Harris County

Ogg draws a primary challenger

Sean Teare

A former Harris County prosecutor, Sean Teare, who left the district attorney’s office in February is running to unseat his longtime boss, District Attorney Kim Ogg in the Democratic primary, depicting her tenure as one riddled with mistakes.

Teare, who for years led Ogg’s vehicular crimes division and resigned, rebuking her office, and filed election paperwork this month. He plans to outline details of his candidacy Wednesday at a formal kickoff.

Ogg’s campaign representative is expected to comment soon about her new Democratic challenger.

During a wide-ranging interview Monday, Teare challenged an array of Ogg’s prosecutorial decisions, saying the DA proceeds on too many cases without taking a precautionary look at the evidence. One example he cited: the misdemeanor charge Ogg pursued against a Houston doctor accused of stealing COVID-19 vaccines, whom a grand jury later declined to indict.

“That man was doing everything he could in order to provide lifesaving care in an unprecedented pandemic,” Teare said. “Instead of stepping back and getting the full set of facts before charging in, (Ogg) ruined this man’s career for doing exactly what we asked him to do.”

A discrimination complaint against Harris County brought by the doctor, Hasan Gokal, is pending in a civil court.

Teare also critiqued the internal workings of Ogg’s office, describing a number of unfilled jobs and a high level of turnover as prosecutors have left the office for better opportunities. Teare says training and mentoring of early-career prosecutors could help lawyers reduce the backlog of cases to pre-Hurricane Harvey levels, he said. He said he’d aim to improve dismissal rates and reduce the number of acquittals in serious offenses.

Teare was explicit in his concerns about Ogg’s leadership.

“She cannot keep anyone working there long enough to get them trained and competent,” Teare said. “We have hemorrhaged prosecutors, many of them to lower paying district attorney’s offices. They’re taking less money to still do the job. They just don’t want to do it for her.”

Wednesday is today, and there’s a Facebook event for the kickoff. You can see a video here and a press release here. Ogg survived a trio of challengers in 2020, and I think it’s fair to say that she has not gotten more popular among the Democratic base. I’m going to reserve my thoughts for now, but it’s interesting to see the primary season get this early a start. We’ll see if anyone else jumps in.

Harris County to sue over those two new election laws

May 26th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

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I wish I felt more optimistic about this.

Harris County will file a lawsuit challenging two Republican-backed election bills headed to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, County Attorney Christian Menefee announced Wednesday.

At issue are two measures that apply only to Harris County, including one that abolishes the elections administrators office.

Menefee said the lawsuit would be filed after the bills are signed into law by the governor.

“The Texas Constitution is clear: the Legislature can’t pass laws that target one specific city or one specific county,” Menefee said. “And that constitutional ban makes a whole lot of sense. We don’t want our lawmakers going to Austin, taking their personal vendettas with them and passing laws that target local governments instead of doing what’s in the best interest of Texans.”

Both bills originally were written to apply more broadly.

Senate Bill 1750, the measure eliminating Harris County’s elections administrator post, initially applied to counties with at least 1 million residents, before it was narrowed to include only Harris.

More than half of Texas’ 254 counties have appointed elections administrators, including several of the most populous, such as Bexar, Tarrant, Dallas and Collin.

The bill returns election responsibilities to the elected county clerk and tax assessor-collector, ending Harris County’s three-year run with an appointed elections administrator.

The second bill the county plans to challenge, Senate Bill 1933, increases state oversight and requires Harris County election officials — upon being placed under “administrative oversight” — to clear all election policies and procedures with the Secretary of State. The bill also gives the Secretary of State, currently former state senator Jane Nelson, authority to send employees from her office to observe any activities in a county’s election office.

A last-minute amendment to that bill narrowed the scope to only Harris County.

“I think we were all completely blindsided,” Menefee said.

While the first bill transfers election administration duties to two elected officials, the second bill creates an expedited process to remove those two officials, Menefee said.

“Under Senate Bill 1933, the Secretary of State is able to initiate lawsuits to remove only two elected officials from office in the entire state of Texas, and that’s the Harris County Clerk and the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector,” Menefee said.

[…]

Rice University political science Professor Bob Stein disputed Bettencourt’s “performance not politics” rationale for the bills.

“This was red meat,” Stein said. “They needed to do this the same way they did voter ID laws in many states, to convince the base that they were doing something about a problem that they claimed existed but did not exist.”

Stein said he thinks it unlikely the county’s legal challenges will succeed.

His fellow Rice political scientist Mark Jones agreed.

“Counties, under the Texas Constitution, really only have those powers that the state chooses to endow them with. And what the state giveth, the state can taketh away,” Jones said. “And so, on a legal perspective, Harris County doesn’t have a leg to stand on in terms of objecting to the elimination of the elections administrator position.”

The county, however, may be able to make the case that it needs more time to implement the transition, he said.

See here for the background, and here for the full statement from County Attorney Menefee. I hate to say this, but I think Mark Jones is right. Years ago when I was a young blogger and discovering the weird ways of Texas politics, I learned about the constitutional ban against targeting or specifying a city or county or other entity in a bill. The way around that was always to put in enough qualifiers to narrow the bill down to only one thing or place or whatever. Far as I know, that’s been The Way It Is And Has Always Been for forever. That doesn’t mean it’s kosher, legally speaking. It may mean that it’s never been challenged in court like this – cities and counties have often asked for specialized legislation in the past, after all – or it may mean that Menefee and others think that the animus aimed at Harris County pushes these bills over a legal line. I don’t know enough to say, but it’s something we’ll be able to tell when we see the actual complaint that gets filed.

Even if we accept everything that Menefee is saying, and there’s no prior case law to contradict his claims, I suspect that the courts may be reluctant to side with Harris County specifically because of the current laws that were written in similar fashion in the past. While there could be a narrow order in Harris County’s favor that just addresses these bills and the forthcoming complaint, the potential will be there for a very large can of worms being opened. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that can were then weaponized against Houston by the usual cadre of villains. I don’t want to speculate too much ahead of the facts – Christian Menefee is way smarter than I am about all this, and I trust his judgment. But these are the things I am worried about.

Again, the problem here is the very political targeting of Harris County by a Republican Party that values its own power over everything else. In an equitable world, in a world where voting rights were cherished and protected, these laws wouldn’t stand a chance. We don’t live in that world, and until we get better state leaders and a real Voting Rights Act again, we won’t live in that world. The route we have to deal with this problem right now is littered with obstacles and probably won’t lead to anything good. But it’s all we have. The Press has more.

Houston’s violent crime rate drops in 2023

May 17th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

10 comments

I have three things to say about this.

Mayor Sylvester Turner on Wednesday touted his crime initiative as the reason behind a double-digit year-to-year reduction in violent crime in the first quarter of 2023, but experts say the figures mirror wider national trends and warned it is premature to predict whether the downtrend will continue.

In a report to City Council, Police Chief Troy Finner said Houston experienced a 12 percent decrease in violent crime during the first three months of 2023, compared to the same period last year. The data continue the downward trend highlighted in the Houston Police Department’s January report, which showed a decline in violent crimes between 2021 and 2022.

From January to March, murders saw the largest year-to-year decline at 28 percent, dropping from 152 to 109. Other categories of violent crime also experienced decreases: reported rape by 6 percent, robbery by 10 percent, aggravated assault by 12 percent, kidnapping by 19 percent and human trafficking by 23 percent, according to HPD’s latest figures.

Turner attributed the improvements to the introduction of One Safe Houston, a $44 million initiative launched in early 2022 to tackle crime when the city’s murder rate was on the rise. The plan included additional funds for crime prevention activities, overtime for police patrols, as well as programs to assist domestic violence survivors and individuals experiencing mental health crises.

“I think what’s important to note is that this trend started after we instituted One Safe Houston,” Turner said. “One Safe Houston is working. And it’s now been in effect for more than one year, and the numbers are reflective (of its success). But we still have a lot of work to do.”

Finner said improved coordination with Harris County’s criminal justice system in recent months and more aggressive efforts by prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office also have contributed to the reduced crime rates.

New Orleans-based criminologist Jeff Asher said Houston’s numbers appear to align with broader national trends. The co-founder of AH Datalytics, a consulting firm that analyzes criminal justice data, Asher said a majority of the nearly 70 U.S. cities his company tracks have reported decreases in violent crime so far in 2023.

“The national trend has been a decline in murders and gun violence, so seeing the same thing in Houston is both encouraging and not surprising,” Asher said. “The likelihood is that it’s not small local things that are driving it, but, rather, national changes. But what those changes are exactly is challenging to ascertain at this point.”

1. The national trends are absolutely the main drivers of the drop in crime, just as they were the main drivers of the increase of the past couple of years. There are things that local governments can do to affect their crime rate, both positively and negatively. There are definitely ways in which we could improve how we collect and update and disburse and react to the national data, to help cities and states be more proactive and less reactive. Finally allowing the CDC to collect gun violence data so as to study it as the epidemic it is would help. But whatever we’ve been doing here, the national trends almost certainly have outweighed it.

2. It’s also important to remember that while the citywide trend is positive, the commission of crime is not uniform throughout the city, and so some areas may not only have crime rates that are higher than other parts of the city, they may also still be experiencing increases, or at least not experiencing decreases. A couple of Council members made this point in the story. How we deploy our resources is one way that we can bend the curve further.

3. Remember all those breathless Republican ads from the 2022 campaign about the unrelenting crimeapocalypse in Houston and how only they could do something about it? Yeah. ‘Nuff said.

NEW Houston requests retraction of bad KHOU story about paper ballot issues

May 15th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

From the inbox:

Houston Leaders Call on Channel 11 To Retract Discredited Report On 2022 Election Paper Shortages

Two New Investigations Debunk Central Claims Presented to the Public by KHOU; Deeply Flawed and Misleading Report Used As Basis by Gov. Abbott and Election Deniers to Call for New Harris County Election, Continues to be Used as Justification for Anti-Democratic State Bills Targeting Harris County

Today, New Economy for Working Houston and Greater Houston LULAC Council called for Houston CBS affiliate KHOU to immediately retract an analysis it aired on Jan.30 implying that 121 voting locations in Harris County ran out of paper on election day last year. The request comes as two separate and independent investigations by the Houston Chronicle and Houston Public Media found that while there were technical glitches on election day, there is no evidence voters were systematically disenfranchised nor that any issues were significant enough to change the outcome of any contested race.

A day after KHOU’s report aired, Governor Abbott used the KHOU report to raise the possibility of calling a new election. Local State Sen. Paul Bettencourt has exploited the story to imply malfeasance. Making matters worse, the analysis has been exploited by partisan elected officials to justify dangerous bills, including SB 823, SB 1750, SB 1039, and SB 1993, which are now poised to pass the state legislature. These bills create a way for partisan state officials to strip Harris County residents of its authority to have local officials conduct elections and will criminalize the routine work of public servants in Houston, creating a culture of fear and making the process of running elections – already a complicated process in the state’s largest county – even harder.

The request for KHOU to retract its now discredited analysis is being made in a letter addressed to News Director Liz Roldan.

Key facts driving the request include the following:

It is not true that 121 locations ran out of paper in Harris County, as KHOU’s story implies. The Chronicle and Houston Public Media investigations both independently found only 20 polling places ran out of paper “some for only 15 minutes and others for up to three hours.”

KHOU’s report left out vital context about the differences between the 2018 and 2022 elections in its comparison of turnout at voting locations. Between those years, the County moved to countywide voting (a large percentage of voters do not vote at their home precinct), a key fact omitted in its analysis.

KHOU failed to prove in its reporting that election day glitches systematically hindered voting and affected the outcome of the elections. Despite a major marketing campaign to find disenfranchised voters by political operatives, to this day, there have not been any voters able to testify under oath that they could not cast their vote.

KHOU’s own political experts have distanced themselves from the analysis. According to KHOU analyst and Rice University political science professor Bob Stein, “I know I work for Channel 11, so it’s going to be a hard thing to say…but they didn’t ask the obvious question: did it impede voting?”

About New Economy for Working Houston

New Economy for Working Houston (NEW Houston) is a non-profit organization that brings together the power of grassroots organizing and public policy innovation to win a just economy for Gulf Coast working families. We seek to build an inclusive regional economy where workers and neighborhoods thrive, and where people of color, immigrants, women, and low-income residents have an equal voice and share equally in regional prosperity.

See here for some background, and here for a copy of the letter, signed by Hany Khalil, Executive Director of the Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation, and Chair of New Economy for Working Houston (NEW Houston), and by Dr. Sergio Lira, President, Greater Houston LULAC Council 4967. You can learn more about NEW Houston here; I’ve gotten a few emails from them, mostly about the bad election bills that have been moving through the Lege. There’s not much besides mission statements on the website now, but we’ll see where they go from here. I don’t expect much from this effort – news organizations usually need a pretty big shove to retract a story – but it’s worth the effort to try.

