My quadrennial warning to be careful with charts and percentages

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

From City of Yes:

The sun came up Wednesday morning, but for many, no doubt, our proverbial American “shining city on a hill” had lost some of its luster. While the presidential election results have disappointed many city dwellers, the results in our actual, non-metaphorical cities show that the urban electorate also wanted something different—not a wholesale ideological shift, but leaders who actually take the problems of urban governance seriously.

Urban voters want to bring the shine back to their cities.

Many theories will be offered in the coming weeks to explain Kamala Harris’s decisive defeat, but the fact is that Donald Trump improved his performance over 2020 seemingly everywhere and with everyone—including in the densest, bluest cities. While Harris won most urban counties, the extent to which Trump outperformed his 2020 numbers is notable: he improved his share of the vote by 34% in New York City (nearly 70% in the Bronx!), 32% in San Francisco, 27% in Los Angeles, and 22% in Washington DC. In the chart below, you can see the red shift for the counties home to America’s 24 largest cities.

The rest is about a connection he draws between city governance and the Presidential vote, and you should read it and come to your own conclusions. My purpose is to talk about the chart, because my first reaction was “where in the world do you get an 8.9% increase for Trump in Harris County?” We’ve already shown that there was no Republican surge in Harris County. Trump’s raw vote total went up by a much more modest 2.78%, while his percentage of the vote went from 42.70% to 46.51%, an increase of 3.81 percentage points. That’s a real increase, though as noted yesterday it was much more about the drop in Democratic votes than anything else; I’m not going to relitigate that, go read that previous post for that argument.

Where that 8.9% figure comes from is that 46.51 is an 8.9% increase over 42.70 – as in, divide 3.81 into 42.70 and you get 0.089, which is to say 8.9%. I have a lot of problems with this type of comparison, which I went into in excruciating detail four years ago, when I encountered an even more painfully mis-informative chart. The issue here is that when you only compare percentages – or in this case, percentages of percentages – you are missing some important context, specifically the raw vote totals. This can lead to weird results at the extremes and sometimes the illusion of that you’re catching up when you’re actually falling farther behind. My earlier post gets into that, so please read it.

The bottom line for me is that you really have to include the vote totals to fully make sense of what happened here. I’ll do that in a second, but I also want to note that since we are comparing across years, it might also help to consider voter registration numbers as well. When comparing candidates from similar races in the same election, you know you’re dealing with the same pool of voters, so if Candidate A in Race A got more votes than Candidate B in Race B, you can say with some confidence that there were people who voted for Candidate A but not for Candidate B. But the fact that Donald Trump got 20K more votes in Harris County in 2024 than he did in 2020, it doesn’t follow that some people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 must have voted for Trump in 2024. That’s because there are more voters in Harris County in 2024 than in 2020, and at least some of those 20K extra votes for Trump may have come from those new people.

That’s a lot of words, which I didn’t get into in the previous post, so let me give you another chart:


Year   County     Votes     Voters     Pct
==========================================
2020    Bexar   308,618  1,189,373  25.95%
2024    Bexar   336,260  1,295,580  25.95%

2020    Dallas  307,076  1,398,469  21.96%
2024    Dallas  319,319  1,467,410  21.76%

2020   El Paso   84,331    488,470  17.26%
2024   El Paso  104,966    521,945  20.12%

2020    Harris  700,630  2,480,522  28.25%
2024    Harris  720,046  2,693,055  26.74%

2020   Tarrant  409,741  1,212,524  33.79%
2024   Tarrant  425,650  1,309,456  32.51%

2020    Travis  161,337    854,577  18.88%
2024    Travis  170,613    921,313  18.52%

These are all the Texas counties covered in the City of Yes post. I included the voter registration figures to add that extra dimension. Yes, Trump got 20K more votes in Harris County in 2024 than he did in 2020 (actually 19,416, but whatever). But there were 213K more voters in Harris in 2024. Of the total universe of people who could have voted, Trump’s share actually decreased. That was also the case in Dallas, Tarrant, and Travis Counties.

Now for sure, my chart also shows some big problems for Democrats. There’s no sugarcoating what happened in El Paso, where the increase in Trump’s support is more than half the increase of new voters. Democrats’ hope for eventually reaching the summit in Texas rested (and still rests, let’s be clear) on their vote share steadily increasing in the big urban and suburban counties. If increases in voter registration in these places don’t translate to commensurate increases in the vote share, that’s a five-alarm fire. That Republicans held steady in Bexar County isn’t good either. Hell, the tiny decrease in Dallas is worrisome too. Honestly, the Harris and Tarrant numbers are the most reassuring from a Democratic perspective, and we already know we have big issues to confront in those places.

Indeed, I’m only showing this from a Republican perspective, since the hook of this post was the Trump increases. I didn’t do the same calculation for the Democratic share of the vote, but we already know that it would show an often-steeper drop in all of these counties, Harris especially. I mean, 200K more total voters, but 100K fewer Democratic votes? You don’t need a spreadsheet to know that’s bad news.

My point here, as before, is not that this isn’t a problem, it’s that it a different problem. Outside of El Paso (which, again, VERY BAD), Republicans didn’t gain vote share. Democrats lost vote share. It may be that some Biden voters from 2020 voted for Trump this time, but that’s swamped by the Biden voters who sat it out this year. The communication we need to have with the two groups are very different. I’m just trying to define the problem so that we can go forward as effectively as we can. Slate’s Henry Grabar has more.

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Where that lack of trust in HISD comes from

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Exhibit A.

Harvard Elementary School’s Parent-Teacher Association welcomed its new principal, Sharon Pe Benito, and assistant principal, Molly Lashway, with cakes decorated in the school’s colors and “H” logo. The pair received gift cards to local restaurants as part of the welcome.

Shortly after, parents learned Pe Benito abruptly resigned. Houston ISD’s Central Division Superintendent Luz Martinez emailed families Tuesday that “after extensive bullying on social media, she determined this job was no longer in her personal or professional best interest.”

Harvard has been appointed an interim principal, Stefanie Spencer, for the rest of the year, during which the community will weigh in on a profile of ideal candidate characteristics for a permanent principal, Martinez wrote.

While Harvard parents welcome Spencer and laud her experience as a former Goose Creek CISD and Spring Branch ISD principal, community members were bewildered by the principal shuffle that began when HISD put principal Shelby Calabrese on leave and has since been recommended for termination for reasons that have not been made public.

Harvard’s assistant principal Alejandra Perez was also reassigned to Memorial Elementary, where Lashway was assigned away from. The school’s magnet coordinator and executive director, who oversees the principal, were also reassigned.

Parents were disturbed that Pe Benito’s hiring process did not include community input, Harvard father Josh Brodbeck said.

“Anyone who’s worked for any organization that has had its leadership swiftly removed without warning knows that doing that really does throw that organization into a certain amount of disarray,” Brodbeck added. “But then for the district to have handled it — or I should say mishandled it since they originally placed Dr. C on leave — for them to have mishandled it this way has only made things incrementally worse.”

Parents are hoping for some semblance of stability so students can finish out the year, he said.

“This has gone beyond the matter of trust, and now it’s about just basic competence,” he said of the abrupt changes. “Are these people even competent of running schools? That’s what has us really worried right now, because again, look at what’s happened at Harvard in just the course of a month.”

Harvard parent Ryan Sothen said the changes are a continuation of the anxiety and instability that began since Mike Miles was appointed superintendent. He noted that Harvard will now have its sixth executive director with the recent reassignment of their former executive director, Wendy Craft.

“That’s quite a bit of turnover that directly impacts the principals,” Sothen noted, adding the school also went through three principals within a month. “And the fact that the last one was in such rapid succession and seemed very disorganized — it really raises the question around the overall stability leadership strategy going into it.” He added this creates anxiety in parents and teachers, permeating to the students.

There may well be very good reasons for removing the first principal and the other leaders at Harvard Elementary, which is a B-rated school in 2024 (it was rated A in 2022 and 2023). Given that at some level this is an employment dispute, there should be some level of confidentiality until the issue is fully resolved. But as the story noted, the now-departed successor, who was named without any input from the school’s community, had emailed Mike Miles pledging her support for NES and for moving non-NES campuses into that system, which was decidedly unpopular with parents, teachers, and students. And again, this is for a highly-rated school with an IB program. You’d think HISD and Mike Miles would have higher priorities than that.

Exhibit B:

Lantrip Elementary School parents protested Wednesday morning for transparency following Houston ISD’s abrupt decision to place Principal Valiza Castro on administrative leave.

More than 50 adults with students protested at the East End campus with signs reading “Transparency 4 Parents” and “Our children are worth a good, quality education.” Parents protested with chants familiar to many other schools across the city, including “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Mike Miles has got to go” and “Mike Miles must go.” A child yelled “We love Lantrip,” leading parents to start up a chorus of “We love Lantrip.”

Lantrip parents are calling on the district to reevaluate its decision to place Castro on leave and to provide clear, transparent communication on the reasoning behind this decision and its plan.

Central Division Superintendent Luz Martinez acknowledged in a Monday announcement this change is abrupt and that parents will have questions and concerns.

“Ultimately, we believe this shift will best support your child’s learning and the workplace experience for Lantrip teachers and staff,” Martinez wrote.

But the decision ambushed many parents who came to love Castro’s leadership. Parents praised her community engagement events to keep up school grounds, the efficiency to drop-off and pick-up, and support to teachers amid massive turnover, which parents said to be a 70% turnover rate in a website calling for Castro to return and state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles to be fired. Fifteen teachers left the environmental science magnet school in June alone, according to a Chronicle analysis of district records.

Timothy Suing, holding a sign with an acrostic that reads “Education requires Accountability 2 Build Community,” said the school has seen a dramatic change in culture since the takeover. His daughters both attended Lantrip, with his younger daughter in fifth grade.

“It used to be a culture where we had a lot of certified teachers who volunteered their time for extracurricular activities,” he said. “That’s all gone. It’s been replaced by a culture of fear. Teachers are afraid to use their own judgment in creating effective lesson plans. They’re being watched. They’re all afraid to speak. And I think this takeover is really disingenuous. What we have instead is we have an entity that’s running the schools that leaves us voiceless.”

Lantrip is an A-rated school, and this principal was new to them as of this academic year. Again, maybe there’s a valid reason for this, but again the parents and teachers and children are dealing with a lot of change and no communication from HISD about what is going on. What the hell is going on here?

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Weekend link dump for November 24

Posted on November 24, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I’ve actually been on BlueSky for awhile, but I don’t use it that much. Maybe that will change as I feel the need to return to a higher level of news engagement.

“But here’s the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they’d never sell out.”

A lot of local PBS programming is going to be available on Prime Video.

“Cold comfort is still comfort.”

“We’ve entered the stage of Trumpist collapse in which people who seek to harm those seen as insufficiently loyal are being promoted over those with actual skills, or vision, or politics. Matt Gaetz is the open threat of violence and targeted prosecution that follows a refusal to take seriously the veiled threat of violence and targeted prosecution. They broke it; they bought it. Far too late to suggest they can choose to return what he will be selling.”

“Top ten RFK Jr. conspiracy theories, now in handy index card format”.

“Fox News contributor Caitlyn Jenner is being sued for alleged securities fraud by people who invested in her $JENNER memecoin and lost tens of thousands of dollars”.

“This week, we’ll travel back in time to 1986, when Voyager 2 became the first (and still only) spacecraft to visit Uranus. This flyby has profoundly affected our view of this mysterious world, but new research suggests we got off on the wrong foot with Uranus and its moons. First impressions matter, even with giant planets!”

RIP, Bela Karolyi, former gymnastics coach. I’m just going to leave it at that.

“Advocates said there are a number of things trans people can do immediately to protect their rights and safety before January. Here’s how the nation’s LGBTQ+ leaders feel things will go in the top policy areas impacting trans people and how trans folks can prepare ahead of January 2025.”

“The late, beloved “Golden Girls” actor Betty White will be memorialized on a new postage stamp next year.”

RIP, Ella Jenkins, singer/songwriter known as the “first lady of children’s music”.

RIP, Charles Dumont, singer, musician, songwriter best known for the classic “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”.

“But if it has anything to do with assignment rules, it’s that the existing judge picking system — put aside whether or not the judges are ACTUALLY in the tank for one side or the other — feeds the impression that the litigants do see judges as bought and paid for toys. That’s bad for the judiciary. You’d think a judge might want to make a simple change that, likely without actually changing the outcome, would stifle that impression.”

“Now that Trump has won the presidency again, it’s worth revisiting these episodes as a guide to what might be coming. It’s often said that Trump campaigned expressly on a platform of authoritarian rule, but this also applies to corruption: He didn’t disguise his promises to govern in the direct interests of some of the wealthiest executives and investors in the country—and he won anyway. Trump and his allies will likely interpret this as a green light to engage in an extraordinary spree of unrestrained malfeasance.”

“Cutting $2 trillion is impossible politically. But if Musk is serious about cutting government spending and waste there is only one place to start: the defense budget. About half of the discretionary budget — the spending that Congress approves each year — is spent on defense. For the 2024 budget, the amount allocated for the Department of Defense exceeded $840 billion.”

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing to want social media to return to a sense of kindness and frivolity. Not every waking moment on the internet needs to be a debate or troll battle. And for those seeking to use BlueSky as a political or activist-focused platform, why should that mean having to engage with the same losers who will never agree with you and just want to hurt you?”

“[Comcast] will move forward with an effort to spin off the bulk of its cable assets, which include MSNBC, CNBC, Universal Kids, USA, E!, Oxygen and Syfy, according to a person familiar with the matter. Only Bravo, viewed as an important feeder of programming to the Peacock streaming service, will stay with the NBC TV business.”

“A lawsuit seeking class action status accuses Meta of rolling back its now shuttered Facebook Watch streaming video service to give Netflix a clear path as part of a deal to split the spoils of the new digital landscape.”

Everything you ever wanted to know about Pink Lady and Jeff, possibly the weirdest and least understood TV show ever. Via Mark Evanier, who was its lead writer and enjoyed the experience regardless of the outcome.

RIP, Tony Campolo, progressive Christian leader. Read The Slacktivist for more about him.

“There are three big reasons you are alive today.”

“House Speaker Mike Johnson blocked an effort by a fellow Republican lawmaker that would have allowed women in Congress who just gave birth to vote by proxy—a way to let them recover from birth and bond with their child while also giving a voice to their constituents.”

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Miles’ record on the HISD budget

Posted on November 24, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

A closer look from the Houston Landing.

In his first year, Houston ISD’s state-appointed superintendent, Mike Miles, ushered in several changes that sparked massive media attention and community pushback — but another important set of shake-ups took place largely behind the scenes.

Facing a roughly $500 million budget deficit, Miles made dramatic cuts and rearrangements to HISD’s central office, reducing the number of employees not assigned to campuses and classrooms from about 8,300 employees to 6,800, records obtained by the Houston Landing show.

The shake-up has reshaped how HISD staff deliver services to students living in poverty, develop the curriculums used in classrooms and clean up campuses, among other key tasks.

