still have an effective teacher and approximately the same class size ratios during the upcoming academic year.

“Last Saturday, at the job fair, we had about 1,500 to 2,000 teachers apply for about 800 positions. Several hundred where offers were made,” Miles said. “I don’t know the exact number, but it’s … maybe 500 positions in the NES schools out of 5,000 that still are vacant, and those will be filled by the end of May.”

Miles said executive directors and division superintendents were also reviewing instructional, achievement and leadership data for principals and making decisions this week “based on several things” about who would be keeping their positions next year.

Along with nonrenewals of teachers and principals, Miles said Thursday that almost every department, including custodians and maintenance workers, have to cut positions, although he said he didn’t know the exact number of employees who had learned they were being cut in recent weeks.

“The budget and financial situation has been complicated this year, because of the end of our COVID relief aid, or ESSER, dollars,” Miles said. “So as a result of ESSER dollars, the district had placed a lot of money into recurrent expenses, and that meant we have not only to balance the budget, but we have to find a way to pay for the positions that were funded by ESSER.”

See here for the background. Bullet point time…

– I see no reason to believe anything Mike Miles says. I’m sure some of what he’s saying will be true, but his overall track record is way too full of untruths that you can’t count on any single thing he says to be one of them. What an absolute disaster he’s been.

– There will be one, count ’em, one public meeting at which the 2024-25 budget will be discussed. Some info on what the Board will be considering is here and here. Good luck with that.

– HISD was always going to face a budget crunch this coming year, in part because of expiring stimulus funds, in part because of the extra cost of the NES program )which Miles has never been clear about), and of course in part of the Legislature’s failure to give school districts any extra money because they were hostage to Greg Abbott’s voucher mania. School districts everywhere have had to make big cuts because of the Republican failure to fund public education. Not that Mike Miles has had anything to say about it.

– So, um, how does that bond issue fit in with this budget? Maybe not for this year, but going forward there will be costs associated with the bonds.

I just have no trust in Miles, and there’s no oversight on him. This is going to suck, suck, suck. The Press has more.

UPDATE: How does any of this make sense?

Houston ISD alerted dozens of teachers and principals of both performance-based job cuts and budget-forced reductions this week, prompting parents across the state’s largest school system to plan another round of protests as the tumultuous school year under state takeover nears an end.

Among the dozens of teachers and principals asked to leave: both the HISD Elementary and Middle School Principals of the Year in HISD in 2023.

Neff Elementary Principal Amanda Wingard confirmed in a Facebook post Thursday that the school district asked her to resign.

“I have loved Neff and the Sharpstown community for the last 35 years,” wrote Wingard, who was honored at a banquet a year ago for her leadership.

Alongside her is 2022-23 Middle School Principal of the Year, Auden Sarabia, who told his staff at Meyerland Performing and Visual Arts this week that he was asked to resign or go before the Board of Managers, a teacher and parents confirmed. Saraba has worked for HISD for 18 years.

Crockett Elementary Principal Alexis Clark is also not returning to her visual and performing arts magnet campus near the Heights.

“I’m heartbroken. We’re all heartbroken. I’ve done my best to protect my kids — they’re young — from what’s happening,” said Liz Silva, PTO fundraising chair and incoming president. “Can’t really avoid the topic anymore with them.”

Clark has been a staunch advocate for the campus, which is set to become one of appointed Superintendent Mike Miles’ 40 new New Education System schools next year. Silva and other parents received “a very cold email” Friday from the school district saying that Clark would not return for the upcoming school year. The district email did not state a reason for the change.

Emphasis mine. That is straight up cowardice. But it’s what happens when you have a completely unaccountable overlord in charge. Nobody who cares about HISD has any power over it right now.

Posted in School days | Tagged Board of Managers, budget, deficit, Greg Abbott, HISD, Houston, Mike Miles, New Education System, schools, stimulus, The Lege, vouchers | 10 Comments

We sure Ken Paxton isn’t investing in VPNs?

Posted on May 11, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I mean…

When she saw that Pornhub was disabling access in Texas, Express VPN privacy advocate Lauren Hendry Parsons’s reaction was rooted in what she’s seen the past few years.

“Honestly, all I thought was, here we go again,” Parsons said.

Texas was the latest state to see Pornhub pull access to its content for people logging on from people in the state. But there is a workaround for people looking to access that content: VPNs.

A VPN is a virtual private network that hides a user’s IP address, which means the location of the user also is hidden and they can operate their device as if they aren’t in the location they are currently residing.

[…]

Parsons, who is based in London, said Express VPN wants to encourage thoughtful solutions for ways to protect people’s rights on the internet.

She said the situation over age verification reminds her of music festivals. At music festivals she has attended, security check IDs before people enter the venue. People of age to drink then receive a wristband, and they never have to have their IDs checked again during the event.

Parsons says trying to translate a system like that, where your ID gets you a signifier and then your ID information is removed while the signifier stays, could work in the digital world.

“If you were asking me to boil it down to one thing, it would be privacy by design,” Parsons said. “Whatever the solution is — whether it’s device based, whether it’s website based, whether it’s an ID, whether it’s something independent — it’s about baking in something that does not diminish people’s digital privacy rights.”

If he keeps filing these lawsuits,, I’ll have to keep asking these questions. It’s not like he’s being transparent about his finances, after all.

Posted in Legal matters, Technology, science, and math | Tagged age verification, Attorney General, Aylo, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Free Speech Coalition, Hammy Media, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, Multi Media, Pornhub, pornography, Texas, VPN | Comments Off

Dispatches from Dallas, May 11 edition

Posted on May 11, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

This is a weekly feature produced by my friend Ginger. Let us know what you think.

This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, we have election results; the anniversary of the Allen Premium Outlets shooting; various events at Commissioners’ Court in Tarrant County; the legal troubles of pro athletes in Dallas; Dallas City Manager issues; followups on some previous stories; Habsburg supporters meet in Plano; women’s soccer comes to Fair Park; book reviews by the DMN’s architecture critic; a heartwarming story about college kids helping shelter animals; and more.

This week’s post was brought to you by the music of the Decemberists, who we’re going to see next week at the Majestic.

We’ll start off with election news. The big Dallas bond proposal passed (DMN ; D Magazine; and CultureMap, which is a bit sniffy about the ease of passage). A point of particular celebration is the arts package, which gets special notice in both the Dallas Observer and the DMN.

But into every blithe approval in Dallas a little disapproval from the state government must fall. In this case, because Ken Paxton has to sign off on the loans for the bond, we have to find lenders who will comply with the state’s rules, specifically, the state’s anti-ESG (environment, social and governance) laws. Since we have a smaller pool of lenders to work with, we’ll get less competitive terms. Bottom line: Dallas taxpayers will pay more in the long run to support Ken Paxton’s goals. You know what we have to do to solve this problem.

Franklin Strong has a good review of the statewide races for school boards. Locally, we had good results in Arlington, Denton, Frisco, and Midlothian; mixed or neutral results in Grapevine-Colleyville, Mansfield, and Mesquite; and the bad guys won in Keller ISD. I strongly suggest you click through and read Strong’s analysis if you’re interested in these school board races. And if you’re interested in politics in Texas, you should be, because this is where they’re road-testing candidates and tactics. Related to this, here’s a Nation article about EducateUS, a group founded to counter anti-sex-ed, book-banning groups like Moms for Liberty. This story doesn’t discuss Texas, but it’s about how we fight back against right-wing haters, which we have plenty of here.

We also had those Appraisal District elections. The Dallas Observer has more information about the DCAD races than I heard from any single source before the election, in this story about the victors. For the TCAD winners I had to check out the Fort Worth Report; I didn’t see a story from the Star-Telegram about the victory. It’s unsurprising that all the Tim O’Hare candidates won in Tarrant County because a new political action committee dumped about $70k into the three races. I strongly suggest you click through on that one if you’re interested in Fort Worth/Tarrant County politics, because the story gets into both where that money comes from and Tim O’Hare’s fingerprints on the race. It also makes the point that these positions, like school district trustee positions, are stepping stones to future political offices.

The best source for overall results in the Metroplex continues to be the DMN’s election page and for Tarrant County/Fort Worth area news, the Fort Worth Report’s election page. It gives me no pleasure to say that the Star-Telegram is falling down on its civic responsibility to report the results. It looks like they had a live page on election night but now they just refer you to the county’s web site.

Meanwhile, in case you thought we were done with elections, there are runoffs coming on May 28. The Texas Tribune has an analysis of what’s going on in the HD 33 (Rockwall) Republican primary runoff. There’s not a lot out there about the Dallas County Sheriff runoff in the Democratic Party but I did find this story about a debate between Sheriff Brown and former Sheriff Valdez that said a whole lot of nothing. And the big race outside of Dallas is of course Dade Phelan in Beaumont, where the DMN is covering all the folks dumping money into that race.

And there’s always November to look forward to both nationally and statewide. The Dallas Observer is telling us about Colin Allred’s appeal to bipartisanship as a way to get through to voters in November. On the presidential election front, both the Texas Tribune and the Washington Post have stories about Trump’s appeal to the oil industry and their donations to him and other Republican candidates. The WaPo story characterizes Trump’s pitch for $1 billion from oil executives as “remarkably blunt and transactional”.

And last, but definitely not least, you may or may not have heard about the AI shenanigans in the HD 21 (Dade Phelan) race, but a local state rep has been put in charge of the new House Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies. Click through to check out the fake mailer apparently “made with AI” that features Phelan hugging Nancy Pelosi. Axios has more, and like the folks at Axios, I’m not sure how much you can do with the kind of folks who will just plain lie by making fake photos or making lying robocalls. They’re going to break the law no matter what the law says.

In other news:

This week saw the first anniversary of the mass shooting in Allen, where eight people were killed at the Allen Premium Outlets on May 6, 2023. There was a memorial service Monday night. (See also: the DMN and the Star-Telegram for more anniversary coverage.) The DMN also answers a question I often have about these tragedies: where does the money raised go?. In this case people and charities have given $3.7 million to the survivors of the deceased, to the wounded, and to first responders and other bystanders for mental health care.
Not related at all: AG Ken Paxton is suing the Biden administration to stop the closure of the “gun show loophole”. The shooter in Allen bought his weapons from a private dealer and didn’t have to undergo a background check because of the loophole.
Also not related: Here’s a DMN editorial on school shootings called Texas can’t stop school shootings just by hardening buildings. Their concern also applies to malls and anywhere else that people gather. The DMN is right to say, “We have to send our children out into the world, and we cannot enclose them in a protective bubble. We’ll continue to fail them as long as we focus on hardening schools while leaving untouched this country’s culture of violence and a gun-rights absolutism that enable each other in a nasty loop.”
As our host has noted, the Tarrant County DA is going back after Crystal Mason, whose conviction for illegal voting was recently overturned. He briefed the Tarrant County commissioners on his decision to continue the case. DA Sorrells, a Republican elected in 2023, is a part of Tim O’Hare’s election integrity unit. He’s quoted: “I want would be illegal voters to know that we’re watching … We’ll follow the law and we would prosecute illegal voting.”
While we’re talking about the Tarrant County Commissioners, here’s the next round of Tim O’Hare v Alisa Simmons at a heated commissioners’ meeting that resulted in one speaker being removed from the room by deputies for speaking over time.
We don’t have to worry about bird flu in North Texas yet, the experts say. If you’re interested in the science of the transmission of bird flu, this Reuters article with good graphics has you covered. The gist: don’t hang out with infected birds and don’t drink raw (unpasteurized) milk.
You’ll be shocked to learn that the Department of Education found that Southlake schools violated the civil rights of students on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation. This means things like calling Black students the n-word. No comment from the Superintendent or the board.
Hillcrest High School is going to be working with the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum to provide training about antisemitism after a Jewish student filed a federal human rights complaint. This time the kids were calling the student “dirty”, praising Hitler, and making swastika drawings.
At the beginning of the school year, FWISD pulled 118 books from its school libraries. Now that we’re at the end of the year, they’ve announced they’re bringing back 90, or just over three-quarters. Too late for this year’s students but at least next year’s students will probably get to read Sherman Alexie, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood, among others.
You may remember the Sherman ISD superintendent who got in trouble last year for gender-policing a production of the musical Oklahoma! and had been suspended since early March. This story has come to the expected conclusion: the board approved a voluntary separation agreement with the superintendent. It wasn’t just his handling of Oklahoma!, which seems to have been merely the last and best-publicized straw in a difficult tenure.
Changes at City Hall in Dallas: Interim City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert has already shaken up the city’s org chart, making one interim director permanent and hiring another. She’s going to have another job, maybe two, to fill in the near future now that Assistant City Manager Robert Perez is moving to Topeka and his colleague Majed Al-Ghafry is on the short list for city manager in De Soto. We may also be about to lose our police chief because the city charter doesn’t allow the city of Dallas to make a contract with the chief so he’s at-will. (The city charter changes on the ballot in November don’t address this concern.) There’s also a survey about what Dallasites want in the next City Manager that I haven’t looked at yet but plan to read and take. And, just for grins, here’s the DMN’s Sharon Grigsby on Johnson v Broadnax: Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, I see your charade of a fond farewell for the city manager. I don’t agree with everything she has to say, but also, don’t piss on my boot and tell me it’s raining, Mayor.
You may remember from two weeks ago that Tarrant County had two more deaths in its jail. Here’s the latest, which is Republican commissioner Manny Ramirez wants more transparency from the Sheriff’s office but unlike the family of one of the deceased, who died after being pepper-sprayed, he’s not calling for the release of video from the incident. The Star-Telegram also has a reality check on whether releasing the video would compromise the investigation into the death, which boils down to the ACLU says no and the CEO of a “research, training and consulting firm that focuses on police use of force” says it might. They report, you decide.
Also on the subject of county jails, you may remember that two weeks ago, we discussed a case where Dallas County kept a prisoner too long and had to settle for $100k. This week there’s another story about that case and another one with another five-figure settlement. The DMN has an editorial on this titled Dallas County Jail population is swelling and it’s for the dumbest reason. They’re not wrong. Sheriff Brown and County Judge Jenkins need to get this fixed.
A second follow-up on old news: State Rep Frederick Frazier (HD 61) served his deferred adjudication for impersonating a public servant to remove some of his opponent’s campaign signs back in 2022. The charges have now been dismissed and Frazier is no longer under supervision. I can’t help but compare the outcome of this case to Crystal Mason’s.
Another matter we’re revisiting this week is the matter of Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Rashee Rice. This time he allegedly lured a photographer to a restaurant in the Harwood district and assaulted him. Again, this case is notable because Royce West is Rice’s lawyer. Similarly, I’d like to note that another football-related criminal case has come to an end now that DPD has found insufficient evidence to prosecute Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott in a 2017 sexual assault case.
In some good sports news, Dallas is getting a new women’s pro soccer team that will play at the Cotton Bowl. Dallas Trinity FC of the USL Super League will start playing in mid-August and while I am interested, I would like to wait for cooler weather to sit in the bleachers, thanks. Taxpayers are on the hook for $592k over two years.
Related: Is the CEO of Fair Park in or out? It looks like he’s on paid leave for 45 days while the board evaluates his performance right now, so we’ll see.
Not related, but interesting: How did Dallas get WNBA’s Wings to move downtown?. The DMN has the scoop.
I was going to report on this D Magazine saga of an open records request originally made in November 2022, but before I got to show y’all the history in the first article about it, DPD decided to hand over the records. Funny that.
The Boy Scouts of America are no more. The Irving-based group is rebranding as Scouting America and the DMN has a Q&A that touches on the reasons behind the rename, the history of sexual abuse in scouting, and the tetchy relationship with the Girl Scouts.
I haven’t had a lot to add to Six Degrees of Clarence Thomas in a while, but I haven’t forgotten it. Neither has the Pulitzer Prize Board, which awarded the Pulitzer for Public Service to the ProPublica team that broke the story. Congratulations!
In local environmental news, it’s cheers for Floral Farms, the former home of Shingle Mountain, where they are getting zoning changes to protect the neighborhood from industrial pollution. But it’s jeers for Denton, where 14,000 water lines need inspection for lead and copper contamination.
Also jeers to whoever is responsible for the mess that is the new Development Services Department’s offices, which failed a city inspection as reported in the Dallas Observer.
D Magazine has a piece on the new advertising kiosks the city wants to put in on Dallas sidewalks. One of the OG kiosks is on a sidewalk near my home; it makes it hard to walk there (it’s on a walking route my spouse and I take). We’ll be glad to see the back of it in 2026. The new ones don’t sound as bad but they don’t sound good either. Nobody seems to like the idea of having more kiosks; here’s a DMN op-ed from a bunch of movers and shakers in Uptown, Downtown, and the Arts District who don’t like the idea either. We’ll see whether the city decides to go ahead anyway.
The crime is what’s legal: the Star-Telegram has this piece on the developer who gave $35k in donations to Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare and another Republican commissioner a few months before they voted for a $200 million project he was developing. The story details a lot of dodgy dealings by the developer in question in other parts of the Metroplex that should have put up some red flags. As usual, the only way to stop O’Hare and his cronies is to vote them out.
When I opened up this article about police training in Lewisville and Collin County while writing this post, I was pleased to see an update that the city and county were no longer going to be working with Street Cop Training. The original article sure makes their training sound both illegal and bait for lawsuits from citizens whose rights were violated. Kudos to the Dallas Observer for exposing the training so that it was canceled.
I thought this piece on a Habsburg gathering in Plano was going to be funny, and it was, but it was also disturbing. Apparently there’s a full on Carlist counterrevolutionary group based in Irving; they’re pre-fascist Catholic authoritarians who think France and Spain should still be governed by Bourbon/Habsburg monarchs. Texas is of interest because it’s part of Spain’s patrimony. If you’re interested in reading up on these guys, you can find out more on their website, but it may be enough to tell you that the most prominent Habsburg is working for Viktor Orbán.
In happier historical news, Opal Lee received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her efforts in establishing Juneteenth as a national holiday. Congratulations!
The DMN’s architecture critic Mark Lamster has two reviews for books I now want to read. One is City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways, by Megan Kimble, which argues for getting rid of the I-345 spur. The other is Home, Heat, Money, God: Texas and Modern Architecture, by Kathryn E. O’Rourke with photography by Ben Koush. The buildings Lamster shows in his review only make me want to see more.
Here’s a story about old time crime in Fort Worth: spooning and mashing, which would get you fined or tossed into jail a hundred years and change ago.
And I have no zoo babies for you, but I do have a heartwarming story about SMU students who are helping with overcrowding at Dallas Animal Services by fostering animals. Also, I am telling myself we do not need another kitten after looking at Animal Services’ Instagram.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged Dallas, guest post, linkdump, Texas | Comments Off