Houston still doing well sheltering the homeless

May 13th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Good news.

As she waited for the results of a yearly census of the Houston area’s homeless population, Ana Rausch clicked open an email detailing the soaring number of eviction filings in Harris County. This March, 6,600 households had evictions filed against them, compared to a pre-COVID average of 3,800.

As the vice president of program operations for the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County, which coordinates the region’s homelessness response, she viewed the data with some worry. She hoped the count wouldn’t show a corresponding increase in homelessness.

Now that the results are in, she is relieved, she said. During a year that saw both evictions and funding for Houston’s programs combating homelessness soar, 2023’s overall count stayed flat from the year before, with the number of people living in tents, cars and other places unfit for habitation down and the number of people in shelters up.

Every year, thousands of volunteers fan out across the country to take stock of their regions’ homeless populations. It’s this census, known as the Point-in-Time Count, that has brought Houston national recognition for its success in reducing its homeless population by roughly two-thirds since 2011.

The 2023 results, released Wednesday morning, showed the count of people living in tents, cars and other places unfit for habitation dropped 17 percent in the Houston area, to 1,200 people from 1,500 the year before. At the same time, the number of people living in shelters increased 18 percent, to 2,000 from 1,700. In the past year, shelters lifted the social distancing measures that sharply reduced the number of beds available during the pandemic.

[…]

Mayor Sylvester Turner also trumpeted the reduction of people living on the streets, in vehicles or in other unsheltered situations. Such a result “does not happen by mistake,” he said in a release. “Rather it’s the result of making it a top priority, enhancing our invaluable partnership with Harris County and the community, and strategically funding data-proven, holistic housing solutions.”

In 2022, Houston, Harris County, the Coalition for the Homeless and their partners poured resources into a strategy of closing down homeless camps by offering everyone in them housing. The strategy has required opening a navigation center, where people moved out of a camp can stay while awaiting their permanent housing, and renting out units where people can stay longterm with supportive services such as caseworkers. The city, county and their partners housed 2,500 people in 2022, and more than 9,000 people who had been without homes were housed through their programs on the night of the count.

In a year when inflation spiked and many eviction protections ended, “We suspect that we might be somewhat unique and remarkable in the fact that we saw our unsheltered count go down,” said Catherine Villarreal, director of communications for the Coalition. However, many cities have yet to release their results from this year’s count, so it’s to be seen how Houston’s results compare.

See here for some background. These counts aren’t perfect – people couch-surfing with friends and acquaintances will be missed, for example – but the big picture is there, and it’s a good one for Houston. There will always be more work to do, but we have done a lot to improve this situation for thousands of people. We should be proud of that. Axios has more.

The sore loser election contest lawsuits have been delayed

May 8th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

This obituary of local Republican activist and professional election denier/vote suppressor Alan Vera was far too kind to him – Votebeat did a better job of accurately capturing his “achievements” – but it did contain one useful piece of information, which I will note here so that when the question comes up later we’ll know the answer.

Vera was also a key witness in the upcoming trial to decide an election contest challenge brought by GOP judicial candidate Erin Lunceford, who lost her race against incumbent 189th District Judge Tamika Craft by 2,743 votes.

Lunceford’s legal team was relying on Vera to explain several types of alleged voting irregularities and asked for an extension on the trial date because of Vera’s death. Judge David Peeples said the trial would likely be postponed from mid-June to early August.

Guess they need time to find someone who can make shit up with as much flair. Anyway, it was in one of the parts of the Chron stories that I didn’t quote from in these posts that said the trial was expected to start in mid-June. Now it will be in August, barring any further delays. You would be forgiven if you had missed this update, as no normal person would bother reading a story like this, but I did and now you benefit from that sacrifice. You’re welcome.

The I-45 project will be old enough to vote before it is finished

May 6th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Isn’t that nice?

Often called a once-in-a-generation project, the planned $9.7 billion-plus rebuild of I-45 from downtown Houston north to Beltway 8, including a total reconstruction of the downtown freeway system, is expected to take a generation to build.

A child born today would drive along the completed freeway around the time they graduate from high school in 2042, according to a new schedule released by state highway officials.

“Just kill me now,” joked Reuben Shuvalov, 42, who commutes to an accounting job in downtown Houston from his home in Spring.

Cleared for development following a two-year pause and lifting of a lawsuit by Harris County, the Texas Department of Transportation is finalizing the sequence of construction across three segments, broken into at least 10 separate projects to remake portions of I-45, key intersections and nearby local streets. Officials updated the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s Transportation Policy Council on April 28, including expected start and finish years.

[…]

“That is just how the development of how the plans are coming along,” said Varnua Singh, deputy district engineer for TxDOT’s Houston office.

Work will be phased based on numerous factors, including funding, the need for some work to precede other parts of construction, and drainage in some spots prior to construction of depressed sections of the freeway on the east side of downtown.

As a result, the first project considered part of the larger rebuild is an $86.1 million project to upgrade drainage through EaDo, just east of Interstate 69 between I-45 south of downtown and Buffalo Bayou.

“The drainage is the first piece,” Singh said. “That is why we are trying to get it out the door.”

That work precedes construction south of downtown, where the first major project is the rebuilding of I-69 between Texas 288 and I-45, expected to cost $584.8 million and start in 2025. That rebuild, through the area where the two freeways converge, will take roughly five years, during which work will begin on nearby segments to Spur 527 and where I-10 and I-45 separate north of the central business district.

It is that 2027-2031 period when many of the projects will be active work zones that worries some about the effects on downtown jobs and businesses.

“Past freeway projects typically only affected one or two spokes at a time, and downtown employers just dealt with it since it only affected a portion of their employee base,” said Tory Gattis, a senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, which advocates for business-focused downtown development. “But with the normalization of remote and hybrid work, as well as this project affecting all the freeways coming into downtown, it could definitely be the tipping point to major employers following Exxon to the suburbs or just going more remote so their employees won’t have to fight their way downtown as often.”

See here for the previous update. All of the first batches of work will be on or south of I-10, so we’ve got that going for us. Hey, remember when driverless buses cruising along at 100 MPH were going to relieve us of all our traffic concerns? Those were the days. The Press has more.

No federal action to un-screw Houston on Harvey relief funds

May 4th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

Not yet, anyway. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around this.

The federal government is punting for now on enforcing a finding that Texas discriminated against communities of color when it stiffed Houston in distributing flood mitigation funds stemming from Hurricane Harvey.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development found last March that the state’s scoring criteria for communities that applied for an initial pot of $1 billion ran afoul of federal civil rights protections.

It said the Texas General Land Office’s criteria “caused there to be disproportionately less funding available to benefit minority residents than was available to benefit white residents.” Some communities, including Houston, Harris County and Port Arthur received no funding in the initial distribution.

After Texas officials, who have denied that allegation, rebuffed federal housing officials’ requests to adjust the plan, HUD referred the matter on April 17 to the Department of Justice.

“On June 28, 2022, HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge requested in writing that Texas Governor Greg Abbott bring GLO into compliance by executing a mutually agreed upon voluntary compliance agreement,” HUD officials wrote in the referral. “Subsequently, the Governor indicated that he was not open to taking any action to resolve HUD’s findings of discrimination. HUD has exhausted all avenues but has not been unable to voluntarily resolve this matter.”

The DOJ, though, said two days later that it would not take any action until HUD’s related investigation into whether the state also violated the Fair Housing Act is complete. It also urged HUD to continue seeking voluntary compliance from the state.

“Based on our review, we are deferring consideration of referral and returning the above-mentioned matter to HUD for further investigation,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke wrote on April 19.

[…]

Two advocacy groups, the Northeast Action Collective and Texas Housers, filed a complaint with HUD, which said the plans ran afoul of the Civil Rights Act. That finding centered on two issues with the GLO criteria.

First, the state used a metric that effectively penalized large jurisdictions, such as Houston, by measuring what percentage of an applicant’s residents would benefit from a proposed project. The City of Iola applied for a project benefiting all 379 of its residents, and received 10 points for that criteria. Houston applied for a project benefiting 8,845 people in Kashmere Gardens, and it received .37 out of 10 points, because Houston has 2.3 million residents.

Second, HUD said the state divided the competition into two uneven categories: the most impacted and distressed areas, as defined by HUD, which included Houston and Harris County; and more rural counties that also got a presidential disaster declaration. Both categories fought for pots of essentially equal money, but the first category has about eight times as many residents, and includes 90 percent of the minority residents in the entire eligible population.

Ben Martin, research director at Texas Housers, said those findings stand, despite the DOJ’s letter. He said the Fair Housing investigation also results from the complaint Texas Housers and the Northeast Action Collective filed.

“We urge HUD and DOJ to move quickly to resolve the remaining investigation and if necessary to move to enforcement in order to cure the discrimination that the state of Texas has engaged in,” Masters said. “Also, both DOJ and HUD have urged the state to participate in voluntary negotiations to resolve the matter and to get desperately needed assistance to the communities who were discriminated against. We stand ready to act to resolve this issue.”

See here, here, and here for some background. As the story notes, Harris County was also initially screwed by the GLO, but eventually received $750 million, which is still not enough but which is now mostly going towards existing flood mitigation projects originating with the 2018 flood bond referendum. I’m not sufficiently versed in bureaucratese to grok this decision by the Justice Department, but if I had to guess they want HUD to finish up its other investigation so that if and when they move to enforce something on the GLO, that won’t be a dangling thread that a federal court could point to as a reason to hold them off. I dunno, it’s all kind of arcane. Given this, I’ll join the call for HUD to get on with it, and then we’ll see what the DOJ does.

How the May election is being run in Harris County

May 3rd, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Of interest.

Fresh off last November’s midterm elections, Harris County Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum has implemented operational upgrades to the county’s system and vote collection process for presiding judges working at polling locations.

These changes have been in full swing as early voting for the May 6 election – which covers races for school board trustees, public infrastructure bond proposals and smaller county municipal leaders and mayors – started this Monday, April 24 and will end on Tuesday, May 2.

Tatum’s moved to alter the county’s procedures after some Republican candidates made claims of voter suppression that they said were due to paper ballot shortages at least 20 of the total 782 polling locations.

To avoid similar issues from reoccurring, the county has digitized its inventory system, moved from its old phone system to the software tracking system, ServiceNow, and designated several of its early voting polling locations as supply centers – locations where ballot paper or other election items that are needed can be picked up, according to Nadia Hakim, deputy director of communications for Harris County election administrator’s office.

Additionally, the county has designated six rally centers where presiding judges will go after they have completed their closing procedures; instead of having to drive all the way to a central downtown location as they did with NRG Arena in the last election.

Each judge will be assigned to one of the six locations; this is meant to make the unofficial results available to the public sooner, Hakim said.

Brandon Rottinghaus, University of Houston political science professor said that this election can be used as a trial run as it features local races on the ballot making it a smaller scale, lower stakes election.

“It is helpful for municipalities to start off with an election like this after they’ve made changes so it can give them a sense of where there might be some flaws and gives them an opportunity to fix them before they’ve got a groundswell of additional voters,” Rottinghaus said.

[…]

Dr. Benjamin Bannon, Manager of Training for Harris County Elections Administration, who prepares the presiding judges’ working polling locations, has been in close contact with the county to ensure that the changes implemented are processed and understood by the judges.

“We are given updates and information and what we do is make sure the training that we are delivering is accurate and communicated to everyone,” Bannon said.

He conducts four-hour long classes making sure the judges carry out procedures correctly, and also trains them to handle and interact with voters at the polls.

“We model training as to how we would like to operate at a voting center with accuracy and precision,” Bannon said. “We tell the judges that they are going to be met with individuals who know what they are doing and those who may need a few questions answered.”

Although these judges will not be traveling to a central location this time around, no other changes to how they are supposed to operate were made. The county usually updates their training curriculum ahead of every midterm election.

For small-scale elections like this one, Bannon trains around 2,000 judges, compared to larger ones, where he will train around 6,000.

I mostly note this because of the news that the Elections Office has implemented a trouble-tracking system, which had been notably absent before now and was a reason cited in the office’s post-election assessment as to why the facts were not fully established regarding the paper shortages. Both that story and this one from last November note that other large counties had implemented such systems years ago; the latter story says Dallas has had such a system in place since 2012. I note this because, of course, Stan Stanart was still running elections in Harris County in 2012. Indeed, he had another six years of running them before finally being voted out. So when certain people complain about how elections have been run in Harris County, it’s worth noting that elections were run in Harris County before 2020 as well. Maybe it’s taking awhile for the Elections office to get things all cleaned up, but there was a much longer period before that, which is what necessitated the cleanup in the first place.