In February, Miles touted the reorganization as his fix to long-standing “dysfunction” in HISD operations, shedding dead weight and redundant spending. HISD Communications Chief Alexandra Elizondo called the transformation “one of the most important and necessary” changes made by Miles during his first year, allowing the district to invest more heavily in classrooms and teacher salaries.

“For decades, HISD’s bloated and outdated systems prevented the district from meeting the needs of its students, limited its ability to pay teachers a competitive salary and perpetuated more than 100 failing campuses across the district,” Elizondo wrote in an emailed statement.

But some critics of Miles argue the cuts have hindered HISD’s ability to provide needed services, including keeping campus grounds trash-free and providing assistance for families lacking basic needs like food or clothing. Even with the cuts, HISD still projects it will run a deficit of $130 million in 2024-25, dipping into its “rainy day” fund to cover the balance.

To evaluate the extent of Miles’ central office overhaul, the Landing compared HISD payroll records from March 2023, a few months before the Texas Education Agency’s takeover of the district, and early October 2024. While Miles initially overstated his administration’s cuts to central office in the months after his arrival, the records now show major changes to some departments. Other departments, meanwhile, appear largely intact.

HISD administrators did not directly respond to several questions sent Friday about specific aspects of the central office overhaul. Elizondo said the district would need more time to conduct a full analysis due to antiquated recordkeeping, but she did not contest any of the Landing’s findings.

You should read the rest for the details. A couple of points:

– The first three items listed are “Fewer custodial, maintenance staff”, “More top-dollar administrators”, and “Cuts to staff helping students in poverty”. Without knowing anything else, does that sound to you like a good way to approach how HISD spends its money? It sure doesn’t to me.

– The story doesn’t get into how much each of the eight items they list cost or saved, so we don’t know what the overall effect was on the budget. That may have been too difficult to tease out, or maybe it’s something they’re still working on for a future story. I hope it’s the latter.

– Also not mentioned is the cost of the expansion of NES schools, which is both a big investment in resources and a huge ongoing source of controversy and dissent. It’s not hard for me to imagine that the current $130 million shortfall would be a lot smaller if Miles had been more modest in his NES ambitions.

– The outlook going forward is also unclear. Some of these cuts seem unsustainable to me – I mean, campuses need custodial services, and sooner or later skimping on that is going to cause a problem. There seems to be a belief that the state will come through with more funding, which at least has some possibility if Greg Abbott finally does achieve his voucher dreams and thus stops holding the extra funding that the Lege had provided hostage. That could of course be a very double-edged sword, but it’s too soon to know and is way bigger than this post to get into. What we can be sure about is that the district’s rainy day fund can only do this so often.

– And once more, with feeling: An elected Board of Trustees would feel some pressure to deal with these issues. All we have here is The Mike Miles Show. I will not be placing bets on the fiscal situation improving in the short term.

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The next phase of the effort against homelessness

Posted on November 24, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

We’ll see how it goes.

Mayor John Whitmire

Mayor John Whitmire stood Thursday afternoon on a stage in City Hall, alongside a screen with a bold proclamation.

“In Mayor Whitmire’s first term, Houston can be the first major city to end street homelessness,” it read. The word “can” was crossed out and replaced with the word “will,” in italics.

He had gathered with city officials, law enforcement officers and nonprofit leaders to outline his plan for how to do so.

The press conference was simultaneously a lofty vision statement, a fundraising pitch and a call for legislative changes that could create sustainable sources of funding and make it easier to commit people with mental illnesses who are living on the street.

Whitmire twice characterized the plan as involving both compassion and enforcement for individuals who may resist housing, citing a recent Supreme Court decision. The nation’s highest court ruled that homeless people can be fined and arrested for sleeping in public, even if there isn’t a shelter where they could sleep instead.

Houston has for years been viewed as a rare success story in the face of growing homeless populations across the country — since 2011, it has cut its annual count of people sleeping in shelters or on the street or in other places not meant for human habitation by more than two thirds. (The count does not include people who lack a home but are staying with friends or in hotels.)

But even as officials from other major cities around the nation have made pilgrimages to Houston in the hopes of finding a solution to their soaring homeless populations, many Houstonians have felt frustration with the number of people they see on the streets.

The city’s new plan tries to address those concerns by adding a new goal: Making sure everyone has a place to stay off the street.

“I’m here to declare today, you help the homeless by getting them off the street and reclaiming our public spaces,” Whitmire said.

The declaration marked a departure from the strategy taken by the city and its partners for over a decade, which focused limited funds on permanent housing, coupled with caseworkers. Mike Nichols, the city’s director of housing and community development, estimated that it cost $23,000 a year to provide such housing, compared with $35,000 a year for each spot provided by the city’s navigation center, a place where people stay between when their encampment is shut down and they secure housing.

Shelters are more expensive because they require staff and meals, among other services. But without them, police officers face difficulties responding to public complaints — where are people to go?

[…]

Houston’s homelessness strategy has long depended on influxes of federal disaster funding, such as the funds unleashed by Hurricane Harvey and the pandemic.

Now that $150 million of COVID-related funding that had channeled into the region’s homelessness response is winding down — at the same time that a budget crunch has caused the Houston Housing Authority to temporarily stop issuing vouchers used to pay for permanent supportive housing — the pace at which people can be moved off the street into housing has slowed.

Nichols said that the city would commit roughly $25 million “from various funding streams.” He hoped the county would contribute $20 million, and that he could get $10 million from other government sources. The Downtown District has contributed $1 million, and Whitmire said he expected other districts, such as Tax Increment Reinvestment Zones and management districts to contribute as well.

“We put $200 million into Memorial Park,” Whitmire said. “The Med Center, we spend billions.” He said he had been meeting with foundations across the city.

I hope this is as successful at getting people into housing as the prior efforts under Mayors Parker and Turner have been. One gets the impression from his quotes in this story that Mayor Whitmire is a little competitive about that, which is fine. Finding a reliable source of funding will be a challenge – for sure, one should not expect much if anything from the federal government for the next four years at least – as well as ensuring that there are enough places for the unhoused to go. The results will be the ultimate measure of that success. Houston Landing has more.

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“Uber with guns”

Posted on November 24, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Not for me, but maybe for you.

A TikTok-famous Black-owned ridesharing service featuring the option of armed drivers with a background in law enforcement or the military will be making its debut in Houston, Dallas, and Austin.

BlackWolf, a small rideshare startup and self-proclaimed people-driven business, recently revealed on social media the results of a poll asking its followers which state it should launch next. The people chose Texas and the startup is now in its recruiting stage trying to find drivers that fit the background: a clean license, a spotless federal background check, and of course, a permit to carry guns, founder Kerry KingBrown told Chron.

“The idea came from one of my clients that I was transporting; she was caught in human trafficking for about three years…she gave me the idea and said you need to create something, some type of transportation for people like me and my daughter,” KingBrown said, who worked for 19 years in the private security industry.

BlackWolf, which launched in Atlanta in 2023, has quickly cultivated a following with over 1 million social media followers on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok and has garnered more than 100 million online views. The app already has more than 300,000 downloads with 45 to 65 drivers in its four current markets of Atlanta, GA; Orlando and Miami, FL.; and Phoenix, AZ.

“We’ve all used rideshare and we’re not new to what I saw were the deficiencies,” KingBrown said, noting subpar driver safety standards in typical rideshare services.

“I wanted to create something for people like myself, for people like my past clients, but I wanted to make it more about them. I want them to feel comfortable. I want them to have peace of mind,” he continued.

The cost of a BlackWolf ride is expected to be 10 to 15 percent more than the average Uber or Lyft ride, bringing it more in line with an Uber Black ride. But KingBrown said that his company doesn’t even view these rideshares as competitors. For one, their drivers don’t carry guns.

“Those who are armed are licensed, they are vetted, and most of them are ex-military or law enforcement,” KingBrown said. “Those people understand how to carry a weapon. They’ve been trained with it.”

However, just because the drivers have a gun doesn’t mean they will use it. Instead, it’s more about perception. The gun acts as a deterrent from those that might want to do you harm, KingBrown told Chron. And as trained professionals, these drivers would know that the gun is “actually the last thing they’re going to use,” KingBrown said.

“We train our drivers in de-escalation,” he added.

Honestly, I’m a little surprised something like this didn’t already exist here. I’m not a regular rideshare user and wouldn’t seek out something like this even if I were, but I can believe there’s an adequate market for it. I wonder how long it will be before I see one of these cars on the street. Reform Austin, USA Today, and Houston Public Media have more.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Paxton won’t be deposed by the whistleblowers

Posted on November 23, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Alas.

Still a crook any way you look

Attorney General Ken Paxton will not have to sit for a deposition in a longstanding lawsuit filed by four former senior aides who said he improperly fired them after they reported him to the FBI, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday.

It is a victory for Paxton, who has managed to avoid testifying about allegations of corruption, bribery and abuse of office despite this civil lawsuit, an impeachment trial and a federal criminal investigation.

The whistleblowers sought to question under oath Paxton and three of his current top deputies: First Assistant Brent Webster, chief of staff Lesley French and senior adviser Michelle Smith. But the Supreme Court overturned a trial court order scheduling those depositions.

The justices said since the attorney general’s office has agreed not to contest the lawsuit, which alleges that Paxton violated the state’s Whistleblower Act, their sworn testimony is unnecessary.

“While we agree with the former employees that OAG’s concessions do not preclude all discovery, we agree with OAG that the trial court abused its discretion in ordering the depositions of these four witnesses without considering that the only fact issue on which those witnesses are likely to provide information — OAG’s liability under the Whistleblower Act — is now uncontested,” the opinion states.

[…]

The whistleblowers sued Paxton in November 2020, alleging their dismissals were illegal under state law. Paxton disagreed but offered to settle the suit and pay the whistleblowers $3.3 million. To fund that settlement, however, Paxton needs an appropriation from the Legislature.

When he asked the Texas House in 2023 for the money, lawmakers wanted him to publicly answer questions about why Texas taxpayers should foot the bill. The House’s ethics committee began investigating him.

[…]

The whistleblower lawsuit remains, however. Paxton in January said he would no longer contest the facts of the case — despite the fact that the allegations by the whistleblowers were similar to the ones his lawyers had vigorously disputed during the impeachment trial.

See here and here for the previous updates – you can follow the links back from there if you need to know more – and here for a copy of the Court’s opinion. For a hot minute back in January, it had appeared that Ken Paxton would finally, finally be forced (under penalty of perjury) to answer questions about the whole Nate Paul situation and why he fired multiple formerly trusted advisors who had become concerned about the way he was doing his business during that time. Paxton’s countermove was to say “fine, I will no longer argue with anything you say, now stop asking me questions”, and on that point he has succeeded. My main takeaway from this is that greased pigs should come to Ken Paxton for advice on how to be more slippery.

I’ve read the SCOTx opinion and I don’t find anything terribly objectionable about it. It’s a bunch of legalistic argle-bargle, but there’s no obviously flawed logic or excessively strained application of existing law that I see. To that end, and to whatever extent the whistleblowers still have matters to work out in court, and then ultimately the Legislature, to get their settlement, I would suggest they lean all the way into Paxton’s insistence, now twice committed to written legal documents, that he doesn’t contest anything they say. Because, as I think it’s clear both from this opinion and from everything we know about Ken Paxton, he’s going to do everything he can to try to have it both ways. From the opinion:

Shortly after the Court denied that petition, however, OAG amended its answer in the trial court. OAG now “affirmatively answers that it elects not to dispute the Plaintiffs’ lawsuit as to any issue and consents to the entry of judgment.” Although the amended answer contains numerous affirmative statements that refute the factual allegations in the live petition and insist that plaintiffs’ claims are “baseless and they would fail,” OAG’s answer nevertheless states that it “consent[s] to the entry of judgment in this matter to the extent of the statutory limitations of the Texas Whistleblower Act.”

[…]

Second, plaintiffs contend that without this discovery, they will be unable to obtain “effective” relief. As they correctly note, collection of a money judgment in their favor will require an appropriation from the Legislature. See Tex. Dep’t of Hum. Servs. v. Green, 855 S.W.2d 136, 145 (Tex. App.—Austin 1993, writ denied) (noting that a successful Whistleblower Act plaintiff “must still request a legislative appropriation to collect the damages awarded him”). According to plaintiffs, the Governor and members of the Legislature have expressed a desire to hear from these witnesses before deciding whether to appropriate funds. But discovery requested as part of the litigation process is not proper simply because it might be used for legislative purposes. See Morath v. Tex. Taxpayer & Student Fairness Coal., 490 S.W.3d 826, 853 (Tex. 2016) (“Courts should not sit as a super-legislature.”). Information is discoverable if it is relevant to pending litigation, and a discovery request must be directed at information that “will aid the dispute’s resolution”—i.e., the dispute before the court. If, as plaintiffs assert, the Legislature will be unsatisfied with the trial court’s judgment and whatever evidence was presented in support of that judgment, the Legislature has at its disposal the means to obtain additional information.

So as the first paragraph notes, Paxton has already been telling the court one thing and everyone else the exact opposite. I say hammer away at Paxton’s admission that everything the plaintiffs say in their briefs is the unvarnished truth, and the first time he says something outside of court claiming that he’s right and they’re lying, make a motion to have him testify about that in court. It’ll probably fail, but at least you can make his lawyers respond to that.

As for the Legislature, I don’t know how much appetite there will be to fight this out. The 2023 Lege didn’t want to fund that $3.3 million settlement, but it was never clear to me if that meant Paxton would try to stiff the plaintiffs or if that money would have to come out of his office’s budget. My advice here is again to make it clear at every opportunity that Paxton has fully conceded on what the truth is, so by his own admission anything else he says is a lie. I can’t guess what the Legislature will do with that, but at least they’ll have to face it. That may be the best that can be done. The Chron has more.

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PUC releases its initial CenterPoint report

Posted on November 23, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Some reasonable recommendations in there.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas on Thursday made public the results of its investigation into the performance of CenterPoint Energy and other Houston-area electric utilities during Hurricane Beryl and the May derecho, offering up about a dozen suggestions for improvement.

Among the report’s conclusions were the need for legislative action to increase penalties for poor service and to expand performance standards.

The assessment came at Gov. Greg Abbott’s directive after widespread outrage from Houston-area residents over CenterPoint’s handling of Beryl. The PUC has also launched a separate audit of CenterPoint at the request of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. 

CenterPoint Chief Communications Officer Keith Stephens said in an email that the company has “heard the calls for change loud and clear.” He pointed to CenterPoint’s ongoing Greater Houston Resiliency Initiative aimed at strengthening the utility’s preparedness and responsiveness to major storms. CenterPoint commissioned an independent, third-party review of its Beryl response and has completed or is working to complete two-thirds of the review’s recommendations, Stephens said.

“We continue to review the Public Utility Commission of Texas staff’s recommendations on further resiliency actions and remain committed to working together with our state’s lawmakers and regulatory officials to achieve our shared goal of building the most resilient coastal grid in the country,” Stephens said.