More on the Finner departure

Posted on May 10, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

That email was the final straw.

After months of controversy surrounding the Houston Police Department’s practice of suspending cases due to short staffing, the revelation Tuesday that Chief Troy Finner was on an email discussing one such case in 2018 was the “final straw”, Mayor John Whitmire said.

[…]

Whitmire said the most important factor in the shakeup was the effect the ongoing controversy has had on rank-and-file officers.

“It had become… disruptive to the department,” Whitmire said. “I talked to many officers at every level of the department; this had become the dominant focus of so much of HPD’s staff.”

During Wednesday’s City Council discussions about efforts to combat hot spots of criminal activities, Whitmire said HPD’s investigation into suspended cases, which the email concerning Finner has recently complicated, continues to get in the way of the department focusing on its main duty – fighting crime.

“Part of the consideration is that the current investigation and suspended cases had become such a distraction that I was convinced that the department had lost some of its focus to address hot spots and response time,” Whitmire said.

The department announced last week that it had finished the internal investigation and would release its findings soon.

However, a new letter involving Executive Assistant Chief Chandra Hatcher forced the department to reopen the investigation last week, Whitmire said. KPRC reported that Hatcher, a member of Finner’s inner circle, initially requested the department launch its investigation, citing information from a command meeting she said she attended in 2021. Documents obtained by the station raised doubt that Hatcher was at that meeting.

Whitmire said the Hatcher letter and the Finner email, taken together, created major setbacks for the department that eventually led to Finner’s retirement.

See here for the background. I haven’t followed every in and out of this story so I’m not familiar with the Assistant Chief Hatcher situation. I said in the previous entry that I didn’t think the email revelation needed to be “I think it’s time you leave” moment, but it’s perfectly reasonable that it was, especially in conjunction with that. I care more about what the Mayor’s committee learns about this whole thing, and I care even more about better oversight of HPD, including better metrics on their clearance rates. If we don’t get that out of all this, then we’ve wasted our time.

Meanwhile, the Chron editorial board has a few parting words.

Finner’s failure to [build trust within the community] muddies his otherwise strong legacy and has now brought an early end to his 34-year HPD career. For a time, it looked as though Finner, who was widely liked and respected among leaders and rank and file alike, might survive the Houston Police Department’s mushrooming scandal involving homicides, rapes and other cases that went uninvestigated for years.

[…]

When Mayor Sylvester Turner tapped Finner to take over for Acevedo, he already had inherited a department under the microscope for strained police-community relations. There was the botched, no-knock drug raid stemming from a fake 911 call in 2019 that ended with residents Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle dead and a rogue police officer charged with murder. Then there was the murder of George Floyd — a former Houston resident — at the hands of police officers in Minnesota, that compounded the calls for police reform.

Finner was tasked with accomplishing what Acevedo failed to do — not just talking a good game on improving police accountability, but actually implementing significant changes. Finner, a native Houstonian who rose up through the ranks, known for his authenticity and straight-forward approach, seemed to be the perfect pick. When he took over, Turner’s handpicked Task Force on Policing Reform had issued 104 proposals for improving transparency and police oversight. By last year, 90% of the recommendations had been implemented, including releasing officers’ body-camera footage within 30 days of a police shooting, which Acevedo notably declined to do.

Once the public became aware of the spike in crime across the nation during the pandemic, attention shifted to making Houston safer. On that front, Finner implemented a data-based approach to target parts of the city rife with violence and drugs and pushed Turner to earmark additional funds for overtime pay and new officers.

Those strategies appeared to pay off with a sharp decline in homicides and violent crime. With Finner’s retirement, Houston has lost a dedicated public servant with a strong record on reducing crime and we wish his time as chief did not have to end this way. Yet Finner acknowledged the thousands of suspended cases have raised serious questions about HPD’s clearance rates. Even criminologists and crime data experts say it may take months or years to ascertain whether HPD’s statistics are trustworthy.

With so many lingering questions, Finner stepping down was the right call. There are simply too many inconsistencies about his own involvement in the scandal for him to continue to be the face of the department. Even if Finner simply got his dates mixed up on when he first discovered the “lack of personnel” classification or simply focused on when he knew of its widespread use, it is still unclear why his raising the alarm didn’t stop that practice immediately. The Chronicle’s own investigation makes clear that, even after Finner’s verbal directive, investigators started applying the code even more than they had previously. It’s unclear whether this code was being used because of managerial incompetence or laziness. And it’s still unclear how many new crimes were committed because of old cases that could’ve been resolved if they hadn’t been shelved.

We still believe all of these open questions warrant an investigation from an outside agency such as the Texas Rangers or FBI. Removing Finner doesn’t resolve the need for Whitmire to push for it.

I don’t know how much we could trust an investigation by any agency under Greg Abbott’s thumb, but letting the FBI in for a look around would be fine. Whatever the case, good luck to interim Chief Satterwaite and whoever Mayor Whitmire picks as the permanent person. You’re going to need it.

Posted in Crime and Punishment | Tagged Art Acevedo, FBI, Houston, Houston City Council, HPD, John Whitmire, Larry Satterwaite, police, Sylvester Turner, Texas Rangers, Troy Finner | 1 Comment

Feds investigating Katy ISD

Posted on May 10, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Good.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation Monday into Katy Independent School District to determine if its controversial gender identity policy discriminates against students, according to records obtained by the Houston Landing.

The investigation comes after the Landing reported in November 2023 that Katy ISD revealed the gender identities of 19 students to their parents in the two months after the policy passed. Several weeks later, student advocacy organization Students Engaged in Advancing Texas used the report’s findings in a federal Title IX complaint alleging Katy ISD discriminated against these students on the basis of sex.

Katy’s conservative-majority school board was one of the first in greater Houston to pass a policy that requires staff to disclose students’ gender identity to parents and allow employees to reject students’ requests to use different pronouns, among other protocols.

Trustees narrowly passed the policy, 4-3, in August 2023 during a heated seven-hour meeting where nearly 100 community members pleaded with the board to reject it.

The Office for Civil Rights, or OCR, enforces federal Title IX law, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally-funded education programs or activities. The OCR has informed Katy ISD and requested information and documentation for the investigation, records show.

See here and here for some background, and here for the story of a now-former Katy ISD student who was adversely affected by this policy. As the Trib notes, Katy ISD is not the first Texas school district to be subject to a federal investigation of this kind, but it’s still pretty rare. Also good to know that the complaint process can get results. I have no idea how long this may take, but as the story notes the goal is to get Katy ISD back into compliance with federal regulations. That could happen quickly if they choose to reverse their existing policy, but if they don’t then it could go on for months. I hope they choose to comply, but I’m not counting on it. As with so many other things, it’s going to take winning some elections there for some real change to happen. The Chron has more.

Posted in School days | Tagged gay rights, Katy ISD, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, Texas, Title IX, transgender rights, US Department of Education | Comments Off

ERCOT and the AI demand boom

Posted on May 10, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Once again we ask, can our grid keep up?

The rapid expansion of data centers, fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence platforms and the increasing digitization of the economy, is driving a surge in electricity demand in Texas and across the country that could soon be pushing the limits of what power grids can handle.

Grid operators such as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas are rushing to adjust their demand forecasts amid projections by consulting firm McKinsey and the International Energy Agency that power load for data centers, which already consume 4% of the power on the U.S. grid, will double by the end of the decade.

In a recent podcast interview, ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas said the rapid speed at which data centers such as the $800 million facility Meta is building in Temple were coming online was “unheard of in terms of grid planning time scales.”

“Historically, you’ve always been able to have years to contemplate a massive manufacturing facility coming online,” he said on the Energy Capital podcast. “Now we’re seeing 500- and 700-megawatt data centers being built in a year.”

ERCOT reported earlier this month that peak power loads on its system would rise 6% by 2030 to 94.3 gigawatts — with the caveat there was an additional 62 gigawatts of additional load asking to connect to the grid. It didn’t detail where those load requests were coming from, and ERCOT declined to make officials available for this story.

But Doug Lewin, an energy consultant in Austin, said data centers, along with new manufacturing facilities such as the semiconductor plants being built around Austin, crypto currency mining operations and growth in oil production in West Texas, were responsible for much of the new load requests.

“Some of (the 62 gigawatts) will come, some of it won’t,” he said. “But even if it’s just one third of that, in five to six years time that’s shocking.”

Those same conversations are happening in power grids across the country, as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other tech giants race to build out computing infrastructure to accommodate not only new artificial intelligence applications but a society that is increasingly dependent on cloud computing systems.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm earlier this month called rising power demand from AI and data centers a “problem” and said in an interview with Axios that conversations with tech companies needed to “accelerate, because this demand for power is only going up.”

I personally would seek to prioritize just about anything ahead of cryptomining, but that’s not our reality. To be sure, AI and the data centers being built to support it are creating demand that outstrips supply nationwide, as this recent episode of What Next TBD discussed. Texas is probably better positioned than many states to keep up because we have a lot of solar and wind capacity that we can bring online in the near future. The problem is that in many places the heightened demand for power is causing a resurgence in coal and gas plants, which is exactly what we don’t need as we try to stave off the worst effects of climate change. It’s a tough problem but we need to find a way forward.

Posted in Technology, science, and math, The great state of Texas | Tagged artificial intelligence, climate change, coal, cryptomining, data centers, electricity, ERCOT, International Energy Agency, Jennifer Granholm, natural gas, renewable energy, solar energy, Texas, wind energy | 3 Comments

HPD Chief Finner retires

Posted on May 9, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

This came suddenly.

Troy Finner has stepped down as chief of the Houston Police Department, Mayor John Whitmire announced in a late-night, four-paragraph email to city employees Tuesday.

“I have accepted the retirement of Troy Finner as Chief of Police, and have appointed Larry Satterwhite acting Chief of Police effective 10:31 p.m. tonight,” Whitmire wrote. “This decision comes with full confidence in acting Chief Satterwhite’s abilities to lead and uphold the high standards of the department.”

Finner’s sudden retirement comes amid the monthslong internal police investigation into the department’s use of a internal code — “SL” — to mark criminal cases and incident reports as suspended due to a lack of personnel.