UPDATE: I drafted this over the weekend, before the Senate passed bills to force Harris County to return election administration to the County Clerk and Tax Assessor and allow the SOS to order a new election in Harris County if more than two percent of voting locations run out of paper. (Which will get sued if it passes.) The weird and probably unhealthy thing is that I actually expected worse. Going back to the old two-office election management process is inefficient and just dumb, but we have a good County Clerk who used to run the elections herself, so it’ll be fine. And if there’s one thing I feel confident we’ll fix after the 2022 saga, it’s never underestimating the amount of paper ballots needed again. If this is all they do, all I can say is it could have been worse. Again, a screwed up way of thinking about it, but this is the kind of trauma that the Lege is inflicting these days.

Spending even more on court-appointed attorneys

Apr 30th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

But maybe there’s an end in sight.

Harris County is on track to pay $95 million by the end of October to private attorneys for representing low-income people accused of crimes — about $35 million more than the county budgeted for its indigent defense system.

The unexpected increase from last year’s unprecedented $60 million bill has prompted county officials to review whether that elevated amount is the result of the cost of reducing a pandemic-induced backlog of criminal cases.

County officials said increased requests for interpreters and psychiatric evaluations may be an indicator the criminal justice system is recovering from delays in court proceedings caused by the pandemic, as well as Hurricane Harvey damage to the courthouse infrastructure.

“Our hope is that this is a sign that cases are moving,” Daniel Ramos, executive director of the county’s Office of Management and Budget, told Commissioners Court on Tuesday.

Ramos said he noticed in January a deficit of more than $9 million caused by increased court appointments and lawyers being late filing their expenses.

That number more than doubled during the second quarter, an increase Ramos said he believes was caused by the volume of cases requiring indigent representation.

Covering the growing cost of court-appointed lawyers would require an additional $27 million for the county’s felony courts and another $9 million for misdemeanor courts, Ramos said.

[…]

Alex Bunin, Harris County’s chief public defender, dismissed any link the packed jail may have to the increase in attorney costs. He noted that a change in culture in the courts has allowed defense attorneys to expense more as Democratic judges became the norm at the criminal courthouse.

Additionally, the fees for court-appointed defense attorneys increased in March, the effect of which Ramos said he had not studied.

“The judges support paying the lawyers more,” Bunin said.

Commissioners Court on Tuesday agreed to consider adding the additional spending to the county budget at a later meeting after a brief conversation on whether the indigent defense funds were being used wisely. An audit on court appointments is expected to wrap up soon. The review will include an examination of the attorneys’ billing practices, the number of court appearances and whether they are visiting clients in jail.

Critics have panned the court-appointed lawyer process as a waste of taxpayer dollars in the wake of a Houston Chronicle investigation that broke down details about the $60 million paid to outside defense attorneys last year. A third of criminal defense lawyers who submitted invoices earned more than $200,000 and reported caseloads higher than state guidelines recommend, according to the Chronicle’s findings. One attorney earned $1 million.

Expanding the Harris County Public Defender’s Office could improve defendant representation and save money, Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis said.

“We should look into whether it’s an opportunity, a way to make sure the money is used more appropriately,” Ellis said.

See here and here for the background. I would hope that this is a sign that the backlog is shrinking because that would be a good thing on many levels. We’ll see what the data says. But whatever the case, I’m fine with paying more for these attorneys if what that means is better representation. I’m also very much in favor of expanding the public defender’s office, as that will act as a hedge against some of these cost increases; certainly, it will provide some amount of cost certainty. I look forward to Commissioners Court following up on that.

Harris Health seeks bond issue

Apr 29th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Probably on your ballot this November.

Harris Health board members on Thursday unanimously agreed to move forward with a $2.5 billion bond proposal to build a new Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital and make what they say are sorely needed upgrades throughout the county’s public health care system, which treats the region’s poor and uninsured.

The board next will seek approval from Harris County commissioners, who will have the final say on the bond amount and whether the proposal will be placed on the November ballot. The proposed bond would finance the project over 10 years, with an additional $300 million in county funds and $100 million in grants and philanthropy.

The health system has struggled to keep up with population growth, officials say, and the major expansion is necessary to handle the projected increase in uninsured patients who rely on Harris Health for care. During Thursday’s board meeting, Harris Health CEO Dr. Esmaeil Porsa choked up as he recounted seeing patients being treated in hallways during his regular walks around LBJ hospital.

“That should not be happening,” he said. “That is not equitable health. We should not expose our patients and our employees to this situation on a daily basis.”

Both Harris Health hospitals — LBJ and Ben Taub — opened more than 30 years ago at their current locations. Since then, the county’s population has increased from roughly 2.7 million to 4.7 million, with a quarter of those residents lacking insurance. In addition to a new, larger hospital on the existing LBJ campus in northeast Houston, the project would include a major expansion of the current facilities and three new outpatient centers.

Located at 5656 Kelley St., just north of Kashmere Gardens, LBJ hospital is the busiest Level III trauma center in the state with more than 80,000 annual patient visits, according to the health system.

The new hospital would become the county’s third Level I adult trauma center and the first outside the Texas Medical Center. A Level I designation provides the most comprehensive care for injuries, including 24-hour coverage by general surgeons and a broader availability of specialty services. The American College of Surgeons recommends at least one Level 1 trauma center for every million people.

The new LBJ would expand the number of inpatient beds from 215 to 390, with room to add another 60, and allow for the beds to be used for interchangeable needs, according to planning documents. The building adds capacity for patients under observation and includes a helipad for those who need to be transported by air. Additional parking garages will be built on the campus.

The current LBJ would undergo $433 million in renovations “to address critical service gaps” and provide more outpatient services, planning documents say. A renovation at Ben Taub would add a new inpatient tower with 120 patient rooms and extend the facility’s life span by 15 years. Low-volume outpatient centers would be expanded, and three new outpatient centers would be built in east, northwest and southwest Harris County.

Seems like some long overdue business to me. This does still need to be approved by Commissioners Court before it can be placed on the ballot, but I would expect that to be a formality. As is often the case with these things, I’ll be interested to see if there’s any organized opposition to it.

The case of the no-evidence lawsuit

Apr 24th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

The lack of evidence in the Harris County election lawsuits is so glaring, I don’t know how we’re talking about anything else.

In the weeks following Harris County’s November election, 22 Republican candidates who lost their races filed lawsuits challenging the results and asking for new elections.

One of those was dismissed in January by House Speaker Dade Phelan on the grounds that Republican House candidate Mike May had failed to include a required fee with his petition.

The remaining cases will not go to trial until mid-June at the earliest. Judge David Peeples, a visiting judge from San Antonio, is hearing all of the remaining election contest lawsuits and likely will consolidate them into two separate trials based on which approach the attorneys in each case take.

Much of their argument, per their court filings, relies on the premise that county officials deliberately created ballot paper shortages at polling locations in predominantly Republican neighborhoods, turning away so many GOP voters that Republican candidates lost elections they otherwise would have won.

Harris County has a countywide voting system, meaning voters were able to cast ballots at any of 782 polling places on Election Day. If a voter went to a location that was out of paper, others polling places were available, typically within one mile.

A Houston Chronicle analysis of polling locations, county data and interviews with 40 election judges, including 32 who ran the polls Republicans said turned away voters, found at least 20 locations ran out of paper on Election Day, about 2.5 percent of the polls open across Harris County on Nov. 8. Some ran out for just 15 minutes, others for up to three hours. A handful of other locations suffered equipment and technical malfunctions that resulted in those polls opening late or having long lines.

While GOP candidates have argued voters were disenfranchised by the ballot paper shortages, the term may not fit the circumstances, according to Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

“The courts are going to have to decide whether people were disenfranchised or not,” Rottinghaus said. “That is something that is a judgment beyond what we can claim politically.”

For now, it remains unclear how large a role the ballot paper shortages will play in determining whether the judge decides to order any new elections.

First things first, just to be pedantic, but what loser Mike May filed was an election contest, which is adjudicated by the House. It’s not a lawsuit, which is heard in a district court. That’s why it was Speaker Phelan who dismissed it. It’s of a piece with the lawsuits filed by the other crybaby sore losers, but it’s a different thing and should be noted as such.

Second, I’ve skipped the main part of the article, but it really has nothing different from any previous reporting. Specifically, it doesn’t have any claim that some sufficiently significant number of people who tried to vote at one of these locations were not only unable to vote there, but were unable to vote at all as a result of the paper shortages. Why they couldn’t – not didn’t, but couldn’t – have gone to one of the 762 locations elsewhere in the county that wasn’t having any problems is a question that I presume the defense will ask them, but it doesn’t really matter because these people don’t exist. Maybe Andy Taylor or the furniture guy have located a couple of people to testify to their failure to vote. Anything is possible. But to even potentially affect all but the single closest race you would literally need thousands, usually tens of thousands of these people (in the closest race you’d need a few hundred), and there is no way they exist. It is simply not possible.

I will point out, as I have done before, that the reason these sites ran out of paper is because more voters showed up than the elections office projected were likely to show up. That’s an error, but quite a small one in context – again, there were 782 voting locations, and only 20 to 30 in the most generous interpretation of the data had shortages. In the pre-paper ballot days, this would have manifested as longer lines due to a lack of voting machines, which is very much a thing we have experienced in Harris County in the past. The lines for early voting in the 2008 Democratic primary were legendarily long because of this, as Dems were obliterating all records for turnout that year. Maybe they could have done a better job, and I would certainly expect that they will learn from this, but the only unique thing about this situation was the paper. We have seen this story before, more than once.

As for the claims about intent, specifically the intent to suppress Republican votes, I’m not a galaxy brain like Andy Taylor, but I don’t know how you can have evidence of intent when there’s no evidence of actual wrongdoing. As the previous reporting showed, the problematic areas were roughly split between centers in Democratic and Republican areas. There were slightly more in the Republican areas, but not a lot. It would not be at all difficult to only target Republican-located centers for this treatment if you wanted to. The data telling you where to aim is well known. To believe that there was an intent to suppress Republican votes in this manner is not only to believe in the criminality of the elections office, but also their total incompetence. You can make that claim if you really want. The explanation that this was just a missed projection is a whole lot stronger.

Finally, I don’t know what the standard the judge will use in these cases is. What I do know is that the core of the Republican argument is a whole lot of theory, hypotheticals, what-ifs, and coulda-shouldas. It’s the legal equivalent of a frustrated football fan after a tough loss saying if the ref hadn’t blown that call and if Miller had made that catch and if the coach had called a better play on that third down and if Johnson hadn’t gotten injured we could have won. If this is enough to order new elections, under what conditions would any election be decided by the voters? Why would we even bother if anyone can successfully petition for a do over any time they don’t like the outcome?

There were fewer voting sites with paper issues than we thought

Apr 21st, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

That’s my takeaway from this.

On Election Day last year, an unusual problem occurred around 6 p.m. — the polling place at El Lago City Hall ran out of paper ballots.

Republican presiding judge Chris Russo, the election worker running the polling location in the far southeast corner of Harris County, said he had been calling the county elections office’s hotline for more than three hours to request more paper. Russo said he told the 40 or so voters waiting in line that they had a few options.

“If you stay in line, you will vote today,” he recounted telling them. “But if you think you can make it to another polling location that has ballot paper and you think that is a better use of your time, you are free to do so.”

When the county finally delivered more paper at 9 p.m., only a handful of people remained and were able to vote.

El Lago was one of about 20 polling locations in Harris County that ran out of paper on Election Day, according to a Houston Chronicle review of county data and interviews with dozens of poll workers. That is a tiny fraction of the 782 polling places across the sprawling county that day.

Now, the ballot shortages in Harris County are placing local election officials at the center of a legal showdown and a raging political debate in Austin as the GOP-controlled Legislature is trying to move urgently to strip local officials of the power to oversee elections. County election officials also face scrutiny from lawsuits filed by 22 local Republican candidates who lost and a separate suit by Houston furniture mogul Jim McIngvale. One of the lawsuits, involving a Texas House race was dismissed by Speaker Dade Phelan in January.

A Houston Chronicle examination of election data found that while there were problems and technical glitches, there remains no evidence voters were systematically disenfranchised. Nor is there evidence the Election Day issues prompted people not to vote in numbers great enough to change the outcome of any of the races being contested.

Nonetheless, without all the facts being known, bills filed in Austin this year could make it easier for the state to order new elections, strip the county’s oversight and authority to conduct elections. They would also add criminal penalties for running out of ballot paper, create a team of state marshals to investigate election code violations and file criminal charges, and abolish the county Elections Administrators office.