See here for the background. As noted, there’s a separate audit now in the works, which will likely focus more on the $800 million generators. The full report is here, and while it’s longer than you want to read, the executive summary lists the recommended actions, of which the ones of the most immediate interest are:

1. Utilities should include neighboring utilities, local governments, and emergency services in annual hurricane and major storm drills.
2. The Commission should require pre-storm communication procedures in emergency operations plans.
3. Utilities should incorporate outage tracker disruptions and high user demand as scenarios in annual hurricane and major storm drills.
4. The Legislature should codify a customer’s right to information about restoration times and the right to contact an electric service provider by phone.
5. The Legislature should consider establishing a framework and penalty structure to assess IOU service quality during major outage events.

There are 14 total recommendations, with most of the rest being of the “utilities should consider” and “utilities should assess” variety. I think these above are all reasonable – if you read my earlier post, I was not very optimistic about this, so kudos to the PUC for exceeding my expectations – but now it’s up to the Lege and apparently the PUC and I guess the likes of CenterPoint themselves to follow through. We’ll see how that goes.

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The Texas A&M bonfire collapse, 25 years later

Posted on November 23, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

A somber occasion.

A panicked Richard and Janiece West were glued to the radio as they drove to College Station on Nov. 18, 1999. The Bellaire couple hadn’t heard from their 19-year-old son since they woke up that morning to learn that the 59-foot bonfire he and his friends were building had crumpled beneath them overnight.

The father assumed that Nathan Scott West was trapped in the pile, but he wouldn’t learn the worst possible news until he got to Texas A&M. In those hours spent in limbo on the highway, the car stereo blared the sound of helicopters chopping above the wreckage.

“For some reason, that has always stuck in my mind,” said Richard West, who now lives northeast of Dallas. “They asked (the helicopters) to move away, because they were trying to put a listening device in the stack to see if they heard any cries for help.”

Twelve people died and 27 others were injured in the event, which spurred a period of national mourning and introspection for a university well-known for its devotion to tradition. Twenty-five years later, the 1999 bonfire collapse remains a painful memory for so many people who lost loved ones, helped in the rescue efforts or survived the disaster. For others, the grief has softened to awe-inducing history, recalled on anniversaries and sometimes in the news.

The Wests, along with several other families of the 12, [gathered] with past and present students at 2:42 a.m. Monday at the memorial site on campus. Bonfire was a visible example of A&M’s identity, and the collapse left a scar – one that carried on the Aggie spirit of service and that changed the university forever.

It’s a long story and worth your time to read, whatever your connection to A&M or memory of the event is. I don’t have anything to add, I’m just glad these families were able to get together and remember their loved ones. May their memory forever be a blessing.

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Paxton sues Dallas over its marijuana decriminalization law

Posted on November 22, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

As expected.

Still a crook any way you look

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the city of Dallas over the newly approved Proposition R — which decriminalizes up to four ounces of marijuana in the city.

The filing names the entire Dallas City Council, Mayor Eric Johnson, Interim Police Chief Michael Igo and Interim City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert.

Dallas voters approved the charter amendment on election night with almost 67% of the vote. Regardless, Paxton said in a Thursday press release that “cities cannot pick and choose which State laws they follow.”

“The City of Dallas has no authority to override Texas drug laws or prohibit the police from enforcing them. This is a backdoor attempt to violate the Texas Constitution, and any city that tries to constrain police in this fashion will be met swiftly with a lawsuit by my office,” the press release said.

Paxton has already sued multiple cities including Austin and Denton for passing similar ordinances.

“I will not stand idly by as cities run by pro-crime extremists deliberately violate Texas law and promote the use of illicit drugs that harm our communities,” Paxton wrote in a press release earlier this year.

Part of the new charter amendment directs the Dallas Police Department to “stop issuing citations or making arrests for Class A or Class B misdemeanor marijuana possession.” Another section prohibits city funds or personnel from being used to conduct testing on “any cannabis-related substance” to figure out if it meets the legal definition of marijuana under state and federal laws.

The amendment language also says that police officers can’t consider the smell of marijuana as probable cause for search and seizure — “except in the limited circumstances of a police investigation.” And the proposal says officers can be punished if they are found to be violating the policy.

See here for some background. The city of Dallas certified the result on Tuesday, which I presume was the catalyst for the lawsuit being filed at this time. I presume there will also be lawsuits against Bastrop and Lockhart at some point as well.

The Trib reviews the status of the previous lawsuits that Paxton has filed over this issue. As of this writing, none of them have been successful.

In July, Hays County District Judge Sherri Tibbe dismissed Paxton’s lawsuit against San Marcos, saying the state was not injured when San Marcos reduced arrests for misdemeanor marijuana possession and that the measure allowed for resources to be used for higher priority public safety needs.

In June, Travis County District Judge Jan Soifer also dismissed Paxton’s lawsuit against Austin ruling there was no legal justification to try the case.

Ground Game Texas — the progressive group that first launched the proposition in Austin and worked with local organizations in other cities — expects Paxton to appeal the decisions to dismiss the lawsuits at some point.

Paxton’s lawsuit against Elgin was resolved in June via consent decree, meaning neither side claims guilt or liability but reached an agreement in court. The decision did not impact Elgin because at no time did the Elgin Police Department implement or enforce the ordinance due to conflicting state laws.

In the North Texas suburb of Denton, where voters approved decriminalization by more than 70%, implementation has stalled after City Manager Sara Hensley argued it couldn’t be enforced since it conflicted with state law.

The case against Killeen filed in Bell County a year ago is still pending.

As I’ve said before, all of this will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court and/or the Legislature – I will be surprised if there isn’t an effort to ban this kind of exception to state law in the next session. Until then, we wait and see what happens in the courts. WFAA and the Dallas Observer have more.

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Harris County Sports & Convention Corp to do its own Astrodome assessment

Posted on November 22, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

We’re on the way to something. Destination TBD.

Ready and waiting

The Harris County Sports & Convention Corp. — which oversees the management, operation and development of NRG Park — has approved a study to consider the future of the Astrodome, whether it should be restored or removed.

Kirksey Architecture, a Houston-based firm, has been hired to provide a comprehensive cost-analysis and evaluate best options for the facility.

The goal of HCSCC’s study is to establish two sets of information: Estimate the cost of restoring the Astrodome to basic operational functionality and assess the cost of removing the structure entirely.

The former approach would address necessary improvements such as plumbing and HVAC systems to allows safe occupancy, according to a statement released by HCSCC. It would not include full historic preservation or upgrades to meet modern venue standards.

“The Astrodome has been a symbol of Houston’s innovation and community pride for decades, since 1965,” said Bishop James Dixon, HCSCC chairman via statement. “The data gained from the study will provide us with critical information as we work to determine the most viable path forward, ensuring NRG Park continues to meet the needs of its stakeholders and the public for now and the future.”

[…]

“The Astrodome Conservancy is pleased that the HCSCC is finally considering the Astrodome in its plans for the future of NRG Park. For the past year, the Conservancy has advocated for the Astrodome to be included in such planning efforts,” Phoebe Tudor, Astrodome Conservancy founding chairman, told the Chronicle via email statement. “We applaud this step in the right direction toward realizing a bright future for the Astrodome and the HCSCC’s commitment to transparency and cooperation. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Harris County to reimagine the landmark Astrodome as the world-class destination it should be.”

See here for the background. I’ve said many times, we have plenty of ideas for what we could do with the Dome, but we’ve never had consensus on which way to go or how to pay for it. This should at least answer the first question – do we repurpose in some fashion, or do we just tear it down? Once we have that, it should at least be a little easier to proceed from there. The story doesn’t indicate how long this study might take, but given that NRG is hosting several World Cup matches in 2026, I’d imagine we’ll get it sooner rather than later, so that if the answer is “demolish” there will be the time to do that and be done beforehand. Stay tuned.

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Dispatches from Dallas, November 22 edition

Posted on November 22, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

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

This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, we have a grab bag: area election news; ongoing moving and shaking in Dallas’ city hall; Dallas city charter amendment news; news from and around the Lege and our local electeds; area school updates; area church updates; area infrastructure issues; some Black history; some Dallas food news; and more.

This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Sean Shibe, the classical and modern guitarist. A friend of mine saw him live recently and reminded me of how much I enjoy his music, which includes everything from early lute compositions rearranged for guitar to Steve Reich compositions.

Let’s jump right into the miscellanea this week:

  • D Magazine has some baseless speculation that Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson might be angling for Secretary of the Interior. I’ve been wondering for a while what he was looking for since I didn’t think he had a future in Texas politics, being a former Democrat, not to mention the whole Black thing. But a Trump administration appointment would absolutely make sense, even if it’s not this one.
  • We have our list of semifinalists for Dallas’ open City Manager position, though why anyone would want it right now is an open question. See also D Magazine, the Dallas Observer, and the Star-Telegram on the Assistant City Manager in Fort Worth who’s up for gig.
  • Meanwhile, Director of the Office of Government Affairs Carrie Rogers, another staffer of former Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax, is leaving to join him in Austin.
  • Finger in the wind around Dallas news: a Florida billionaire has bought a significant stake in the parent company of the Dallas Morning News. Blink twice in the videos if you have to post those Sinclair-style pieces, journalists.
  • The election was two and a half weeks ago, but it’s already old news. But in case you were wondering about those Election Day reports of incorrect ballots, it looks like almost 4,000 voters may have received incorrect ballots because of a system glitch. The glitch gave voters the ballot for a different precinct, which could result in voting in the wrong contests. According to this PDF from the Dallas County Elections Department, almost 839,000 voters voted in the November 5 election.
  • Collin County’s elections administrator is quitting in December. He’s held the job since 2015.
  • When I was living in far west Austin, Michael McCaul was my Congressman, in one of those weird gerrymandered districts that stretched around through north Austin and its suburbs, down 290 through Prairie View, and I think into west Houston. He was known as R-Clear Channel because that’s where his family money came from. So it gives me some feelings to report that he was arrested at Dulles Airport for public drunkenness. Couldn’t happen to a nicer.
  • Wandering on to the statehouse, let’s note this DMN op-ed on how Texans (the Lege) must support working parents. The three authors are two local state reps who were recently re-elected, Morgan Meyer (my rep) and Angie Chen Button of Richardson, who survived a good run from Averie Bishop, and, perhaps surprisingly, House Speaker Dade Phelan.
  • Another op-ed in the DMN about the upcoming session is from the Texas Rangers’ COO. He’s in favor of pro sports betting. Good luck with that.
  • The Lege is, as usual, going to be full of terrible bills this upcoming session, and north Texas is sending its share of the folks who bring them on. First up, we have freshmen reps Andy Hopper (HD-64) and his bill about fetal cell lines, which are lab-grown products, not from abortions, and used to make vaccines, and Mike Olcott (HD-60) and his bill to reject the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Economic Forum in Texas. Lone Star Left has the deets. Next, the Dallas Observer has five bills from Texas lawmakers, including one from Matt Shaheen of Plano (HD-66) that would require school districts to forbid terrorist or gang items in their dress codes. No keffiyehs for Texas kids! I’m sure I’ll have more of these as filing season ramps up.
  • Southlake Carroll ISD is considering armed marshalls on campuses for the next school year but parents have concerns. Remember that the armed guard rule for public schools is an unfunded mandate from Greg Abbott and the Lege.
  • The (Democratic) representative for SBOE district 13 was elected to the Legislature and a new Democratic representative will take the seat next year after running unopposed. Meanwhile, Greg Abbott’s pick, a Fort Worth area Republican organizer, will be voting on SBOE issues, including the Bible-based Bluebonnet Learning curriculum.
  • Fort Worth ISD is looking for schools to close as enrollment declines. Meanwhile, the funds from the 2021 bond to upgrade schools are falling short due to inflation and the board declined to shift funds to meet the new price tag this week.
  • The DMN’s editorial board is complaining that Dallas County schools aren’t educating students sufficiently to get them good jobs. Since the DMN continues to be the newspaper for folks who have stocks, this problem is presumably not about educating the children and grandchildren of the readers so much as the workforces they will command when they come out of SMU or TCU.
  • UT Dallas is in the news this week, and not for good reasons. First, they removed all those yucky DEI words from course titles and descriptions and their faculty didn’t like that. Second, first amendment groups told them to lay off their student journalists who have been in trouble with the administration over their coverage of pro-Palestinian protests at the school. Third, they had an alumni speaker talk about the election: an Executive VP of the Heritage Foundation who contributed to Project 2025. Unsurprisingly there were protests, which is not inherently bad, but what the school is likely to do to the protestors will be.
  • The civil case that the family of Botham Jean, the citizen killed by former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger by mistake, filed against his killer, went to federal court this week. The jury awarded Jean’s family more than $98 million in damages. Guyger didn’t show up and had no attorney, and nobody knows how she would be able to pay the damages when she gets out of prison. Dallas PD was originally a defendant in the case but the federal judge dismissed them. The DMN had an explainer earlier this week if you want to catch up on the matter.
  • It will not surprise those of you who have been following the Gateway Church/Robert Morris scandal that church attendance is down, tithing is down 35-40%, and they are cutting staff.
  • First Baptist Dallas is defending against a million-dollar lawsuit over a sexual assault of a teen during a youth mission trip in 2022 and the alleged coverup that followed. As always with this kind of story, please read with caution and self-care.
  • The Star-Telegram’s new op-ed columnist has a fascinating piece about the Mercy Culture trafficking shelter zoning fight. The neighbors come off looking small-minded and petty, but Mercy Culture comes off looking worse. It all sounds about right to me, but what a way to jump in with both feet to annoying your newspaper’s subscribers.
  • You may remember that Princeton, a Dallas exurb in Collin County, put a moratorium on development for six months because the town’s infrastructure can’t support more growth at the moment. The Dallas Observer explores the decision, its causes, and its potential effects.
  • The DMN’s editorial board is unsurprisingly in favor of the Marvin Nichols reservoir.
  • The Star-Telegram has some thoughts on what the new administration’s immigration policy and cabinet choices may mean for Texas. The Texas Tribune has some related news about Texas congressmen Tony Gonzales and Chip Roy fighting over those mass deportations the administration is promising.
  • Let’s talk about those Dallas charter amendments, now that we’ve gone and done the thing:
    • The Dallas Observer explains what the fuss about Prop S, the one about governmental immunity, is about. I wish they’d written this before the election.
    • Dallas City Council certified Prop R, the one that legalized small amounts of weed, and to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the city.
    • Prop U, the one that’s supposed to add all the cops to the street and hands half of the city’s money to Dallas PD, the one that even Dallas cops didn’t want, is turning around and eating the faces of its voters. The credit rating firm Moody’s has given Dallas a negative debt outlook because the amendment will limit how the city spends its money when expenses are increasing. Among other things, the city’s pension fund is already suffering from a shortfall, and when we add more officers, we’ll have to put more money in. The city’s credit rating remains good for now but this is a very bad sign. KERA and Axios also have the story, and D Magazine has more details.
  • This week I learned that University Park, the Park City around SMU, has a 1973 “brothel law” that says more than three unrelated people can’t live together. I found this out because the neighbors are complaining about SMU students living in duplexes because off-campus houses are easier to find than on-campus housing and it’s cheaper with roommates.
  • Speaking of cheaper housing, Dallas and Collin Counties spent about $200 million on services like medical care, hospitalization, emergency shelter, and jail to unhoused persons in 2023. It would have been cheaper to just house them; the report shows it by the numbers.
  • Also this week I learned that one neighborhood in five in Dallas is in the early stages of gentrification. My neighborhood gentrified in the 1960s when developers built my house after buying out the Black community that lived here.
  • The DMN’s editorial board would like the city council to let the short-term rental ordinance go through the court system instead of preemptively reopening the arguments about the ordinance. Last December, a state district judge hearing the suit by STR operators issued an injunction blocking the city from enforcing the ordinance. The DMN, as always, is concerned with civility; the fight between STR operators and householders wanting to keep STRs out of their neighborhood was rough. I’m inclined to agree with the DMN on other grounds they cite: the value of figuring out how to reconfigure the ordinance after the city sees what the courts will accept.
  • UNT Health Science Center, the state’s laboratory for bad ideas in death practice, has been using “water cremation” (alkaline hydrolysis) to dispose of bodies used in medical research. The Texas Funeral Service Commission has now ordered them to stop on the grounds that water cremation isn’t legal in Texas. UNT says they stopped back in September when they were caught renting bodies out.
  • Black Wolf, an armed-driver rideshare service that the DMN calls “Uber with guns” is coming to Dallas, Houston, and Austin early next year. Great.
  • Speaking of too many guns out there, Dallas PD is investigating how a gunshot hit a Southwest Airlines plane near its flight deck while it was on a runway at Love Field on Monday. The plane was on its way to Indianapolis but the passengers were deplaned until the runway was declared safe and, presumable, so was the plane. Yikes.
  • This is a depressing story, but not a particularly surprising one: the first Black bookstore in Farmer’s Branch has been harassed into closing. You may remember Farmer’s Branch as the suburb of Dallas that tried to keep landlords from renting to undocumented folks some years ago.
  • Arlington is about to put changes to its city charter on the ballot in the May election. One of the proposed amendments that won’t go forward is a change to the language around the mayor and councillors. The current charter was written in the 1920s and refers to all officials as men; the amendment was set aside on the grounds that using gender-neutral language to refer to city officials could set off a culture war firestorm and cause other amendments, including one to increase the pay of Arlington’s part-time officials, to fail.
  • Salem Institutional Baptist Church, a 135-year-old Black church in South Dallas, got a Texas Historical Marker this week.
  • Mayor Mattie Parker declared November 15 to be Leon Bridges Day in Fort Worth on the occasion of his sold-out show at Dickies Arena. (Wish I’d gone!)
  • Speaking of Fort Worth, alcohol receipts show that drinking has shifted out of downtown to the Cultural District and the Stockyards. This is interesting as part of the long decline of the Sundance Square area and likely changes coming to that part of town. As an occasional visitor to Fort Worth, I go over there to the museums and to shows, usually at Dickies Arena, and rarely bother to go downtown unless the show I’m seeing is at Bass Hall.
  • I’m sure you were ready to hear the last of Dallasites griping about Michelin, but this interview with celebrity chef John Tesar, who had a Michelin star at his Orlando restaurant and lost it, might still interest you. This is a guy called the most hated chef in Dallas, and he has some spicy takes about Dallas food.
  • Texas Monthly’s review of the new Black-owned Deep Ellum restaurant Kanvas goes deep into the Black history of Deep Ellum.
  • Long-time Houstonians will remember Eatzi’s, which was basically the fancy take-home prepared food section of your grocery store without the actual grocery store. Eatzi’s still operates several stores in Dallas, and while the owner is a jerk (I’m still mad about his mask commentary during the pandemic), the food is still great and I can get a slice of Italian cream cake similar to the one we had at our wedding almost a quarter-century ago. If you want some Eatzi’s nostalgia, here are two puff pieces about them from the DMN.
    • Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