Finner announced the investigation into the internal code in February and has delivered periodic updates on the investigation and reviews of the suspended cases as it progressed. Last week, Finner announced that the internal investigation had concluded, but the police department had yet to release any information on its findings.

Similarly, an independent investigative group organized by Whitmire to conduct its own review of the police department has yet to make any disclosures about its findings.

On Tuesday, multiple Houston TV stations reported a new development in the scandal: an email written by Finner in 2018 referring to the suspended case issue. Finner had previously said that he first became aware of the code in 2021.

In a statement posted by the department on X at 6:02 p.m., Finner said he didn’t remember sending the older email and appeared to dismiss its significance.

The linked article on the “new development” shows one email about the “SL” code, to which Finner replies that it’s unacceptable and the emailer should look into it. There may be more than this, but this by itself doesn’t strike me as anything earth-shaking. It’s one email, not a long chain, and Finner directed someone else to take action, he didn’t promise any action on his part. If the issue here is that he said he first heard of this in 2021 and this is a contradiction of that, I can understand why he might have forgotten about it. But again, there may be more than just this, so I’ll hold off on further comment for now.

Now-former Chief Finner still has a lot of support on Council, which perhaps puts a little pressure on his interim and future successors. I don’t have a strong opinion on Finner other than to note that he was a definite improvement on Art Acevedo. I still want to see what that internal report says and what the Mayoral committee finds. I hope Finner isn’t getting out ahead of some other show dropping, and (modulo that) I wish him well in whatever comes next. Houston Landing has more.

Posted in Crime and Punishment | Tagged Houston, Houston City Council, HPD, John Whitmire, Larry Satterwaite, police, Troy Finner | 6 Comments

All but one of the Astroworld wrongful death lawsuits have been settled

Posted on May 9, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

A big day in court yesterday.

Nine of the 10 wrongful death lawsuits filed after a deadly crowd surge at the 2021 Astroworld music festival have been settled, including one that was set to go to trial this week, an attorney said Wednesday.

Jury selection had been set to begin Tuesday in the wrongful death suit filed by the family of Madison Dubiski, a 23-year-old Houston resident who was one of 10 people killed during the crowd crush at the Nov. 5, 2021, concert by rap superstar Travis Scott.

But Neal Manne, an attorney for Live Nation, the festival’s promoter and one of those being sued along with Scott, said during a court hearing Wednesday that only one wrongful death lawsuit remained pending and the other nine have been settled, including the one filed by Dubiski’s family.

Noah Wexler, an attorney for Dubiski’s family, confirmed during the court hearing that their case “is resolved in its entirety.”

Terms of the settlements were confidential and attorneys declined to comment after the court hearing because of a gag order in the case.

The one wrongful death lawsuit that remains pending was filed by the family of 9-year-old Ezra Blount, the youngest person killed during the concert. Attorneys in the litigation were set to meet next week to discuss when the lawsuit filed by Blount’s family could be set for trial.

“This case is ready for trial,” Scott West, an attorney for Blount’s family, said in court.

But Manne said he and the lawyers for other defendants being sued were not ready.

State District Judge Kristen Hawkins said she planned to discuss the Blount case at next week’s hearing along with potential trials related to the injury cases filed after the deadly concert.

Hawkins said that if the Blount family’s lawsuit is not settled, she is inclined to schedule that as the next trial instead of an injury case.

[…]

At least four wrongful death lawsuits had previously been settled and announced in court records. But Wednesday was the first time that lawyers in the litigation had given an update that nine of the 10 wrongful death lawsuits had been resolved.

See here for the previous update. I’m glad these cases have been resolved – it won’t surprise me if the last one gets settled as well – and I hope the settlement brings all of the families some peace. There are still a huge number of lawsuits filed by people who were injured at the concert, including some with eye-watering damages claims, though in the end I expect the vast majority of them to settle as well. Assuming the suit survives a motion to dismiss, it’s usually the prudent thing for all to do. Houston Landing and the Chron have more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged Apple, Astroworld, First Court of Appeals, Harris County, Harris County Sports & Convention Corp, HFD, Houston, HPD, Larry Satterwaite, lawsuit, Live Nation, Reliant Stadium, Travis Scott | 1 Comment

We need to pay more attention to the I-10 construction proposals

Posted on May 9, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

By which I mostly mean I need to pay more attention to them, because they sound terrible.

Between the shrill of large trucks barreling down Interstate 10 – when only the whoosh of cars dominates the din – Matt Tetlow tries to overcome the noise to talk about how Houston can avoid having the freeway cut into its center.

Tetlow and others are encouraging a redesign of the planned I-10 widening that limits the freeway to the space it now occupies and potentially tops it with open space or development.

“People are going through, clearly, but what about the people along it,” Tetlow said, standing in Cottage Grove Park, steps from the wall dividing the buried freeway from the neighborhood. “What we’re saying is this can be a lot more a part of the community, connect the community, if we put a cap on it.”

The proposal, which has the support of local civic clubs and some local elected officials, is among a handful of proposals related to planned work along I-10, the region’s primary east-west road.

[…]

Among the planned projects:

Elevating the freeway east of Heights Boulevard to Interstate 45 so it is less susceptible to flooding from White Oak Bayou.

Adding a dedicated elevated busway south of the freeway along the frontage road to connect the Northwest Transit Center at North Post Oak to downtown Houston in order to speed up transit and commuter bus trips.

Extending the Katy Managed Lanes along the freeway from Voss eastward to I-45 to connect carpools and toll-paying drivers faster to the central business district.

In February, the Texas Department of Transportation presented two options for the managed lanes. One, which many attendees said would be ruinous for the area, adds two managed lanes in each direction level with the existing freeway and widens the state’s right of way. That option claims 52 homes and 30 businesses north of the freeway.

The second, and more palatable to many, option would add the managed lanes on an elevated roadway in the center of the freeway. That keeps the freeway in the same footprint, but poses noise, pollution and light concerns for the neighborhood.

In an email, TxDOT spokeswoman Kristina Hadley said public comments are still being compiled from the meetings, with officials planning more rounds of public meetings before the $682 million-plus project could proceed. Construction could take four years or more.

Late in design – by transportation planning timelines – Tetlow and others are amassing support for a rethink of some I-10 project redesigns that would incorporate covering the freeway from Memorial Park to Patterson, where it is already below city streets. The design, backers say, allows TxDOT to build most, if not all, of the capacity additions it is planning, but in what proponents call a better way.

“We’re not saying do not build it, but build it where it is already and give us something that is not higher or wider and divide the community,” said Joseph Panzarella, who along with Tetlow and others helped organize the No Higher No Wider I-10 plan.

The goal, the duo said, is to work with TxDOT to remake the freeway so it serves the needs of drivers and neighbors alike. The current plan, they and others argue, is tilted too much in favor of through-travel.

“When you hear someone from TxDOT say they want the freeway to be better, what is obvious is they mean better for commuters,” Tetlow said. “What we want is something that is also better for the community, and the cap design kind of delivers that.”

I-10 is already depressed below city streets from near Memorial Park, where it flows under Washington Avenue, to east of Patterson, where it elevates to span atop Yale Street and Heights Boulevard.

The No Higher plan challenges TxDOT to rebuild the freeway, frontage roads and whatever managed lanes possible in the existing space, without elevation, and provide a chance for the neighborhood to cap the freeway.

Capping the freeway gives the neighborhood, and by extension the city, space for everything from parks to trails to affordable housing, Tetlow said – all priorities for the area.

I have talked about this before, mostly the elevating the segment near I-45 portion of it. I learned about No Higher No Wider I-10 through this story, and I’m glad they exist. I hope they work with the Stop I-45 folks and take some lessons from their experiences. What they propose makes a lot of sense but is well outside what TxDOT normally does, and as we know TxDOT doesn’t like to do things it doesn’t normally do. The story also indicates later on that TxDOT has “not discussed the No Higher plan formally with anyone involved”, so there’s a lot of work to be done here. But these guys are quite right that what we all should want is a project that’s better for the whole community, not just the commuters. Getting to that point, that’s the tricky part. Go check out No Higher No Wider I-10 and see what you can do.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged BRT, construction, Cottage Grove, Heights, Houston, HOV lanes, I-10, I-45, Inner Katy line, Metro, No Higher No Wider I-10, Texas, TxDOT, White Oak Bayou | 3 Comments

Texas blog roundup for the week of April 6

Posted on May 9, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance congratulates Sen.-elect Molly Cook as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged blog roundup, TPA | Comments Off

April 2024 campaign finance reports – Senate and Congress

Posted on May 8, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

With the primaries settled and there being no runoffs of interest for Senate and Congress, we can combine the two sets of reports into a single post. The January reports for Senate are here the October 2023 reports are here, the July 2023 reports here, and the April 2023 reportshere. The January reports for Congress are here, and the October 2023 reports are here. The earlier reports had both Senate and Congress, as the fields were small enough then to do them together.

Colin Allred – Senate

Sandeep Srivastava – CD03
John Love – CD06
Lizzie Fletcher – CD07
Pervez Agwan – CD07
Michelle Vallejo – CD15
Sheila Jackson Lee – CD18
Amanda Edwards – CD18
Sam Eppler – CD24
Julie Johnson – CD32
Melissa McDonough – CD38


Dist  Name             Raised      Spent    Loans    On Hand
============================================================
Sen   Allred       27,910,142 17,436,707        0 10,473,435

03    Srivastava      294,485    234,696  543,233     63,381
06    Love             57,668     52,895        0      5,425
07    Fletcher      1,721,000  1,723,385        0  1,319,322
07    Agwan         1,554,838  1,407,463        0    147,375
15    Vallejo         920,341    473,699  100,000    458,358
18    Jackson Lee     529,880    834,744        0     66,446
18    Edwards       1,625,850  1,597,683        0     28,167
24    Eppler          441,405    352,336        0     89,069
32    Johnson       1,329,471  1,229,325        0    100,146 
38    McDonough       105,177    100,803   90,395      6,154

That Colin Allred sure is raising a lot of money, isn’t he? I approve. Keep up the good work. We’re going to need a lot of that money spent here.

Rep. Lizzie Fletcher spent something like $1.1 million in Q1 to defend her seat in the primary. Given the result, that was money well spent. Pervez Agwan had been spending his cash all along, and as such only dropped $400K in Q1. He was doing some “help me retire my debts” fundraising after the election, but I haven’t seen or heard anything from him since. I could write a much longer treatise about brash newcomers who make a lot of noise and spend a lot of money to win a seat somewhere and then vanish from view after they lose, but I’ll save that for another time.

Amanda Edwards also spent about a million bucks last quarter, while Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee spent about $600K, which I bet she wished she’d had a little earlier than that. I expect her to build her campaign treasury back up, though probably not that quickly. I doubt she draws a serious challenger in the near future anyway.

Sandeep Srivastava and Sam Eppler have both raised a decent amount of money, and have also spent it nearly as quickly. Both had primaries to win so to some extent that’s understandable, but I’d like to see them get a bit ahead of their burn rate. To whatever extent there are winnable seats for Dems, those two and CD15 are highest on the list. Michelle Vallejo has national backing so I’m not worried about her, but I’d sure like to see some more firepower for those two.

Not much else to say. I don’t think we’re falling back to 2012 levels of boringness for these reports, but we’re definitely in a more fallow period. Maybe things will pick up in Q2. Let me know what you think.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged campaign finance reports, CD03, CD06, CD07, CD15, CD18, CD24, CD32, CD38, Colin Allred, Congress, Democratic primary, Election 2024, fundraising, John Love, Julie Johnson, Lizzie FLetcher, Melissa McDonough, Michelle Vallejo, Pervez Agwan, Sam Eppler, Sandeep Srivastava, Senate, Sheila Jackson Lee, Ted Cruz, Texas | 1 Comment

The Mayor and the Land Commissioner are buds

Posted on May 8, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I have three things to say about this.

On Mayor John Whitmire’s first day in office, he got a call from Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham.

Her message? “We want to work with the City of Houston,” Whitmire recounted at an April 17 council meeting.

Whitmire shared the contents of the call at the start of Buckingham’s visit to City Hall – a trip largely framed as a relationship reset, and one the land commissioner was quick to note herself.

“It is wonderful to actually be invited here, as last time I tried outreach I was disinvited,” Buckingham told council members.

After years of verbal and legal battles between the former mayor and the former land commissioner, Whitmire and Buckingham seem poised to usher in a new era of cooperation between their new offices. As experts predict an active hurricane season in the Gulf, the potential for better relations between the city and state agency could be well-timed.

Whenever disaster strikes in Texas – whether it be wildfire, winter storm or hurricane – it’s the state’s General Land Office that has primarily retained responsibility for divvying out the federal funds to cities and counties that apply for relief across the state. The agency is also in charge of making sure the cities and counties they grant funds to are spending it correctly.

But despite the rhetorical reset, Houston remains on the outs when it comes to the Hurricane Harvey funds. The city still is not set to see a single dollar from $4.3 billion in federal funds approved for flood mitigation after the 2017 storm.

Houston’s history with the GLO has been rocky since Harvey. After the storm, the GLO, then led by George P. Bush, was charged with distributing federal funds for home repair and flood mitigation.

Bush’s office, at the time, argued that Mayor Sylvester Turner’s administration was mishandling the housing funds it had been given and determined not to provide the city with any funds for flood mitigation. The city argued the GLO made the process of applying for and receiving funds difficult and called the state agency an overbearing partner.

Since then, Buckingham has taken over the GLO office and Whitmire has taken over the mayor’s office. The two have a longstanding relationship as former colleagues who worked together in the Texas Senate, and the new mayor said that will only continue in the days to come.

“There will be strong collaboration with the GLO and our state partners,” Whitmire told the Chronicle.

1. Mayor Whitmire ran on his strong connections with state government and how that would benefit Houston with him as Mayor. This is an example of that in practice and it is good to see. I hope we don’t need it this year, but we will certainly need it sooner or later.

2. That said, I don’t think it’s a lot to ask for one branch of government to cooperate with another as a matter of course and without having to depend on whether or not this person likes that person. What George P. Bush did as Land Commissioner to Houston (and Harris County) was despicable and shameless, done for his own failed political ambition, and has been actively harmful to Houston and its residents for almost seven years now. I’m glad that Dawn Buckingham and John Whitmire have a solid relationship. The city of Houston will indeed benefit from it. It should never have come to that, is what I’m saying. And by the way, Houston is still out a crap-ton of money that the GLO should have provided us. Let me know when you plan to make that right, Dawn.