The remaining lawsuits filed by 21 local Republican candidates include one from Republican Alexandra del Moral Mealer, whose bid to oust incumbent County Judge Lina Hidalgo fell short by more than 18,000 votes. These candidates are asking judges to overturn the results and order new elections. Most of those candidates lost their races by 12,000 to 29,000 votes, according to official county results.

The argument made in most of those lawsuits is that Election Day problems, including ballot paper shortages and technical issues that delayed the opening of some polls, resulted in polling locations turning away thousands of voters whose ballots could have changed the outcome of those races.

It is impossible to know if or how many people at El Lago City Hall, let alone countywide, did not vote because of paper shortages or other technical or equipment malfunctions.

Harris County uses a countywide voting system, meaning voters could cast ballots at any of 782 polling locations on Election Day instead of being restricted to their home precincts. Voters turned away from one location could go to another polling place, typically about a mile away.

To win, the plaintiffs would need to prove that voting irregularities affected the election results.

That could prove a high bar to clear.

Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said the challenge will be proving that people intended to vote but could not.

“If they ended up voting, it’s clear that it wasn’t so onerous that they weren’t able to effectively overcome it,” he said.

Twenty locations is quite a bit fewer than what I had previously seen in mostly Chron stories. It’s also a lot lower than the 121 locations claimed to have had problems by a KHOU story that I missed, which according to this companion story is the basis for a lot of bullshit claims and bad bills. What continues to be missing from all of these articles are the names and stories of people who were actually unable to vote as the result of any paper shortages. Which is still the only thing that matters as far as the contested elections go.

Go read both stories, they’re well reported and quite informative. The first one does a good job of showing where voting slowed down or stopped as a result of paper outages; in all cases, there were just more people showing up at that location than there had been paper to begin with. That kind of missed guess about Election Day turnout is a tale as old as time, and had we still been using the old non-paper machines, no one would have noticed. This story has been blown so far out of proportion it’s hard to even recognize it. See reporter Jen Rice’s Twitter thread for more.

UPDATE: While I don’t think this bill to ban county voting centers on Election Day will get through the House, it must be noted that if it does and there are problems of any kind on Election Day that affects the ability to vote, the people at the affected locations will be well and truly screwed. It’s paranoid bullshit all the way down.

I’ll help you pack, dude

Apr 21st, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

This story about the furniture guy’s latest temper tantrum about Harris County took me a couple of hours to work up the mental energy to click on. Now that I have, my reaction is simply this: Just fucking move to Montgomery County already. Or Galveston or Waller or Chambers or wherever, I don’t care. I’m in what I suspect is a large group of people who used to have vaguely positive feelings about this guy, because of his goofy TV commercial persona and deserved reputation for offering financial aid to people who need it following a disaster. I always knew he had terrible politics, but people have layers and life is a rich pageant and all that. At this point, he’s just another obnoxious sore loser crybaby, and no one has time for that. Go be miserable somewhere else and leave us out of it.

Harris County versus AG over when election records can be withheld

Apr 18th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Interesting.

Christian Menefee

Harris County is battling Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office over its ability to withhold election records that have been requested under the state’s public information law.

In the case, filed last December, the county argues it should be able to reject requests for three types of information: voting records that are prohibited from release by state law for 22 months after an election, documents related to pending litigation, and working papers involved in ongoing audits.

The Texas Election Code, in keeping with the Civil Rights Act of 1960, bars officials from releasing anonymized completed ballots for 22 months after an election.

There has been a longstanding consensus that those election records are confidential during that period, according to Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee.

“And then, out of thin air, our current attorney general decided that those records were no longer confidential and had to be produced to the public for inspection immediately following the election,” Menefee said. “Again, this was a complete 180 from not only the law, but also previous opinions issued by previous attorneys general.”

Menefee said Paxton’s decision was driven by politics, not the law.

“It’s just a bad faith reading of the law to appease a certain part of his base,” Menefee said.

The county is asking a Travis County court to rule Paxton’s office wrongly concluded the county could not withhold those records, but others side with the attorney general’s interpretation. Williamson County also is suing the attorney general on the election ballots issue.

[…]

Chad Dunn, a longtime election lawyer based in Austin, said Harris County is doing the right thing by seeking a court ruling.

“There are good arguments on both sides on whether or not election records should be available within that period. And what I have found frustrating is that the state takes each side of that position depending on what the political stakes are at issue,” Dunn said. “So, getting a final ruling on it from the courts, to me, is the critical piece.”

Harris County also is fighting the attorney general’s determination that it must hand over records related to pending litigation.

The Texas Public Information Act includes that exemption to prevent the public from misinterpreting information before a case has had its day in court, which is particularly important when the litigation involves election misinformation, Menefee said.

“This is the quintessential example of people seeking to litigate something in the public sphere, and that’s why the Legislature passed the law allowing for documents to be withheld subject to the litigation exception,” Menefee said.

Menefee said the exception is standard practice at every level of government.

“In fact, just last week, the AG’s office notified us that they were asserting the litigation exception on something relevant to something going on in Harris County,” Menefee said.

See here for some background on the lawsuit, for which there are multiple counties as plaintiffs. The story also obliquely refers to the furniture guy lawsuit over election records, which is relevant to this litigation. I don’t have a whole lot more information here. As a matter of course, I’ll side with Harris County against Ken Paxton, but on a broader level I think Chris Dunn has this right. What we want is clear rules that are consistently applied, and we don’t want the state picking on its political enemies. We’ll see what we get, which I’m sure will eventually wind up before the Supreme Court.

One more thing:

The county has turned over some election-related documents to lawyers involved in the 22 election contest lawsuits filed by Republican candidates, Menefee said.

“To the extent that those cases end up going to trial, then all these issues are going to be litigated in public,” Menefee said.

Some of those lawsuits could go to trial by mid-June at the earliest.

Good to know.

Harris County felony bail bond lawsuit ruling coming

Apr 6th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

Definitely something to look forward to.

Lawyers on both sides of a lawsuit accusing Harris County of unfair bail practices that unjustly imprison lower-income inmates are pressing for a swift resolution, and a judge says a ruling in the four-year legal battle will come soon.

U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal heard arguments from attorneys representing Johnnie Ray Pierson, Dwight Russell, Joseph Ortuno, Maurice Wilson and Christopher Clack on whether Harris County officials and Sheriff Ed Gonzalez violated the five men’s and other current and former inmates’ rights by putting them behind bars because they couldn’t afford cash bail.

“In this hearing, it became clear that the judge was mostly trying to clear away some of the procedural obstacles that would prevent her from actually addressing what this case is really about,” Cody Cutting, an attorney with the Civil Rights Corps, said on behalf of the men whom he and the nonprofit have represented since 2019. “People are being jailed because they lack money and no other reason.”

Harris County’s, the State of Texas and Gonzalez’s attorneys argued that the enactment of Senate Bill 6 in September 2021 would make the men’s lawsuit “moot” because of legislation allowing any person, including all prisoners, to be eligible for bail unless denial of bail is “expressly permitted” by the Texas Constitution or by other law. The provision doesn’t apply to capital offenses when the burden of proof is evident.

“What SB6 did is require the use of secured money bail, prohibiting unsecured bonds, for people charged with certain categories of offenses,” Cutting said.

A motion in the felony bail challenge asks Rosenthal to rule in favor of all inmates held at the Harris County Jail because they cannot afford the bail amounts set by the court. Lawyers from the Civil Rights Corps, based in Washington, D.C., also argue that local judges’ practices in felony court are unconstitutional.

[…]

The main issue Gonzalez has with the lawsuit is the implementation of the bail practices and whether Rosenthal’s ruling, if in favor of the plaintiffs, will put him in a difficult position in terms of deciding which courts’ orders to comply with, Fogler said.

“The sheriff certainly does not want an overcrowded jail, but that’s what’s happening,” Cutting said. “And what the sheriff has been resisting, is being held responsible for jailing people solely because they lack money.”

See here for the previous update, from over two years ago, and here for a Chron explainer on the lawsuit. This is about felony bail, not misdemeanor, as that issue was settled in 2019 via a different lawsuit. Note that because district court judges are defendants, and district courts are state offices, the Attorney General is defending them, not the County Attorney as was the case with the misdemeanor bail lawsuit. Not sure how much longer we’ll be waiting – that story was from last week, I just hadn’t gotten to it yet. I expect an appeal regardless of the ruling.

Hegar caves on phony “defunding” claim again

Apr 4th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Clown the Comptroller II: Electric Boogaloo.

Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar on Monday backed off his claim that Harris County “defunded” a constable’s office in violation of a state law intended to prevent cities and counties from cutting their police budgets, ending the latest standoff between the state’s Republican leaders and Democratic officials heading the state’s most populous county.

Hegar accused Harris County leaders in February of cutting the constable’s budget without getting voter approval — a requirement under a 2021 state law passed in the wake of the George Floyd protests. The comptroller barred the county from being able to set their property tax rate, which prompted Harris County officials to sue Hegar.

Local government technicalities and number-punching differences led state and county officials to opposite conclusions of whether Harris County did in fact reduce that constable’s budget.

Ultimately, Harris County won the argument — with Hegar rescinding his finding Monday and allowing the county to once again set its tax rate.

“I’m glad the Comptroller admitted his error and is no longer holding Harris County’s budget process hostage,” Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said in a statement. “I hope that in the future, we can talk through these types of allegations, as the law requires, before the Comptroller makes a final decision.”

The fight hinged on a math problem.

Harris County officials adopted a seven-month spending plan last year as it transitioned to a new 12-month budget schedule. In that shorter plan, county officials set aside $28.6 million to fund Harris County Constable Ted Heap’s office. This year, the county is back on a 12-month budget cycle and allocated $46.6 million for Heap.

But Heap believed his office should’ve received more. He complained to Gov. Greg Abbott’s office and Hegar launched an investigation.

The comptroller estimated that based on the money Heap spent each month during last year’s shorter cycle, the constable should’ve gotten about $48.9 million this year. Hegar argued that Harris County shortchanged Heap by about $2.3 million.

County officials shot back by using Hegar’s calculation method against him. If they compared Heap’s budget this year and last year, like Hegar did, the constable’s share now actually represents a bigger slice of the county’s budget than it did then. The law also says that if a city or county’s budget is less than the previous year’s budget, the share of funds set aside for a law enforcement agency can’t fall — a standard Harris County did not violate.

See here for the previous update, and here for what happened the last time we were subject to this bullshit. Hegar is out there claiming he was right anyway, a bold move when you just publicly conceded you were wrong. This is all too stupid and annoying for words. The Chron has more.

Checking in on the Astrodome

Apr 3rd, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

With the Final Four in town, we have visitors at Reliant Stadium looking over at its unused predecessor and wondering what’s going on with it. The short answer is, not much.

Ready and waiting

The state of the dome and prospects for its future weigh on the minds of those who scout the surrounding NRG Park for special events, according to Ryan Walsh, the CEO and executive director of the Harris County Sports & Convention Corporation, a governmental nonprofit that manages the complex on behalf of the county.

“It’s coming up in conversation more and more about, ‘What are you guys doing with that?'” Walsh said. “When people come and tour these facilities, for these large events, it’s, ‘What about that large building over there? What about the Astrodome?’ Unfortunately, it’s been the same answer we’ve had for, gosh, a decade or more now.”

That answer is nothing and no changes are imminent. The Astrodome was condemned by the City of Houston in 2009 and does not have a working HVAC system or plumbing, according to Walsh, and a series of ideas to refurbish and repurpose the building since that time have not come to fruition.

Former Harris County Judge Ed Emmett led a $105 million proposal to convert the county-owned Astrodome into a multi-purpose event space with under-the-floor parking, which county commissioners approved in 2018, but the project fizzled out after Emmett lost an election to Lina Hidalgo later that year. There were concerns about the plan’s long-term cost and viability, according to Hidalgo and Harris County Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who voted in support of the proposal but said he always had reservations about it.

Ellis, who represents the part of Houston where the Astrodome is located, said there is no longer an interest in spending taxpayer money to refurbish it as construction costs have escalated and county leaders have more pressing priorities such as flood control, community healthcare needs and a backlog in their criminal justice system. Walsh said the county spends about $150,000 per year in utility and insurance costs for the Astrodome as a part of the larger NRG Park complex, and Ellis said any additional funding would need to come from the private or philanthropic sectors.

A plan to resurrect the Astrodome also would need the support of the NFL’s Houston Texans and the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which are NRG Park’s primary tenants. Tearing down the mostly revered domed stadium – an idea for which many Houstonians have expressed support over the years – is off the table after the Astrodome received a state historical designation a few years ago that largely protects it from being demolished or significantly altered.

[…]

Walsh said his nonprofit is starting to have conversations about the future of NRG Park with the Texans and rodeo, which have leases at NRG Stadium through 2032, adding that the Astrodome will be part of those talks. Rodeo president and CEO Chris Boleman, who recently wrapped up the 2023 event, said he wants to see the Astrodome become a usable space and would support a plan that benefits the rodeo and its operations.

The Astrodome Conservancy, a private nonprofit which formed in 2016 at the urging of Emmett, is gradually working to solicit public input, conduct market research and vet outside proposals to get the building up and running again. Executive director Beth Wiedower Jackson said she fields multiple inquiries per month about the Astrodome.

She added that the conversancy, which has a fundraising run scheduled for April 15, has a “very lean budget” and is “very much in the process” of finding a viable solution. Ellis said it’s likely to be at least a couple more years before an idea could be galvanized and set in motion at the Astrodome, which is paid for and “structurally solid as a rock,” according to Jackson.

The conservancy conducted a public-input campaign in 2021, with Jackson saying an overwhelming majority of the 7,500-plus respondents wanted to see the Astrodome utilized in some capacity.

“There is very much the public will, and even the political will, to do something with this building,” she said. “But there is not a vision right now, today currently, for the public or the politicians to rally around or get behind. There is not even something to say, ‘No, that’s not it.’ We’re trying to come up with that vision.”

Indeed, the last updates I have relating to the Astrodome are from 2021, and before that a post from 2019 about what’s going on with the Dome. There’s never been a shortage of ideas of what to do with the Astrodome, it’s always been about how to pay for it. I think at this point it’s going to take the Conservancy to mostly finance whatever will be done, with only a modicum of public funds being used. How we get there and how long that might take, I have no idea. This has been your semi-regular look at What’s Going On With The Astrodome.

Jared Woodfill and Paul Pressler

Mar 31st, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Sleazebags of a feather sleaze together.

In 2016, former Harris County GOP chair Jared Woodfill received an urgent warning about Paul Pressler, his longtime law partner and a Southern Baptist leader. In an email, a 25-year-old attorney from Woodfill’s Houston firm said he’d recently gone to lunch with Pressler, who told him “lewd stories about being naked on beaches with young men” and then invited him to skinny-dip at his ranch.

Woodfill — an outspoken anti-gay politician and prominent conservative activist who’d just played a key role defeating an equal rights ordinance for LGBTQ Houstonians — responded to the young man’s request for help with shock and indignation. “This 85-year-old man has never made any inappropriate comments or actions toward me or any one I know of,” he wrote of Pressler at the time.

But new court records show that wasn’t true.

In recent sworn testimony, Woodfill said he’d known since 2004 of an allegation that Pressler had sexually abused a child. Woodfill learned of those claims, he said, during mediation of an assault lawsuit filed against Pressler that he helped quietly settle for nearly a half-million dollars at the time. Despite his knowledge of the accusation, Woodfill continued to work with Pressler for nearly a decade — leaning on Pressler’s name and reputation to bolster their firm, Woodfill & Pressler LLP.

Rather than pay him a salary, Woodfill testified, the firm provided Pressler a string of employees to serve as personal assistants, most of them young men who typically worked out of his River Oaks mansion. Two have accused Pressler of sexual assault or misconduct.

Woodfill led the Harris County Republican Party from 2002 to 2014 and has for years been at the helm of anti-LGBTQ and other hardline conservative movements in Houston and Texas. In 2015, amid tense debate over a Houston equal rights ordinance that would have made LGBTQ workplace discrimination illegal, he and well-known GOP power broker Steven Hotze co-led a campaign that, among other things, said the measure would allow children to be sexually groomed and abused in bathrooms, paid for hundreds of thousands of dollars in opposition advertisements and compared the gay rights movement to Nazis.

Since then, Woodfill has remained a fixture in Texas GOP politics: During the height of the pandemic, he and Hotze filed numerous lawsuits challenging COVID-19 mandates, and he’s currently representing conservative political candidates challenging the 2022 election results in Harris County. Woodfill is also representing Hotze in a criminal investigation stemming from a 2020 incident in which a private investigator, allegedly acting at Hotze’s behest, held at gunpoint an A/C repairman who he believed was transporting fake ballots.

Woodfill’s deposition came as part of an ongoing, six-year-old lawsuit in which a former member of Pressler’s church youth group accuses him of decades of rape beginning when he was 14. The suit also accuses Woodfill and others, including leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, of concealing and enabling Pressler’s behavior — claims that prompted a 2019 Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News investigation into widespread sexual abuse in the SBC, the nation’s second-largest faith group.

Released over the last few weeks, the thousands of pages of new court records show how Woodfill leaned on his Pressler connections to bolster his political and legal career — despite warnings about his law partner’s behavior. And they shed new light on how Pressler, a former Texas Court of Appeals judge and one-time White House nominee under George H.W. Bush, allegedly used his prestige and influence to evade responsibility amid repeated accusations of sexual misconduct and assault dating back to at least 1978, when he was forced out of a Houston church for allegedly molesting a teenager in a sauna.

Pressler is best known for his work in the Southern Baptist Convention, where he was instrumental in pushing its 16 million members and 47,000 churches to adopt literal interpretations of the Bible, strongly denounce homosexuality and align more closely with the Republican Party. And for decades, he was a high-ranking member of the Council for National Policy, an uber-secretive network of conservative judges, mega donors, media figures and religious elites led by Tony Perkins, head of the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council.

The new records show that in 2004, leaders of First Baptist Church of Houston, a massive Southern Baptist congregation, investigated claims that Pressler, then a deacon, had groped and undressed a college student at his Houston mansion. The church leaders deemed the behavior “morally and spiritually” inappropriate and warned Pressler but took no further action, citing differing accounts of the incident and Pressler’s stature in their church and the Southern Baptist Convention. In recent depositions, plaintiffs attorneys also briefly mention new complaints from two others about Pressler, though those documents remain sealed ahead of the looming civil trial in the case.

At least six men have now accused Pressler of sexual assault or misconduct, including two who say they were molested while minors and two who say they were solicited for sex in incidents after 2004, when Woodfill and First Baptist leaders were separately made aware of complaints about Pressler.

Pressler has not been criminally charged in any of the incidents. Neither Woodfill nor his attorney responded to a list of questions about Woodfill’s handling of the allegations against Pressler. In a Wednesday email, Woodfill’s lawyer David Oubre said they are “confident Mr. Woodfill will be successful in defeating these claims.”

See here for previous mentions of Paul Pressler. If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you already know that I consider pond scum to be a higher form of life than Jared Woodfill. If you didn’t already know that, now you know why. My homework assignment for legislative Democrats is to make sure you mention the names Jared Woodfill and Paul Pressler every time someone disparages LBGTQ folks in a hearing. It won’t change anything, but it will make them mad and it will help spread the word. Go read the rest of the article.

Commissioners Court supplements Public Defender budget and supports adding more courts

Mar 20th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

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Good moves.

Harris County Commissioners Court this week approved a package of public safety measures to support state legislation to create additional district courts, expand the county’s holistic assistance response team program and look at enlarging the public defender’s office.

The measures are aimed at ongoing efforts to reduce the ongoing backlog in the county’s criminal courts system and relieve persistent jail overcrowding. The public defender’s office, for example, currently has capacity to handle fewer than 20 percent of indigent criminal defense cases, leaving the rest to court-appointed private attorneys, who last year earned more than $60 million in fees while, in many cases, taking on caseloads that exceeded state-recommended limits, a recent Houston Chronicle investigation revealed.

The resolution in support of the Texas Legislature creating six additional courts in Harris County passed by a 4-0 vote, with County Judge Lina Hidalgo abstaining, citing fiscal concerns. Hidalgo said that while she was in favor of adding more courts she would only support the measure if it required the state to cover the cost of maintaining additional courts, which comes out to an estimated $17 million per year.

“We don’t have the money for it and somebody needs to call it like it is. I will call it like it is. We cannot afford this,” Hidalgo said, adding that the county would be in a position to cover the cost had two Republican commissioners not forced the county to adopt a lower tax rate last fall.

[…]

Another measure passed by the court Tuesday directed county departments — including Harris County Public Health, the Office of County Administration and the Office of Management and Budget — to develop a plan to expand the county’s Holistic Assistance Response Team, or HART program, in which mental health and social work professionals respond to certain types of emergency calls instead of law enforcement officers. The fledgling program in a section of north Harris County, has responded to more than 1,900 calls since beginning operations last March, according to the county.

Handled incorrectly, police responses can turn deadly; according to a 2015 report from the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit that promotes access to mental health care, people with untreated mental illness are 17 times more likely to be shot dead by police.

Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told the court Tuesday that his deputies have found the program effective.

“Our busiest area was in north Harris County off the 1960 corridor. We did some holistic approaches out there that balance community outreach with enforcement and the procedural justice way. We were able to turn that area, during that pilot program, from the busiest area down to number three. And so it works,” Gonzalez said.

The measure approved by the commissioners would expand the HART program into Harris County Precinct 4.

On a motion by Precinct 4 Commissioner Lesley Briones, the court also requested the county work on a plan to expand the public defender’s office. The proposal approved by the court would save the county money by having up to 50 percent of indigent defense cases handled by the public defender’s office rather than the more highly paid private attorneys, Briones said. One of those attorneys earned $1 million last year, handing 399 felony cases and 207 misdemeanors.

See here, here, and here for the background. I agree with trying to get more courts, and I definitely approve of expanding the Public Defender Office; the story notes some issues with each, which you can read for yourself. I don’t know how I missed the Holistic Assistance Response Team (HART) story – okay, I do know, it was published last October 13, when I was fully encumbered with Election Brain – but it’s a great idea and seems to be catching on. It was also opposed by The Loser Alexandra Mealer (insert rude hand gesture here), so yay us for avoiding that mistake. Just, please, make sure that HART is an item in the Sheriff’s budget so that we don’t run into any further “defunding” bullshit. Anyway, kudos all around for this.

Harris County creates reproductive health access fund

Mar 18th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

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Good.

In a bid to protect residents’ already restricted access to reproductive health care, Harris County officials voted to approve a proposed fund to go toward Harris County Public Health and smaller community organizations at Tuesday’s Commissioners Court meeting.

The reproductive health care access fund passed on a 4 to 1 vote, with Republican Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey at odds with his Democratic counterparts.

This fund will allocate $6 million in federal dollars from the American Rescue Plan to assist Harris County Public Health and the partner organizations in providing reproductive care – including contraception, family planning education, preconception health screenings, and STI testing and treatment – to a minimum of 20,000 residents, said County Judge Lina Hidalgo.

It would not include abortion funding or related pregnancy termination services, as Texas has a total ban on abortion even in cases of rape or incest, allowing it only if continuing the pregnancy puts the mother’s life in danger.

The total amount will be distributed in three parts, with $1.1 million going toward expansions for Harris County Public Health’s services, $4.2 million to funding care at the partner organizations, and the remaining $700,000 for operating expenses for these partner organizations and the county’s health facilities.

This fund is a response to Hidalgo’s resolution passed last year following the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, making abortion illegal in in most states, said Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who accompanied Hidalgo at a press conference held on Monday at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast’s headquarters.

“There is only so much we can do to stop these draconian, dangerous laws,” Ellis said. “But we can use the resources and power we have in Harris County for residents to access health care services they need to make decisions about their health, family and future. That is what this fund will do.”

Here’s a preview story in the Chron about this action. Because this was onetime grant money, the fund is in place for two years, and after that Commissioners Court will either have to pay for it themselves or find other sources for it. That’s a problem for Future Them; this will address a real need in the here and now, and that’s what matters. Here are a couple of tweets from Judge Hidalgo about it. Good job to the four members of the Court who made this happen.

Chron story on Fair For Houston

Mar 13th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

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Good stuff.

Local advocates have launched a petition drive aimed at increasing the city’s voice on the Houston-Galveston Area Council, a 13-county regional planning council that has been criticized by Houston leaders for what they consider unfair federal fund allocation.

Consisting of more than 100 local governments, including cities, counties and school districts, the council frequently serves as the decision maker for distributing federal funding for flood protection, workforce development and large-scale infrastructure works to member jurisdictions.

With more than 2.3 million residents, Houston represents more than 30% of the population within H-GAC’s jurisdiction, but only two city officials serve on its 37-member board.

Since mid-January, volunteers of the newly formed Houston-Galveston Area PAC have been collecting signatures from Houston voters under an initiative called “Fair for Houston,” with the aim of putting a city charter amendment on the ballot in November.

The proposed charter amendment would have Houston withdraw from any regional planning group without a proportional voting structure based on population size. The goal , organizer Michael Moritz said, is to compel H-GAC to revise its voting system.

“This organization is continuing to influence Houston in a way that has a strong human cost,” Moritz said. “Flood infrastructure not being built in Houston is going to influence how our city experiences the next major hurricane. And transportation projects are going to influence the risk of someone being injured or killed in a car crash or the rates of childhood asthma in schools near freeways.”

“Houston is the largest city in the metro area,” he said. “We have a significant amount of leverage here. The H-GAC would be in an existential crisis should they not be willing to hear Houston out and adapt the voting structure.”

Waller County Judge Trey Duhon, chairman of the H-GAC board of directors, said a proportional voting structure would give Houston and Harris County too much power and go against the spirit of regional representation.

“H-GAC is a regional planning organization and must always consider the big picture when it comes to our Gulf Coast region and the impact we can have on every county in H-GAC, large or small,” Duhon said. “What is being proposed would essentially kill the essence of a regional planning council of governments. It would allow two jurisdictions to essentially control and dominate regional decisions amongst the 13 counties. That undermines the entire purpose of the council of government.”

[…]

Moritz said that while the group’s ultimate goal is to have H-GAC change its voting structure, the city could decide to withdraw from H-GAC but still continue to receive funding under federal regulations on metropolitan planning organizations until a new regional planning group is created.

“There’s no risk that federal funding dries up,” he said. “All that we’re doing here is forcing H-GAC ‘s hand in a way. And Houston could decide to work with regional governments to constitute a new MPO in what would be sort of the last possible scenario if they continue to be obstinate toward Houston’s request.”

Danny Perez, a spokesperson for the Houston District of the Texas Department of Transportation, said the department “is committed to working with our MPO partners and will continue to do so whether as currently defined or restructured.”

See here for when I noted the existence of Fair For Houston. The story notes some previous examples of HGAC screwing us out of a fair share of funds, a situation that the likes of Trey Duhon no doubt thinks is just fine. It’s called “democracy”, Trey. Look it up sometime.

After I first posted about FFH, I started wondering about what would happen to the federal grant and appropriation process if Houston and Harris County were no longer in HGAC. My main fear was that some alternate organization would have to be created by the Legislature for the new Houston/Harris organization to participate in that process. That doesn’t appear to be the case, which is greatly reassuring, but I’d still like to see a super wonky explanation of what exactly would happen if the “take our ball and go home” threat got carried out, just so we’d all know what hoops or pitfalls there might be along the way. And if HGAC gets on board with the idea of, you know, not screwing Houston and Harris County, that would be great. Not blowing it up is usually the easier path. We just need to make sure the path we’re on is going somewhere good. If you go to the Fair For Houston website, you can see they have a number of events coming up to help collect the needed signatures. Go help them out if you can.

More on spending less on court-appointed lawyers

Mar 13th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Seems like a good start.

A Houston Chronicle investigation into how some private attorneys earn enormous sums to represent thousands of indigent people accused of crimes in Harris County – at a cost of $60 million to taxpayers last year – is prompting widespread calls for reform, as well as a county audit of the program.

The 10 highest-paid private attorneys each pocketed more than $450,000 last year, with one pulling in $1 million. Dozens of attorneys – not all among the highest-paid – took on far more cases than county-employed public defenders are allowed. Their caseloads also exceeded state-recommended limits.

“Obviously, these numbers are huge,” said Jed Silverman, president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association. “It’s wrong, it’s offensive to your average person off the street, and it calls into question whether or not these accused people are getting effective assistance of counsel.”

Here’s a look at what officials are doing to address the issue, and other proposed solutions.

Late last month, the Harris County Auditor told county leaders that his office “started a review of court-appointed attorneys’ fees.” Errika Perkins, who also works in the office, told the Chronicle that officials hope to examine everything from the attorneys’ billing practices to whether they’re visiting clients in jail.

“Our goal is to be able to analyze the different hours attorneys spent on different aspects of the case,” Perkins said, adding that she expects the audit will take at least a couple of months before results can be publicly released.

Two of the county’s Democratic commissioners, Rodney Ellis and Leslie Briones, separately are pushing for an expansion of the public defender’s office, which employed about 130 lawyers to represent indigent clients last year.

But Silverman and others say those changes won’t be enough.

“Everybody involved has to double down” to fix the problem, said State Sen. John Whitmire, who also is running for mayor of Houston. “There’s no justice for victims, defendants, or society … the whole damn thing’s broken.”

For their part, judges and county staff say they’re trying to improve the situation by increasing attorney pay and mentorship opportunities to entice more attorneys to take cases. Harris County courts have faced so much turmoil in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Hurricane Harvey that many attorneys stopped taking appointments, forcing judges to overload some of the ones that remain.

See here for the background. First, I’m glad to see that there is publicly-expressed support for increasing the budget of the Harris County Public Defender Office, which makes all kinds of sense. The story suggests that the max case load the PDO could handle is about half of the indigent cases, which would require slightly more than doubling their current budget. The story mentions other things that the county is doing now, but it’s not clear to me what things that it should be doing that it isn’t or hasn’t brought up. I don’t know what the particulars are that Silverman and Whitmire – who obviously would have some skin in the game as Houston Mayor, even though this is a county matter – have in mind. Be that as it may, I believe this situation will look very different in a couple of years. That should be the goal, anyway.

Court blocks phony “defunding” claim again

Mar 12th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

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From the inbox:

A Travis County District Court temporarily blocked Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar’s determination that Harris County defunded the Precinct 5 Constable’s office in violation of state law. The order means the Comptroller’s determination as to Harris County’s budget is currently legally ineffective; he’s prohibited from reinstating it.

“I’m glad the courts are blocking Comptroller Hegar from his misguided attacks on Harris County,” said Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee. “Comptroller Hegar violated the law. It’s clear. We’re prepared to fight this in the courts until he does the right thing by the people of Harris County and withdraws his determination. We’re seeing a pattern of state officials trying to get in the business of disrupting Harris County government to score political points. We are not going to stand for it; the five million residents of Harris County deserve better.”

Today’s ruling blocks Comptroller Hegar’s determination that Harris County violated Chapter 120. He made that determination by taking the Precinct 5 budget for the County’s 2022 short fiscal year, annualizing it, and then reasoning that because that annualized number was greater than Precinct 5’s budget for fiscal year 2023, the county violated Chapter 120. That is legally incorrect, even applying the Comptroller’s own math. Chapter 120 requires that if a county’s overall budget decreases from one budget year to the next, a prohibited funding reduction occurs only if the police agency’s share of the county’s overall budget has decreased over that same period. Harris County did not violate that standard because using the Comptroller’s math, Harris County’s overall budget decreases from his annualized version of the 2022 short fiscal year budget to the County’s fiscal year 2023 budget, while Precinct 5’s share of the County’s budget increases.

The next hearing is set for March 23, 2023. A copy of the county’s lawsuit is available here.

See here and here for the background. There’s a Chron story, but it’s mostly this press release plus some others. As was the case the last time around, it looks like this flimsy pretextual claim by the Comptroller is going to get stopped. Hopefully he’ll concede and withdraw the claim like he did the last time. And then hopefully he won’t go for a three-peat. Hopefully.

I-45 project is back on

Mar 8th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

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Though it will still be several years before there is any real construction.

Nearly two years to the day that federal officials paused TxDOT’s plans for rebuilding Interstate 45 and downtown Houston’s freeway system, national and state highway leaders have come to an agreement that will let the rebuild proceed, but with several concessions aimed at addressing the project’s impacts on low-income and minority neighborhoods.

The Federal Highway Administration and Texas Department of Transportation announced Tuesday they had reached an agreement, similar to those TxDOT reached with Harris County and Houston in December, outlining commitments related to the planned $9.7 billion rebuild of I-45 from downtown Houston north to Beltway 8.

The agreement immediately lifts the federal pause placed on the project on March 8, 2021, and resolves the audit conducted by federal officials related to TxDOT’s adherence to federal environmental rules.

“This agreement moves forward an important project, responds to community concerns, and improves (I-45) in ways that will make a real difference in people’s lives. Through this agreement the community will have a greater voice in the design and throughout the project’s life cycle,” said Federal Highway Administrator Shailen Bhatt, in a statement.

[…]

Unlike the agreements with the city and county, the deal reached with federal officials holds TxDOT to both oversight and enforcement of many of the specifics. As part of the agreement, TxDOT will:

conduct twice-annual public meetings during development and construction, expected to take more than a decade, to update the community on the progress and plans for detours during construction.

add another $3 million to the $27 million TxDOT already committed to help the Houston Housing Authority develop new affordable housing opportunities, mirroring the promise TxDOT previously made to the city.

commit $1.5 million to create parks and trails, in particular to replace park space near the Kelly Village public housing complex.

support the creation of the Emancipation National Historic Trail, a proposed federally-sponsored historical route chronicling the journey of freed slaves from Galveston to Houston, including trail links and planning for historical displays along the footprint of I-45.

coordinate detours near two Houston Independent School District schools to take students’ bicycle and pedestrian routes into account during construction

Longtime skeptics of the project, however, said they fear the promises of partnership will erode as TxDOT proceeds.

“They are doing what federal agencies do, using the term enforcement when historically we have seen no follow-through,” said Joetta Stevenson, president of Houston’s Super-neighborhood 55 and one of those who had accused TxDOT of skirting federal civil rights laws, prompting the review by FHWA. “Trust has been broken for generations, and by signing off on the choices of the state, only enforcing after harm has been done, they continue a painful legacy. So far, I see no tangible changes that don’t rely on TxDOT’s good faith participation.”

In a statement the group formed to oppose the project, Stop TxDOT I-45, said “Houston deserves a project that prioritizes safety, centers the lived experience of those most impacted by the project, actually relieves traffic, and moves us toward a more equitable future. We will not stop fighting for our city and our lives.”

Air Alliance Houston and LINKHouston, which have advocated for sweeping changes to the plans, said they were reviewing the details but initially indicated the details alone leave the project short of expectations.

“While we hoped the federal government would maximize its leverage over TxDOT to push for a more equitable project, we are encouraged to see that the Federal Highway Administration will hold TxDOT accountable in ways that the City of Houston and Harris County memorandums of understanding could not,” LINKHouston Executive Director Gabe Cazares said.

Parts of the agreement commit TxDOT to elements that are less specific, for now, but eventually could have sweeping effects on the communities impacted by the freeway. TxDOT has agreed to re-evaluate drainage studies for the freeway rebuild to reflect ATLAS-14, the national rainfall analysis released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2018 that places more of Houston in areas at flood risk. TxDOT already had agreed to do this as part of its agreements with the city and county. The change potentially could mean more flood control, such as detention ponds or channels for neighborhoods near the freeway.

See here and here for the background on the city/county deal with TxDOT. If the skeptics and opponents remain unconvinced, then there continues to be reason to not want this to happen. If it mostly comes down to how close the federal oversight and enforcement of the deal will be, then at least we know where to concentrate future efforts. A statement from County Attorney Christian Menefee is beneath the fold, a statement from Commissioner Adrian Garcia is here, a Chron story recapping the saga so far is here, and the Trib and Campos have more.

(more…)

If not for I-45 then for something else

Mar 5th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

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Money for highways never goes unspent.

Drivers on Houston freeways likely can relate: Facing a slowdown when it comes to rebuilding Interstate 45, state transportation leaders are shifting gears and changing lanes.

Unable to significantly move ahead with the controversial rebuild until probably 2027, the Texas Transportation Commission is considering taking money it planned to spend in the next four years on I-45 and dedicating it to other projects in the Houston area, citing the need to keep spending now with the expectation that the funding for I-45 will come later.

“I am looking at it as an opportunity to get projects funded,” transportation commission Chairman J. Bruce Bugg said Thursday during the board’s monthly Austin meeting.

While no projects have been advanced, there are a handful in the Houston area that are substantially planned and set for construction in the coming years, but not fully funded. They range from small projects on nearly every farm-to-market road in Houston, adding two lanes to major routes such as Texas 36 in Fort Bend County and FM 359 in Harris and Waller counties, to the $2.4 billion rebuild of Loop 610 north from Texas 225, including replacement of the Sidney Sherman Bridge across the Houston Ship Channel with one much higher in elevation. Other planned work includes:

• expansion of Spur 5 near the University of Houston and Texas 35 south of Loop 610 into a new freeway segment

• widening of Texas 6, FM 1960 and FM 2100 in various locations

• elevating I-10 out of the floodway near White Oak Bayou

Commission members urged Texas Department of Transportation leadership to examine projects in the Houston area and make possible changes to timelines for moving some to the construction phase. The first step, part of the state’s annual process of revising its 10-year-plan, would be to adjust the dates in the Unified Transportation Program during revisions planned for June. The commission typically approves updates to the UTP in late August.

Officials stressed that shuffling money between projects and away from I-45 was not an indication the massive project is less of a priority, or that other parts of the state will capture the funding.