    SBOE to support “Bible-infused curriculum”

    Posted on November 21, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    What could possibly go wrong?

    A majority of the Texas State Board of Education signaled their support Tuesday for a state-authored curriculum under intense scrutiny in recent months for its heavy inclusion of biblical teachings.

    Ahead of an official vote expected to happen Friday, eight of the 15 board members gave their preliminary approval to Bluebonnet Learning, the elementary school curriculum proposed by the Texas Education Agency earlier this year.

    The state will have until late Wednesday to submit revisions in response to concerns raised by board members and the general public before the official vote takes place Friday. Board members reserve the right to change their votes.

    The curriculum was designed with a cross-disciplinary approach that uses reading and language arts lessons to advance or cement concepts in other disciplines, such as history and social studies. Critics, which included religious studies experts, argue the curriculum’s lessons allude to Christianity more than any other religion, which they say could lead to the bullying and isolation of non-Christian students, undermine church-state separation and grant the state far-reaching control over how children learn about religion. They also questioned the accuracy of some lessons.

    The curriculum’s defenders say that references to Christianity will provide students with a better understanding of the country’s history.

    Texas school districts have the freedom to choose their own lesson plans. If the state-authored curriculum receives approval this week, the choice to adopt the materials will remain with districts. But the state will offer an incentive of $60 per student to districts that choose to adopt the lessons, which could appeal to some as schools struggle financially after several years without a significant raise in state funding.

    Three Republicans — Evelyn Brooks, Patricia Hardy and Pam Little — joined the board’s four Democrats in opposition to the materials.

    […]

    Board members who signaled their support for the curriculum said they believed the materials would help students improve their reading and understanding of the world. Members also said politics in no way influenced their vote and that they supported the materials because they believed it would best serve Texas children.

    “In my view, these stories are on the education side and are establishing cultural literacy,” Houston Republican Will Hickman said. “And there’s religious concepts like the Good Samaritan and the Golden Rule and Moses that all students should be exposed to.”

    The proposed curriculum prompts teachers to relay the story of The Good Samaritan — a parable about loving everyone, including your enemies — to kindergarteners as an example of what it means to follow the Golden Rule. The story comes from the Bible, the lesson explains, and “was told by a man named Jesus” as part of his Sermon on the Mount, which included the phrase, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” Many other religions have their own version of the Golden Rule.

    Brooks, one of the Republicans who opposed the materials Tuesday, said the Texas Education Agency is not a textbook publishing company and that treating it like such has created an uneven playing field for companies in the textbook industry. Brooks also said she has yet to see evidence showing the curriculum would improve student learning.

    Hardy, a Republican who also opposed the materials, said she did so without regard for the religious references. She expressed concern about the curriculum’s age appropriateness and her belief that it does not align with state standards on reading and other subjects.

    Meanwhile, some of the Democrats who voted against the curriculum said they worried the materials would inappropriately force Christianity on public schoolchildren. Others cited concerns about Texas violating the Establishment Clause, which prohibits states from endorsing a particular religion.

    “If this is the standard for students in Texas, then it needs to be exactly that,” said Staci Childs, a Houston Democrat. “It needs to be high quality, and it needs to be the standard, free of any establishment clause issues, free of any lies, and it needs to be accurate.”

    Emphasis mine. The one good thing about this story is that this dumb curriculum is optional, so one can hope that most districts will choose to avoid it. In a better world it wouldn’t survive first contact with the federal judiciary, but in the world we inhabit it’s unfortunately very easy to see SCOTUS giving it the green light. As with many other things right now, there’s no easy way out.

    By far the most enraging part of this story is this.

    The decisive vote that could determine the fate of a state-proposed school curriculum under scrutiny for its heavy focus on Christianity will likely depend on a State Board of Education appointee who will only serve for one meeting and whom Gov. Greg Abbott favored over the Democrat voters elected to fill the seat next year.

    The seat for State Board of Education’s District 13, which covers parts of North Texas, was vacated earlier this year by Aicha Davis, a Democrat who successfully ran to serve in the Texas House. Tiffany Clark was the only candidate to run for the District 13 seat. She received more than 416,000 votes in the general election.

    Instead of appointing Clark to temporarily fill the vacant seat until her term officially starts in January, Abbott looked past her and instead appointed Leslie Recine, a Republican who will likely serve as the deciding vote on whether the controversial curriculum receives approval on Friday. Abbott appointed Recine four days before the general election when it was already clear that Clark, who ran unopposed, would win the race.

    […]

    Clark said she would have voted against the materials if she had been chosen to serve on the board for this week’s meetings.

    “I think that would have been the swing vote that was needed,” Clark told The Texas Tribune. “It would have been 8-7 in the other way.”

    Clark expressed disappointment and frustration with the governor’s decision to appoint Recine. She criticized Abbott’s choice to have Recine serve on the board for only one meeting, when the board was scheduled to vote on the curriculum, despite the governor having plenty of time to fill the position in the months prior. Davis resigned on Aug. 1.

    Clark said she believes Abbott chose Recine so she would vote in favor of the curriculum.

    “I just wish the state leaders wouldn’t play politics with our kids,” Clark said.

    Whatever else you might say about Republicans, especially in this state, they never miss an opportunity to exert power. It’s infuriating, but short of winning more elections I’m not sure what there is to be done about this. Add it to the ever-growing list of their sins and never forget that it happened.

    Posted in School days | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

    PUC to audit CenterPoint

    Posted on November 21, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    Missed this last week.

    No longer seen at I-10 and Sawyer

    The Public Utility Commission of Texas took a step toward an audit of CenterPoint Energy, fulfilling Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s directive issued in the wake of widespread criticism of the Houston-area electric utility’s handling of Hurricane Beryl.

    PUC Chairman Thomas Gleeson directed the commission’s staff to begin vetting third-party organizations that could audit CenterPoint. The results of the audit should be delivered to the PUC in April, so it has time to make recommendations before the end of the legislative session in June, Gleeson said at the commission’s Thursday open meeting.

    “There are a few things we can look at, (such as) CenterPoint’s policies and procedures when procuring goods from a third party. We can look at how they evaluate customer needs for where the mobile generation needs to go, including looking at their emergency operation plan and how it deals with this,” Gleeson said.

    Gleeson cited the Public Utility Regulatory Act, which gives the PUC authority to regulate utilities, as the basis for the “management audit,” a term that is not well-defined in the law. There is no record of the PUC auditing a utility under this provision in recent years, spokesperson Ellie Breed said in an email.

    The PUC is already investigating the performance of CenterPoint and other Houston-area utilities during Beryl and the May derecho, with a report due to Gov. Greg Abbott and the legislature by Dec. 1. Breed said the audit’s sole focus would be on CenterPoint, and that further distinctions between the two inquiries would be made clear when the request for proposals from auditors was issued.

    Beth Garza, former director of the watchdog organization that oversees the Texas wholesale electricity market, said Gleeson’s comments on procurement hint that the commission is likely to focus on CenterPoint’s $800 million lease of generators in its audit.

    […]

    Patrick first called for an audit during a rare Houston meeting of the PUC in October, citing testimony from cities and consumer associations that the utility is overcharging customers.

    “I expect you to do that audit,” Patrick said to the commissioners during the Houston PUC meeting in October. “I want to know how much they have been overcharging, if they’ve been overcharging the customers at CenterPoint, and for how long.”

    Steven Aranyi, Patrick’s communications director, said Thursday that the lieutenant governor “requested the audit to see if CenterPoint spends ratepayer money smartly on issues that matter, or if they waste money maximizing profits at the expense of ratepayers.”

    CenterPoint has strongly contested that it’s overcharging. In fact, CenterPoint invested $75 million in system improvements and vegetation management that were not billed to customers in 2023, Oshodi said.

    The company has proposed a plan to forgo $110 million in future profits, which is more than half of the profit anticipated from the generators. The company announced Thursday that it has completed all 42 of its initial post-Beryl commitments to improve, including trimming trees along more than 2,000 miles of power lines, installing more than 1,110 stronger poles, launching a new outage tracker and hosting listening sessions across the region.

    I approve of the effort, but I’ll wait to see what it actually encompasses before going beyond that. I don’t have much faith in this government’s accountability efforts, but enough people are mad at CenterPoint that there might be some real follow-through. We’ll know more soon enough.

    Posted in Hurricane Katrina | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

    The first Harris County LGBTQIA+ Commission report

    Posted on November 21, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    For your perusal.

    The Harris County LGBTQIA+ Commission came out with its list of recommendations to improve the quality of life for Houston’s LGBTQIA+ community.

    The commission, created in June 2023 under the office of Precinct 4 Commissioner Lesley Briones, presented its inaugural biennial report Tuesday at Commissioner’s Court outlining key initiatives and policy recommendations for the upcoming year.

    “This commission is important not only for representation but for the commitment that Harris County is making to the LGBTQIA+ community to ensure that we are always at the table and in partnership with our local government to address our needs and issues,” said Vice Chair Brandon Mack.

    The goal is to provide actionable guidance to the Harris County Commissioners Court on policies and initiatives to better serve LGBTQIA+ residents, and to promote equality and justice in Harris County.

    “This inaugural report reflects the resilience of Harris County’s LGBTQIA+ community and the Commission members who have brought this vision to life,” Briones said in a release. “Harris County rejects hate and discrimination and is committed to building a more just, equal, inclusive community for all.”

    Some of the commission’s key initiatives include holding a large-scale town hall, a banned book fair, expanding partnerships with law enforcement to boost cultural competency, and fostering health initiatives to combat HIV. Harris County has one of the highest cases of HIV in the country, exceeding rates both for Texas and the U.S. according to the Houston Health Department.

    The report lists the following recommendations based on community input during a series of listening sessions held in the past year around the county:

    1. Collecting local data through a quality-of-life survey to learn the experiences of LGBTQIA+ residents living in Harris County and their feelings on the resources provided by the county.
    2. Becoming the named LGBTQIA+ liaison and advisory council for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office and other county departments and areas in need of LGBTQIA+ inclusive policies and strategies.
    3. Introducing consistent LGBTQIA+ awareness and cultural competency training for Harris County law enforcement agencies.
    4. Developing a pipeline of qualified LGBTQIA+ residents for county boards and commissions.
    5. Investing in LGBTQIA+ educational resources at county community centers.

    […]

    The committee also emphasized the need to invest in more LGBTQIA+ educational resources at Harris County community centers, especially after public colleges and universities like the University of Houston were forced to disband their diversity, equity and inclusion offices and initiatives under Senate Bill 17.

    “It becomes very easy for us to be separated in our community, and when that happens, that’s what makes it easy to devalue one another,” Mack said. “In doing this type of work, we’re once again uplifting our community and making it easier for others to interact and learn about the LGBTQIA+ community.”

    Community centers should provide more than just educational resources about the LGBTQIA+ community, said Maria Gonzalez, who serves on the commission and is also an associate professor of English at the University of Houston.

    “One of the things with the loss of the UH LGBT Resource Center was, in fact, beyond just books and information, but gathering places,” said Gonzalez, who was among the core group of faculty, staff and students who helped establish the LGBTQ resource center. “We want to make sure that every member of the LGBTQ community in Harris County feels welcome in all our spaces of service. Those community centers are so valuable to our communities broadly.”

    You can download and read the report for yourself, and we’ll see what actions Commissioners Court takes in response. These are obviously fraught times for the community, and there’s a real threat of the Legislature doing more damage as well. I hope this helps until we can get to a better place politically.

    Posted in Local politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Texas blog roundup for the week of November 18

    Posted on November 21, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    The Texas Progressive Alliance is getting back up off the mat to fight another day as it brings you this week’s roundup.