3. Any plans to invite Judge Hidalgo to City Hall, Mr. Mayor? Sorry, not sorry.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged Dawn Buckingham, flooding, George P. Bush, Harris County, Houston, Hurricane Harvey, John Whitmire, Land Commissioner, Sylvester Turner, Texas | 3 Comments

Our chief export these days is forced birth zealotry

Posted on May 8, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Maybe New Mexico should build a border wall.

Abortion rights opponents in Texas dictated terms and pressured officials in New Mexico municipalities to pass ordinances restricting clinics, according to public records — potentially as part of a bigger legal strategy.

Emails show former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell and Mark Lee Dickson, founder of the “Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn” initiative, succeeded in influencing local governments in rural parts of the state — despite warnings and hesitation from local officials.

In late 2022 and early 2023, the New Mexico cities of Clovis and Hobbs passed ordinances saying people have no right to violate the Comstock Act of 1873, a previously obscure federal statute that bans the mailing of abortion pills or abortion-related materials. They were later joined by Eunice and Edgewood, and Roosevelt and Lea Counties.

There are some variations among the six ordinances: Lea County’s ordinance specifies financial penalties for violations; the Roosevelt County and Edgewood ordinances allow a private citizen to sue and win monetary damages; and the Clovis, Hobbs and Eunice ordinances impose new licensing requirements on abortion clinics.

Emails obtained via public records requests show Mitchell and Dickson approaching local New Mexico governments to pitch versions of the ordinances.

A legal nonprofit called Democracy Forward brought the emails to light, and Source New Mexico independently verified the records through interviews with local officials and our own records requests.

The emails also show influence and control: Mitchell required any changes to the Clovis ordinance be approved by him, he was providing free legal advice to Eunice about amending the ordinance, and Dickson directed the language of the Hobbs ordinance.

Hobbs Mayor Ed Cobb said in a phone interview that it’s “not unusual for us to be provided information,” adding that the city has taken input from outside attorneys on other ordinances in the past.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean that we copy and paste it, but it’s not prohibited,” Cobb said.

The ordinances now face a challenge at the New Mexico Supreme Court, because they throw up regulatory roadblocks for abortion clinics by barring them from having drugs for medication abortions shipped from other states through the mail. And a 2023 statute gives the state — not local governments — the final say on reproductive health care.

New Mexico’s Democratic Attorney General Raúl Torrez is prosecuting the case against the local governments. He’s asking the justices to nullify the ordinances, and to go even further by setting legal precedent to ensure abortion rights under the New Mexico Constitution.

This was from a couple of weeks ago, so there may have been some updates, I haven’t looked. Mitchell is the attorney behind the mifepristone lawsuit, though that’s only one of his many forays into forced birtherism. If there’s a terrible lawsuit out there being pushed by wingnuts, he’s probably involved. Dickson is the guy behind the various abortion “sanctuary city” ordinances who is now also focused on “travel bans” in localities along the highways from Texas into New Mexico. Their explicit goal, as Mitchell says in this story, is to get a case about the Comstock Act before the Supreme Court, with the idea being that SCOTUS would declare that Comstock is the law of the land and that it fully bans all abortion-related activities, and probably lots more things as well. Obviously, they’re the life of any party.

That was part one of a two-part series. Here’s part two.

Documents show the N.M. cities of Hobbs, Clovis, Eunice and Edgewood working with former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell and Mark Lee Dickson, founder of the “Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn” initiative.

The documents also include engagement letters for Lea and Roosevelt Counties from Mitchell after the New Mexico attorney general challenged the ordinances in court, but the letters are not signed by anyone at the counties. Still, both counties’ votes to pass the ordinances are listed on Dickson’s website, presented as examples of his movement’s reach.

The emails were initially requested under the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act by Democracy Forward, a legal nonprofit. Source NM independently verified the records through interviews with local officials and our own records requests with the local governments.

Records show Mitchell and Dickson pitching the measures, directing their language, overseeing changes, and in exchange for adopting them, offering to defend the local New Mexico governments in court for free.

In a phone interview on Monday afternoon, Dickson declined to say how he and Mitchell can afford to do this work pro bono, and declined to identify who, if anyone, is paying them for their time.

“The Lord takes care of all the behind the scenes,” he said, adding that there are a lot of people on board who understand these ordinances as a stepping stone to ending abortion in America. Among the volunteers, he highlighted the Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based anti-abortion rights law firm.

[…]

Two local legal experts said it’s highly unusual for someone from outside of New Mexico to come in and dictate the terms of a draft ordinance. In fact, it’s “never happened before,” said Frank Coppler, a Santa Fe-based lawyer who practices municipal law.

“It’s not just unusual. I’ve never heard of it before, and I believe I’ve kept track of this kind of municipal law for the last 50 years,” he said.

Coppler is one of a pool of several attorneys working on contract to represent Edgewood. He said he advised the town’s elected commissioners last year not to adopt Mitchell’s ordinance, but they didn’t follow his advice.

Municipal councils and commissions “can’t delegate their legislative power to somebody else. That notion is crazy,” he said. “Because they’re elected to be the legislators — not a lawyer from Texas, not a lawyer from New Mexico.”

Verónica Gonzales is an associate law professor at the University of New Mexico whose professional work often relies on interpreting language in local government charters and ordinances.

She agreed that legislative authority rests solely with commissions or councils, which aren’t required to seek input from anyone else necessarily. They can, of course, hire third-party attorneys to review something they’re working on, or run it past their city attorney. What’s strange in the case of Clovis, for example, is that this appears to have worked the other way around, according to the records, with Mitchell providing the first drafts and approving changes for commissioners along the way, she said.

“It signals to me, as a lawyer, that those individuals are really trying to exert pressure and influence in this community.”

Pretty sure if the money is followed, it will take you to some even darker places. I am confident that the New Mexico Supreme Court will rule against these jokers. The real question is what SCOTUS will do. We ought to have a plan for that.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged abortion, Clovis, Comstock Act, Mark Lee Dickson, mifepristone, New Mexico, SCOTUS, Texas | 1 Comment

Some further special election stuff

Posted on May 7, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

We begin with this from the inbox.

The Harris County Clerk’s Office posted the unofficial May 4 Uniform and Special Elections results on the Harris Votes website early Sunday morning, with 56,612 ballots cast in total. About 2% of Harris County’s eligible registered voters cast a ballot in the May 4 Uniform and Special Elections. Official results will be available after the canvass is completed.

About 3% of the eligible voters residing in Texas Senate District (SD) 15 voted in the May 4 Special Election to fill the vacancy left by Houston Mayor John Whitmire. This is the first time someone other than Whitmire will represent SD 15 in over 40 years. The newly elected Senator will represent SD 15 until the end of the current term, December 31, 2024.

The May 4 election was the first opportunity voters had to cast their ballot for three unpaid positions on the Harris Central Appraisal District (HCAD) Board of Directors. The HCAD Board of Directors will now consist of three at-large elected members, the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector, and five appointed positions representing local taxing entities. Because only one candidate received an absolute majority of votes in the three HCAD contests, a runoff election will take place on Saturday, June 15, 2024 to determine the winners for HCAD, Director Place 2 and Place 3.

“My job is to ensure accessible and fair elections in Harris County. There are still two more elections before we conduct the November general election,” said Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, the county’s chief election official. “While the upcoming elections will admittedly have a lower turnout than we are bound to see in November, I encourage voters to exercise their privilege to vote in every election.”

The Harris County Clerk’s Office hired approximately 2,100 election workers for the May 4 Uniform and Special Elections. Election workers staffed 25 vote centers during the nine-day early voting period and 151 vote centers on Election Day.

“As always, we are incredibly thankful for the election judges, election workers, and Harris County Clerk’s Office staff who make conducting elections in the largest county in Texas possible,” added Clerk Hudspeth. “It is due to their hard work and dedication that we are able to serve Harris County voters.”

As noted before, the results are here, for now. So SD15 turnout was higher than overall turnout as I guessed, though not by that much. Indeed, by historical standards, that three percent turnout in SD15 is low, though as noted this was an election with not much at stake. Be that as it may, Campos had a few words.

Congratulations to my State Senator-Elect Molly Cook for her outstanding victory garnering 57.23% of the vote or 9,330 votes to 6,973 votes over State Rep. Jarvis Johnson. These are the unofficial results. Molly now heads to the May 28 Democratic Party Primary runoff riding on a huge wave of momentum.

For those not convinced, maybe thinking that unlike Saturday’s Special Election, the May 28 runoff will be off limits to GOPers who may have voted on Saturday and in the Republican Party Primary on March 5. Here is a tidbit. In the December 11, 2018, State Senate District 6 Special Election that elected State Sen. Carol Alvarado, 15,339 voters turned out including 152 undervotes or just a hair under 1%. The State Senate 6 Special Election was the only race on the ballot back in December 2018. This past Saturday in Senate District 15, 18,376 turned out including 2,035 undervotes or 11%. Commentary is thinking that a good chunk of the 2,035 were GOP voters who wanted to vote in the Houston Central Appraisal District (HCAD) Board of Directors elections but didn’t want to vote for either Democrat on their SD 15 ballot.

Jarvis ran strong in African American precincts, Molly won handily everywhere else. In my precinct in the Heights, she won 80% of the vote.

In my precinct, she won 75% of the vote. I’ll do more analysis on this later when there’s an official canvass. Bear in mind, the March election had three times as many votes as the May election did. Jarvis Johnson got almost as many votes in March as were cast in total in this election. I say that just for some perspective, because in a super low-turnout race, one should be very careful about any inferences one might be tempted to draw. The primary runoff should be higher turnout than this was, but only because it’s a known quantity and people are used to it. There’s nothing to push turnout on May 28 – no statewide race, and the only countywide races are low profile affairs. Remember also, there’s a runoff in HD139, Johnson’s current district. That ought to help him, though it’s not exactly a barnburner itself.

Anyway. The undervote numbers from this race, as noted by Campos, intrigued me.


Race    Votes   Voters  Under     Pct
=====================================
SD15   16,303   18,376  2,073  11.28%

HCAD1  54,433   56,612  2,179   3.85%
HCAD2  54,252   56,612  2,360   4.17%
HCAD3  53,286   56,612  3,326   5.88%

You know how people complain about the long ballots in Harris County races and how voters get “fatigued” working their way through all those damn judicial elections? I can tell you that the undervote rate in the 2022 judicial elections in Harris County ranged from 3.37 to 5.22%, which is lower on both ends of the May 2024 ballot in which most voters had all of three races to participate in. I will no longer accept any “voter fatigue” explanations, thank you very much. Anyway, I think Campos is right that the high undervote rate in SD15 – normally, contested district races of all kinds have lower undervote rates than countywide races – is due to Republicans showing up for the HCAD stuff and having no interest in the D-versus-D race there. I don’t think that has any effect on the May 28 runoff, as those will be Dem-only voters by definition, but it could have an effect on the HCAD runoffs in June, and not in a positive way for the Dem candidates. We won’t have SD15 as a natural boost, so we’ll need to do some more work to win these two. Very doable, since there are more Dems than Rs in Harris County, but this is a weird election at a weird time, and the voters need to know about it.

Elsewhere in County Appraisal District land, Dems swept Travis County, and the candidates backed by the terrible Tarrant County Judge swept theirs. Bexar County will have two runoffs just like we will. I have no idea what the partisan makeup of those candidates are. No runoffs in Dallas, as only one of their elections was contested.

The runoff for the remaining two HCAD races will be on Saturday, June 15. I don’t know yet when early voting will begin or how long it will be. The last legislative special election in Harris County was in 2020, and it had one work week of early voting, as we have for city runoffs and primary runoffs. I have also heard from some reliable folks that there will be nine days of early voting for this runoff, as there was for the May election. Don’t quote me on any of this, I want to see an official proclamation. I’ll let you know when I know more.

In other election news, Frank Strong finds some good in the various school board races.

Of the 41 candidates I gave red or orange highlights, only 8 won their races. Overall, the good guys won the day in 13 of the 23 districts I followed—and only 3 of 23 districts went the wrong way (7 had mixed or neutral results).

It wasn’t just the wins and losses, though; the margins also told a clear story. Red and orange highlighted candidates lost by huge percentages in many districts. Melody Fowler defeated Kendall Orr by 61 percentage points in Arlington ISD, for example, and Bridgette Marshall defeated Andy Rokovich by 65 in Victoria ISD. In contrast, the races in which red-highlighted candidates won were generally very close. The message across the state was unmistakable: banning books from districts is no longer a political winner in Texas, and attacking teachers and librarians will cost you a steep electoral price. That is a big change from the political mood in May of 2022.

It gets more nuanced than that, so go read the rest. Katy and Spring Branch ISDs were listed as Good results, while Fort Bend was Bad. The Press had more on the Katy ISD races.

That’s what I have for now. I’ll aim to do a precinct analysis when I get the data. Anything else to discuss here?

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged Bexar County, Dallas County, early voting, Election 2020, Election 2022, Election 2024, Fort Bend County, Fort Bend ISD, Harris County, Harris County Appraisal District, HCAD, HD139, Jarvis Johnson, Katy, Katy ISD, Molly Cook, precinct analysis, runoff, SD15, Senate, special election, Spring Branch, Tarrant County, Texas, Travis County, turnout | Comments Off

What could it have cost for the firefighters?

Posted on May 7, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

City Controller Chris Hollins throws out some numbers and kicks up a fuss.

Chris Hollins

Houston Controller Chris Hollins faced fierce criticism from firefighters union president Marty Lancton, after estimating that equalizing past pay for Houston firefighters with their peers in other major Texas cities would cost about half of the $650 million backpay currently under consideration.

The city only has a few weeks remaining to finalize a landmark $1.5 billion settlement with the firefighters union, aimed at resolving a years-long dispute and determining the backpay owed to Houston firefighters for the past seven years that they have not had a contract. For the first few years without a contract, the firefighters received no raises, but former Mayor Sylvester Turner worked around the lack of contract and gave firefighters a three-year, 18% pay raise in 2021.

Since Mayor John Whitmire first announced the proposed settlement in March, many council members have complained about the lack of information on how the administration and the union arrived at the $650 million figure. As the city plans to issue a judgment bond to spread its cost, the backpay’s total financial impact could reach around $1 billion and affect the city budget for decades.