“This is not a choice of ice cream or cake,” Bugg said. “This is, we want to give the Houston area ice cream and cake, but the timing is the cake is not coming out of the oven for a long, long time. We might as well serve them ice cream in the meantime.”

“Ice cream or cake” would not be the metaphor I or any other skeptic/opponent of the I-45 project would use here. Maybe the second choice is appetizing, but honestly just not being force-fed works. That said, please, just no to the I-10 elevation proposal, at least not without addressing the neighborhood’s concerns. Given that that remains the crux of the disagreement over the I-45 project, I’m not terribly optimistic.

The project will be the largest freeway rebuild ever in Houston, replacing the aging I-45 from downtown to Beltway 8 north of Greenspoint and redesigning the entire freeway system around the central business district. The project will move I-45 to follow Interstate 69 along the east side of downtown, removing the elevated portion of the freeway along Pierce but maintaining many of the downtown connections.

None of that will happen, however, until construction starts in 2027, as the project has faced years of delay that has pushed breaking ground years beyond what officials had hoped. Since 2017, the project has faced criticism, including opposition from Houston and Harris County officials who sought some changes to the design.

Some, but not all, of the concerns came to conclusion in December, when TxDOT, the city and county announced they had reached some agreements, which also ended a lawsuit filed by Harris County.

Still unresolved, however, is a federal pause, placed in March 2021, that halted most development of the project.

“Right now, we are just stuck,” Bugg said.

Officials are working on an agreement, essentially a contract between TxDOT and the Federal Highway Administration, that would lift the federal hold, TxDOT Deputy Executive Director Brandye Hendrickson said.

“We believe we have come to terms,” Hendrickson said, adding that final approval of the deal rests with U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Resolving the issues, however, still puts most parts of the project years from construction as the design is refined. While some portions of I-69 could see construction, many major areas, such as I-69 at Main and Fannin and construction along I-45, Texas 288 and Interstate 10, are not scheduled until 2027.

Take your time. Seriously, no rush. We’re all fine over here.

You still have time to donate to the Democratic judges’ legal fund

Mar 2nd, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Just a reminder:

Here @JudgeGenesis Draper. She is 1 of 17 elected Harris County Dem. judges sued to undo ‘22 election. Judges can’t take pro bono help to defend selves. Can’t let Mattress Mack undo election wins. Clubs In Action raising legal $ for judges. Please help. https://mailchi.mp/3860a20fae8b/we-need-your-help?e=cf7bb2b770&fbclid=IwAR3bf6Pdu4mhPHiTnPDtpzT361sMx5VyDAxSnUXy7qM7EbTLGfZabSUiT4w

— Clubs in Action PAC (@CIAHTX) 8:32 PM – 27 February 2023

See here for the background. That link takes you here, and while the in-person fundraiser mentioned there is now over, the Donate link remains. But due to a change in state law, you only have until March 8 to make a contribution. That’s a new statutory deadline for all judicial fundraising – it used to be the case that judges who were involved in lawsuits could continue past that deadline, but the law was changed in the last session, so here we are. Please give a few bucks if you can and help them all out. Thanks!

We do need more felony courts

Mar 1st, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

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This is a good start.

County officials are considering adding new district courts and making more room for detainees in an effort to reduce to county’s court backlog and alleviate overcrowding at the Harris County Jail.

During Commissioners Court on Tuesday, officials considered adding six more district courts to help expedite pending cases in the county’s criminal court system.

County Judge Lina Hidalgo questioned whether focusing directly on the county’s court system would make a significant impact on the jail’s bloated population.

“How do we know that if we bring these new courts that cases will: number one, move faster, and number two, that the backlog reduction will translate into a reduction in the jail population?,” Hidalgo asked.

The number of pending criminal cases in the county has decreased by more than 20% over the last year, according to Harris County’s district court dashboard. Despite the backlog reduction, the jail’s daily population has continued to increase.

As of Wednesday, there were 9,915 people in the jail and 1,051 people outsourced to other facilities, according to the Harris County Jail dashboard. The facility’s daily population has been dangerously close to maximum capacity since June 2022.

Last year, 27 people died with in custody — the highest number in nearly two decades, according to county records and data from Texas Justice Initiative. So far, at least four people have died while in custody this year.

The county’s budget office said the additional courts would cost the county about $30 million to build. After construction, the courts would cost nearly $17 million per year to operate.

On Wednesday, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said she supported adding more courts, but was concerned about the amount of time needed for the new courts to make a meaningful dent in the backlog and overcrowding in the jail.

“I would simply be concerned about the timing that we need time to ramp up,” Ogg said. “It’s not an immediate fix to the problems of the Harris County Jail. It would take time for the legislature to agree and approve, then implement, then you’d have to hire.”

One point to clarify here, Harris County cannot add more district courts to the mix. District courts are state courts, created by the Legislature. Harris County can add county courts, and has done so in recent years, but in the criminal context those are for misdemeanors. District courts are for felonies. The backlog here is in the felony courts.

District courts can also be Civil or Family, but they all come from the Legislature. Harris County has more district courts than any other county, but we are of course by far the biggest county, and we have had a total of two new district courts created here since 1984, and one of those was a Family court. Harris County is about twice as big as it was 38 years ago. District courts are numbered by creation date, so the higher the number the more recent the court. Since the 351st Criminal District Court was created, Fort Bend County and Montgomery County have each had five new district courts added. They have both grown exponentially over the past 40 years and absolutely needed those new courts, my point is that Harris needs some new ones, too. Six new district criminal courts sounds good to me, just on population growth alone.

That doesn’t mean those new courts would solve all of our problems right away – we have issues beyond the backlog, and even if we could snap our fingers and get these new courts tomorrow, it would take awhile for them to have any effect. Other issues, from mental health care at the jail to bail issues to who’s getting arrested and charged with what need to be dealt with, too. Along those lines:

Jail reform advocates say the DA’s Office should follow the recommendations of a 2020 report from the Justice Management Institute, which suggests the department dismiss “all non-violent felony cases older than nine months” in order to alleviate the number of pending cases. The report found that of all the county’s felony cases in 2019, about 57% were either dropped or deferred.

In response, Ogg said the recommendation was “an unrealistic solution.”

“Not only is it unfair, it’s basically unethical,” Ogg said. “If I were to simply dismiss cases because they were over nine months old, it would punish crime victims and it would punish innocent people who might be subjected to repeat crimes.”

Maybe dismissing them all is going too far, but we can certainly try to get our priorities in order. DA Kim Ogg was elected in 2016 in part on a platform of prioritizing violent crime over things like minor drug crimes. We could take a good look at that in deciding which of these years-old unresolved non-violent felony cases really need to be pursued and which can be safely let go. I don’t see why this should be controversial.

Lege targets Harris County election administrator

Feb 28th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

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We knew something like this was coming.

House and Senate bills filed by Republican lawmakers in response to Harris County’s mismanagement of its recent elections could give the Texas secretary of state the authority to step in, suspend county election administrators when a complaint is filed and appoint a replacement administrator.

Election administration experts told Votebeat the legislation was an overreaction to the desire to hold Harris County accountable for years of election mismanagement, and would disrupt the state’s ability to help county election offices improve and address systemic problems.

If passed, the secretary of state’s office would change from being a guide and resource for election workers to being an auditor that can investigate and fire them. Some election officials are concerned this change could prevent local election workers from asking questions or seeking help from the office for fear of being reprimanded.

“Currently we work hand-in-hand. [The secretary of state’s staff] are our No. 1 resource, and that benefits all voters,” said Jennifer Doinoff, Hays County elections administrator. “Putting them in the position of oversight would definitely change the dynamic.”

Authored by state Rep. Tom Oliverson and state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, both Harris County Republicans, the bills are among several already filed this legislative session in reaction to the long lines, late openings and reports of shortages of ballot paper on Election Day in Harris County. More than 20 lawsuits from losing Republican candidates have also been filed against the county, citing those problems and seeking a redo of the election. Harris County Elections Administrator Cliff Tatum did not respond to Votebeat’s request for his comment about the legislation.

House Bill 2020 and Senate Bill 823 would allow the secretary of state’s office to take action in a county if a complaint is filed by one of several officials and organizations involved in elections, and if there’s “good cause to believe that a recurring pattern of problems with election administration exists.”

The bills list five causes for suspension of an elections administrator:

malfunction of voting equipment,

unfair distribution of election supplies,

errors in tabulation of results,

delays in reporting election returns,

discovery of voted ballots after the polls close.

Currently, any problems that arise in an election or with an elections administrator are handled by the county’s election commission. Those commissions are made up of the county judge, the tax assessor-collector, the county clerk and the chairs of local political parties. The commission’s oversight powers allow it to appoint, terminate or accept the resignation of the county’s election administrator.

Some Texas voting rights groups worry the Legislature will use the problems in Harris and those lawsuits as “an excuse” to advance bills such as these. The League of Women Voters of Texas in a statement last week said such legislation, if passed, “is fraught for potential abuse, infringes on the rights of county governments to select their own elections administrator, and demeans the meaning of local governance.”

Slightly more than half of Texas counties appoint nonpartisan election administrators to run their elections. This legislation would apply only in those counties and not in the 122 that elect county clerks or tax assessors tasked with running elections and handling voter registration.

“We are subject to the authorities of those that appointed us,” said Remi Garza, Cameron County elections administrator and the Texas Association of Elections Administrators legislative committee co-chair. “It does cause concern that somebody from outside that jurisdiction would be able to usurp the authority of the elections commission in dealing with their elections administrator.”

There’s more, but I don’t have the mental energy to continue, so go read the rest for yourself. This story came out the same day that a Senate committee approved a bill making “illegal” voting a felony with even harsher punishments and lower standards for “illegality” than before. So, you know, a banner Monday.

My first thought is that I’m not really clear what these guys are aiming at. I mean, Harris County could in effect call their bluff, restore election administration to the County Clerk, have Cliff Tatum move over and be the chief of elections under Teneshia Hudspeth, and this bill would no longer apply to us. Democrats would still be running the elections. Maybe they actually think Stan Stanart can win that ridiculous election contest, I don’t know. At this level, this is just weird.

Second, these bills – I assume they’re identical in each chamber – are just a mess. The story goes into detail about how absurdly vague the provisions are, which could put a whole lot of election administrators in solidly red counties in danger if something goes wrong, as things sometimes do. I obviously wouldn’t expect the Secretary of State to crack down on, say, Bell County as they’re slavering to do to Harris, but it could be that the first example to be made is in a red place. This is what happens when you let your rage control you.

(Of course, if we had managed to pass a federal voting rights law over the past two years, we wouldn’t be talking about any of this now. But hey, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema preserved the filibuster, so.)

Third, I kind of suspect that in the same way that the TEA probably doesn’t actually want to take over HISD, the SOS probably wants no part of administering Harris County elections. It’s big, it’s hard to do, and most importantly now everything that goes wrong is your fault. Who wants that? But the Republicans in the Lege don’t care about that. Slapping around Harris County is the point. If there’s collateral damage, so be it.

And finally, with a less-predatory state government, we could have a reasoned discussion and admit there are problems that could be fixed with some help from that state government and Lege find ways to do elections better that aren’t predicated on punishment and the exercise of raw power. And if I flap my arms and think happy thoughts, I could fly.

I’ve made the decision to pay less attention to the Lege than I have in the past because I don’t need the mental torment. The Republicans are gonna do what they’re gonna do, and we can’t stop them. One fine day we’ll win enough elections to make it stop, but until then this is what we’re gonna get. I don’t know what else to say.

Let’s spend less money on court-appointed lawyers

Feb 27th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

That’s my main takeaway from this.

Harris County paid one private attorney just over $1 million last year to represent hundreds of low-income people accused of crimes, helping proliferate a system that critics say wastes taxpayer dollars and robs indigent defendants of a fair shake in court.

Jeanie Ortiz, a former Harris County prosecutor, reported to the state that she earned the $1 million while working on about 400 felonies and 200 misdemeanors. A study funded by the Texas Indigent Defense Commission in 2015 concluded that attorneys could only reasonably handle at most 128 felonies or 226 misdemeanors a year.

“That’s too many cases for one lawyer to handle,” Harris County chief public defender Alex Bunin said of Ortiz’s caseload.

[…]

Sixty years after the U.S. Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright enshrined a person’s right to a lawyer in criminal proceedings, data shows that few indigent clients in the country actually get a good one.

A lack of funding is one big factor, but money isn’t the only reason. Texas’ constitution gives judges the ultimate authority to assign indigent defendants an attorney, and to decide how much that attorney gets paid. That system has led to persistent allegations of favoritism at the expense of defendants.

In Harris County, judges for decades doled out the vast majority of court appointments to a select few. Since attorneys earned a flat fee per case, the only way to make a living representing indigent clients was to take massive numbers of appointments. To get those appointments, attorneys gained favor with the judges by doing everything from contributing to their campaigns to bringing tacos for courtroom staff.

“It was the good ol’ boys system, 100 percent,” [Jed Silverman, president of the Harris County Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Association,] said.

The county eventually began paying court-appointed attorneys hourly. It also opened a public defender’s office in 2010, though many judges refused to use it, instead continuing to appoint overloaded private attorneys. The office has since expanded dramatically, but it still takes the minority of criminal cases in Harris County.

“The issue is, I need money to grow,” Bunin said. And more money will be hard to come by after the county adopted a lower-than-planned tax rate last year following a bitter political fight.

I’ll get to the money issue in a minute. The question about caseloads is one where there’s room for disagreement – Silverman, the HCCDLA President mentioned above, mounted a defense of the attorneys named in this story – though those at the extreme end always look dodgy. Harris County has a new system called “managed assigned counsel” (MAC) that helps a little with keeping anyone from having too many cases, but outside of the occasional news coverage and the State Bar, a process that’s completely opaque to most of us, there’s little oversight of the system as a whole. And that matters because whenever there’s large amounts of money at stake, the potential for ethical issues arises. Look at these three posts from the archives on this topic, and note that even though they span a decade, the same names kept coming up, with certain attorneys being closely connected to certain judges and – not at all coincidentally – their campaign coffers.

This is exactly the sort of thing that a public defender can mitigate. It’s also why there was such fierce opposition to the creation of such an office in Harris County even though most other large counties in Texas had them. Given the extremely cozy relationship between sleazeballs like Gary Polland and his machine for endorsing and financially supporting Republican judges, that was no surprise. But we have a public defender now, and yet we still have judges who make a whole lot of appointments to the same handful of attorneys. The names have changed but the practices have not, or at least not enough. I’m sure lots of new judges think they can do a better job of managing that, but history is against them. It would be better if they didn’t feel the need to try, as there’s a perfectly good alternative already in place.

Which comes back to the budget question. The past obstruction on Commissioners Court to implementing reforms like this has been eliminated thanks to the 2022 election. I am optimistic that the Commissioners will have the desire and the space to add to the public defender budget. Given how much cheaper one public defender is than these court-appointed attorneys, it just makes sense. The PDO doesn’t have to handle every indigent case – I’m sure there will the need for specialized services going forward. But we can and should spend less on those individual appointments, and get more for those dollars via the PDO. Let’s make this happen.

Harris County libraries to eliminate fines

Feb 26th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Good.

Harris County residents no longer will have to pay late fees on overdue library books, formalizing a policy the 26 branches of the county library started during the pandemic.

Harris County Commissioners Court voted unanimously on Tuesday to approve a measure making the elimination of late fees permanent, following Houston City Council’s decision last month to do the same at the Houston Public Library.

“The county will join the city of Houston, New York, San Diego, Nashville, Baltimore, San Francisco, and League City,” Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis said.

More than 1.8 million people have library cards with the Harris County Public Library system. The library’s roughly 2 million items were checked out more than 9.5 million times last year.

Late fees make up less than 1 percent of the library’s annual budget, according to Edward Melton, executive director of the Harris County Public Library system.

“During the pandemic, we stopped taking fines,” Melton said. “It’s really a very minor impact that we have on our budget, but we do see that with not having fines, people are more prone to bring back materials and also use the library, because that’s one of the barriers in terms of people not coming back.”

See here for the background; sadly, the link to my favorite (and relevant to this issue) Bloom County comic has expired, because Facebook be like that. I don’t think I had considered before how little of their budgets library fines must be. Not surprising, since they’re ten cents a day and are capped at three bucks total, but still. Some cultural axioms just get very deeply internalized. Anyway, good for HCPL, and good for the Houston library system for leading the way.

Here come the new floodplain maps

Feb 25th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Coming soon to tell you if you are now in the floodplain.

When Harris County debuts a massive overhaul of its floodplain maps later this year, the Houston area will be the first in the country to rely on a more accurate assessment of homes and businesses at risk. The update is a direct response to Hurricane Harvey, a storm so ferocious it forced the region to change its understanding of how much rainfall to plan for and which neighborhoods could flood.

Harvey — the third 500-year storm in three years — overwhelmed Harris County with up to 47 inches of rain, exposing serious flaws in communicating flood risk. A county analysis found half of the 204,000 homes and apartments that flooded were outside the boundaries of the official flood risk zones mapped by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

More than half of the damaged homes in the Tax Day storm in 2016 were outside the mapped floodplains, as were more than one-third of those during the Memorial Day flood in 2015.

On the new maps, most of Harris County’s floodplains will expand, reflecting a major effort to capture a more comprehensive understanding of flood risk.

FEMA’s existing floodplain maps show communities their risk of fluvial, or river flooding, when a bayou, creek or lake overflows its banks and floods nearby structures. What they do not show is the risk of urban flooding, when intense rainfall overwhelms stormwater systems regardless of proximity to a bayou or other channel.

The new floodplain maps for Harris County — originally set to be released in late 2022, but now expected in late this summer at the earliest — will be FEMA’s first maps to depict urban flooding. They also will reflect updated rainfall estimates from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that better reflect the reality that storms have intensified in recent decades, data that had not been updated since the 1960s.

“This update is really a transformational way of thinking about floodplains,” said Tina Petersen, executive director at the Harris County Flood Control District. “This is the first program that FEMA has done with a partner like Harris County Flood Control District that’s really looking at innovative mapping tools trying to develop what is a much more comprehensive understanding of flood risk, beyond what has been done in the past.”

Communities across the United States are going through the process of updating their floodplain maps to align with NOAA’s higher rainfall estimates.

Harris County’s effort to map urban flood risk is its own innovation in response to Harvey, which demonstrated the limitations of the existing models, said Ataul Hannan, planning division director at the Harris County Flood Control District.

“That is a new approach,” Hannan said. “They have never done it anywhere in the United States.”

There’s a lot more to the story so go read the rest, or read the companion story that summarizes the main points. Lots of things change – the amount of rainfall needed to be called a 100-year or 500-year flood, changes to individual watersheds, future updates to include new flood mitigation projects – with a big one being that inclusion of urban flooding risk. Some number of people who are not now in a defined floodplain will be in the new maps, and some of them will not be happy about it. There will be a lot of discussion to be had afterwards.

On a related note.

Harris County Commissioners Court is expected next week to consider a plan for spending $750 million in flood mitigation funds, all or part of which could be earmarked for closing a funding gap in the county’s flood bond program.

A year after a calamitous 2017 storm inundated more than 200,000 homes and businesses, voters approved a $2.5 billion bond proposal to tackle more than 180 flood control projects across the county.

County officials expected to receive additional billions of dollars from state and federal governments to undertake those projects, but the money failed to materialize. The county two years ago said that had resulted in a $1.4 billion shortfall in the flood bond program.

The Harris County Flood Control District said it has been able to keep the flood bond projects on schedule thanks to the Flood Resilience Trust the county created in June 2021 to address the funding gap. The county budget office estimated that if no other federal or state aid comes through, the trust would be able to make up bond project shortfalls until about 2026.

The trust is funded by Harris County Toll Road Authority revenues.

Now, county officials could spend part of the $750 million allotment to close what remains of that funding gap.

That’s from last week, I was waiting to see what the post-approval story looked like but then decided to add this in to this post. You know the background here, if I start thinking about it too much my head will explode, so I’ll just leave this here. The county is allowed to do this as long as the projects in question are HUD-compliant since this is HUD money, and there seems to be unanimous support for it.

ShotSpotter

Feb 24th, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

I’m more skeptical than not, but there is a way to make me less so.

Two years in, Houston’s ShotSpotter program has resulted in 5,450 alerts, 99 arrests and the seizure of 107 guns, but no real consensus on its value as a crime-fighting tool or even how to measure its success.

Critics say the numbers — just 19 percent of the gunfire alerts in the last 25 months even led to an offense report — do not justify the $3.5 million cost of the controversial tool. In the remaining cases, officers were dispatched based on the alerts but did not find any evidence, such as shell casings.

Authorities filed 126 charges related to ShotSpotter alerts, including one capital murder charge, according to Houston Police Department Assistant Chief Milton Martin, who presented an update to a City Council committee last week. Half of those charges involved misdemeanor offenses, most commonly the illegal discharge of a firearm in the city.

Not directly reflected in those statistics, Martin said, is the intelligence that HPD was able to gather from ShotSpotter data. Because residents do not always call 911 to report every gunshot they hear, the tool has allowed officers to map out areas where gunfire problems are the most severe and deploy its resources accordingly, he said.

“Just in the first year of operation, over 200 shell casings that we collected were linked to firearms that were used in other crimes in other parts of the city,” Martin said. “While that’s not an automatic ‘Oh, now we know who to arrest,’ it’s information that investigators did not have before.”

Some advocates, however, say the numbers do not justify the cost of the program: $3.5 million for a five-year contract from 2022 to 2027 at an annual price of approximately $74,000 per square mile.

“Only 20 percent of alerts result in an offense support, meaning that 80 percent of responses are a waste of public resources,” Christopher Rivera, outreach coordinator at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said. “I believe that we can use the $3.5 million…and put it into programs that actually reduce gun violence, like housing and health care and debt relief.”

[…]

Meanwhile, critics and studies of the system in other cities raise questions about the accuracy and efficacy of the gunfire detection tool.

Little consensus exists even among officials who have adopted the technology. In Texas, San Antonio canceled its contract in 2017, after just one year of operation, saying that ShotSpotter simply was not worth the money. Harris County officials, however, have called ShotSpotter a “godsend” for the Aldine area.

Chicago’s former Inspector General Joe Ferguson said Houston’s statistics so far are “in the same universe” as those in other parts of the country that have been subjected to criticism by experts.

The author of a 2021 report by Chicago’s Office of Inspector General, Ferguson found that ShotSpotter alerts rarely led to evidence of a gun-related crime and could result in biased policing behaviors. He cautioned Houston officials against making premature conclusions based on ShotSpotter data during an interview with the Chronicle.

“What was found in Chicago and has been found in other places is the false positive rate is over 50 percent,” Ferguson said. “And people don’t understand that. People assume things are worse than they are. That spawns fear, and fear spawns overreaction, both as a political matter and in terms of response in the field and on the street.”

At the same time, Ferguson applauded Houston’s incremental approach to implementing the program.

“The way that Houston is going about it is the way that these things should be approached. It started with a pilot program, it is focused, it generates the data, and the data is subjected to analysis and made publicly available,” he said. “But the results that they’ve gotten so far aren’t significantly better than what has been reported nationally.”

I thought I had written about ShotSpotter before, but my archives say otherwise. This article does a pretty good job of telling you what you need to know, and there was a CityCast Houston podcast episode from last January that also discussed it, if you want to know more. My sense about this is similar to how I feel about security cameras, which is that it sounds like it could be beneficial, and may have value in certain specific circumstances, but we need to be very rigorous about the data that we have for it and make decisions based on that data. Basically, does the data say this thing works as its proponents claim it does, which is to say that it reduces or helps solve crime at a certain level, or does it not? What even is a reasonable expectation given our investment, the context in which we are using it (e.g, in a high-crime area or just someplace where the locals are loudly clamoring for it regardless of need), and the experiences of other cities? We need to know that going in, and we need to be willing to turn it off if it’s not working as hoped. If we have all that in place, then I’m willing to give it a try. If not, then surely there are better uses of the money.

Harris County settles Juul lawsuit

Feb 23rd, 2023

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

From the inbox:

Christian Menefee

Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee announced a settlement of the county’s lawsuit against e-cigarette company JUUL Labs, Inc. over claims that JUUL deceptively marketed its products to children. The county received the second largest settlement for a local government in the nation.

“I’m proud of this outcome settling our lawsuit against JUUL. We’re bringing real money to the county to ensure we’re protecting our youth from e-cigarette use,” said Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee. “This case was always about reducing youth nicotine addiction in our communities. I want kids across Harris County to go on to live long, healthy lives. That’s one of many reasons why I plan to do everything I can to protect public health.”

In 2021, Harris County became the first governmental entity in Texas to file suit against JUUL. Harris County’s settlement is part of a global settlement with JUUL Labs, Inc resolving numerous cases brought by government entity plaintiffs, including school districts, cities, and counties. The distribution of Harris County’s settlement funds will be decided by Commissioners Court.

See here for the background. Googling around, I saw a news item from September about Juul settling with the state of Texas, which was part of a larger class action settlement, and a news item from December about a $1.7 billion settlement of over 5000 lawsuits nationwide. This was separate from all of those, which I confirmed with the County Attorney Office. I was also told that the settlement amount was $20 million, which was discussed at this week’s Commissioners Court meeting. And now you know what I know.

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