    Continue reading →

    Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged , | Leave a comment

    Do we really need an engineer at the head of Public Works?

    Posted on November 20, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    The engineers think so. The Mayor, not so much.

    Mayor John Whitmire

    Mayor John Whitmire received a written rebuke from a national engineering group over plans to change city ordinance to no longer require an engineer to head Houston Public Works, according to a letter obtained by the Chronicle.

    In a Nov. 7 letter, the American Society of Civil Engineers, which calls itself the “nation’s oldest engineering society,” expressed concerns about the potential change being heard at this week’s city council meeting, writing that the administration should maintain its engineering requirement for the director position should that role “continue to oversee the planning, design, construction, and maintenance of engineered public infrastructure systems that directly affect public health, safety and welfare.”

    ASCE president Feniosky Peña-Mora, referencing the organization’s policy, wrote the organization encouraged “the selection and appointment of licensed professional engineers to government agency positions” that lead policy and practice surrounding public infrastructure.

    The engineering organization felt it was important to highlight that keeping the public works director’s engineer requirement “ensures public safety is upheld,” an ASCE spokesperson wrote in an email Tuesday morning.

    […]

    Houston City Council will hear the potential change at their Wednesday meeting.

    The change, if passed Wednesday, wouldn’t necessarily eliminate the position’s current engineer requirement but expand the purview of who could take on the role. Newport previously said the ordinance would allow someone who was either an engineer or had experience leading a large organization to be the department’s leader.

    Current city ordinance requires the Houston Public Works head to be a professional engineer registered in Texas. The administration has yet to provide a copy of the proposal to the Chronicle, nor has it posted publicly on this week’s council agenda.

    The potential ordinance change would allow the administration to appoint Randy Macchi – the department’s chief operating officer, who has been leading the department alongside city engineer Richard Smith since April – to take on the role of director. Macchi’s appointment is also on Wednesday’s council agenda.

    This earlier Chron story has some more details. I was with the ASCE up until that last paragraph above. If Randy Macchi has that kind of experience in this department, it’s hard for me to say he’s not qualified to lead it even if he isn’t an engineer. I get the ACSE’s objections and I think that they’re basically right, but perhaps they’re being too rigid in this case. I’m open to persuasion from the engineers out there, but I’m inclined to think the Mayor gets to pick their person, within reason. If it blows up in the Mayor’s face down the line, they’ll have to own that. What do you think?

    UPDATE: The path has been cleared for Randy Macchi.

    Posted in Local politics | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

    Buzbee sued by unnamed celebrity for alleged extortion

    Posted on November 20, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    Okay then.

    Tony Buzbee, the prominent Houston attorney representing more than 100 people in a suit against Sean “Diddy” Combs, has been sued in California for allegedly extorting “high profile” individuals, according to court documents filed in Los Angeles County Court.

    The lawsuit, which was filed in L.A. Monday by an unnamed individual identified only as “John Doe,” accused Buzbee and his firm of threatening to publicize “entirely fabricated and malicious allegations of sexual assault — including multiple instances of rape of a minor, both male and female.” The suit claimed Buzbee weaponized allegedly baseless accusations in a bid to extort money from the unidentified plaintiff.

    Attorneys from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP are representing the plaintiff. The firm is one of the largest in the world with more than 1,000 attorneys and 35 offices in countries across the globe.

    “Buzbee has established a pattern of leveling baseless, fabricated and malicious allegations at high profile individuals and threatening to name them publicly if they fail to pay exorbitant sums of money,” the firm stated in a Monday release. “Buzbee then uses this money to fund his lavish lifestyle. He has deployed these threats in letters, statements to the press, his website and on social media in recent months to try to shake down well known individuals.”

    The complaint filed against Buzbee alleged the Houston attorney employed a “clear playbook” for extorting celebrities. According to the unidentified plaintiff’s attorneys, Buzbee would fabricate allegations and then send a letter demanding payment. If those targeted did not pay, Buzbee would turn to various media outlets as a means to apply public pressure, according to the complaint.

    While the plaintiff’s identity remains uncertain, the lawsuit accused Buzbee of employing a scheme to obtain payment from individuals associated with Combs.

    “With Combs behind bars, and payment unlikely to be forthcoming any time soon, Defendants devised a scheme to obtain payments through the use of coercive threats from anyone with any ties to Combs — no matter how remote,” the complaint alleged. “Defendants specifically targeted high-profile individuals who would suffer immeasurable loss from being publicly accused of committing sex crimes, including drugging and raping minors, even if those allegations are false.”

    In a statement to the Houston Chronicle, Buzbee dismissed the claims, saying they were without legal merit and “laughable.”

    “We won’t allow the powerful and their high-dollar lawyers to intimidate or silence sexual assault survivors,” Buzbee said. “It is obvious that the frivolous lawsuit filed against my firm is an aggressive attempt to intimidate or silence me and ultimately my clients. That effort is a gross miscalculation. I am a U.S. Marine. I won’t be silenced or intimidated.”

    Buzbee said that, on behalf of two clients alleging sexual assault, he sent a standard demand letter to a New York lawyer who represented a potential defendant. The letter was a routine part of the legal process and included no threats or requests for compensation, Buzbee said.

    “The letters were sent seeking a confidential mediation in lieu of filing a lawsuit. No amount of money was included in the demand letters. No threats were made. The demand letters sent are no different than the ones routinely sent by lawyers across the country in all types of cases,” he said.

    See here for some background. I’m hardly a Tony Buzbee fan, but at first glance his version of this story sounds the more plausible to me. I’m going to need to hear more from the plaintiff – and yes, it would help to know who it is – to find their allegations credible. I’m not dismissing the possibility that these charges have merit, just that there’s not enough here for me to believe them. We’ll see where this goes.

    Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

    The Texas A&M Space Institute

    Posted on November 20, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    Cool.

    A grassy field next to NASA’s Johnson Space Center is getting an otherworldly makeover.

    Officials gathered Friday to celebrate the groundbreaking of the Texas A&M University Space Institute, which will re-create the moon and Mars to help develop rovers, spacesuits and other new technologies. Construction is slated to begin in January and wrap up in October 2026.

    “There are grand visions of what will happen in that facility as we enter into a really unprecedented time of exploration — actually returning humans to the moon and planning to go from the moon and then on to Mars,” said Rep. Greg Bonnen, R-Friendswood, who led the legislation that provided funding for the building.

    The four-story facility will have the equivalent of two indoor football fields. One will represent the moon with slippery gray gravel, craterlike holes and a harsh light. The other will reflect Mars with a reddish sky and hard-packed terrain, plus the occasional sneaky sand trap.

    A “wormhole” — or two-lane road, to be more precise — will connect the moon and Mars.

    The facility is intended to be a collaborative effort. Different universities, companies and government projects will work in offices or garages that open directly to the lunar and Martian surfaces. That shared mentality has Rob Ambrose, the associate director of the institute and a professor of mechanical engineering, thinking long and hard about the color of Mars.

    “We’re being very careful,” he joked. “We’re looking for some simulant material that’s somewhere between burnt orange and maroon.”

    The linked story in the excerpt tells more about the purpose of this new facility, at which “companies will be able to develop spacesuits, test tools and robotics, and study actual rocks from the moon and (perhaps one day) Mars”. The A&M press release says that the facility “will support training for missions, including simulated landings on the moon and Mars, as well as advanced research and development in aeronautics, robotics, and other fields”, and “will be vital for partnerships, both research and commercial, that help Texas businesses as well as NASA stay at the forefront of the final frontier”. One part research, one part incubator, I suppose. You’ll still have to go elsewhere to simulate being on Mars, but NASA is big enough to handle it. Anyway, I look forward to seeing what this new facility can do.

    Posted in Technology, science, and math, The great state of Texas | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Can HISD pass the next bond?

    Posted on November 19, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    It depends.

    After Houston ISD’s historic bond failure in November, several parents, teachers and community members are wondering if or when the state’s largest school district will go back to voters to place another measure on the ballot.

    […]

    Some bond opponents have said they want HISD to develop and propose a new bond at a later date — potentially as early as May 2025 — that includes more community input and transparency, a smaller price tag and a narrower focus on security upgrades and improvements to HVAC systems.

    “If they come back with something that truly just meets urgent needs … in the next six to 12 months, I think there would be a lot of support behind something, as long as those numbers make some sense and there could be explanations behind those numbers,” HISD parent Heather Golden said.

    After the election, Miles said he didn’t know when HISD would place another bond on the ballot, and he needed to get input from the Board of Managers before deciding. The board would need to vote to place a bond on the ballot by Feb. 14 if the district wanted to hold an election in May, according to the Texas Secretary of State.

    […]

    Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said that it would be risky for HISD to put a bond back on the ballot in May for several reasons, including an “air of conservatism” among Harris County voters about the economy and their personal budgets.

    “Tougher economic times means fewer bonds pass,” Rottinghaus said. “People don’t want to raise their own taxes, even if it means they’re going to get something in the future as a result. Most of the time these bonds pass, but in the rare instances where they don’t, it tends to be a financial question that’s at play, so that definitely is worrisome.”

    Until this year, HISD’s only bond failure in the past three decades had occurred in May, due largely to low turnout and a Republican-led campaign against a proposed tax increase. Afterward, the district proposed four consecutive school bond elections during November elections, which all succeeded.

    Rottinghaus said that it’s unlikely that voters’ opinions on the economy or district leadership will change much in the next six months, but they may shift in future years. He said a bond election further down the road would be easier for the district to win, particularly if the bond is smaller and developed with more community input.

    “This was a protest vote against HISD and its leadership,” Rottinghaus said. “Since it’s been exercised by voters, it may be that they feel differently when they look at a different set of bond issues, and assess where their schools are. My sense is probably it gets easier from here, if HISD handles it well and if they can shape the bond in a way that’s more appealing to people.”

    However, the biggest hurdle for HISD leaders may not be partisan politics or economic concerns, but overcoming voter opposition to the state takeover and Miles if they hope to pass a bond while the intervention remains in place.

    In interviews outside polling locations, dozens of voters told the Chronicle they voted against the bond because they had lost faith in Miles’ leadership, particularly after rising principal and teacher turnover.

    “Given the many conversations I’ve had over the last few days and months, I feel like the sentiment is very much that the public wants an elected board to be accountable for bond funds,” said Judith Cruz, co-chair of HISD’s bond community advisory committee. “I can’t speak for voters, but given those conversations, it seems unlikely that they would support a bond until that happens.”

    With all due respect to Prof. Rottinghaus, I think Judith Cruz has the right explanation here. “No trust no bond” was about Mike Miles, the takeover, and the lack of voice people rightly believe they have in their school district. Believe me when I say I know many, many people who were fervently against the bond. They were overwhelmingly Democrats and they were mad as hell about Mike Miles. I’m also a Harris County Democratic Party precinct chair, and that resolution to oppose the bond passed with zero “no” votes.

    My point here is that it was Democratic opposition that doomed the bond, not some “air of conservatism” or whatever. I don’t have the full canvass for the 2024 election yet but I do have it for 2012, the last time HISD passed a bond and conveniently also a Presidential election year. I can tell you that in the 2012 election in HISD, which I remind you is a subset of Harris County, President Obama got 64.5% of the vote, fifteen points higher than the 49.4% he got countywide. I’m willing to bet that when I get the full canvass, I will find that Kamala Harris did at least as well as that. Democrats voted this bond down, and they voted it down because they do not like and do not trust Mike Miles. It’s really that simple.

    Does that mean that a May 2025 bond, presumably a smaller one, is doomed? Not necessarily. Maybe Mike Miles will be visited by some ghosts over the Christmas break who will convince him to change his ways before it’s too late. Maybe the Board of Managers will grow a spine and insist on some changes that would placate the anti-Miles majority as part of a new bond package. Maybe Miles will declare victory and announce his departure at the end of the 2024-25 school year. Maybe a smaller and more focused bond, combined with stronger oversight and community involvement plus a campaign that better communicates what the bond will do, can drag itself across the finish line. I trust you can see what the common denominator of all these scenarios is. Bottom line, a bond referendum and campaign that addresses the reasons why it failed in 2024 has a chance to pass in 2025. Otherwise it will be a waste of time and effort.

    Posted in Election 2024, School days | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

    Welcome to Daikin Park

    Posted on November 19, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    Out with the old sponsor, in with the new.

    Minute Maid Park’s time is up.

    Jose Altuve, Yordan Alvarez and their Houston Astros teammates will play home games at the renamed Daikin Park when next season begins.

    The Astros on Monday announced a 15-year naming rights agreement for their downtown ballpark with Daikin Comfort Technologies North America, Inc., a subsidiary of Daikin Industries, Ltd., the Japan-based manufacturer of air-conditioning products.

    The name change to Daikin (pronounced die-kin) will officially take effect Jan. 1, 2025, ending the stadium’s run of over two decades as Minute Maid Park, and last through the 2039 season. The Astros announced the change in a news conference at the ballpark Monday morning, unveiling a home plate-themed Daikin Park logo.

    “Today we’re here for a special celebration to welcome Daikin to the Astros family,” Jim Crane, Astros owner and chairman, said at the on-field news conference. “Daikin is a global company whose North American headquarters are based right here in the Houston community, and we hope to make that name present and popular around town.”

    Minute Maid Co., a formerly Houston-based division of the Coca-Cola Co., affixed its name to the Astros’ ballpark in June 2002, agreeing to pay the team an estimated $170 million over 28 years for the naming rights plus other advertising and marketing opportunities.

    That agreement was to run through 2029. The Astros did not announce why it ended early, but a person with knowledge of the situation said it was a mutual decision for the team to explore finding a new naming rights partner and that the Astros did not have to buy out the rest of the Minute Maid deal.

    Minute Maid will remain a marketing partner of the Astros through 2029, the team said.

    […]

    The Astros’ ballpark opened in 2000 as Enron Field, its name for two seasons before the Astros bought naming rights back from Enron Corp. after the energy company’s bankruptcy filing. For several months, the stadium was known as Astros Field, prior to its becoming Minute Maid Park.

    Some fans will surely retain a connection to that name. During its tenure, the Astros reached their first World Series in team history in 2005, endured a rebuild, changed leagues, won their first World Series in 2017 (later marred by their electronic sign-stealing scandal), and won a second championship in 2022.

    Known best for its orange juice, Minute Maid was based in the Houston region for more than 50 years until moving its headquarters to Atlanta in 2021. Crane thanked Minute Maid and the Coca-Cola Co. “for being a great partner for a very, very long time and committed to the ballpark.”

    “We look forward to continuing working with them moving forward,” Crane said.

    Minute Maid has prominent signage at multiple spots around the ballpark, including the exterior facing U.S. 59 and above the huge video scoreboard beyond the right-field bleachers. A rendering displayed at Monday’s news conference showed a Daikin Park logo above the scoreboard and on the outside of the building.

    Signage changes will be made throughout the first quarter of 2025 and completed by opening day, March 27, when the Astros host the Mets, a team spokesperson said.

    The train above the left-field Crawford Boxes has held a “cargo” of oranges since the ballpark was christened after Minute Maid. The train is not going anywhere, but in regard to the oranges, the team is working on a replacement “surprise” that will be revealed opening day, Crane said.