On Monday, Hollins outlined several scenarios of hypothetical pay raises that the city might have offered firefighters from fiscal years 2018 to 2024, the period covered by the back salary under the proposed settlement. In each case, the costs to the city would have been hundreds of millions lower than $650 million, according to the controller’s analysis.

For example, if the city had aligned Houston firefighters’ hourly pay with the average rates of firefighters in Austin, San Antonio, Fort Worth and Dallas starting from fiscal year 2018, the cost, including interest, would have totaled approximately $380 million, he said.

Alternatively, if the city had raised Houston firefighters’ pay steadily over the past seven years to match the state average, the cost would have been around $300 million, Hollins said.

If the city had given Houston firefighters the same pay raises as Houston police officers or municipal workers during this period, the total costs would have amounted to $260 million or $110 million, respectively, he said.

“In every scenario we ran – and this should not surprise you at all – it says the firefighters are owed something,” Hollins said during a Monday public briefing. “It’s up to you all, members of City Council, to decide what’s fair and what you’ll agree to.”

Hollins also presented his analysis of the forward-looking component of the deal, which includes up to 34% pay raises for firefighters over the next five years. Assuming other major Texas fire departments continue to receive around 3% annual raises, he said, Houston’s pay will catch up to the state average by fiscal year 2026 and exceed the average by around 9% by fiscal year 2029.

[…]

He noted the list of hypotheticals he presented on Monday is not exhaustive, and his office has launched an interactive tool for the public to explore other scenarios.

Several council members attended Hollins’ briefing on Monday. Council Members Tiffany Thomas and Edward Pollard, who have been closely scrutinizing the deal, praised the controller’s efforts to disseminate key information.

“For me, it’s always about how do we get to the numbers… Did you just pull them out of thin air?” Pollard said. “Now we have much more insight and clarification on what those numbers look like here.”

Thomas said she might consider advocating for modifications to the proposed agreement or the city’s financing methods. She suggested there might be opportunities to pay down some of the financial liabilities immediately rather than financing all of it through a bond, which would incur interest and payments for decades.

“I’m not willing to put my name on anything blindly,” Thomas said. “If we are rolling out fees and taxes, there’s going to come a time where people are going to choose to live outside the city, and I think that some of those decisions will start (happening) based on what’s going to happen in our budget season coming up soon.”

See here, here, and here for some background, and here for a story over the weekend of Controller Hollins trying to arrange a meeting to discuss the settlement. We’ve had this agreement for almost two months now without knowing any of the details – Hollins is on record saying that his office has not been privy to the details, and Council is in the same boat. Politics abhors a vacuum, so of course one is going to speculate when the facts are not available. I don’t think any of what Hollins is proposing here is out of whack, but that didn’t temper the reaction.

Houston’s firefighters had sued the city for failing to reach a contract. Before the settlement, the city was facing a March 25 trial in which the law would have required a judge to compare Houston firefighter pay to that of their private-sector peers. Lancton said private-sector firefighters make 50 percent more.

“The law is very clear,” Lancton said. “What isn’t clear are the motivations of the controller to continue to politicize this issue. His facts are wrong. His scenarios are legally inapplicable.”

The controller’s analysis also failed to factor in the cost of the pension benefits and additional overtime pay that would have kicked in with higher pay, Lancton said.

“He is politicizing an issue in order to undermine Mayor Whitmire, and that is not helpful for the citizens, and it is certainly not helpful for the brave men and women who have been out all weekend rescuing citizens in floodwaters,” Lancton said.

Whitmire also took a dig at Hollins in a statement. He had analyses similar to Hollins’ available to him when he reached the deal with the firefighters, Whitmire said.

“Monday-morning quarterbacks may choose to ignore the fact that Texas law mandates firefighter pay to be based on private-sector compensation comparisons, not public sector, but as mayor and lead negotiator, I cannot ignore that fact,” Whitmire said. “It very well could have been a less costly deal to settle with the Houston Professional Firefighters Association, but that is a conversation to have with the previous administration eight years ago.”

If the law required the city to match the much higher private sector salaries, then I can see where the complaint is coming from. But we don’t know that that’s where the case would have ended up had there been no settlement. That’s been one of the complaints from Council, that we don’t know what the city’s strategy was and what options they were facing. It’s not crazy to suggest that super staunch firefighter ally Mayor John Whitmire might not have driven the hardest of bargains here.

Let’s take Whitmire and Lacton at their word and assume that 1) Mayor Turner screwed up royally by not agreeing to a contract with the firefighters earlier, 2) the city was totally going to get hammered if the lawsuit had gone to a verdict, and 3) the settlement they agreed on was in fact the very best deal the city could have hoped for under any circumstance. It’s still a big hit to the city’s finances, especially at a time when the Mayor is also promising to hire a bunch more cops. It’s a political problem for Whitmire even if you assume he’s done hero’s work. Voters might have been less enthusiastic about the promise to settle with the firefighters if they had known last year that this would be the price, even if the downside was substantial.

Whatever you think of all this, it’s on the Mayor to sell the agreement to Council and to the voters. We could have been talking about this a lot earlier than now, but we didn’t have the terms of the deal, and we still don’t have them. I’m sure I’m not the first person to notice that if Chris Hollins has his eyes on the next Mayor’s race, we now have a big difference in vision and governance to debate going forward. I don’t know if anyone still believes in “honeymoon periods” for newly elected officials, but this one appears to be over. Houston Public Media and KHOU have more.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged budget, Chris Hollins, collective bargaining agreement, Edward Pollard, HFD, Houston, Houston City Controller, HPFFA, John Whitmire, lawsuit, Marty Lancton, Mayor, pension obligation bonds, revenue cap, Solid Waste Management Department, Sylvester Turner, Tiffany Thomas | 17 Comments

Amtrak is going hard for the high speed rail line

Posted on May 7, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I love it.

If Texas ends up getting a long-envisioned high-speed railway between Houston and Dallas, the Amtrak executive now leading the initiative says it would feature the fastest trains in the world.

The plan for the 240-mile route between the state’s two largest cities, first hatched about a decade ago and recently buoyed by support from Amtrak and political leaders in both the United States and Japan, calls for using Japanese Shinkansen technology in which trains move as fast as 205 mph. Passengers would be able to travel between Houston and Dallas in a matter of about 90 minutes.

“People are just going to be blown away when they experience that. I have been lucky enough to go to Japan and ride it,” Amtrak senior vice president Andy Byford, who leads its high-speed rail development program, said in a Monday video posted on Amtrak’s X account. “The average speed (between Houston and Dallas) will be about 187 mph, which currently would be the fastest average speed in the world.”

The 4-minute video featuring Byford and Amtrak president Roger Harris appears to signal that the national passenger railroad company for the U.S. is committed to seeing the project through, even though Byford cautioned at a Dallas-area rail conference in mid-April that the Texas bullet train was not a “done deal.” He said then that Amtrak continues to use $500,000 in federal grant funding to explore a partnership with Texas Central, the private company that came up with the idea and moved it forward before appearing to stall out in 2022, and will do so for about another 18 months before making a final decision.

But in Monday’s video, Byford said the Houston-to-Dallas route “stands out” as the most feasible and viable corridor in the country for high-speed rail. The video ends with Harris saying, “Let’s go make it happen.”

See here, here, and here for some background. The video can be found here; it’s also embedded in the story. You know that I am fully aware of the history of this project and the many obstacles it faces in ever getting completed. I’ve been suckered before. And yet, as long as the hope remains, I very much want to see this happen. I want to ride that train to Dallas. I am rooting for this to happen. Please let me have my dream.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged Amtrak, Andy Byford, Dallas, Federal Railroad Administration, high speed rail, Houston, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, stimulus, Texas, Texas Central High-Speed Railway | 1 Comment

Yeah, it looks like we do have to worry about Metro going backwards

Posted on May 6, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I have three things to say about this.

Transportation advocacy group LINK Houston, in its annual “Equity in Transit” report released this week, asked the region’s public transit provider to accelerate a $7.5 billion plan that was backed by Harris County voters in 2019. The idea behind the recommendation was to provide more frequent service, especially in low-income communities of color such as Gulfton, and to ultimately boost ridership.

But the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County (METRO) appears to be backtracking from, if not scrapping altogether, one of its key selling points when it asked voters to approve $3.5 billion in bond funding for its aforementioned METRONext Moving Forward Plan. That plan at the time included bus rapid transit, an environmentally friendly service entailing dedicated lanes for electric buses, platform boarding and buses arriving every 15 minutes or less.

The webpages for three planned bus rapid transit (BRT) lines in Gulfton, the Inner Katy corridor along Interstate 10 and the University corridor – with the latter being a 25.3-mile route from northeast to southwest Houston that a previous METRO board chair described last year as a “transformational project for the region” – all were removed this week from the METRO website.

“We are alarmed by METRO’s removal of all three BRT webpages without any sort of announcement or explanation to its customers or to Harris County taxpayers and voters who voted overwhelmingly to support the METRONext Moving Forward Plan in 2019,” LINK Houston executive director Gabe Cazares said Friday.

[…]

“METRO’s new leadership team is committed to reviewing all projects in order to best serve our customers and the community,” METRO’s interim president and CEO, Tom Jasien, said in a statement to Houston Public Media. “We are prioritizing ridership and meeting customer needs for today by ensuring each service we offer is safe, clean, reliable, and fiscally responsible.”

Cazares said LINK Houston, which noted in its Equity in Transit report that overall METRO ridership is at 86% of pre-pandemic levels, supports the idea of improving safety on its buses and light rail lines and better serving the needs of its current customers. But he also said, “pitting that against the transit system we want for the future is a false dichotomy.”

One of the stated goals of the METRONext Moving Forward Plan is to help alleviate congestion on Houston roads by giving residents a range of attractive and feasible transportation options. In that regard, Cazares said scaling back or scrapping bold plans based on current ridership, or even expected ridership, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“The Silver Line doesn’t connect to anything now,” Cazares said. “To increase ridership on the Silver Line, you need the Gulfton BRT and you need the Inner Katy BRT so all those lines connect and folks have access from southwest Houston to downtown Houston using all three of those lines.”

1. How is any of this consistent with wanting to increase ridership? The Universities Line, first as light rail and now as BRT, was always envisioned as a backbone of the entire system, a key east-west connector that would make it possible for a lot more of Houston to get to places like the Galleria area more easily. Look at the map in that story – it literally intersects with every existing light rail and BRT line. The original projections for the Universities Line showed it having very high ridership. What are we doing here?

2. And by the way, voters have now twice approved referenda to fund the construction of this line. How many times to we have to vote to build this damn thing before it finally gets built?

3. As with many other projects, also mentioned in the story, all of this has come completely out of left field. None of this was discussed during the Mayoral campaign. Whatever you thought you were voting for if you voted for John Whitmire last year, this wasn’t it. Again I ask, what are we doing here?

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged BRT, Election 2003, Election 2019, Election 2023, Elizabeth Brock, Houston, John Whitmire, light rail, LINK Houston, Metro, Tom Jasien, University line | 10 Comments

HISD budget cuts coming

Posted on May 6, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

This is going to get ugly.

Houston ISD’s state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles said Friday afternoon that the school district is facing an estimated $450 million gap in funding that will largely be made up by staff reductions as federal pandemic relief money expires and student enrollment continues to decline.

Miles has said previously that the majority of the cuts will come from HISD’s central office, and that his aim is to keep them “as far away from the classroom as possible.” His remarks Friday, though, appear to give the first indication of how widespread those cuts may be.

“We can’t cut $450 million in people, we wouldn’t be able to operate central office, but that’s the money we have to find in additional revenue, a small use of the fund balance and then cuts,” Miles said. “So most of that is cuts.”

HISD officials said last week that several central office departments have been reducing staff since January. On Thursday, those cuts appeared to accelerate as HISD notified scores of student support specialists that their positions were being eliminated, according to the Houston Landing.

[…]

Miles said the $450 million gap between the district’s revenue and expenditures won’t entirely be made up of cuts, noting the district will use about $80 million from its fund balance and make back a small amount through the sale of “dilapidated buildings” and other strategies. The remainder, however, will likely be made up by eliminating thousands of positions, primarily in the central office.

Individual campuses, however, will not be immune from the crunch. Miles said in March that schools that are not in his New Education System may see cuts of up to 12%, as the district returns to a pre-pandemic funding formula that awards dollars based on attendance and enrollment, and which had been paused for years as students shifted to and from remote learning.

The planned cuts and layoffs are occurring as the number of HISD employees who are making more than $200,000 has tripled since last year. The district is also planning to spend at least $120 million more toward increasing teacher salaries and expanding the controversial NES program to 45 more campuses next year.

The 130 NES schools, where Miles is concentrating his biggest reforms, may see slight budget increases due to their staffing model, which sees teachers earn substantially more money and support from “teacher apprentices” and “learning coaches.”

Remember, Mike Miles has talked big about his fiscal plans, and that has largely been bullshit. He has made promises about teacher pay that turned out to be bullshit. He made promises about wraparound services staff that turned out to be bullshit. Why should we believe anything he says?

Posted in School days | Tagged Board of Managers, budget, deficit, HISD, Houston, Mike Miles, Millard House, New Education System, schools, stimulus | 4 Comments

Let’s wait till 2031 for that Women’s World Cup

Posted on May 6, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Maybe 2027 was too soon.

Put a pin in that…

U.S. Soccer and the Mexican Football Federation (FMF) have withdrawn from the 2027 World Cup bidding process on Monday, only weeks before the public vote scheduled on May 17 at the FIFA Congress in Thailand. Instead, the two North American federations will bid on the 2031 edition of the tournament.

A statement released by U.S. Soccer said that by withdrawing the 2027 bid and focusing on 2031, it will allow the federations to fully take advantage of what they learn from the 2026 men’s edition and provide greater support for host cities — many of which could host both men’s and women’s matches.

U.S. Soccer also said that by pushing back the bid, it could more fully focus on ensuring that a Women’s World Cup hosted by the two federations would have equal investment to the men’s. With the proposed timeline of a jointly hosted 2026 men’s tournament amongst the U.S., Mexico and Canada, followed by the proposed women’s edition, then the 2028 Olympics, as well as the U.S.’s other hosting obligations for other smaller tournaments, 2027 appears to have proved too much for the timeline.

On the 2031 front, the U.S. and Mexico could face some strong competition in that bidding process as well. While bids won’t be due for a while, Football Association chairwoman Debbie Hewitt previously said that England is considering launching a bid for 2031.