    I think the train should instead be full of air conditioning ducts, which honestly is more Houston than the oranges ever were. Be that as it may, I feel like “Minute Maid Park” was never all that memorable a name. Unlike when, say, the Summit became the Compaq Center, I don’t think too many people are going to refuse to update their preferences. I may go full hipster and start calling it Enron Field again, just to see who’s with me on the joke. Anyway, like it or not here comes Daikin Park. CultureMap has more.

    Posted in Baseball | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

    New Sports Authority CEO hired

    Posted on November 19, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    The changeover is complete.

    Ryan Walsh was hired Friday as the CEO of the Harris County-Houston Sports Authority, tasked with overseeing the city’s largest sports facilities and events, after a unanimous vote by the agency’s board of directors.

    The move follows a series of high-profile exits from the organization. Walsh works as the CEO and executive director of the Harris County Sports & Convention Corporation and NRG Park. He plans to step back from his position to take on the role of sports authority CEO, he said. His first day with the authority is Nov. 21.

    […]

    Former CEO Janis Burke was fired in a unanimous vote Oct. 11 after Mayor John Whitmire and the region’s sports executives called for new leadership at the agency in a City Hall news conference, citing facility maintenance and transparency issues. Chris Canetti, the city’s FIFA World Cup host committee president, was hired to replace Burke in the interim.

    The agency also saw former board chair J. Kent Friedman, who led the organization for more than 20 years, step down. Houston City Council and the Harris County Commissioners Court both voted to confirm [new board chair Juan] Garcia’s appointment to replace Friedman last week.

    Walsh’s hire comes a little more than a month after the leadership shakeup, and there was a reason for the speediness with bringing Walsh on board, Garcia said.

    Garcia said there was work to do, not only with the FIFA World Cup, but with the Rockets, Astros and at NRG Park. Garcia specifically pointed toward its lease agreements and adapting its sports facilities to make sure they were the best so they could attract business as well as keep its sports teams in Houston.

    “It’s been loud and clear, even in the short time period that I’ve been here, by the Rockets, the Astros, the Texans and the rodeo, that we have some work to do, and that’s what we’re going to get to work,” Garcia said.

    Walsh said transparency would be a focus in his tenure, and that collaboration and partnership was going to be top of mind — especially as the city prepares to host seven games in the 2026 FIFA World Cup and as the authority looks toward ways to extend their sports facilities’ lifetimes.

    See here and here for some background. I’m sure this is fine, I have no quibble with the hire, but it’s a little funny to me that a month after former CEO Janis Burke was suddenly fired for “lack of transparency”, I still have no idea what they mean by that. Like, lack of transparency about what and with whom? Tell me more and give me an example, that’s all I’m asking. I mean, this doesn’t make the first page of the Big List Of Things I Need To Be Worried About Right Now, but it’s still annoying. Anyway, good luck to you, Ryan Walsh. I hope to know more about why you’re here sooner or later.

    Posted in Local politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

    Judicial undervotes 2024

    Posted on November 18, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    One brief comment on this Houston Landing story about undervoting, and then I will have some numbers for you.

    Tens of thousands of Harris County residents stopped voting well short of the end of their Nov. 5 ballots, skipping dozens of races and passing up the opportunity to change the outcome of all but one countywide contest.

    Known as undervoting, the number of people that left races blank varied by contest, ranging from .6 percent to a little more than 9 percent.

    That .6 percent represents 9,822 voters who bypassed the presidential contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris, the first race on the ballot.

    The gap generally grew wider as voters moved down the ballot, ending with 144,571 who did not make a selection on the question of whether to raise the property tax rate for the Harris County Flood Control District. The winning margin was 39,198 votes.

    […]

    Numerous contests were decided by a few thousand votes but skipped by more than 100,000 voters.

    For example, in the 177th Judicial District, which flipped from Democratic to Republican control this year, Emily Munoz Detoto won by 5,864 votes. Meanwhile, 110,630 people who cast a ballot left that race blank.

    In the contest for Harris County tax assessor-collector, Democrat Annette Ramirez beat Republican Steve Radack by just under 34,100 votes. More than 90,000 voters, however, skipped that race.

    “It’s part of the life of a politician,” Radack said. “If you’re further down the ballot, you’ve got to know there’s a certain number of people that don’t care or don’t know.”

    Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of undervotes exceeded 600,000 in uncontested races, with voters presumably deciding their support was not needed.

    Only the race between Democratic Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez and Republican Mike Knox would have been unaffected by the undervote. Gonzalez won re-election by more than 93,000 votes. The number of people who did not vote in that race was about 82,000.

    The possibility that a race could flip if everyone had voted in it is only partly a function of how many undervotes there are. For the outcome to change, the trailing candidate would have to win a greater share of a smaller number of votes than they have already received. In a race with a tiny margin, where in a vacuum one may assume that the undervoters are basically a coin flip, there can be a decent albeit still minority chance that enough of those coin flips favor the laggard. In cases where the margin is greater, those odds diminish rapidly, to the point where you’re more likely to be bitten by a shark that is then struck by lightning. The math is just brutal.

    All of that assumes that the undervoters are a random sample of the electorate as a whole. That may not be true – it may be the case that more undervotes came from precincts that heavily favor one party or the other. It’s possible to do that work and assign an expected value for the undervotes in question, but we’re still assuming that the undervoters are representative of their precincts. We’re also assuming that they didn’t have a reason beyond “I didn’t feel like it” to skip that particular race. I think those are reasonable assumptions, but they’re still assumptions. At some level, it’s all a guess.

    Anyway. I promised you some numbers, so here they are. 

    
   2020     2024   2020%  2024% Winner
======================================
 83,611   98,078   5.05%  6.26%      D
 86,623  102,744   5.23%  6.55%      R
 91,780  104,785   5.54%  6.68%      R
 88,352  102,809   5.33%  6.56%      D
 91,886  108,455   5.55%  6.92%      D
 93,171  110,584   5.62%  7.05%      D
 94,804  111,935   5.72%  7.14%      R
108,196  112,997   6.53%  7.21%      R
105,880  115,383   6.39%  7.36%      R
105,259  118,450   6.35%  7.56%      D
104,103  117,669   6.28%  7.51%      R
105,551  118,909   6.37%  7.59%      R
102,111  122,356   6.18%  7.81%      D
104,456  124,838   6.31%  7.96%      R
         124,167          7.92%      D
         106,708          6.81%      R
         115,320          7.36%      D
					
 97,556  112,717   5.89%  7.19%

    The first column is the undervote total for each of the contested district and county judicial races in 2020; the second is the same for 2024. Similarly, the next two columns are the undervote rate expressed as a percentage of total turnout. I didn’t list the names of the races because they don’t line up (and they really don’t matter). The numbers are in the order that the races appeared on the ballot – that Landing story has a chart for 2024, so you can figure out which number goes with which race for each. Note that they wrote this before the official canvass was released, so they will differ slightly from my figures. There were three more contested judicial races in 2024 than there were in 2020. The last column is just a note of which party won that race in 2024. The last line is the average for each column.

    There were more undervotes this year than in 2020. Not a huge amount, but there was an increase and it happened in the context of fewer overall votes being cast. The undervote rate jumped by more than a point as a result. What that happened this year when there were basically as many races as in 2020 is unclear to me. Maybe the change in voting machines made a difference – maybe it took longer to vote and people were a little more likely to lose interest as a result. You can see that generally speaking, the undervote rate increases as we get farther down the ballot. There are a couple of complicating factors here, though.

    One is that the rate doesn’t uniformly increase as we go down. Notice that in both 2020 and 2024, the rate dipped, then went back to increasing, with the fifth race having a higher rate than the third. In both years, that fourth race featured Democrat Michael Gomez. In 2020, there were several races that came after the high-water undervote rate of 6.53%. Those races featured, in order, Democrats Natalia Cornelio, Julia Maldonado, and Leslie Briones, and Republican Linda Garcia. It seems that the presence of a Latino candidate in the judicial races can increase participation in that race by a little bit.

    Another factor is that just before the last two races, which is the end of the District Court elections, is the District Attorney race, followed by two County Court races. The undervote rate in the DA race was 5.45% in 2020 and 6.16% in 2024. Well below the average in each case, and also in each case the judicial races that followed got a bounce as well. In 2024, that first race after the DA again featured Republican Linda Garcia, so there were two causes for the bounce. I’m just saying, there are more dimensions to this than one might think.

    There are other races that then come after the last of the judicial races. If fatigue were the big issue, you’d think that the undervote rate would keep increasing. But that’s not what happens.

    
Year        Race    Undervote    Pct
====================================
2020   County Aty     100,251  6.07%
2024   County Aty     106,526  6.80%

2020      Sheriff      79,737  4.83%
2024      Sheriff      84,256  5.37%

2020  TaxAssessor      80,107  4.85%
2024  TaxAssessor      92,263  5.89%

    Those races all have lower undervote rates than the judicial races before them, and with the exception of County Attorney in 2020 they’re all under the average for the undervote rate. People are still paying attention way down at the bottom of the ballot. They presumably feel like they have more information about these races than the judicial ones, but I don’t think it’s the case that they think they have more information about the earlier judicial ones than the later ones. I don’t have a good answer for this, I’m just telling you what the numbers say.

    I should note that I ran the numbers for this in 2022 as well, where again there were a few scattered Republican victories, but I never got around to finishing and publishing it. I’m going to try to do that now. Spoiler alert, the pattern is very similar.

    One last thing, while the overall undervote rate was higher in 2024 and the range from top to bottom was higher in absolute numbers, the undervote share didn’t increase more proportionally in 2024 than it did in 2020. The 6.53% undervote rate in 2020, the highest one for that year, is 29% higher than the low score of 5.05%, while in 2024 the high undervote rate of 7.96% is 27% more than the low undervote rate of 6.26%. Just in case you were wondering.

    Anyway, this is all a lot of words and numbers for a truly niche topic, but I figure that’s what you come here for. Let me know if you have any questions.

    Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

    Nate Paul serves his contempt sentence

    Posted on November 18, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    Noted for the record, and for a couple of newsy bits at the end.

    Austin real estate investor Nate Paul reported to Travis County jail on Thursday night for a 10-day sentence for contempt of court, avoiding a possible media frenzy by showing up earlier than his 10 a.m. Friday deadline.

    If Paul had refused to show up, a Travis County judge had authorized law enforcement to apprehend him.

    The developer was at the center of the 2023 impeachment case against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was accused of abusing the office to help Paul fight legal battles. Paxton denied wrongdoing and the state Senate acquitted the Republican attorney general, but a federal investigation into the allegations was still underway as recently as August, according to Bloomberg.

    Travis County state district Judge Jan Soifer, a Democrat, first found Paul in contempt of court in March 2023 after he made false statements in a civil case before her. Since then, Paul has so far appealed the charge unsuccessfully to every state appellate court, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court. That includes a habeas corpus case that is still pending in which he argues his due process rights were violated because he did not receive a sentencing hearing, though U.S. District Judge David Ezra had already denied Paul’s motions twice within the last week.

    […]

    Paxton and Paul are reportedly still facing an FBI investigation that was launched in late 2020 after eight of Paxton’s top aides accused their boss of abusing the power of his office and taking bribes from Paul, a friend and campaign donor. Bloomberg reported that a grand jury was meeting in August to hear testimony. No charges have been filed. It’s unclear what will happen to the federal probe after President-elect Donald Trump, a longtime Paxton ally, takes office.

    Paxton continues to face a whistleblower case filed by his former aides. He has said he is no longer contesting the facts of the suit so it should be brought to a close. But the whistleblowers say the case should still move forward and accuse Paxton of trying to avoid deposition. On Friday, they filed a motion to expedite before the Texas Supreme Court, lamenting that it has been four years without any discovery because of  Paxton’s appeals.

    Paul is separately set to go to trial in February on federal charges of wire fraud and lying to mortgage lending businesses and credit unions.

    See here for the previous update, which was in March and which serves as another reminder of the glacial pace in some of these cases. Delay sure can be a good strategy if you have the means for it.

    I think it’s very clear what will happen to the federal probe of Ken Paxton on January 20 of next year, and we would be kidding ourselves to think otherwise. What could happen before then is either for charges to be brought if that’s a viable thing, or for a report to be issued outlining the case and the evidence if it’s not. That would normally be very unusual, but if the reason why a case isn’t brought is because of lack of time and/or interference or other exogenous obstacles, I think it’s very much in the public’s interest to hear about it. Failing all of that, I’ll settle for a good tell-all interview/article/book/podcast done by and with the people who worked on that case. The only unacceptable outcome is for this to vanish entirely into the ether.

    (You might be thinking “Aren’t you assuming that there was a case to be brought against Ken Paxton?”, and my answer to that is yes, I sure am. But you know what, if a reasonable professional prosecutor would have declined to pursue a case for lack of evidence or sufficient exculpatory evidence, then let us know about that, too. I’d rather know the truth, even a truth I don’t like, than to be forever left in the dark.)

    Beyond that, there’s still the State Bar case against Paxton, and that whistleblower lawsuit. I wish those guys all the best. I also hope that no matter how their case concludes, they understand the need for them to join the fight to keep Ken Paxton from being elected to anything in 2026. If they don’t, they truly are chumps.

    Posted in Crime and Punishment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Evolv

    Posted on November 18, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    Very interesting.

    In the 2022–23 school year news reports nationwide identified more than 1,150 guns brought to K-12 campuses that were seized before anyone fired them. That averages out to more than six guns per day, according to an investigation by The Washington Post.

    On top of that, one in 47 school-age children attended a school where at least one firearm was seized and reported on by the media in that same school year. Here in North Texas, Arlington ISD found only one gun on its campuses in the 2018–19 year, but during the 2022–23 fall and spring semesters, 19 guns were found in the district, according to the Post report.

    Such a drastic increase is why some school districts, including those in Forney, Mansfield and McKinney, are turning to new tech to ensure weapons aren’t turning up on campus. The problem is, it doesn’t always work and could lead some to let their guard down.

    In the coming weeks, McKinney ISD students at five campuses will find themselves walking through weapons detection systems when they enter school. The district’s board of trustees paid $1.27 million to purchase the system from a company called Evolv, which doesn’t have the best track record.

    The company’s tech is used in museums, theme parks, stadiums and schools. It resembles the metal detectors you might see when walking into a court building or police station, for example. But they’re different. Instead of just sounding an alarm any time metal is detected, Evolv uses artificial intelligence to specifically look for weapons like guns and knives. This way individuals don’t have to empty their pockets or remove personal belongings. People pass through sensors and are flagged if the sensors detect weapons or weapon-like materials. A flagged person is directed to a staff member who will check their belongings. Once cleared, they’re free to proceed.

    McKinney ISD didn’t respond to requests for comment. But according to Community Impact, Russel May, senior director of safety and security for the district, said, “The purchase is not in response to a specific threat or weapon problem within our schools but rather a proactive measure to keep McKinney on the forefront of safety and security initiatives.”

    Checks through Evolv are supposed to be quick, easy and accurate. The company claims it has the ability to scan a thousand students in 15 minutes. But at times it can be slow and difficult to manage, and can produce false alarms. The problems with Evolv are detailed in a 2023 article by the online news site The Intercept.

    In Maryland’s Dorchester County Public Schools, there were 250 false alarms for every weapon accurately detected from September 2021 to June 2022, according to The Intercept report. In the Hemet Unified School District in California, there were more false alarms, slowing foot traffic on campuses. Evolv’s solution? Let the students proceed.

    It also came out in 2022 that the company had doctored results of their software testing. Its systems were failing to detect knives and handguns, and it misrepresented these failures in public reports. Law firms also announced investigations into the company to search for possible violations of securities laws, according to The Intercept. This included misrepresentations of the technology and its capabilities.

    I found this in the Dispatches from Dallas from August 9. This totally sounds like the sort of new technology that makes a lot of promises related to crime prevention and public safety that it can’t quite keep (*cough* *cough* ShotSpotter *cough* *cough*), and as such I wondered if it had wormed its way into the Houston area. I didn’t find any evidence of it in local school systems, though it is apparently used by the Rockets and (per this WFAA story) the Astros. We passed through it on our way into the Cyndi Lauper concert at the Toyota Center on Saturday; my wife wound up having to go through a more traditional metal detector and then got wanded, apparently because of the necklace she was wearing. Not sure that was its best showing, but whatever. Be that as it may, it’s not hard to imagine it getting its tires kicked by one or more of the area ISDs.

    While this technology is not perhaps mature yet, I don’t think it’s doomed to forever fail. With enough data, its algorithms ought to improve. That’s been the trajectory in the cybersecurity space, where earlier systems to detect potential threats were extremely noisy and generated a ton of mostly false-positive alerts that ultimately weren’t really worth investigating. But with time and a metric crap-ton of more data to analyze, those systems are much more accurate and useful. I would expect systems like Evolv to get there as well, though at what pace I couldn’t say. I would not advise any ISD to pay for the privilege of helping them improve their detection capabilities. If your ISD puts this on their next board agenda, I’d suggest you show up and ask a lot of questions.

    Posted in Technology, science, and math | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Weekend link dump for November 17

    Posted on November 17, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    “To obey a tyrant before you are compelled to do so teaches them what they will be able to get you to do, easily, without even needing to expend the resources and energy it takes to carry out that part of their agenda.”

    “Max will kick off its password-sharing crackdown over the next few months with “very soft messaging” surrounding the change.”

    “It spreads like a skin cream and grips like sandpaper.”

    “Louisiana students Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson wowed their teachers in 2022 when they discovered a new way to prove the 2000-year-old Pythagorean theorem in response to a bonus question in a high school math contest. But that was only the beginning.”

    I personally have no desire to go to space. Not as a pioneer, that’s for damn sure. But I can think of a lot of people who I’d be happy to see go off into space themselves.

    RIP, Tony Todd, actor best known for the “Candyman” movies, and if you’re a Star Trek fan for playing Lt. Worf’s brother Kurn.

    If you’re looking for some to do lists, to get ready for the atrocities to come, see here and here. Get ready.

    Please meet our new friend Chonkus, which is doing its best to help us fight climate change.

    RIP, John Robinson, College Hall of Fame football coach for USC and also the Los Angeles Rams.

    RIP, Gerry Faust, legendary high school football coach from Ohio who later coached at Notre Dame and the University of Akron.

    “Did The Terminator Rip Off an Obscure 1960s TV Show?” (Spoiler alert: A little, kinda, enough to get a settlement but not so much that it needs to be obsessed over.)

    “Now that the 2024 election is over and Trump will be returning to the White House, it is even more important that President Biden do as I urged him to do last July and use his clemency power to empty the federal death row. He should make sure that none of the men now there will ever be put to death.”

    Nothing sums up the Trump 2.0 experience quite like nominating bad lawyer and worse human Matt Gaetz for Attorney General.

    Poor, poor Rudy.

    “Conspiracy mega-site Infowars, whose founder and main host Alex Jones has become the face of monetized suspicion in America, has been acquired at a bankruptcy auction by the satirical news company The Onion. They plan to relaunch Infowars as a parody of itself, with backing from Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun law reform.” I’ve often said that I don’t know how The Onion stays ahead of the satire curve. This is truly next level on their part, indeed the funniest thing they could have done.

    RIP, George Miller “Huckleberry” Fox, former child actor best known for his role in Terms of Endearment.

    “The sex scandals of the incoming Trump Cabinet”.

    RIP, Thomas Kurtz, mathematician, computer scientist, and co-inventor of the BASIC programming language.

    Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged | Leave a comment

    SCOTx lets Robert Roberson get another execution date

    Posted on November 17, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    But thank God that separation of powers was preserved.

    The Texas Supreme Court on Friday ruled a House committee overstepped its authority when it effectively stalled Robert Roberson’s execution by issuing an eleventh-hour subpoena.

    The ruling clears the way for prosecutors to seek a new execution date for Roberson. But the court also gave the green light for the committee to call Roberson to testify before them in the meantime — as long as his appearance does not delay any future execution. Roberson would be the first person executed for a murder conviction tied to shaken baby syndrome.

    It is the latest twist in an unprecedented legal and political saga surrounding the Roberson case, which drew national attention and sparked fresh rifts within the Republican party. Members of the House committee butted heads with GOP state leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who said the panel was acting beyond its power and refused to allow Roberson to testify.

    In a 31-page ruling, Justice Evan A. Young said the committee does have the authority to subpoena Roberson, but that doing so just hours before his execution last month violated the separation of powers provision of the Texas Constitution.

    The Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence issued its subpoena a day before Roberson was set to be executed. Abbott, who had resisted calls from lawmakers to grant a reprieve in the case, argued the panel was usurping state clemency power left solely to him.

    “The committee’s authority to compel testimony does not include the power to override the scheduled legal process leading to an execution,” Young wrote. “We do not repudiate legislative investigatory power, but any testimony relevant to a legislative task here could have been obtained long before the death.”

    Still, Young wrote, “there remains a substantial period between now and any potential future rescheduling of Roberson’s execution.”

    “If the committee still wishes to obtain his testimony, we assume that the department can reasonably accommodate a new subpoena,” he wrote.

    […]

    State Rep. Joe Moody, an El Paso Democrat who chairs the committee, cheered the ruling.

    “The Supreme Court strongly reinforced our belief that our committee can indeed obtain Mr. Roberson’s testimony and made clear that it expects the executive branch of government to accommodate us in doing so,” Moody said in a statement.

    Roberson’s attorney Gretchen Sween said in a statement that the ruling “hopefully gives time for those with power to address a grave wrong.”

    “Robert is innocent,” Sween said. “Given the overwhelming new evidence of innocence, we ask the State of Texas to refrain from setting a new execution date.”

    The Anderson County district attorney did not respond to a request for comment on whether she would seek a new death warrant in the case. The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    See here and here for previous background from me; this case was also featured twice in Dispatches from Dallas. A copy of the opinion is here. Call me old-fashioned, but I would prefer to spend more time on the fact that the case against Roberson is garbage, resting entirely on a thoroughly debunked medical claim plus some prejudice against the autistic Roberson. That’s not SCOTx’s purview, I understand, I’m just saying they’re allowed to say something. The power to do something rests with Greg Abbott, who as previously noted doesn’t give a damn, and the Court of Criminal Appeals. Normally the CCA is a place where hope goes to die, but as it happens one of the CCA judges caught up in the Ken Paxton purge this November was Sharon Keller, so maybe – just maybe – there’s a chance that a different set of them could come to a different conclusion. I wouldn’t count on it, but it’s about all Roberson has unless the local DA changes its mind. The Trib has more.

    Posted in Crime and Punishment | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    HPD’s worsening response times

    Posted on November 17, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    Putting a pin in this for later.

    Mayor John Whitmire

    City leaders blamed an increased lag in police response times in 2024, in part, on the fallout from a scandal in which 264,000 cases were suspended citing a lack of personnel.

    Police leaders, past and present, said staffing has led to the increase in wait times, which this year has seen the average time for top-priority calls increase from an average of 6 to 6.2 minutes. While Houston Police Department had to reallocate resources to examine the dropped cases, Mayor John Whitmire and law enforcement experts said the rise in police response time is part of a trend that has continued for more than a decade.

    The suspended cases scandal shows that what is an important customer service role for agencies in instilling public confidence by showing up to calls quickly is also a logistics problem in that prioritizing calls risks neglecting investigations, the experts said.

    […]

    Agencies like the Houston Police Department categorize calls based on their severity, with top-priority calls, including reports of a shooting or a crime in progress, all the way down to Priority 5 calls that might not require a police response.

    Through September, officers responded to priority 1 calls, considered life-threatening, in an average of 6.2 minutes, compared to 6 minutes in 2023, according to Houston Police Department data. Priority 2 response times increased from 11.3 to 11.7, priority 3 from 72.4 up to 75.5; priority 4 from 91.9 up to 95.1 and priority 5 from 106.5 up to 107.7.

    “It’s a constant balance of where to allocate resources,” said Jay Coons, a criminal justice professor at Sam Houston State University and a retired member of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. “I would be concerned if a police department were targeting, say Priority 2 calls at the expense of some of those street-level tactical units.”

    The uptick is the continuation of a years-long trend of officers responding to top-priority calls at the slowest rate since the 1990s, according to a Chronicle investigation. The department tries to answer those calls within an average of 4 to 6 minutes, but officers have exceeded that range multiple times in recent years, including 2024.

    If the suspended cases scandal was responsible for some of the recent increase in response times, then we should see an improvement in the coming months, as those investigations are being wrapped up. I don’t know what HPD should be doing, but I’m sure there’s tons of academic research and best practices out there for them to consult and follow. What I do know, and what I’ve been saying for some time now, is that we should be getting a lot more transparency about HPD’s overall performance than we have been getting. Not just response times, but solve rates and more clarity on where their money is being spent and what we’re getting out of it. Mayor Whitmire talks a lot about waste and fraud and efficiency, but I don’t see that being applied to the single biggest item in the city’s budget. We’re going to be spending more on HPD. We should know in a lot more detail what that spending is doing for us.

    Posted in Crime and Punishment | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    Time for another warfarin update

    Posted on November 17, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    Not much effect on the feral hog population yet, but it’s still early days.

    Nine months after the Texas Department of Agriculture approved a new toxicant to curb crop-destroying feral hogs, many farmers and ranchers are still leery or unaware of the hog poison.

    Scimetrics Ltd., the company that makes the bait — known by its brand name Kaput — said 586 people have been certified for its use so far in the state, only some of whom have begun its lengthy protocol.

    Kaput’s hog bait contains warfarin, a blood thinner used as medication for humans that is toxic for hogs in low doses. It requires a state pesticide applicator license for use.

    “The time we launched was probably not the best time,” said Mark Jones, who leads sales of the product. “We did it in April, so a lot of the crops were in or going in. Right now its (use is) picking up.”

    […]

    Much of the early pushback came from hunters concerned the blood thinning medication in the hogs would be dangerous for humans and other animals, or worried the new solution would take out too much of their stock.

    The last time Scimetrics held an open Kaput training session in 2017 in Waco, it drew a crowd of 200 ranchers, farmers and hog hunters, according to Jones.

    “We had to close the meeting down because things got ugly,” he said.

    A Texas-based feral swine processor even sued the Texas Department of Agriculture, which included supportive legal briefs from the Texas Hog Hunters Association and the Environmental Defense Fund. The case was later dropped.

    After the state’s first attempt to get Kaput on shelves, the Texas legislature commissioned a study by the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service to test its safety and effectiveness.

    The research team’s final report, released last August, cited findings to allay earlier concerns – including evidence first found in 2018 that a blue dye in the warfarin-laced bait showed up in the bodies of poisoned hogs within hours of its ingestion. It also found that the product worked.

    “If the landowners are diligent and follow the labeling and manufacturer recommendations for the use of the product, it will kill pigs,” said Bruce Leland, the assistant state director of Texas Wildlife Services.

    Still, the poisoning process is lengthy – hogs have to be trained on a feeder before farmers add live bait to the mix, and even then, they do not die immediately. Many of the researchers’ trials took several months from start to finish.

    Tyler Rich, manager of West Texas’ Pro Chem Sales – one of 22 distributors of the feral hog bait in the state – said some of his customers find it well worth the trouble.

    “We have one customer who buys a fair amount of the bait right now. He had one field where he had shot like 1,200 hogs in one year. They just decimate crops,” Rich said. “And they can’t shoot enough of them.”

    Rich thinks Kaput does a good job of killing hogs without hurting other wildlife when its certified users follow the directions.

    While baiting with Kaput is a long and expensive process — operators need to count on a hog-specific feeder and a long period of training the pigs — “it’s cheaper than losing all of your crops to the hogs,” Rich said.

    See here and here for the previous updates. I don’t think anything is going to make a big difference in the feral hog population, but this may have some success over time. And maybe something more effective will come along later as a result. In the meantime there are still the traditional methods of hog control.

    Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

    Dems win another judicial race after final vote canvass in Harris County

    Posted on November 16, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    Some good Friday news.

    Nicole Perdue

    The result of a hotly contested race to replace a retiring Harris County judge has flipped from a narrow Republican win to a Democratic victory after the final set of ballots was reported.

    Official results published by the Harris County Clerk’s Office Friday show Democrat Nicole Perdue prevailing over Republican Michael Landrum by just 774 votes out of about 1.46 million ballots cast in the race. The Clerk’s unofficial and incomplete results from the Nov. 5 election had shown Landrum narrowly leading for a week after election day before the final ballots were reported.

    Harris County Commissioners Court canvassed the vote Friday morning, making the results official.

    The race is one of 15 district judge races targeted by Harris County Republicans in an effort to reverse several years of Democratic gains in local judicial races. Last week, the local Republicans celebrated Landrum as one of 10 Republican candidates for local judgeships that won their races, despite the outstanding ballots that still needed to be counted and reported.

    The other nine races still show Republican candidates holding on to their leads.

    […]

    County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth said in a statement Friday that the counting and reporting process went as it should.

    “The November 5 elections were successfully administered through the dedication and commitment of Harris County voters, election workers, and stakeholders,” Hudspeth said. “Everyone played a vital role in ensuring the integrity and accessibility of the voting process, and I’m proud of how smoothly Election Day went.”