This leaves only two remaining bids for the voters to choose from: one from Brazil, and a joint bid from Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. While the European joint bid may be a strong bid, Brazil is the heavy favorite to host at this point. The country hosted a men’s World Cup relatively recently in 2014, and considering the growing investment in South America, it may prove to be a smart long-term play for FIFA to use the boost of a major tournament to firmly cement the women’s game in the region.

See here for the background, and here for that US Soccer statement. Would have been awesome to have two World Cups in a row here, especially if at least some of the matches were literally here in Houston, but I can understand the desire to take a little more time. I’ll be ready for it either way.

Posted in Other sports | Tagged Belgium, Brazil, Cindy Parlow Cone, England, FIFA, Germany, Mexico, soccer, The Netherlands, US Soccer, Women's World Cup | Comments Off

Weekend link dump for May 5

Posted on May 5, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Whatever happened to Charlotte Braun, the least popular Peanuts character?

“This article attempts to answer the question of why the polls show good numbers for Republicans that don’t always bear out in final results and why current polling might be off.”

“MLB fans getting younger as more kids taking to the diamond”.

“Conservative Legal Philosophy Was All a Lie, Too”.

I’m old enough to remember when being an avowed puppy-killer was considered to be a political negative.

Where have I heard that song before?

“The Shōgun story has been told. There is no “second novel” involving any of these characters to adapt.” So stop asking for a Season 2, as good as the miniseries that just concluded was. There may be another James Clavell novel worth adapting, but no Shōgun season two.

RIP, Mike Pinder, co-founder of and keyboardist for The Moody Blues.

“Turns out that remembering some guys is good for you.”

“More than just being adjacent, the latest [Harvey] Weinstein and Trump stories are connected—or at least, they might be.”

“Indeed, after a week of blockbuster opening testimony from David Pecker, it’s unclear when things will heat up again with the trial’s most explosive witnesses, Cohen and Daniels. Which is why now is a good time to reflect on how Pecker laid the groundwork for a key part of the story prosecutors seem to be building: that the Trump Organization functioned as a crime family business, with Donald J. Trump as the boss.”

“And yet, in the face of such outrageous suppression of protest through state agents, the powerful phalanx of elite opinionists who have told us for about a decade now that the “free speech crisis” on college campuses is a clear and present danger to freedom and democracy has had nary a critical word to offer. On the contrary, the crackdown at Columbia, specifically, has garnered an enthusiastic response from such prominent members of the “free speech crisis” industrial complex as Caitlin Flanagan and John McWhorter who have sided unequivocally with the authorities. The same circles who have been presenting themselves as uncompromising fighters for free speech, imploring us to understand that speech must not be curtailed just because you (on the Left!) may disagree with it, are now fully on board with speech they don’t like being suppressed by the state. Weird, huh?”

“Grizzly bears will be reintroduced to Washington state’s North Cascades mountain range, the federal government said this week — a decision that followed years of bitterly divided debate.”

“Hunter Biden is threatening to sue Fox News for defamation, exploitation of his image and publication of hacked photographs”. And hey, it worked.

I can get behind more episodes and fewer binge drops for (good) TV shows.

“The mysterious ‘Great Attractor’ pulling the Milky Way galaxy off course”.

“Arcade, sports bar and restaurant Dave & Buster’s will allow guests to place wagers on its games, like Skee-Ball through its app.”

“United Methodist delegates repealed their church’s longstanding ban on LGBTQ clergy with no debate on Wednesday, removing a rule forbidding “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from being ordained or appointed as ministers.”

Congratulations to Carli Lloyd and her husband Brian Hollins.

RIP, Richard Tandy, founder and keyboardist for Electric Light Orchestra.

“I assume you’re familiar with Kristi Noem/Cricket the executed dog discourse. But I have to flag this new controversy from her memoir, No Going Back. Noem appears to have made up a meeting with North Korea paramount leader Kim Jong Un.”

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged linkdump | 2 Comments

May 2024 Harris County special election results

Posted on May 5, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Election live results are here. As of the 11 PM update, in which 118 of 151 voting centers had reported, Molly Cook was easily winning the SD15 special election, with about 56% of the vote. In the HCAD elections:

Position 1: Kathy Blueford-Daniels had 55% after early voting, but Bill Frazer was catching up thanks to his Election Day performance. As of 11 PM, Blueford-Daniels was still winning outright with just under 51%, but if things continued as they had been she would likely end up in a runoff. It’s hard to say where exactly this race was because we don’t know which centers had returned results and which were still out. I’ll update in the morning.

Position 2: Kyle Scott (46%) and Melissa Noriega (25%) appear headed to the runoff. Scott was over 50% on Election Day but I don’t think there are enough votes out to push him to a majority.

Position 3: Ericka McCrutcheon (41%) is in the runoff, but it’s hard to say whether she’ll face Amy Lacy or Pelumi Adeleke. Lacy was slightly ahead of Adeleke after early voting, but Adeleke pulled ahead in the last update. Of interest is that Blueford-Daniels had a big lead in mail ballots, Noriega and Scott were basically tied in mail ballots, but Adeleke was well behind McCrutcheon and Lacy in mail ballots. She was ahead of Lacy in both early in person and Election Day votes, however, and that may be enough for her to make it to the runoff.

I saw somewhere that the Clerk announced that something like 21,500 votes were cast on Saturday. As of the 11 PM update, there were just under 18K votes counted. So that’s where we are. This would put final turnout at around 53K votes, just barely over two percent of registered voters.

I will update in the morning. Good night.

UPDATE: And as of the morning, the results are the same. Kathy Blueford-Daniels remained above fifty percent and was the outright winner in Position 1. Pelumi Adeleke held on to second place in Position 3 and will be in the runoff. Melissa Noriega will be in the runoff for Position 2.

Here’s the Chron story about SD15 and the story about HCAD. The runoff elections for HCAD will be on Saturday, June 15. Light a candle for all the election workers out there, who will be handling the primary runoffs on May 28 as well.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged absentee ballots, Amy Ngo Lacy, Bill Frazer, early voting, Election 2024, Ericka McCrutcheon, Harris County, Harris County Appraisal District, HCAD, Jarvis Johnson, Kathy Blueford Daniels, Kyle Scott, Molly Cook, Pelumi Adeleke, runoff, SD15, Senate, special election, Texas, turnout | 4 Comments

Texas man seeks to “investigate” ex’s out of state abortion

Posted on May 5, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Take a couple of deep breaths and we’ll have a brief discussion of this on the other side.

A Texas man has asked a court for permission to launch an investigation into his ex-partner’s alleged out-of-state abortion, which could lead to one of the first lawsuits against people who help Texans leave the state to obtain the procedure.

Prolific anti-abortion attorney Jonathan Mitchell filed the now-sealed petition in Texas state court last month that would allow him to investigate suspected illegal actions before filing litigation, according to a lawyer representing the people targeted.

The man Mitchell is representing, Collin Davis, threatened his ex-partner with legal action earlier this year upon learning she planned to go to Colorado to obtain an abortion, according to the Washington Post, which first reported the legal action.

Davis has said in legal filings that he plans to pursue wrongful-death claims against “anyone involved in the killing of his unborn child,” the Post reported. Mitchell could not immediately be reached for comment.

Molly Duane, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights, said her group is representing the woman, who is remaining anonymous for privacy and safety reasons and who declined an interview, as well as multiple others who are named in the legal action.

Duane declined to say how many or who is named but noted that Mitchell has previously stated publicly his desire to punish out-of-state doctors. Mitchell engineered Texas’ novel citizen-enforced abortion ban known as Senate Bill 8 and regularly represents anti-abortion plaintiffs.

Duane’s group is opposing Mitchell’s attempt to depose her clients. Among other things, Mitchell could ask them about others involved in the abortion, such as abortion funds or groups that might have provided financial support, and receive documentation related to the alleged abortion, the Post reported.

[…]

With these legal actions, Mitchell and his anti-abortion allies are seeking to test the reach of Texas restrictions since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

It is not currently a crime to obtain an abortion in a state where it is legal, and Duane said the petition amounts to “fearmongering.”

“It’s not enough for Texas to ban abortion,” she said. “They truly want to trap people in their state, pregnant, and the purpose of this is to frighten people to make them think there might be repercussions for doing things that are perfectly legal. … That is really troubling, but it is emblematic of what abortion extremists really have on the agenda.”

The woman Davis is targeting was “still in the process of recovering from a very unhealthy relationship” with him when he filed the legal action, Duane said, without providing details. Duane said it “speaks for itself” that in both this case and the Silva case, the women are being targeted by ex-partners who describe their former relationships as toxic or even abusive.

The new petition was filed using an unusual civil procedure called Rule 202, which allows lawyers to collect interviews and documents in anticipation of a lawsuit to help them determine their targets and confirm their suspicion that the issue at hand meets legal standards required to file officially.

While other states allow pre-suit discovery, Texas’ rules around when the procedure can be used are the “most expansive,” according to legal scholars.

The story notes that this is the second time professional creep Jonathan Mitchell has tried to use the legal system to get information from a former partner for some loser; see here and here for the first lawsuit, out of Galveston, which may be set for a trial in the fall. As for this action, I mean, what is there to say? This is what these people want. The goal has always been to punish the women who get abortions, and as long as they have the power they will relentlessly push to pass laws that allow them to do exactly that. That’s far from all that they want to do, of course, but it’s a high priority. They’re not shy or subtle about it, though the Republicans they have helped elect do a good job of being coy and evasive when the subject arises. Which is why I continue to be extremely frustrated that Ted Cruz hasn’t felt any pressure about this as yet in the campaign, even as abortion is a huge issue nationally. Everyone in the media who has any reason to be talking to Ted Cruz needs to ask him about this. Reform Austin has more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged abortion, Center for Reproductive Rights, Colin Allred, Collin Davis, Donald Trump, Election 2024, Galveston, lawsuit, SCOTUS, Senate, Ted Cruz, Texas | 2 Comments

HFT leaders vote “no confidence” on Mike Miles

Posted on May 5, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Hardly a shock.

The leaders of Houston’s largest teachers union approved a resolution of no confidence in Houston ISD’s Superintendent Mike Miles on Tuesday, in a strong but ultimately symbolic rebuke of the state-appointed superintendent’s leadership.

The union’s resolution calls for Miles’ removal as superintendent and lays out numerous grievances that have surfaced repeatedly over the course of his 11-month tenure. It now heads to the Houston Federation of Teachers’ 6,000-plus members for ratification, with results of the vote expected next week.

“The takeover of Houston ISD, the largest school district in Texas and the eighth largest district in the country, is a politically motivated, irresponsible experiment that is worsening inequities and disenfranchising Houston voters,” the resolution begins. “Houston ISD teachers and support staff have come together now to call for a vote of no confidence in state-installed superintendent Mike Miles.”

Among other complaints, the union took issue with Miles’ dissolution of their exclusive consulting agreement with the district, which effectively ended their monthly meetings with HISD administration. They also cite a “track record of broken promises,” such as rescinding teacher retention bonuses, widespread teacher turnover and Miles’ expanded spending power as reasons for the vote of no confidence.

“The ongoing lack of respect Miles has demonstrated for educators, their profession, and the students they serve has resulted in a complete lack of confidence in his leadership efforts,” the resolution reads.

[…]

The resolution calls for Miles’ removal as superintendent and his replacement with a leader “who will not treat our community with disdain, will work to restore trust with employees and parents, and will end the harm being done to our students from Miles’ ‘reforms.'” Other demands include a request that all teachers be certified, librarians be restored and the district return to the state’s teacher evaluation system.

It would have been a huge upset if they had done anything else. This has no practical effect, as HFT has no power over the Superintendent. But in case there were any lingering doubts about how they felt, this ought to clear them up.

Posted in School days | Tagged HFT, HISD, Houston, Mike Miles, schools, Texas Education Agency | Comments Off

One last pre-election look at those Appraisal Board elections

Posted on May 4, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

From the Trib, which did the initial reporting that informed me of these dumb new elections in the first place.

The new law requires only counties with more than 75,000 residents to hold the elections, a designation that applies to 50 of the state’s 254 counties. In 30 of those counties, appraisal board candidates either didn’t draw challengers or the elections were canceled because no one filed for the positions. In instances where no one filed for an elected spot, the remaining board members can appoint people to those seats.

[…]

Still, some critics worry that elected board members will insert havoc and political jockeying into the property appraisal process. Before the Texas Legislature created appraisal districts in the late 1970s, the task of assessing property owners’ values fell to individual taxing entities like cities, counties and school districts — which often came up with different values for the same property. Appraisal districts came about as a way to smooth out that process and create one set of values.

The state also created appraisal districts in order to “remove political pressure from the appraisal process,” South said.

“Having elected board members might interject political pressure right back into it,” said South, who chairs the Texas Association of Appraisal District’s legislative committee.

Voter turnout in Texas’ local elections tends to be anemic. Political experts expect the appraisal district races also to be low-turnout affairs: Candidates are running for an obscure board, and it’s the first time they’re doing so.

“It just all adds up to this very lackluster interest into what could make a difference, particularly in these large metropolitan counties that have seen their property values just skyrocket over the last decade,” said Renée Cross, senior executive director of the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston.

Though the seats are nonpartisan, candidates have campaigned with partisan identifiers, drawn endorsements from prominent officials and deployed campaign rhetoric that hues along traditional partisan lines.

Conservative-leaning candidates in particular have campaigned as “taxpayer advocates” seeking to rein in what they see as excesses among appraisal districts.

“Tarrant Appraisal District has been hostile to the very taxpayers they were commissioned to serve,” Eric Morris, a Haltom City Council member running for a seat on Tarrant Appraisal District’s board, wrote on his campaign website. “It’s time to end that and balance the scales between the government and the people footing the bill!”

Liberal-leaning and progressive candidates have positioned themselves as bulwarks against would-be tax-cut warriors who they fear would unduly interfere with the appraisal process and starve school districts and municipalities of much-needed tax revenue.

Kendall Scudder, a Texas Democratic Party finance chair seeking a seat on the Dallas Central Appraisal District’s board, notes on his campaign website that the assessment entity is “vitally important” to ensuring local governments function and that it’s his priority to “ensure fair, equitable, and uniform appraisals, to ensure that citizens protesting their appraisals feel that they are treated fairly.”

Two of the newly elected board members must sign off on the appointees to appraisal review boards, which could let elected members stack review boards with people who promise to cut property owners’ values, said Dick Lavine, a tax policy expert at the left-leaning think tank Every Texan. Lavine is running for the Travis Central Appraisal District board.

[Brent] South, the Hunt County chief appraiser, also worries elected members could exercise their veto power and bring the appointment process to a halt, he said.

A likely outcome of either scenario: the chief appraiser would be forced to accept lower values, at a potential cost to localities and school districts.

“Making it more direct like this is just an invitation for political meddling,” said Lavine, who previously chaired the Travis appraisal board.

Emphasis mine. Ain’t democracy grand? As I noted in January, as of the November 2023 election there were just those 50 counties affected by this new law, but the 51st was right on the edge of being covered, and others (including counties in the greater Houston area) were likely to meet that milestone in the next few years. It remains unclear to me what mechanism exists to force a county that has surpassed 75K in population to begin holding these elections.

Anyway. I’ll have the results for you tomorrow. Go vote if you haven’t, today is the day.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged Austin Pooley, constitutional amendments, Dallas County, Dick Lavine, Election 2023, Election 2024, Galveston, Harris County, Harris County Appraisal District, Harris County Tax Assessor, HCAD, Kathy Blueford Daniels, Kendall Scudder, Melissa Noriega, Paul Bettencourt, Pelumi Adeleke, property taxes, Senate, Tarrant Appraisal District, Texas, Texas Association of Appraisal Districts, The Lege, Travis County | 1 Comment

Apple appeal delays Astroworld trial

Posted on May 4, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

This may take awhile.

The start of the first civil trial stemming from the 2021 Astroworld Festival, at which 10 people were killed in a crowd surge, has been delayed.

Jury selection had been set to begin Tuesday, May 7 in the wrongful-death lawsuit filed the family of Madison Dubiski, a 23-year-old Houston resident who was killed during the crowd crush at the Nov. 5, 2021, concert by rap superstar Travis Scott.

But Apple Inc., one of the more than 20 defendants going to trial next week, filed an appeal this week, automatically delaying the start of jury selection.

“Unless I hear differently, the trial is stayed,” state District Judge Kristen Hawkins said during a court hearing Thursday, May 2.

Apple, which livestreamed Scott’s concert, is appealing a ruling by Hawkins that denied the company’s motion to be dismissed from the case. Apple has argued that under Texas law, it can appeal Hawkins’ ruling because its defense claims are being made in part as a member of the electronic media.

Apple is arguing that in livestreaming Scott’s concert, it was acting as a member of the electronic media and its actions merit free speech protection.

“It remains our position that our conduct is protected by the First Amendment,” Kent Rutter, one of Apple’s attorneys, told Hawkins during a court hearing Thursday.

Just before the hearing ended, Hawkins said she had been notified that the appeals court earlier Thursday had denied a request by the lawyers for Dubiski’s family to lift the stay.

Jason Itkin, one of the attorneys for Dubiski’s family, said he planned to appeal that denial, likely up to the Texas Supreme Court.

See here and here for some background, and here for an earlier Chron story about Apple’s last-minute appeal. This is going to be complicated, with all that legal paper flying around, and it could be over in days or it could drag on for weeks and months. I’ll keep an eye on it. Houston Landing has more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged Apple, Astroworld, Harris County, Harris County Sports & Convention Corp, HFD, Houston, HPD, lawsuit, Live Nation, Reliant Stadium, Travis Scott | 1 Comment

Mutinous nuns file and then withdraw a restraining order motion

Posted on May 4, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

This happened last week.

Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), Doctor of the Church and co-founder of the Discalced Carmelites

Legal and ecclesiastical tensions escalated between the Discalced Carmelite Nuns in Arlington and the Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth after a group of sisters filed for a temporary restraining order on Monday against Bishop Michael Olson and the Association of Christ the King.

Rev. Mother Teresa Agnes Gerlach, Sister Francis Therese and Sister Joseph Marie are seeking the order to prevent Olson and the association from entering and having authority over the Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity in south Arlington.

The move comes days after the Vatican issued a decree placing the governance of the nuns under the authority of the Association of Christ the King, with its president serving the monastery as the monastery’s superior. The nuns issued a statement in opposition of the new leadership, equating the change of leadership as a “hostile takeover.”

“If Rome wishes to ‘save face’ and to sweep the issue of the abuse of the Bishop under the carpet and move on regardless, this is unacceptable,” the nuns wrote.

[…]

Matthew Wilson, professor at Southern Methodist University who specializes in politics and religion, described the latest disputes between the nuns and the bishop as a “remarkable event.”

Religious orders, such as nuns, are not part of a diocese per se, Wilson said, but are meant to have a “cooperative and respectful relationship” with the local bishop. Most religious orders are governed by a global superstructure.

“The Catholic Church, by its nature, by its structure, is hierarchical and deferential and, ultimately, authority in the church proceeds from Rome,” Wilson said. “If you submit an appeal to Rome, and Rome comes up with a solution, you can’t just defy that.”

See here, here, and here for some background. There was to have been a hearing on this on April 30, but before that happened the nuns backed down.

Following the sudden cancellation of an April 30 court hearing between the Arlington Carmelite nuns and Fort Worth Catholic Bishop Michael Olson, lawyers representing the diocese told the Fort Worth Report that the nuns withdrew their request for a temporary restraining order without explanation.

Michael Anderson, an attorney representing Olson and the diocese in civil matters, said the opposing side withdrew its claims before the hearing, which was scheduled for 4 p.m. Tuesday. Matthew Bobo, an attorney representing the nuns on civil matters, declined to comment.

[…]

Matthew Wilson is a professor at Southern Methodist University who specializes in politics and religion. He said civil courts have been reluctant to weigh in on the dispute because of previous rulings over the conflict being an ecclesiastical matter rather than a legal one.

Questions over who has ownership of access to the physical facilities could be disputed in civil court, Wilson said. However, the more difficult issue at hand, Wilson said, is how the dispute will impact the nuns’ relationship with the diocese and the Vatican.

Wilson said the nuns’ response to the decree places the sisters “in a much more different situation” both ecclesiastically and within the court of public opinion.

“In civil court, they can theoretically win the right to be a group of women who own a piece of property,” Wilson said. “What they cannot win in civil court is the right to continue to be Catholic, and that is where I think the real rub is in this situation.”

The Arlington nuns wrote in an April 20 statement that they are waiting on a response from the Vatican regarding their concerns over Olson’s actions.

Whether the disputes continue in the court of civil law, the canonical saga will continue, Wilson said.

“No matter what the civil court rules, it doesn’t help them ecclesiastically,” he said. “And I think that’s their biggest problem.”

I bet Professor Wilson has spoken to the media a lot more lately than he ever had before. I don’t have anything to add here, I’m just following this story because it’s absolutely fascinating.

Posted in Legal matters, The great state of Texas | Tagged Arlington, Catholic Church, lawsuit, Michael Olson, Tarrant County, Teresa Agnes Gerlach, Texas | Comments Off

The SD15 effect on the HCAD elections

Posted on May 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

We have had two elections going on these past weeks. I’ve done my best to bring attention to the three HCAD elections, but they have gone on alongside the special election in SD15. While the stakes in that one are relatively low – both candidates would gladly trade winning tomorrow for winning on May 28 – it makes sense to me that the turnout for the HCAD elections is being driven in part by turnout for SD15. It’s an active campaign, and there are no others like it going on.

I wanted to check that, so I went and downloaded the voter rosters for the ongoing special election, to see how many votes were cast by people in SD15. For that to mean something, we have to compare it to something else, and the most sensible thing to use as a point of comparison is the 2022 election. I wanted to see what percentage of the total vote in each election was cast by voters in SD15. And once I got on that track, it was easy enough to do the same thing for all of the other Senate districts. I had the voter roster for the 2024 data and the precinct data for 2022, so off I went. And here’s what I found:


Dist    2022    2024
====================
SD04   8.52%   6.97%
SD07  23.82%  16.05%
SD11   8.53%   7.75%
SD17  10.23%  11.09%

SD06  11.66%   9.57%
SD13  11.29%  16.54%
SD15  22.45%  30.20%

SD18   3.20%   1.83%

GOP   51.10%  41.86%
Dem   45.40%  56.31%

The numbers here represent the share of the total vote cast in that district. For example, in 2022 there were 248,556 votes cast in SD15 out of 1,107,390 total votes in Harris County, which is 22.45% of that total. I then applied the same math for each Senate district in each election. I have them grouped as I do because the top four are Republican, the next three are Democratic, and for the tiny piece of SD18 that is in Harris County, in 2022 it was basically fifty-fifty. That yields the GOP and Dem percentages at the bottom, which are the sums of the top four and next three numbers in each column, respectively. Make sense?

The first thing to note is that my initial hypothesis, that turnout in SD15 was driving overall turnout in Harris County, was correct. SD15 is a much larger share of the overall vote in this election than it was in 2022. I’d be confused, and even more alarmed, if that were not the case, because it would suggest that Republicans are doing an unexpectedly strong job of turning out their voters for HCAD. At least based on that, I don’t think that’s the case.

However, we need to apply a few caveats here. One is that I’m comparing final vote totals in 2022 to early (including mail) vote totals in 2024. Democrats did better in early voting in 2022 than they did on Election Day, so if we assume that the larger share of the vote coming from Dem districts is good for the Dems, it may be somewhat ephemeral, depending on what Election Day turnout looks like. As I said before, I have no idea how that pattern will play out, and I’m not going to try to guess now. Point is, it is entirely possible that Republicans could make up ground on Saturday. We won’t know until we see the returns come in.

Let me digress for a minute to address the fact that more votes were cast in Republican districts in 2022 than in Dem districts. You may wonder, how can that be if the Dems still won nearly everything countywide? Very simply, because the Dem districts are a lot bluer than the GOP districts are red. Greg Abbott got 59% of the vote in (the Harris County part of) SD04, 58% in SD07, 61% in SD11, and 53% in SD17, but Beto got 67% in SD06, 80% in SD13, and 65% in SD15. The difference in degree led to the overall greater vote share for Dems in 2022.

Which again should be good news for the Dem HCAD candidates, especially with the significant lead Dem districts have this year, but that leads to caveat #2: Particularly in a low-turnout election, the partisan splits can vary greatly from what you might expect. I mean, SD15 is still going to be majority Dem, but maybe it and the other Dem district are five or ten points less blue, while the GOP districts are five or ten points more red. Think about all those special elections elsewhere in which Dem candidates have outperformed the 2022 and even 2020 benchmarks. We don’t know what the partisan splits actually are, so we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions. One could do an estimate of the partisan mix with the use of various campaign datasets, but I don’t have that. This is what I do have.

Finally, while more people are turning out in SD15, it may be that a disproportionate number of them are only voting in SD15, as they had little knowledge of or interest in the HCAD elections. I can tell you as an SD15 resident that I’ve been blockwalked by HCDP volunteers pushing the HCAD elections, so there’s an effort to make sure it gets some attention from the one known pool of slightly more likely voters, but we don’t know how effective that’s been. Again, we’ll know more when we start seeing the returns.

So this is where we are. I will say, seeing these numbers made me feel a little better, like Dem efforts to get out the vote have borne fruit. I don’t know how effective that has been, and given the caveats I will try to keep my expectations modest. I would still much rather be in this position than one in which Republican districts were outpacing their 2022 numbers. That would make me very nervous. What I see here gives me a sense of tempered optimism. We’ll know more soon enough.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged absentee ballots, early voting, Election 2022, Election 2024, Harris County, Harris County Appraisal District, HCAD, precinct analysis, SD04, SD06, SD07, SD11, SD13, SD15, SD17, SD18, Senate, special election, Texas, turnout | 1 Comment

Solid Waste study approved

Posted on May 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Could this be the precursor to a garbage fee? Maybe.

As Houston’s Solid Waste Management Department faces ongoing challenges in providing basic services, such as consistent garbage collection and recycling pickup, City Council has promised to give the department a helping hand.

Council members voted unanimously Wednesday to approve a 12-month, $176,600 consulting contract with Houston-based Burns & McDonnell Engineering Company to study Solid Waste and make recommendations for how the department can improve services.

Ahead of the vote, Council Member Amy Peck said she hoped the firm made recommendations beyond just saying the city needs a garbage fee, which has been a much-debate topic in Houston.

Other council members agreed something more needed to be done to help the department.

“There’s no way we can keep operating Solid Waste like we’ve been operating it,” Council Member Sallie Alcorn said.

Mayor John Whitmire said the study would be comprehensive and include metrics on efficiencies, cost effectiveness and Solid Waste’s overall performance.

“(It’s) really to see how they’re doing so well with so little, quite frankly,” Whitmire said, adding that the study would also seek to amplify the department’s improvements as well.

See here for a recent discussion of the garbage fee issue. Yes, this study should so more than just lay the groundwork for a fee, and if there are lessons to be learned from how Solid Waste operates that can help the rest of the city, so much the better. But let’s be clear, the city needs more revenue, there are a very limited number of ways it can generate it, and we are an outlier in not having a trash fee, which would free up some amount of general revenue dollars for things like paying for that firefighter settlement. You do the math. Houston Landing has more.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged Amy Peck, budget, fees, Houston, Houston City Council, John Whitmire, Sallie Alcorn, Solid Waste Management Department, Sylvester Turner | 1 Comment

Election Day for HCAD and SD15 is tomorrow

Posted on May 3, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

From the inbox:

Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth reminds citizens that Election Day for the Uniform and Special Elections is this Saturday, May 4. Harris County uses the countywide polling place program, meaning voters can vote at any of the 151 vote centers open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on May 4.

“More than 19,000 votes were cast in person during early voting for the May 4 Uniform and Special Elections,” said Clerk Hudspeth, the county’s chief election official. “If you did not participate in early voting, your last opportunity to vote in this election is this Saturday, May 4.”

This is the first-ever opportunity for voters to elect three members to the Harris Central Appraisal District (HCAD) Board of Directors. Thirteen candidates are running for three unpaid, elected positions on the nine-member board. The HCAD Board of Directors is responsible for many administrative processes, including hiring the chief appraiser and appointing members to the appraisal review board.

Additionally, voters residing in Texas Senate District (SD) 15 can vote to fill the position left vacant by Houston Mayor John Whitmire. The winner of this contest will immediately assume office and represent SD 15 until the end of the current term, December 31, 2024.

“No matter where you live in Harris County, there is something on the May 4 ballot that affects you,” explained Clerk Hudspeth. “I want to encourage every Harris County voter to view their sample ballot on our website and head to the polls prepared this Saturday on Election Day.”

Election Day Tips

Written materials, including sample ballots, are permitted inside the voting booth. Voters can view and print their sample ballot on our website.

No electronic devices, including phones or cameras, are permitted within 100 feet of the voting area at any time.

Voters can find their nearest vote center and view its estimated wait time on our website.

The following forms of photo ID are acceptable when voting in person:

Texas Driver’s License issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS)

Texas Election Identification Certificate issued by DPS

Texas Personal Identification Card issued by DPS

Texas Handgun License issued by DPS

United States Military Identification Card containing the person’s photograph

United States Citizenship Certificate containing the person’s photograph

United States Passport (book or card)

Voters who do not possess and cannot obtain one of the acceptable forms of photo ID may fill out a Reasonable Impediment Declaration (RID) at a vote center and present another supporting form of ID, such as a utility bill, bank statement, government check, or voter registration certificate.

Unofficial election results will be posted on www.HarrisVotes.com/Election-Results as they become available on election night, starting after 7 p.m. with early voting and ballot-by-mail results. Official results will be posted after the canvass is complete.

Additional election information is available at www.HarrisVotes.com. For news and updates on social media, follow @HarrisVotes.

You know my spiel about this election by now so I’ll spare you a rerun. The main thing I would say is that if you are voting tomorrow, please go to the Vote Center finder and make sure you know where the nearest one to you is. There are going to be fewer of these than usual open on Saturday because of the low turnout, so check before you go. You can still vote at any of them, just find where they are first. I doubt waiting will be an issue, but you can check that too. I’ll have the results on Sunday. Go vote!

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged Austin Pooley, Election 2024, Election Day, Harris County, Harris County Appraisal District, HCAD, HCDP, Kathy Blueford Daniels, Melissa Noriega, Pelumi Adeleke, SD15, Senate, special election, turnout | Comments Off

Former Mayor Parker “considering” a run for County Judge in 2026

Posted on May 2, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

The next election is always closer than you think.

Annise Parker

Former Houston Mayor Annise Parker has been talking to friends and supporters in recent months about making another run for elected office.

Parker, a Democrat who led City Hall from 2010 to 2016, is considering a run for Harris County judge in 2026, according to two people who have spoken to her directly about her interest in the job. The Houston Chronicle granted the sources anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The former mayor said she has not finalized any plans about her future. She is leaving her job at the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund in December and said she will assess her options after departing the political action committee, which is dedicated to supporting LGBTQ candidates for elected office nationwide.

“I don’t know that I’m ready to retire, but I do know that I hate being on the road,” Parker told the Chronicle. “I have to find something that fits my skill set and allows me to be here in the greater Houston area. I’m going to keep my options open.”

She added that while she had not made a decision about running, the county judge position has an appeal.

“I would certainly be open to (county judge), but you know, that’s two years away. Two years is an eternity in politics.”

[…]

Primary elections for the seat will be held in March 2026, with a general election in November. It is not unusual for campaigns to kick off at the beginning of the preceding year, which would allow Parker to start fundraising and organizing a campaign as she exits the Victory Fund.

It is unclear whether Parker would challenge Hidalgo in a primary or if the former mayor is exploring a run in case Hidalgo decides not to seek a third term. There has been speculation that Hidalgo may run for statewide office or eye a federal appointment if President Joe Biden wins in November, instead of seeking reelection.

One of the two sources who spoke on condition of anonymity said Parker is likely to run even if Hidalgo does seek reelection, suggesting the former mayor is interested in taking on the incumbent Democrat.

[…]

Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston, said a primary matchup between the two would set up a generational fight that could expose intraparty battles that have played out in private.

“That would be stunning to see,” he said.

Let me begin by saying that I consider both Mayor Parker and Judge Hidalgo to be friends. I like and admire both of them. I’ve heard this chatter for a couple of months now, including the speculation that Judge Hidalgo might get an appointment of some kind in a second Biden term. I have some thoughts on this but let me begin by noting what Campos has to say:

I agree that two years is an eternity in politics.

Mayor Parker has been on a City of H-Town ballot over a dozen times including runoffs over the past 30 years. The last time being in 2013, err, eleven years ago – a super eternity in politics. I don’t think she has ever been on a partisan ballot, err, Democratic Party Primary ballot.

I am sure the former mayor will look into polling data. The last polling data I saw on Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo a few months ago show Judge Hidalgo with very high favorable numbers with Democrats.

If the race were held today, Judge Hidalgo would likely score the most endorsements from groups and organizations who endorse in a Democratic Party Primary. I don’t even think that the Houston LGBTQ+ Political Caucus would endorse Annise.

I think Judge Hidalgo would also hold on to the support from most of the elected officials who are Democrats.

The local Fox 26 “What’s Your Point” crew holds zilch influence on a Harris County Democratic Party Primary election. A big zilch. Certainly don’t take political advice from this bunch.

Latino Democratic voters enjoy the fact that a majority of the Harris County Commissioners Court are Latino and Latina. I think they would come out and support Judge Hidalgo and the current majority.

In a Democratic Party Primary in these parts and in these days, the voter landscape tends to favor the more partisan Democratic candidate. I don’t think former Mayor Parker could out-partisan Judge Hidalgo.

You have to figure that one of the factors that contributed to incumbent Harris County DA Kim Ogg getting severely trounced a couple of months in the primary election was because of Ogg’s vendetta against Judge Hidalgo. Yes, I will go on record as labeling it a vendetta after the DA handed the Hidalgo related case off to the crook Texas GOP AG Ken Paxton last week. The vendetta got Ogg 25% of the vote and bolstered Judge Hidalgo’s cred among Democrats.

If DA Ogg and/or crook Paxton decide to indict Judge Hidalgo in the next few months, it will only embolden Judge Hidalgo with Democrats.

Oh, well. 22 months is an eternity in politics. Stay tuned.

I largely agree with this take. We know that Parker considered running for County Judge in 2018 but decided against it because she had enjoyed a close working relationship with then-Judge Ed Emmett (*), and didn’t want to run against him; she very likely decided he would be basically unbeatable anyway, as did a lot of other folks. I’m sure she must have thought about that once or twice since then with a certain amount of wistfulness. That she still might like to have this job can’t be a big surprise to anyone.

The thing is that there’s no way any serious challenge to Judge Hidalgo in 2026 would be anything but ugly, negative, and just soul-crushingly awful for everyone involved. Judge Hidalgo attracted an assortment of opponents in 2022, none of whom were serious challengers. The closest one to that was HCDE Trustee Erica Davis, whose “campaign” consisted of a handful of shiny biographical/introduction videos that never mentioned Hidalgo; it was as if she were running a campaign from years past as the sole challenger to a Republican incumbent. Whatever else a 2026 campaign against Hidalgo would be, it would not be like that.

Annise Parker is a seasoned political veteran who has run and won a bunch of campaigns, though as Campos notes never in a Dem primary. I have no doubt that she could articulate a credible case against Judge Hidalgo and for herself. I’m also sure that she is aware of the effect that would have on a Democratic electorate that likes Judge Hidalgo, and the knock-on effects it would have with her friends and allies in the party who will feel incredibly torn about this. Primary elections are family fights – they can and do leave a lasting mark. This is not an argument for or against any course of action. It’s just how it is.

I can’t say that I would look forward to this election, if it were to happen. I feel like I’m still recovering from Carol Alvarado versus Sylvia Garcia for SD06 back in 2013. As everyone here says, two years is a long time in politics. It’s also closer than you think.

(*) A Houston Mayor who has a close working relationship with a Harris County Judge? Imagine that.

Posted in Election 2026 | Tagged Annise Parker, Carol Alvarado, Democratic primary, Ed Emmett, Election 2013, Election 2018, Election 2022, Election 2024, Election 2026, Erica Davis, Harris County, Harris County Judge, Houston, Ken Paxton, Kim Ogg, Lina Hidalgo, Mayor, Sylvia Garcia, Texas | 9 Comments

Here come the deepfakes

Posted on May 2, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Here already, and we’re not ready for them.

Rep. Dade Phelan

A recent “deepfaked” ad targeting House Speaker Dade Phelan could inspire further legislation to crack down on doctored imagery in political ads.

At the end of Monday’s hearing of the House Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies, political attorney Andrew Cates suggested the committee should recommend an update to Senate Bill 751 from 2019, which created a Class A misdemeanor offense for distributing a “deep fake video” created with the intent to deceive voters.

“Not to bring up sensitive stuff, but the speaker got hit a couple days ago with a fake image, or a deceptively altered image,” Cates said. “It’s not against the law here.”

That mailer, paid for by the Jeff Yass-bankrolled Club for Growth Action PAC, depicted Phelan in an intimate hug with former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, apparently a remake of Pelosi hugging new House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Less publicized was the flip side of the mailer, which falsely depicted Phelan at a lectern speaking at a Texas House Democratic Caucus news conference.

If the ad was a sore subject among the members of the Texas House, committee Chair Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, didn’t seem to mind.

“It was multiple images, one on each side, and what’s a video but multiple images played really quickly?” Capriglione said, adding that the Legislature may need to update the law.

“The reason, though, is because it’s unfair,” Capriglione continued. “It’s deliberately made to deceive individuals — especially because AI can make things look so realistic and, obviously, neither of those two images actually happened.”

In addition to the ad containing photos, not videos, SB 751 only outlawed deep fake videos within 30 days of an election, and the ad was sent just outside of that time frame.

Cates suggested that the Legislature also expand the law to include radio, sound, speech and text. He also suggested making it a third-degree felony, as that would get the attention of groups who are scared of felonies but unaware of misdemeanors.

Good luck with that, and I mean it sincerely. Among other things, you’re never going to be able to ban this sort of thing at all times so it will always be out there in the wild, some new technology or method will come along that will be outside the scope of the legislation, you’re going to need to figure out an enforcement mechanism that might actually work on PACs as well as on people, and you just know one of those asshole billionaires is going to sue you on “free speech” grounds. We’re so not ready for this.

Posted in Election 2024, That's our Lege | Tagged artificial intelligence, Dade Phelan, deepfakes, Election 2024, Giovanni Capriglione, HD21, Jeff Yass, Texas, The Lege | Comments Off

The problem with Texas’ anti-porn law

Posted on May 2, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Here’s a good explanation of the issue from Slate.

After a federal district court judge found that the law likely violated the First Amendment rights of the plaintiffs—led by the adult film trade association the Free Speech Coalition—the 5th Circuit reversed its decision and allowed the law to take effect.

Pornhub’s statement goes on to say that collecting identification under the law would, in fact, put the privacy of all users at risk. And the site is right: This is both a free-speech problem and a privacy problem. The state’s paternalistic fantasies of cutting off children from dangerous pornography and keeping their souls pure have led it to curb for everyone—including legal adults—the anonymous nature of watching legal pornography.

In theory, it makes sense to card porn users, as happens when one buys a dirty magazine. But online, going further than simply asking users to confirm, on the honor system, that they are of age gets into dicey territory, quickly. Even the best models for collecting government ID, such as through a secure third-party service that automatically deletes data upon verification, may still create a treasure trove of highly sensitive data that can be easily exploited against the user. Collecting that data creates an instant risk, even with the best information security practices. And what might someone pay a blackmailer threatening to reveal a user’s history of visiting kink or fetish sites—or of viewing LGBTQ+ porn, when they themselves haven’t come out?

Data breaches affect all corners of the internet, and any dataset connecting individuals with their porn-watching habits would be sweet stuff for blackmail-happy hackers. Pornhub’s stance is that if age verification must happen, it should occur at the device level, not on the web, as Texas currently mandates. In theory, one’s Mac or iPhone, say, would be able to allow or deny access to 18-plus sites; you’d put in your ID upon setting up the device, rather than having that ID information bouncing around the web. Kind of like a blanket parental control, but mandated by the government.

Texas isn’t the only state to nuzzle up between its citizens and their porn supply—in fact, it’s the seventh. Pornhub’s parent company, the Canadian firm Aylo, has already restricted access to its network of popular sites in Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia. There’s also one state that Pornhub hasn’t withdrawn from over its age-verification law: Louisiana, which developed a proprietary digital driver’s license that Pornhub thinks is better than the more “haphazard” mandates to verify ID from other states like Texas. “This system isn’t perfect,” as Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes, “but it is less invasive than the alternative—closer to a convenience store clerk glancing at someone’s ID than to creating a gigantic porn viewer database linked to real identities.”

Meanwhile, a number of other states have passed kinda-similar-but-kinda-different age-verification laws for social media users as part of a patchwork of efforts to protect minors from the clutches of Instagram and TikTok and the like. Some of these social media laws have been blocked or struck down on free-speech grounds.

Digital driver’s licenses and device-level verification could be steps in the right direction if they can verify identity without risking the privacy of adult users. But the end result of both kinds of age-verification laws is the same: The government wants to get into the business of policing the internet, carding adults, in their homes, for the simple privilege of doomscrolling or watching porn, and taking the complicated question of how to manage internet access out of the hands of parents. A lot of people squirm at that.

The bigger problem, according to Jason Kelley of the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, is that age-verification laws not only create risk for the user’s privacy but also gate off content that should be perfectly legal for people to see—and legal for them to see anonymously.

“Anonymity and the ability to both speak and receive information without identifying yourself has always been a strong and important part of our rights,” Kelley told me. “It’s not just that there’s a danger in sharing your information, but it’s also the case that anonymous speech is regularly seen over the course of our history as an important right.”

Porn has always been at the forefront of First Amendment fights, and this is just the latest example, Kelley said: “If you lose that protection for that otherwise entirely constitutional speech, you set up precedent where you could lose it elsewhere.”

See here for some background. I drafted this a little while ago, and since then SCOTUS has allowed the law to stay in place pending appeals. One way to read this story is that Texas could have passed a less onerous law that would pass muster. Not surprisingly – I mean, Angela Paxton was the bill author – Texas went for maximum effect and intrusion. But if this law is ultimately struck down, the Lege could learn from this and make another run at it that could succeed. In the meantime, we’re going to have to live with it.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged age verification, Angela Paxton, Attorney General, Aylo, data privacy, drivers licenses, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Free Speech Coalition, Ken Paxton, lawsuit, Pornhub, pornography, Texas, The Lege | Comments Off

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