    My judicial Q&A with Nicole Perdue is here. The difference between the unofficial November 6 report, which is the last one we had received, and the official November 15 report is one part more mail ballots – the 2021 omnibus voter suppression law that added more requirements to mail ballots also allows for some time after the election to fix some of the inevitable errors and omissions in the information that voters must provide – and one part provisional ballots. Here are the two results, with the earlier unofficial one listed first:

    
Candidate    Mail    Early    E-Day    Prov    Total     Pct
============================================================
Landrum    18,065  570,568  138,056       0  726,689  50.04%
Perdue     31,835  543,309  150,294       0  725,438  49.96%

Candidate    Mail    Early    E-Day    Prov    Total     Pct
============================================================
Landrum    19,749  570,568  138,056     811  729,184  49.97%
Perdue     34,851  543,309  150,294   1,504  729,958  50.03%

    There was a similar flip in 2022, so this shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. (That result remains up in the air because of the sore loser election lawsuit; unless that gets overturned by an appellate court, there will be a rematch in May.) What isn’t mentioned in this story is that the Dems came pretty damn close to flipping two more races:

    Nov 6 unofficial totals, 80th District Court

    Sonya Aston (R) = 729,336 – 50.10%
    Jeralynn Manor (D) = 726,499 – 49.90%

    Nov 6 unofficial totals, 215th District Court

    Nathan Milliron (R) = 723,801 – 50.08%
    Elaine Palmer (D) = 721,459 – 49.92%

    Nov 15 official totals, 80th District Court

    Sonya Aston (R) = 731,731 – 50.02%
    Jeralynn Manor (D) = 731,084 – 49.98%

    Nov 6 unofficial totals, 215th District Court

    Nathan Milliron (R) = 726,251 – 50.01%
    Elaine Palmer (D) = 725,947 – 49.99%

    That’s a 647-vote loss for Jeralynn Manor, and a 304-vote loss for Elaine Palmer, both of which are closer than Nicole Perdue’s 774-vote win. Needless to say, it would not have taken much more Democratic participation to flip these. Every vote matters, y’all. The Chron has more.

    Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

    A little self-reflection is good

    Posted on November 16, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    It’s best if it’s accompanied by a sincere effort to change one’s actions. But it’s a start regardless.

    During much of its first year and a half of service, Houston ISD’s state-appointed school board has endured criticism for what some community members derided as a tight-lipped, opaque approach to district governance.

    Now, the board has made an unusual admission: Its critics may have been right.

    HISD’s board in September awarded itself just 1 out of 10 possible points on a section of its annual self-evaluation that measured “advocacy and engagement,” records published this week show. Members said the board failed to meet several benchmarks over the past year, including hosting community meetings across high school feeder patterns and having students participate in training sessions about board procedures.

    The low evaluation doesn’t trigger any disciplinary processes, such as firing board members or requiring more training. It does, however, suggest an awareness from board members, who replaced HISD’s elected leaders in June 2023 amid a controversial state takeover of the district, of shortcomings with including community members in decision-making.

    The grade also comes on heels of a decisive vote against a $4.4 billion HISD bond package, the clearest indicator yet that a large swath of the community is dissatisfied with the district’s leadership.

    “It is an acknowledgement that we need to do better,” Board Member Cassandra Auzenne Bandy said.

    Part of the improvement will come from following a “Community Engagement Action Plan” that the board approved in May, Bandy said. The plan encourages members to hold meetings with groups of 10 to 20 community stakeholders following a “shared script” that largely centers discussion around student data, rather than other aspects of district operations that have been subject to community criticism, such as high employee turnover.

    The board has completed 25 such meetings since May, Bandy said.

    The document asserts that the board should seek feedback from voices other than those who speak during board meetings — which have been largely critical of district leadership — because speakers “may not be a representative sample of the community.”

    “The problem we’re trying to solve with our new community engagement strategy is, ‘How do we do better?’” said Bandy, who co-chairs the committee on engagement. “It’s not going to be sitting in a room and getting yelled at, or exchanging emails back and forth with someone that’s angry, just for them to post on Facebook.”

    I dunno, I feel like maybe they should be listening more to the people who’ve been yelling at them. At least, they should make sure they understand why they’ve been yelled at. The more that the Board can comprehend the message that they should listen less to Mike Miles, the better.

    Posted in School days | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

    More on how the Lottery odds were stacked

    Posted on November 16, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    Another fascinating deep dive into how a recent Lottery was won by an outfit that had bought a ticket foe every possible combination.

    In the year and a half since an anonymous player engineered a $95 million Texas lottery jackpot win by buying virtually all of the 25.8 million possible number combinations, two mysteries have persisted:

    Who did it? And how did the small group of outlets conducting the operation process so many tickets in only 72 hours while still following the strict rules the Texas Lottery Commission places on its sales?

    Now there are some answers — one of which raises new questions about the Texas Lottery Commission’s role in abetting the operation, which, while controversial, did not violate any state laws or game rules, according to the agency.

    After seven months without a player correctly picking all six numbers, the April 22, 2023, Lotto Texas jackpot had climbed to the third-highest in state history. The single winner took advantage of a state law allowing big winners to remain anonymous. In June, the one-time payout of $57.8 million was claimed by Rook TX, a limited partnership identifying only a New Jersey lawyer as its registered agent.

    According to three sources, however, the Texas lottery operation was orchestrated by a gaming entrepreneur operating out of Malta, a Mediterranean island nation that is a hub for the online gaming industry. There is evidence the enterprise was funded through a large London betting company with connections to similar lottery buys.

    A Florida investor said the Malta businessman told him he had orchestrated the big Texas payday.

    Late last year, Philip Gurian, owner of Honey Tree Trading, lent an online lottery sales company called Lottery.com $1.3 million, according to allegations in court documents. The Austin-based Lottery.com played a central role in the April 2023 Lotto operation; it and an affiliate in Waco processed nearly 7 million of the tickets for the draw.

    In an interview, Gurian said that soon after he made the investment, he attended a gathering of Lottery.com executives and others at a Boca Raton mansion being rented by the company’s board chairman. While at the party, he said he met a gaming software executive named Ade Repcenko.

    “He told me he worked with a syndicate, and they pool money so that when lotteries get big enough they buy up all the tickets and get a big return,” Gurian recalled. “He said, ‘We just did it in Texas.’” Repcenko added that the buying syndicate conducted such operations several times a year, Gurian said. The Texas Lottery Commission has said such professional buying does not violate any rules.

    Two other sources close to the April 2023 Lotto Texas operation confirmed Repcenko was the point person. Repcenko, founder of Malta-based Spinola Gaming, did not respond to multiple phone calls, emails and texts.

    […]

    So-called professional buyers have been a lively topic among state lottery officials, Texas Lottery Director Ryan Mindell told legislators last month. He testified that investors recently had approached state lotteries in Indiana, Oklahoma and Maryland when their jackpots had climbed to levels making it mathematically attractive for gambling syndicates to score a large return with minimal risk by buying all, or most number combinations.

    None of the state lottery agencies returned calls and emails for details. That could be because investor-led lottery plays are controversial, creating tension between government agencies charged with maximizing profits, and everyday players expecting a fair game when they buy a ticket or two.

    For lottery agencies striving to raise money for good public causes — Texas lottery proceeds primarily fund schools — having a single customer buy millions of tickets generates a huge windfall. While most Lotto Texas games sell 1-2 million tickets, for example, the April 22, 2023, draw sold 28 million.

    Yet guaranteeing the grand prize to a single customer is widely perceived as unfair to other players, who unknowingly are competing against a sure winner for only half the advertised jackpot. The specter of a state lottery draw being taken advantage of by foreign buyers would make such operations especially awkward.

    “We should not mention anything about Lotto Texas wholesale operations in the US,” Lottery.com’s Potts wrote in an internal email debriefing company officers on the April 22 operation that was reviewed by the Chronicle. “This type of business is legal and compliant but is not something we publicize. It is considered cheating by lottery players and we do not want to raise attention to it.”

    The practice nevertheless remains legal in many, if not all states, including Texas. Still, agencies often create procedural and logistical roadblocks that make it extremely difficult for a single buyer to acquire millions of tickets within the short timeframe between draws.

    The Texas Lottery Commission, by comparison, assisted the single-buyer operation corner the $95 million April 22, 2023, Lotto Texas jackpot.

    See here, here, and here for the background. As with the previous stories there’s a lot to this one, so read the rest. The short answer at this point is that the appropriate legislative committees need to hold some hearings and then as appropriate put forth one or more bills to address this issue. I don’t think it’s necessary to ban this practice, but there’s no reason it should be facilitated. Make these syndicates follow the same rules that ordinary players follow, and we’re good. It should be on the Lege to deal with it.

    Posted in Jackpot! | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

    The road ahead for Sean Teare

    Posted on November 15, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    He definitely faces challenges. I believe he’s up to them.

    Sean Teare

    Sean Teare, Harris County’s district attorney-elect, is a longtime prosecutor who has tried armed robberies, visited the scenes of countless homicides and convicted a man of mass murder. But those aren’t the cases that keep him up at night.

    “If you look at my early prosecutions, they were strong,” Teare told the Landing. “I was, and still am, a pretty talented trial lawyer and can utilize that for good and bad. So I have convictions and sentences that I’m not proud of now on possession of controlled substances.”

    Teare, 45, said he “gravitated” toward drug cases as a young prosecutor, having spent his adolescence watching his mother struggle with a heroin addiction. Now married with four children, he says maturity taught him to take a less punitive approach to drug abuse and mental illness.

    “We’re not going to prosecute our way out of this,” he said. “The mark of a good prosecutor is not waking up in the middle of the night thinking about the case you lost. It’s thinking about the case you won that you shouldn’t have.”

    Naturally charismatic, with a quick grin and easygoing affect, Teare’s political skill carried him to victory in an election that was otherwise catastrophic for Democrats. When he takes office in January, he will become one of the most powerful elected officials in Harris County, the final decision-maker for criminal prosecutions in the county’s felony, misdemeanor and juvenile courts. As district attorney, he will oversee a budget of over $116 million and more than 350 prosecutors.

    Yet he faces stiff headwinds. Teare has laid out ambitious plans for change, but his narrow margin of victory in the general election leaves him without a commanding mandate. He will also take office amid a political realignment, with President-elect Donald Trump promising to weaponize the Department of Justice against “radical left prosecutor’s offices” and Texas billionaire Elon Musk, who has already targeted Democratic district attorneys and judges, turning his attention to Harris County.

    Teare, therefore, will have to perform a political high-wire act, balancing Democratic priorities like support for bail reform with the widespread anxiety about public safety that nearly propelled his opponent to victory.

    “He’s got a very difficult path,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston. “There will be a lot of distrust early on. He’ll need to find a way to use relationships he’s got and establish additional relationships to be successful.”

    Friends, former colleagues and supporters say Teare is equal to the task. In interviews with the Landing, they described an experienced prosecutor whose strengths are not confined to the courtroom.

    “Leadership is difficult,” said Paul Fortenberry, formerly a senior Harris County prosecutor who supervised Teare during Teare’s second stint at the office. “Some people can learn it. Some people have it or they don’t. And he’s always had it.”

    Fortenberry and others pointed to Teare’s steady hand at the helm of the Vehicular Crimes Division, which he led during his later years as a Harris County prosecutor. In that role, he appeared frequently at crash sites, earning the respect of stakeholders across the justice system — even those who did not support him.

    “I’ve known him for many, many years,” said Doug Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, which endorsed Teare’s opponent. “I think he’s going to be good for the DA’s office, to be honest.”

    Those relationships and Teare’s depth of experience have left his supporters hopeful that the new district attorney will be able to steer his agency through choppy waters.

    “My faith is that he is going to live up to the campaign promises that he made,” said Nia Hernandez, an organizer for the progressive organization Indivisible Houston who campaigned for Teare. “It is faith and it is hope, but I don’t believe that the person I’ve seen and spoken with is going to lead us down (the wrong) road.”

    You can always go back and listen to the interview I did with Teare for the primary if you want a feel for what makes him tick. I don’t know what kind of interference he’ll get from the feds and the state, but I hope he has a plan and a communications strategy in mind for it. What strikes me is that every DA we’ve had since Johnny Holmes (with the exception of the late Mike Anderson, whose term was sadly cut short by his illness and death) has had a rough time in office. Some of that was circumstantial, but a lot of it was the result of their own actions and policies. If Teare can do better on that front, he’ll be way ahead of the pack regardless of what gets thrown at him. I’m very much wishing him the best.

    (Side note: Holmes had a long career in the DA’s office and has always been spoken of reverentially by those who knew him. I was just here for his later years and wasn’t paying close attention to local politics then, so all I really know about the guy was that he had a legendary mustache and he put a crap-ton of people on Death Row. I’d be very interested in seeing a modern reckoning of his time in office, just for the context. It’s actually a little wild to me that he’s kind of vanished from view, given how larger than life he was at the time.)

    Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

    Austin’s pitch to the WNBA

    Posted on November 15, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

    Interesting.

    Fran Harris has a plan.

    The former Texas women’s basketball great has the financial backing, she insists. She’s got the support of the school administration and the city’s mayor and has had constructive conversations with the sports investment group that built the possible arena home. She’s got the ear of the WNBA commissioner if not exactly the outright blessing.

    And she has the passion.

    Oh, does she have passion.

    Now she just needs a team.

    That’s right. The ambitious fireball of a business entrepreneur who has founded the Athletic Club, which builds sports facilities for soccer, softball and basketball, who once made her pitch on Shark Tank and consummated a deal about the sports drink she was launching (and has relaunched), who has played on championship teams with the Longhorns and the Houston Comets and who’s been an author and behind the microphone for WNBA games has one more thing on her bucket list.

    Harris wants to be the owner of a WNBA expansion team.

    She’ll be part of a group — she says she can’t reveal her investors — that hopes to submit a bid for an expansion team within the next two months. The league is expected to announce a 16th franchise next spring to start by 2028, but Harris hopes the WNBA will seek to add three, not one.

    “It ain’t going to be cheap,” Harris said.

    […]

    Harris has had “very friendly” conversations with the Oak View Group, which built Moody Center for $375 million and might be interested in a 20-date WNBA home schedule.

    “There’s got to be a big pocketbook,” Harris said. “A big practice facility that would be between $60 million and $100 million. You have to have an arena or a plan for an arena. You have to be a city that welcomes or demonstrates they love women’s basketball. Austin checks all of those.”

    Austin does offer a vibrant corporate community, an area population of more than 2.5 million people, and a fan base that is probably starving for pro sports beyond soccer and something other than the Texas Longhorns. It’s got the climate. It’s got a central location in the country. It’s got traffic gridlock. (OK, overlook that.) It’s got money. It’s a destination city.

    And it’s got promise.

    Nevertheless, you don’t often hear Austin mentioned prominently for the next wave of WNBA expansion, while other cities are tripping all over themselves to capitalize on the sudden popularity and viability of the league, thank you very much, Caitlin Clark. But Harris is aware.

    “It’s an uphill climb for getting a team in Austin only with the sheer number of competitors,” she said. “But we know the economics can work. We’ve seen the business model flourish. But I have to say some of those teams don’t check all the boxes.”

    See here and here for the previous posts about Tilman Fertitta getting into the fray for the 16th franchise. The first link contains a mention of Austin being a bidder, which I think was the first I had heard them mentioned. Fran Harris was a member of the 1997 Comets, who won the first WNBA championship. I wasn’t following them that closely yet so I didn’t remember her from the team.

    I like Harris’ optimism about the W going all the way to 18 – there are lots of suitors for #16, so there’s a decent case to be made for going bigger – but we’ll see. Even in that scenario, I have a hard time picturing Texas getting more than one team; there’s already a franchise in Dallas, so that would mean three for the state, the same as the NBA. I feel like the WNBA would want a bit more geographic diversity than that. But who knows? Spectrum News, KXAN, KVUE, and the Austin Business Journal, which notes that Kevin Durant may also get involved, have more.

    Posted in Other sports | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment