More on our future doctor shortage

Posted on January 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

This is unsustainable.

Abortion restrictions have forced Texas obstetrician-gynecology residency programs to send young doctors out of the state to learn about pregnancy termination, a burdensome process educators say is another example of abortion bans undermining reproductive health care.

At least one Houston-area program, the University of Texas Medical Branch, began sending residents out of state this year, to a partner institution in Oregon. Two other local programs, Baylor College of Medicine and Houston Methodist, said they still are working out arrangements for their own out-of-state rotations. McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston declined to comment on its plans.

The changes follow revised requirements from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the standard-bearer for residency programs, which maintains that abortion training is essential for providing comprehensive reproductive health care. Requirements updated in September say OB-GYN programs in states that ban the procedure “must provide access to this clinical experience in a different jurisdiction where it is lawful,” with exceptions for residents who choose to opt out.

Experts, however, say it takes month of coordination to arrange a temporary rotation in another state, leaving some inexperienced physicians with few options.

“There is no question that the restrictions in place following the Dobbs decision pose a risk to the training of up to 45 percent of OB-GYN residents who are training in states where abortion care is restricted,” said Dr. AnnaMarie Connolly, chief of education and academic affairs at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “The joint efforts of ACOG … and countless residencies in protected states are directly addressing this risk to medical education and training.”

[…]

Arranging an out-of-state rotation is a logistical feat, Steinauer said, as it takes up to nine months to develop a plan for housing, airfare, training permits and other needs.

The university also takes on additional costs. To send two UTMB residents to Oregon for two weeks, it costs $5,216 for housing, $1,689 for airfare and airport transportation, $240 for parking and $370 for training permits, according to documents obtained through an open records request. The Ryan program is paying $1,500 for each resident, while the university picks up the remaining expenses, documents show.

There also is a strain on the host institution, said Dr. Aileen Gariepy, director of complex family planning at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. Some programs that offer abortion care may only have the capacity to accommodate their own residents. With a small number of programs left to take on a crush of new learners, “we may be doing a disservice to the training needs of all of our trainees,” she said.

She noted that Weill Cornell does not have the space yet to take on residents from its affiliate institution, Houston Methodist, which has approached the school about an out-of-state rotation.

“This kind of legislative interference in medical care is unprecedented,” she said. “We didn’t have a plan for that.”

[…]

Beyond the immediate challenge of meeting accreditation requirements, some educators publicly have expressed concern that abortion laws will make it harder for Texas to attract and retain OB-GYNs.

Out of nine publicly funded OB-GYN residency programs in Texas, six saw a drop in applicants from 2020 to 2021, the year SB8 was enacted, according to documents obtained by the Chronicle. Seven of those programs saw a drop in applicants in 2022.

Experts caution against drawing conclusions based on those trends. Yaklic noted that the number of graduates interested in OB-GYN programs often fluctuates, and recent changes to the application process may have influenced the data.

Still, at UTMB, many applicants have asked about abortion training during interviews, he said. Even before the Dobbs decision, earlier abortion restrictions caused medical school graduates to favor states that allow the procedure.

See here for some background. It’s certainly possible that we’ll more or less get acclimated to how things are now and the system will limp along as degraded but basically functional, with the bulk of the cost being borne by the people with the least power and fewest resources. It’s also possible, as noted in the comments, that the Lege could pass a bill to outlaw out-of-state abortion training for medical students in Texas, and then we’ll see how bad things can get. All I’m saying is that our state’s forced-birth laws are going to have a negative effect on overall health care, and we are already starting to see it happen.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on More on our future doctor shortage

R’Bonney Gabriel wins Miss Universe

Posted on January 16, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I know, I know, not my usual beat, but it’s a followup on a previous post, so here we are.

R’Bonney Gabirel

R’Bonney Gabriel, the first Filipina Texan to win Miss Texas USA and Miss USA, has a new title: Miss Universe.

The 28-year-old from Friendswood was crowned the 71st Miss Universe in New Orleans Saturday night, beating out runner-up Miss Venezuela, Amanda Dudamel, according to the Associated Press.

Gabriel is an eco-friendly fashion designer, model and sewing instructor who crafted several of her own outfits for competition at the Miss USA competition in October, where she placed first against runner-up Morgan Romano of North Carolina. After graduating from the University of North Texas with a degree in fashion design, she founded and currently owns her own sustainable clothing line, R’Bonney Nola, according to her Miss Universe bio.

As an homage to her hometown, she donned an space-themed costume during the competition, complete with an American flag, glittering stars and a large moon balanced above her head.

In the final stage of the competition, Gabriel was asked what she would do to show Miss Universe is “an empowering and progressive organization,” the Associated Press reported. She responded by speaking about her work to use recycled materials in fashion and teach sewing to survivors of human trafficking the domestic violence, according to the AP.

Before we review the history here, you need to see that space-themed costume:

Incredible. Anyway, the reason I note Ms. Gabriel’s triumph is because her victory as Miss USA was marked with controversy, as well as the revelation that she is a critic of Texas’ forced-birth laws, which has caused some tut-tutting in her hometown of Friendswood. For what it’s worth, in the news stories of her Miss Universe win that I’ve scanned, neither of these items were mentioned. Be that as it may, congratulations to Miss Universe R’Bonney Gabriel. Best of luck, and may you at least occasionally remind people that Houston and Friendswood are two different places.

Posted in Society and cultcha | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Weekend link dump for January 15

Posted on January 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

“In addition to helping absorb water, rain gardens can filter dirty street runoff, reduce urban heat, and provide a habitat for pollinators like bees and birds. So if you have space for it, you might consider adding one to your home.”

Some notes from a book critic about the first chapter of Ross Douthat’s epic fantasy novel that he posted to his Substack.

“We were the most gangsta as you could be, but that day at Dionne Warwick’s house, I believe we got out-gangstered that day.”

I don’t know if the Republicans have finally elected a Speaker as I write this, but once they do and they start doing actual legislative things, crap like this will be high on their priority list.

RIP, Adam Rich, former child star best known for his role on Eight is Enough.

Ethics, schmethics.

“We lost many former major league baseball players in 2022. Here is a review and roster of the most prominent ones.”

“Political action committees affiliated with more than 70 major corporations said they would pause or reconsider donations to those who objected to certifying the results of the 2020 election after the attack on the U.S. Capitol two years ago. Then they gave more than $10 million to members of Congress who did just that, according to a POLITICO analysis of federal campaign finance filings.”

“The narrative laid out in the Select Committee’s report illustrates how the twin threats of political violence and anti-democracy schemes were able to feed off each other in the lead-up to January 6 in a vicious cycle that still has not subsided.”

“A Tax Guru Explains Why Donald Trump May Finally Be in Trouble“.

“You do your job, hold up your part of the deal, the way they ask you to. Then they decide they don’t want to do their part of the job — for a tax break. And suddenly you’re paid, but you’re NOT getting the support you were promised as part of the deal.”

“The Earth’s ozone layer is on its way to recovering within the next 40 years”.

RIP, Sheila Masters, Houston community leader, friend and neighbor to George Floyd and his family.

“Investigators used forensic genealogy to zero in on [Idaho multiple murders] suspect Bryan Kohberger. But they aren’t saying so.”

“Give it up, lawmakers: It’s time to give C-SPAN better access to the House floor”.

“How Democrats Managed to Avoid a Red Wave in the 2022 Midterms”.

“Roman concrete, in many cases, has proven to be longer-lasting than its modern equivalent, which can deteriorate within decades. Now, scientists behind a new study say they have uncovered the mystery ingredient that allowed the Romans to make their construction material so durable and build elaborate structures in challenging places such as docks, sewers and earthquake zones.”

RIP, Jeff Beck, guitar virtuoso and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer.

RIP, Charles White, former ALl Pro NFL running back who won a Heisman Trophy and a national championship while at USC.

RIP, Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis.

RIP, Robbie Bachman, drummer and co-founder of Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged | 1 Comment

Paxton sued over his deranged ballot access opinion

Posted on January 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Good.

The only criminal involved

The Williamson County attorney’s office has sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, claiming a ruling he made that gives the public immediate access to ballots after an election violates state law.

County officials, the lawsuit said, can be charged with a misdemeanor if they release the information before a 22-month period required by the state election code that ballots must be kept confidential.

[…]

Three people requested to see the Williamson County ballots on Aug. 17, 2022, and Aug. 23, 2022, from different county elections, including all 2021 elections and the March 2022 primary, according to the lawsuit. The only reason they gave for their request was that the attorney general had ruled on Aug. 17, 2022, that ballot information could be released before the 22-month waiting period if there was a public information request for it, said the lawsuit.

County officials, the lawsuit said, did not want to release the information before the 22-month waiting period was over, saying the information was confidential, according to the Texas Election Code.

The attorney general’s office responded in a Nov. 9 letter saying that the ballot information is public information and that the county must release it immediately, the lawsuit said.

The county disagreed with Paxton’s ruling, saying the Texas Legislature “has decreed that the voted ballots remain secure for the 22-month preservation period and has criminalized the unauthorized access to those ballots,” according to the lawsuit.

“The Attorney General does not have the authority to overrule the expressed command of the Legislature by ruling that the Open Records Act supersedes the Election Code provision.”

The lawsuit also said that Paxton had made multiple rulings the county had received in 2022 “that the ballots and cast vote records were confidential during the 22-month preservation period” before Paxton changed his mind and ruled that the public must be allowed access to the ballots.

Linda Eads, a law professor at Southern Methodist University and a former deputy attorney general for litigation for the state of Texas, said she was shocked by Paxton’s August ruling.

“Section 66.058 (of the Texas Election Code) is specific and makes clear that election information is deemed confidential and must be treated as such, even if the more general statute Section 1.012 says election information is public information,” said Eads.

See here and here for some background. The courts have on occasion been willing to put a check on Paxton’s power, and I hope this will be one of those times. At least we’re in the state courts, so the Fifth Circuit won’t be involved. The Lege could modify the law in question to moot the claim, but with any luck there won’t be the time or the inclination to do that in this session. We may have to worry about it again in 2025, but we have enough to occupy ourselves with now, so let’s not borrow trouble.

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

No more library fines in Houston

Posted on January 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Good news for some of you, I’m sure.

Houston Public Library patrons no longer will have to pay overdue fees and will have a month-long amnesty period to get past fines canceled.

City Council on Wednesday unanimously approved the library’s proposal to eliminate overdue fees — currently 20 cents per day for adult and young adult books and 10 cents per day for children’s materials — for all patrons at its more than 40 locations. The goal is to encourage more residents, especially younger and low-income Houstonians, to utilize the system, Mayor Sylvester Turner said.

“A fine-free library system evens the playing field and incentivizes Houstonians to become lifelong users of our Houston Public Library,” Turner said in a statement. “When you analyze the numbers, you see that young people account for more than 27 percent of users with fines, preventing them from accessing free resources and tools for learning. Simply put, this is the right thing to do.”

The library has issued 1.4 million library cards to consumers, according to a 2020 library foundation report. The branches have 3.6 million materials, which includes laptop computers and tablets.

Research on public libraries consistently shows late fines do not make people return books on time and actually can deter those who owe fines from using the facility again, according to Houston Public Library spokesperson Julie Mintzer.

The change will cost the library system approximately $60,000 per year in revenue generated by late fines, Minztzer said. The library has a $44 million annual budget. Going forward, book borrowers still will be responsible for the cost of damaged or lost books.

At the request of CM Amy Peck, Council will get briefed on the effect of the change at the end of the year so they can consider revisions to the ordinance if needed. All this seems reasonable to me. Fines for overdue books topped out at $10, so their cost was unlikely to be a deterrent to anyone. Be all that as it may, I just wanted the excuse to embed one of my favorite Bloom County strips:

You’re welcome.

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Uvalde DA gets DPS report on school shooting

Posted on January 15, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

We’re still a long way from seeing it for ourselves.

State police investigating the Uvalde school shooting have sent an initial report to prosecutors, according to a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety.

The Texas Rangers, a division of DPS, are conducting a criminal investigation into the shooting at Robb Elementary, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in May. Hundreds of law enforcement officers who responded to the school, including those from DPS, did not confront the shooter for more than an hour after initial reports of shots fired.

The district attorney in Uvalde, Christina Mitchell, said the Rangers’ investigation remains open and that she did not anticipate a complete report for at least a few more months. Neither she nor DPS have publicly released the initial report yet. The investigation is expected to eventually include a review about whether any victims who died may have survived had police intervened sooner

DPS Director Steve McCraw said last fall that the Rangers’ investigation would be completed by the end of December.

“The initial report is what the Director was referring to and that was made available to the DA’s team last week,” agency spokesperson Travis Considine wrote in an email this week.

In previous statements, Mitchell said that she needs a completed investigation to make any decisions about potential charges, including against any of the nearly 400 officers whose actions and inactions have been under scrutiny since the massacre, which was the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.

“I don’t expect to receive the complete investigation report until the spring, at the earliest,” Mitchell said in an email last week. “It is not uncommon for an investigation of this magnitude to take over a year.”

[…]

At least one part of the investigation has not yet been completed.

A medical analysis of victims’ injuries — led by Dr. Mark Escott, medical director for the Texas Department of Public Safety and chief medical officer for the city of Austin — to “determine whether there may have been opportunities to save lives had emergency medical care been provided sooner” remained underway as of Tuesday, a city of Austin spokesperson said.

That review began in earnest around November. Autopsies of the victims, key for the examination, were completed a few weeks ago. The results of the autopsies have since been sealed, according to local news reports.

Considine, the DPS spokesperson, said the overall investigation is considered ongoing — and the report is initial rather than final — because “Rangers may receive assignments from special prosecutors for some time, which would lead to additional information.”

See here, here, and here for some background. So far two DPS officers have been forced out of their jobs as a result of DPS’ internal investigation. One chose to retire and the other was fired; the latter has filed an appeal. Yes, having the Rangers investigate DPS, for whom they work, is at best a weird idea and sure looks like a conflict of interest, but here we are anyway. We missed our chance for political accountability on this, so we’ll get what we get when we get it.

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SCOTx removes injunction blocking TEA takeover of HISD

Posted on January 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I don’t know what happens next, but there’s a lot more of this to play out.

The Texas Supreme Court cleared the way Friday for the state to potentially take control of the Houston Independent School District, which state education officials say has been plagued by mismanagement and low academic performance at one of its high schools.

Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath first moved to take over the district’s school board in 2019 in response to allegations of misconduct by trustees and years of low performance at Phillis Wheatley High School.

Houston ISD sued and, in 2020, a Travis County district judge halted Morath’s plan by granting a temporary injunction. The injunction was upheld by an appeals court, but the TEA took the case to the state’s highest court, where the agency’s lawyers argued last year that a 2021 law — which went into effect after the case was first taken to court — allows for a state takeover.

The Texas Supreme Court sided with TEA on Friday and threw out the injunction, saying it isn’t appropriate under the new law. The decision could allow TEA to put in place new school board members, who could then vote to end the lawsuit.

TEA told The Texas Tribune that it is reviewing the court decision. The agency didn’t immediately respond to questions about whether it has plans to install a new school board right away.

The Texas Supreme Court also remanded the yearslong case back to a trial court.

Houston ISD’s lawyers have already said they would welcome returning to a trial court so the temporary injunction can be considered under the updated law, adding that the district has been ready to make a case for a permanent injunction since 2020.

Houston ISD Superintendent Millard House II said in a press release Friday that the district’s legal team is reviewing the court’s ruling. He also touted the school district’s recent improvements, including at Phillis Whitley High School. The historic school received a passing grade last year from TEA — like a majority of the district’s schools — for the first time in nearly a decade, prompting a celebration at the school.

“There is still much more work to be done, but we are excited about the progress we have made as a district and are looking forward to the work ahead,” House said in the release.

Judith Cruz’s time as a Houston ISD trustee and as the school board’s president has been consumed by this fight. She was elected as a trustee shortly before Morath’s takeover attempt, and her term as president ended Thursday, the night before the Texas Supreme Court’s decision.

Hours after the ruling, she told the Tribune that it’s still too early to determine whether or how TEA would implement a takeover — as well as how district officials would respond to such a change. She said she hopes any potential changes would cause the least amount of disruption to students in the district. Houston ISD trustees will continue to serve as elected representatives for their community, she said.

“Whether elected or appointed, the focus should always be the children,” Cruz said.

Houston ISD trustee Daniela Hernandez, the board’s current president, said the community has generally supported elected representatives instead of appointed ones, citing the pushback that TEA saw from local parents when the state agency first attempted the takeover.

She added that both the board and the school district have changed for the better since 2019.

“We have been in an upward trajectory, and we can keep on improving,” Hernandez said.

See here for the most recent update. The Chron adds some details.

The takeover case has been long in the making. Education Commissioner Mike Morath first made moves to take over the district’s school board in 2019 after allegations of misconduct by trustees and Phillis Wheatley High School received failing accountability grades.The following year, HISD sued and a Travis County district judge provided the district some relief by granting a temporary injunction, bringing the Texas Education Agency’s plan to a halt. An appeals court upheld the injunction, but the TEA took the case to the Texas Supreme Court.

The justices heard arguments from both TEA and HISD in October over whether Morath had the authority to appoint a board of managers. The state argued that he does under a bipartisan law, enacted in September 2021, known as Senate Bill 1365, that gives the education commissioner authority to appoint a board of managers based on a conservator appointment that lasts for at least two years. The law became effective after the case was first taken to court.

The state appointed Doris Delaney to be a conservator for Kashmere High School due to its low academic performance in 2016.

HISD’s counsel argued that wasn’t enough to count under the law. The purpose of a campus conservator is to help make an improvement and Kashmere High School now has a passing rating, HISD’s lawyers said in October.

The latest Supreme Court opinion says that the school district failed to show that the TEA’s actions would violate the law.

“Because Houston ISD failed to show that the Commissioner’s planned actions would violate the amended law, the Court vacated the temporary order and remanded the case for the parties to reconsider their arguments in light of intervening changes to the law and facts,” according to the case summary.

The court’s opinion is here; I have not yet read it. One point I made in that last update is that seven of the nine Trustees that were on the Board at the time of the TEA directive in 2019 are now gone; Cruz and Hernandez replaced two of the members that the TEA had cited in their open meetings investigation. Replacing the Board now would be largely taking out trustees who had nothing to do with the original problems, and the one school whose then-failing grade was the fulcrum for the TEA is now passing. Whatever you think of the takeover idea or the conditions under which it was imposed, things are very different now and it just feels wrong to me to impose this now. I assume that will be the argument that HISD makes when the case is remanded back to the district court. I also presume that the TEA will wait until that court holds a hearing before taking any action. We’ll see. Reform Austin and the Press have more.

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Universal Studios to open a theme park in Frisco

Posted on January 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Of interest, at least to those in the target demographic.

Another major development is coming to Frisco.

City business leaders on Wednesday morning announced that a new Universal Studios theme park is planning to come to the booming Collin County suburb.

The park will be a kids-themed park with immersive experiences and rides involving Universal movies, leaders said.

Universal operates five theme parks and several more resorts.

The Frisco park will sit on 97 acres near the Dallas North Tollway and Panther Creek Parkway. The park will be about one-fourth of the size of Universal’s main theme parks, officials said. The Frisco park will be “a scale appropriate for our young family audience,” officials said at the press conference.

Officials did not announce an expected opening date.

It’s been a few years, but I’ve been to the Universal Studios park in Florida. It was fun – I was there as part of a business trip, which these things are quite conducive to. This one will be pitched a little differently, per the Dallas Observer.

The new park will be built on the northeast corner of Dallas North Tollway and Panther Creek Parkway, just a few miles east of the Grandscape entertainment and shopping district in The Colony. The 97-acre park, tentatively named Universal Kids Florida, will be “a one-of-a-kind theme park, unlike any other in the world, specifically designed to inspire fun for families with young children,” according to a statement released by Universal Parks & Resorts.

“We have a portfolio of terrific attractions that appeal to young families around the world and we had an idea to bring all those together and create a destination that is specifically designed to appeal to families with young children,” said Mark Woodbury, chairman and chief executive officer of Universal Parks & Recreation at Wednesday’s press conference after revealing the first artist’s rendering of the new theme park. “That’s what you’re seeing in this illustration now, and that’s what we hope to bring to Frisco.”

Universal’s new Frisco location will also have an adjacent hotel themed to the park’s kid-friendly design, with room for expansion for future attractions and services. Universal released an artist’s rendering of an overview of the theme park showing possible attractions. These include a boat ride on a lake at the center of the property, a land with a medieval castle, a visitors center and playground space that looks similar to buildings in the film Jurassic Park and the Netflix kids’ animated series Camp Cretaceous, based on the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films.

Woodbury described the park as “a lush landscape environment [with] four or five themed lands, each one of them full of attractions, interactive experiences, discovery experiences, exploration, learning opportunities and just a rich, rich experience for families to enjoy together.”

So far, neither the city of Frisco nor Universal have released any further details regarding construction or a possible opening date, nor which movie or television properties and attractions will be included in the new theme park concept. Universal noted in its statement that the park is “intended to have a completely different look, feel and scale than Universal’s existing parks and will appeal to a new audience for the brand.”

The new Universal Studios concept in Frisco is aimed at younger visitors, and will be the first American expansion made by the theme park in the almost 33 years since Universal Studios Florida opened in Orlando.

Click over the see the artist’s rendering. I have to assume that the name will have “Texas” in it and not “Florida”, because that would just be weird. But who knows. It will surely be a few years before this thing opens. What do you think, is this something you’ll be first in line to experience or something you’ll avoid like the plague? TPR, the Chron, the Current, and CultureMap have more.

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Nobody knows the state of the gas supply in Texas

Posted on January 14, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

That can be a problem during freezes. You know, like the one we had over Christmas.

As questions continue to swirl about widespread outages Atmos Energy customers experienced in North Texas and beyond last week, the opacity of Texas’ sprawling natural gas industry is being scrutinized.

Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday called for the Texas attorney general and the chief regulatory agency of the state’s natural gas industry to investigate Atmos Energy for the outages in Grand Prairie and elsewhere.

The Railroad Commission opened an investigation Tuesday. No timeline for any findings has been provided, and Atmos Energy continued to avoid answering basic questions about what led to service outages, including questions The Dallas Morning News sent to the utility Thursday.

But some answers might have been available already if Texas had an independent market monitor for natural gas akin to what is in place for Texas’ electric grid. Following the deadly 2021 February freeze, ERCOT, the power grid operator, has also proposed the idea of a so-called gas desk to provide real-time information on the resource.

[…]

Austin-based energy expert Doug Lewin said the opacity of Texas’ natural gas system remains a problem for Texas’ energy system. While the public can see in real time how much electricity is being generated, consumed and the price, none of that can be said for Texas’ lightly regulated gas industry.

ERCOT’s former interim CEO Brad Jones proposed creating a “gas desk’’ after he took the reins of the power grid operator following the dismissal of most of its leadership in the aftermath of the February 2021 deadly winter storm that killed more than 200 Texans.

Natural gas outages contributed in part to the vast outages that plagued the state during the freeze. And the Legislature, in a sweeping grid overhaul bill, set up a confidential body designed to foster honest cooperation and intercommunication between the power industry and the natural gas industry.

But no further action was taken to strengthen the transparency of the natural gas industry, which provides fuel on a global scale. While Texas’ oil and gas industry is vast, it enjoys lax regulations and is overseen by the exas Railroad Commission, an agency some argue is only in place to serve the industry it regulates.

“There effectively is no regulator of the intrastate gas system,” Lewin said.

Creating a so-called gas desk would be the bare minimum Texas could do, Lewin said.

“If we don’t do that, then the policymakers, the legislators are just telling the state of Texas, ‘Sorry, you’re on your own. Y’all better go buy generators,’” Lewin said.

But the idea of a gas desk has already faced pushback from legislators. At a Dec. 5 meeting of the Texas House State Affairs Committee in which legislators were questioning the ongoing power grid redesign, Corpus Christi Rep. Todd Hunter told the head of that process, Public Utility Chairman Peter Lake, that he would have a lot less pushback on his proposed untested market model if he could assure the gas desk idea was dropped.

“If you say yes, there are a lot of questions that will just disappear,” Hunter said.

Lake did not make any assurances.

That story was from December 30, so adjust your inner calendars accordingly. I assume Rep. Hunter pushed back on the gas desk idea because his benefactors in the industry squeezed him about it. If that’s not the case then someone will have to explain to me where that reluctance came from. It sure seems like a sensible idea, and given that the Railroad Commission isn’t interested in doing this on their own initiative, it would be up to the Lege to make them. I would not hold my breath in anticipation of that, of course. We were assured that the grid was fixed, so what more do you want? KERA and the Chron have more.

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Two out of three state leaders open to expanded gambling

Posted on January 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

As we know, two out of three ain’t bad, but it also ain’t enough.

Photo by Joel Kramer via Flickr creative commons

House Speaker Dade Phelan on Thursday left the door open to legalizing sports betting and casino gambling in Texas, the latest sign that opposition may be softening among state Republican lawmakers, though the proposal still faces major hurdles in the Senate.

Phelan, the Beaumont Republican who leads the Texas House, told reporters in a roundtable interview he believes voters would approve a referendum on expanded gaming options. With limited exceptions, most forms of gambling are prohibited by the Texas Constitution, which can only be amended if two-thirds of lawmakers in both chambers agree to put the matter to a statewide vote.

Echoing Gov. Greg Abbott, who voiced support last fall for expanding gambling options, Phelan said he doesn’t want to “walk into every convenience store and see … slot machines.”

“I want to see destination-style casinos that are high-quality and that create jobs, and that improve the lifestyles of those communities,” Phelan said.

[…]

This session, the gambling industry has hired an army of lobbyists to push for casino and sports betting legalization. Last month, however, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said he isn’t expecting the issues to go anywhere.

“I don’t see any movement on that right now,” Patrick said in an interview with KXAN-TV in Austin.

Patrick, a Houston Republican who has overseen the Texas Senate since 2015, said that doesn’t mean things can’t change during the 140-day legislative session, which kicked off Tuesday.

He said there is “a lot of talk out there” about gambling, but he hasn’t seen any Senate Republicans file a bill on the issue yet. State Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat, has filed legislation to open the state to casinos and sports betting, however.

See here for some background. I’m not saying Dan Patrick can’t change his mind on this. I have no idea what Dan Patrick will do. I’m just saying that until he says he’s changed his mind, nothing has changed. That’s really all there is to it. Reform Austin has more.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

It’s re-redistricting time

Posted on January 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

More amusing than alarming, with a bit of annoying as well.

The Texas Senate voted unanimously on Wednesday to again take up the decennial process of redrawing the boundaries of the state’s political districts a year and a half after the Legislature completed the process and yielded new districts. Those newly drawn districts increased the Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House and reduced the voting strength of voters of color.

The redistricting process this year is mostly procedural and is not expected to produce very different results.

Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, said she was taking the step “out of an abundance of caution” to ensure that Legislature had met its constitutional requirement to apportion districts in the first regular session after the federal census, which is done every 10 years. Because of the pandemic, census numbers were not released until after the end of the last regularly scheduled legislative session on May 31, 2021. Redistricted maps were passed in a subsequent special session that year.

Two Democratic lawmakers, Sens. Roland Gutierrez of Antonio and Sarah Eckhardt of Austin sued, saying that violated the Texas Constitution because the census numbers weren’t received until Aug. 12, 2021. That would make the current legislative session, which kicked off on Tuesday, the first regular session since the release of those numbers.

Eckhardt said the Senate’s decision to take up the issue again proves she and Gutierrez were right on the law, but she said she didn’t expect much change in the maps drawn by the state in 2021.

“I think this will be a check-the-box exercise,” she said. “I would have liked to have seen in the first go-around a substantive discussion and taking the input of constituencies into account.”

[…]

Huffman, who led the redistricting committee in the 2021 legislative session and will again lead its efforts this year, said the procedure would follow similar rules to those applied last session and would create an opportunity for “regional hearings” to be held in the Capitol that will be streamed on the internet for the public across the state. The public will also have an avenue to testify in those hearings virtually. Those hearings will be held between Jan. 25 and 28.

See here, here, and here for some background. While this resolution is only for the Senate, the same exercise will need to occur for the House and the SBOE as well; Congressional redistricting is exempt because the constitutional provision only applied to state offices. I think Sen. Eckhardt is correct in her assessment, and it’s a shame that the State Supreme Court did not see it the same way, but here we are. I presume the federal litigation over Texas’ maps and processes will be unaffected by this – the legal issue in question was one of state law. As noted I don’t expect much to change, but anytime there is redistricting there is the potential for shenanigans, so stay alert. Reform Austin.

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San Antonio will vote on marijuana decriminalization

Posted on January 13, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

We’ll see how it goes.

Progressive groups celebrated on the steps of City Hall Tuesday afternoon before delivering the boxes of signed petitions needed to get a measure in front of voters that would decriminalize both cannabis possession and abortion.

Ananda Tomas, executive director of police reform group ACT 4 SA, told reporters that her group and its allies collected 38,200 signatures in favor of the San Antonio Justice Charter. That’s well above the roughly 20,000 required to put it on the ballot for May’s citywide election.

If passed, the charter also would codify the ban the San Antonio Police Department’s current leadership has placed on police chokeholds and no-knock warrants.

“I’ve been frustrated working within the system and working in City Hall to try to get things like this done,” District 2 City Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez told charter supporters. “I think this is a demonstration that when the people will it, it will happen.”

Although the petition garnered support from McKee-Rodriguez and an array of progressive groups from around the state, it’s likely to face stiff resistance from others. Danny Diaz, head of San Antonio’s powerful police union, said his organization will work to defeat the measure, which he said ties officers’ hands.

See here for some background and here for an earlier version of the story. The San Antonio Report adds some details.

The City Clerk’s office has 20 business days, until Feb. 8, to verify the signatures.

“We’re ready,” City Clerk Debbie Racca-Sittre said inside City Hall as she and a colleague sealed and time stamped four boxes filled with more than 5,000 pages of petition signatures.

City Council will call for the election, which will include council district seats and other local elections, during its Feb. 16 meeting.

Voters will likely see just one item on the May 6 ballot to make the batch of changes to the City’s Charter — but city officials could split them up into separate votes, Tomas said. “The intent is for it to be one single proposition. I think that that’s still going to be a conversation with City Council.”

[…]

The charter changes would essentially direct the police department not to spend resources pursuing most abortion and low-level marijuana possession cases.

A provision in the Texas Constitution states that “no charter or any ordinance passed under said charter shall contain any provision inconsistent with the Constitution of the State, or of the general laws enacted by the Legislature of this State.”

Whether the charter rules, if approved, violate that provision may ultimately be left up to legal challenges — but “this is entirely legal,” Mike Siegel, political director and co-founder of Ground Game Texas, told the San Antonio Report.

“Every day, police departments decide what they’re going to enforce and what they’re not going to enforce, and this represents the people of San Antonio saying: these are not our priorities for our scarce public dollars,” Siegel said. “The roots of the Texas Constitution are in local self control [and] self determination. So that’s why we have charter cities that have this authority to adopt their own charters and decide their own laws.”

It will be up to opponents of the charter changes to decide whether they want to challenge it, he said.

I would expect this to pass, as similar referenda has done in other cities. Whether it will get a similarly chilly reception from City Council or Commissioners Court remains to be seen. Unlike some other counties, the Bexar County District Attorney is on board with the idea, as noted in this Texas Public Radio story, so they have that going for them. On the other hand, the Lege is out there as well, with a giant hammer to wield against cities and counties that do things the Republicans don’t like. Sometimes I don’t necessarily mind Houston being a bit behind the activism curve. If six months or a year from now this ordinance is in place and being complied with, I’ll be delighted and looking to our city to follow suit. If not, I’ll be disappointed but not surprised. Stay tuned.

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The Lege does its housekeeping

Posted on January 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

In the Senate, they drew their lots to see who would have to run again in 2024.

Sen. John Whitmire

It was the luck of the draw for Texas senators on Wednesday as they drew lots to decide which half of them would get two-year terms and which would get four-year terms.

The practice is outlined in Article 3, Section 3, of the Texas Constitution, which calls for “Senators elected after each apportionment [redistricting]” to be divided into two classes: one that will serve a four-year term and the other to serve a two-year term. That keeps Senate district elections staggered every two years. After that, senators serve four-year terms for the rest of the decade.

On Wednesday, each of the chamber’s 31 lawmakers walked to the front of the chamber and drew lots by picking an envelope that held a pill-shaped capsule. Inside the capsules were numbers: Even numbers meant two-year terms, and odd were for four-year terms.

“I’m sure each and every one of you are happy with what you drew, right?” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick joked.

Sixteen senators had Lady Fortune on their side and drew four-year terms, and fifteen unlucky souls will have to run for reelection in two years.

[…]

All eyes were on Sen. John Whitmire, a longtime Democrat who has announced plans to leave the chamber to run for Houston mayor after the session, and Judith Zaffirini, a Laredo Democrat who is second in seniority to Whitmire.

Whitmire drew a two-year term, and Zaffirni drew a four-year term.

Three freshmen senators drew two-year terms, including Democrat Morgan LaMantia of South Padre Island, who was in the tightest race in the Senate last year. The two other freshmen, Republicans Kevin Sparks of Midland and Mayes Middleton of Galveston, both drew four-year terms.

After the 2012 election, the main question was whether then-Sen. Wendy Davis, who won a tough race in a district carried by Mitt Romney, would have to run again in 2014. She drew a short straw, and I think that contributed to her decision to run for Governor. Of course, we were in a time and of a political makeup in which Dems were getting creamed in non-Presidential years. That changed quite dramatically in 2018, when Dems won back Davis’ old seat and picked up another Senate seat as well. Sen. LaMantia had a tough race in 2022, and at this time I have no idea if it’s better for her to run in 2024 or not. We’ll just have to see.

As for Whitmire, what this means is that if he’s elected Mayor this year, things will be messy in SD15 the next year. There would be both a primary and a special election to replace and succeed him, much as there was in HD147 this past year. You could have the primary winner, who would get to serve a four-year term after winning in November of 2024, and the special election winner, who would serve out the remainder of 2024, be two different people. One person could face five elections total in 2024, if the primary and the special both go to runoffs; this would happen for someone who wins the primary in a runoff and makes it to the runoff (win or lose) in the special. Did I mention that the primary runoff and the special election would take both place in May, but on different dates, again as it was in HD147? Speaking as a resident of SD15, I’m already exhausted by this possibility, which may not even happen. May God have mercy on our souls.

Anyway. The Houston-area Senators who will be on the ballot in 2024 are Carol Alvarado (SD06), Paul Bettencourt (SD07), John Whitmire (SD15), and Joan Huffman (SD17). The ones who get to wait until 2026 are Brandon Creighton (SD04), Mayes Middleton (SD11), Borris Miles (SD13), and Lois Kolkhorst (SD18).

Meanwhile, over in the House…

Texas House leadership on Wednesday shut down a long-building push to ban Democratic committee chairs, deploying procedural legislative maneuvers to defeat multiple proposals on the issue.

The chamber also approved new punishments for members who break quorum, like most House Democrats did two years ago in protest of GOP-backed voting restrictions. Those members left for Washington, D.C., for weeks to stop the House from being able to do business in an effort to prevent passage of the bill. Under the new rules, quorum-breakers can now be subject to daily fines and even expulsion from the chamber.

The chamber passed the overall rules package by a vote of 123-19, with Democrats making up most of the opposition.

Going into the rules debate, most attention was on the subject of committee chairs, who have the power to advance legislation or block it from being taken up by the full House. For months, a small but vocal minority of House Republicans have been calling for the end of the chamber’s longtime tradition of having committee chairs from both parties. But Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, and his allies moved successfully Wednesday to prevent the matter from even getting to a vote on the floor.

They did it by passing a “housekeeping resolution” earlier in the day that included a new section codifying a constitutional ban on using House resources for political purposes. That resolution passed overwhelmingly with little debate or fanfare. Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, then cited the new provision to call points of order — procedural challenges — on two amendments proposed by Rep. Bryan Slaton, R-Royse City, to restrict Democratic committee chairs. Phelan ruled in favor of Geren both times.

“The amendment would require the speaker to use public resources, including staff time and government facilities, on behalf of one political instrumentality,” Phelan said the first time. “This obviously would require the speaker to violate the Housekeeping Resolution.”

It was a relatively anticlimactic end to the fight over Democratic committee chairs, which were a major issue in House primaries earlier this year, a rallying cry for conservative activists and a recurring theme in speeches as the legislative session kicked off Tuesday. After the House reelected Phelan by a nearly unanimous vote, he cautioned freshmen to “please do not confuse this body with the one in Washington, D.C.”

“After watching Congress attempt to function last week, I cannot imagine why some want Texas to be like D.C,” Phelan said.

Committee appointments are expected to be made in the next couple of weeks. Phelan has said he will appoint roughly the same proportion of Democratic chairs as last session, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll be appointed to lead any powerful or coveted committees.

The amendment about sanctions for quorum-busting drew more No votes, almost entirely from Dems. Honestly, I have no problem with what was passed. It’s perfectly appropriate for the chamber to have sanctions for that kind of action, and it’s not that different, at least to my mind, than what was passed after the 2003 walkout. New rules get adopted each session, this can always be revisited in the future. TPR has more.

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HD135 election contest dismissed

Posted on January 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

From the inbox:

This week, Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan dismissed the election contest filed by Mike May, the candidate who lost to Representative Jon Rosenthal in the 2022 election for house district 135. The case was dismissed because May failed to timely pay the security of costs required by Texas law.

“This quick dismissal shows these election contests are largely about political posturing and undermining our democratic processes,” said Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee. “I thank Speaker Phelan and Representative Morgan Meyer for upholding the law and ensuring the will of the voters stands.”

Under Texas law, the Texas House of Representatives presided over this contest because it was filed by a candidate for that body. Unfortunately, more than 20 other election contests are still pending in Harris County—most of those races had greater vote margins than May’s. Those cases are expected to proceed over the next few months.

See here for the background. This one was particularly unserious, and the resolution shows how weak it was. Here’s County Attorney Menefee’s Twitter post, with a copy of the letter to May from Speaker Phelan:

My post about the HD135 election contest ran on December 3, so it was filed at least one day before then. The deadline for paying the required fee – I have no idea how much, but if there was even a sliver of a chance this was for real, this guy would have had no trouble getting some fat cat to pay for it as needed – was December 9. Maybe he could have gotten an extension if he’d asked and had some reason for it, but practically speaking this thing has been dead for a month.

This has no effect on the other challenges filed by other losing losers, as legislative contests are heard in the House while these others will be argued in a courtroom. They aren’t any more valid, they’re just in a different venue. From the County Attorney’s press release, they may take awhile to be resolved. I will of course keep an eye on them. The Trib, whose story published after I drafted this and which mostly recapitulates what I’ve got here, has more.

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More on the Winter Street Studios fire

Posted on January 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The Chron profiles two artists that were affected by the recent fire at the Winter Street Studios.

At Winter Street Studios, red caution tape draped an X pattern over an entrance to the building, a workspace for Houston area artists. The door is gone and black stains from a fire around the outer entrance are a stark contrast on the exterior of the large white structure.

Further into the building, chunks of the pillars are blown off, revealing brick and concrete. In one hallway, clean white squares where paintings used to hang stand out against the charcoal of the wall. In the area where Montgomery County based artists Toria Hill and Rebekah Molander have their studios, hallways that were once white and adorned with vibrant artwork are now soot stained.

The scene is a heartbreaking one for them both, especially since a person who was tied to the arts community was deemed responsible for the fire. It is testing Molander’s sense of security.

“It’s a safe place. What would be safer than an artists’ community?” the 38-year-old Woodlands artist said. “Who targets a group of artists and who destroys art? Of all things, art and music bring people together. Now that feeling of safety has been damaged.”

Molander had 18 pieces on display at the gallery in Sawyer Yards when authorities said it was set on fire on Dec. 20. The arsonist targeted the first-floor worksite of Bohemian Photography, then died by suicide days later, according to the Houston Fire Marshal’s Office. Bohemian owner Jack Potts and the man who set the fire were friends and reportedly had a disagreement over $1,000 in equipment.

[…]

The fire destroyed hundreds of pieces of art at the gallery, where about 110 artists rent space among the 77 studios to create and store their work. Some of the artwork may be salvageable, Hill and Molander said. All the artists are sharing notes on how to recover their work.

Hill will soon turn to an art restoration group, hoping her work can be salvaged. She suspects, however, that nothing is resellable. She had what is called “show insurance” that covers six pieces. But that only covers the supplies, like paint and brushes.

“They all smell like they’ve been sitting in someone’s chimney,” Hill said. “We’re learning it’s hard to get the smell of smoke out of your canvas without ruining the work.”

She’ll be focusing on creating more work before big shows like the Bayou City Art Festival in March and The Woodlands Waterway Arts Festival in April.

Molander, part of an artist collective called The Seekers who work out of the Taft McWhorter Art Gallery, couldn’t get in the building until the week following Christmas. She and her husband donned masks because the smoke smell was so thick. They took the 18 pieces that were on display, wrapping them with commercial grade plastic.

Once home, they’ve been airing the pieces out in intervals.

“One issue is that some soot, especially from the back of the canvas, could seep in and further damage the paintings in the next six months,” Molander said.

She also purchased a tool called a soot eraser — a dry chemical sponge — to clean the canvas.

“When you swipe down, the sponge comes out black. It’s incredible the way it works,” Molander said. “Right now everyone is trying to be as positive as they can. This isn’t anything I’ve ever dealt with but it’s giving me a lot of hope.”

The Houston Arts Alliance has activated its emergency relief fund, first created in 2020 to support artists during the COVID-19 pandemic, to help those whose studios were damaged. Donors can contribute to the fund at the alliance’s website https://ready.haatx.com/.

See here for the background, and please do consider making a donation to the support fund. I went looking for more stories to see what news there has been in the intervening weeks, and I found this from about ten days after the fire. There’s a lot of background about the studio and its history and purpose, but what really caught my eye was towards the end, about its immediate future.

The arson victim was a behemoth of a building: the 75,000 square-foot space at 2101 Winter Street, a historic brick-and-concrete structure dating from 1928, originally built by E.A. Hudson for the Houston Transfer Company. The rambling two-story fortress later become Harris Moving & Storage, before being turned into studios for rent for professional artists by developer Jon Deal in 2005. Deal took a chance on rehabbing the rambling elephant of a building, betting artist-generated income could be financially successful.

The developer also had to convince the permitting department, which granted the building the first permit ever under the groundbreaking Artist Studio Ordinance in the City of Houston.

Flash forward 17 years, and Winter Street had become the bedrock of what would morph into one of the largest communities of working artists in the country. The thriving Sawyer Yards complex, that has also birthed under Deal and other partners, a plethora of pendant properties for artists, other creatives, stores and restaurants, led by Spring Street Studios, Silver Street Studios (home to the international biennial of photography FotoFest) and The Silos at Sawyer Yards. Winter Street Studios has also been the headquarters, thanks to generous owners, of countless fundraisers, mostly notably the art auction benefiting affordable housing and artists, the iconic Art on the Avenue presented by Avenue CDC.

[…]

What Deal once did to rehab the raw, cavernous space of Winter Street — later replicating that model throughout Sawyer Yards — makes many confident that he can and will do it again.

We reached out to Deal the Friday before Christmas. Within hours he emailed back details to PaperCity of his new plans that provide uplifting news to not only the Winter Street Studios artists, but also members of the Houston art family at large.

“Definitely arson,” Deal tells PaperCity of the cause of the devastating fire. “I reviewed some of the video with the arson investigators and it was a targeted theft and firebombing of a specific studio. With our building and campus cameras we were able to follow the thief/arsonist’s steps from the time he entered campus to the entry into Winter Street Studios then directly to the studio door without hesitation at any turn.

“Clearly he had been in the studio before (photographer Jack Potts’ studio). On the video you can see him leaving the studio at a rapid pace and then seconds later the explosion.”

“The eastern 1/3 of the building, Section C, looks like a war zone on the first level,” Deal details of the damage. “The remainder of the building (Sections A & B) suffered severe smoke damage, which left a thick soot. The second level of Section C shows signs of structural damage due to the heat of the fire.”

Now that a plan is in place. Deal has a timeline in mind.

“Our plan is to have Sections A & B (2/3 of the building) cleaned and ready for the artists to move back in in February,” he tells PaperCity. “Section C will require some structural repairs and complete rebuild of about one half the studios in that section of the building. We are estimating that it will be six months before we are able to get those studios ready for the artists to move back in.”

As to who will rebuild Winter Street, Deal dispatched his own crews immediately.

“The fire occurred at 5:20 am Tuesday, December 20,” Deal details.” We had crews on site at 7 am on Wednesday, December 21, and have already made it possible for artists to enter their studios in Sections A & B. Many already have. We made the decision to remediate in-house (Dealco) as we felt like we were able to mobilize quicker with more manpower and equipment than the remediation company could.”

Another silver lining is the nearby presence of warehouses under the Sawyer Yards umbrella.

“Silver Street opened up warehouse space that had recently been vacated and is allowing the Winter Street artists to store their artwork there until we can get them back in the building,” Deal shares. “We are prepared to open two of our warehouses a little further away if needed.”

And wall space will be provided, Deal notes.

“Alexander Squire, Sawyer Yards creative director, will be coordinating with management and other building artists to help the Winter Street artists to display what artwork they have left during the second Saturday event in January and in February if necessary,” Deal tells PaperCity.

You can click over to see some pictures. I’m very glad to hear there’s a plan in place to rehab and recover, and I look forward to the grand re-opening. The Leader News has more.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of January 9

Posted on January 12, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance mourns the death of labor stalwart David Van Os as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

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Dade Phelan easily re-elected Speaker

Posted on January 11, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

No drama, as expected.

Rep. Dade Phelan

Texas House of Representatives members on Tuesday voted 145-3 to elect state Rep. Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, to a second term as speaker — the most powerful position in the lower chamber.

He defeated state Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington, who was nominated by ultraconservative members who feel Phelan is unreasonably accommodating of Democrats in the chamber. Tinderholt cast a ballot for himself, as did two Republican members who nominated him, Nate Schatzline of Tarrant County and Bryan Slaton of Royce City.

[…]

Phelan guided the House through the 2021 legislative sessions, which some observers called “the most conservative” in state history. Lawmakers passed new laws banning almost all abortions and allowing permitless carry of handguns.

But conservative grassroots activists said the House had not gone far enough on conservative priorities like banning gender-affirming care for transgender children and have often butted heads with Phelan. Critics attacked him for appointing Democrats to leadership positions in the chamber, following a long-held chamber tradition to appoint members of the minority party as committee chairs. Phelan has not budged on the issue, indicating he once again plans to allow some Democratic chairs and arguing that the Texas House operates better on a bipartisan basis and eschewing the divisiveness seen in Washington, D.C.

See here for the background. The two main differences between Speaker Phelan and Speaker Tinderholt is that Tony Tinderholt is an asshole, and Dade Phelan will appoint some Democratic committee chairs. In terms of outcomes, the Lege is still going to pass brutal right-wing legislation, with no real limit on their id beyond their own capacities for shame and empathy. I suppose there’s a chance that Speaker Phelan might help bottle up a particularly noxious bill that some Republican members would rather not have to vote on, but I wouldn’t expect much. This is where we are.

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SCOTx to decide if ERCOT can be sued

Posted on January 11, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Big decision to come.

Lawyers argued before the Texas Supreme Court on Monday over whether the state’s power grid operator should be protected from lawsuits, a question that has become especially important after the deadly February 2021 freeze.

Individuals and insurance companies have filed lawsuits against the Electric Reliability Council of Texas and power generators since the storm, which left millions of Texans without power in bitterly cold temperatures and hundreds of people dead after electricity was cut in large portions of the state. How those cases proceed will depend on what the Supreme Court decides in the coming weeks or months.

Lawyers for the ERCOT — the nonprofit that manages the state grid — argued Monday that it should receive the same “sovereign immunity” that largely shields government agencies from civil suits.

Because ERCOT is empowered by the state to fulfill a public function and is overseen by a state agency — the Public Utility Commission of Texas — ERCOT should not be held liable, they argued, saying legal claims against ERCOT should instead be the responsibility of the PUC.

ERCOT “has no function other than what the state assigned,” attorney Wallace Jefferson said. “It has no autonomy from the state. … It has no private interest. Its interest is in furthering the public’s interest in a reliable grid. The state controls its bylaws. And the state sets the fee that funds the organization.”

The opposing argument from attorneys in two separate cases was that giving ERCOT such immunity was inappropriate.

Attorneys for Panda Power Funds, a Dallas-area private equity firm that develops and operates power facilities, and CPS Energy, San Antonio’s energy utility, argued that just because ERCOT is regulated by a government entity doesn’t make it part of Texas government.

CPS Energy attorney Harriet O’Neill said the state Legislature has the power to make ERCOT explicitly part of the government, “but despite many opportunities, including after the winter storm, the Legislature has never conferred government status on ERCOT, which it knows how to do.”

Supreme Court Justice Jeff Boyd offered an analogy to explain the lawyers’ arguments: Imagine the state Legislature decided that all the yellow stripes on highways needed to be repainted red. If the Texas Department of Transportation did the work and was accused of doing it wrong, it would be protected from lawsuits.

But if the Legislature instead told TxDOT to authorize another entity to do the work and TxDOT set the prices and dictated how to paint the stripes, would the contractor then be considered a government entity?

See here, here, and here for some background. Note that the original Panda Power lawsuit was filed in 2019, well before the infamous freeze, and is over their claim that ERCOT intentionally manipulated projections of energy demand to encourage new power plant construction. I think Justice Boyd’s analogy is a good one and I can see the merit in either side. On balance, though, I think we overextend the principle of sovereign immunity in this state, and as such I’m rooting for the plaintiffs. But this could go either way. We ought to know in a few months.

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Is trap-neuter-return illegal?

Posted on January 11, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

A question that could affect a lot of cities, including Houston.

Trap, neuter, return programs are popular across Texas as a way to control feral cat populations. But one local official is now posing a thorny question: Are they legal?

Brazoria County District Attorney Tom Selleck has asked the attorney general’s office to determine whether the initiatives run afoul of animal cruelty laws that criminalize abandonment.

Selleck insists he is not trying to put an end to the programs, but instead wants clarification as several cities in his area consider their use.

“We’re certainly not saying it’s a bad program, quite the contrary, I think it has some excellent benefits,” he said. “I just don’t want somebody getting arrested over it. I’d like to know what my parameters are as a prosecutor.”

Attorney General Ken Paxton has yet to issue the opinion that could have sweeping implications for animal control efforts in Dallas and other cities. In addition to managing stray cat populations, the programs are also credited with cutting back on nuisance mating behaviors like fighting, yowling and marking.

Generally the programs work like this: Stray cats are trapped, then sterilized and vaccinated by a veterinarian before being returned to where they were found. Animals that have been through the process are often marked with a clipped ear.

In his November letter, Selleck questioned whether the programs may conflict with a state law that makes it a crime to abandon “unreasonably an animal in the person’s custody.”

“Returning the animal into the wild, without making reasonable arrangements for another individual to take custody of said animal, operates as a form of abandonment, by letter of the law,” he wrote. “If the abandonment is made unreasonably, such as leaving the stray in an open and unsafe environment, then that may support a conviction.”

Danielle Bays, a senior analyst for cat protection and policy at the Humane Society of the United States, pushed back on that notion.

“It’s not as if these cats are being left to fend for themselves,” Bays said. The stray cats are returned to the same place they were trapped, she said, often where they’re being fed or cared for by people.

“I don’t know of anywhere where people have actually been charged with abandoning cats when they return them to where they were found,” she said. “If you’re taking those cats and releasing them somewhere else, if you were just dumping them somewhere, that’s not the same thing.”

I get where DA Selleck is coming from – certainly as an officer of the court he wants to make sure he’s in compliance with the law – but I dunno, if the issue has never come up before and so many cities have been doing this without any problems, maybe it’s not an issue? Houston is one of those cities, so we have some skin in this game. Selleck says that he hopes the AG’s office will return an opinion in time for the Lege to take action if needed, a sentiment with which I agree. That said, if there really is a concern, there’s no reason not to ask a legislator right now to craft and carry a bill that would clarify the law and remove the potential conflict. Why take the chance on the opinion landing after the bill filing date, or the Lege not having the time to move it after the opinion drops? If it’s an issue, take action now. That’s my opinion.

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It’s going to be a brutal legislative session for LGBTQ folks in Texas

Posted on January 10, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

I really wish this weren’t the case, but it is. It’s going to be bad.

Two bills that would ban classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in Texas public schools before certain grade levels are poised to receive top Republican backing in this year’s legislative session. But critics warn that the legislation could further marginalize LGBTQ students and families while exposing teachers to potential legal threats.

The two bills — authored by Reps. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, and Jared Patterson, R-Frisco — closely resemble legislation out of Florida that critics dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law. House Bill 631 and House Bill 1155 are among a flurry of anti-LGBTQ legislation awaiting lawmakers when they return to the Capitol on Tuesday.

Florida’s law prohibits schools from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade. Both Texas bills mirror such a ban. Toth’s HB 631 would expand the restriction until fifth grade. Patterson’s HB 1155 would extend it to eighth grade.

Their proposals would also prohibit lessons on sexuality and gender identity at any grade level if they are “not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate.” Patterson’s bill doesn’t define what is appropriate for various age groups. Toth’s bill requires the lessons to align with state standards but doesn’t specify which standards.

Like Florida’s law, the two Texas bills don’t explicitly ban the use of the word “gay” in schools. The bills’ authors also maintain that the legislation would protect “parental rights” by allowing parents to more directly control what their children learn in school, including the existence of different sexual orientations and gender identities.

“Parental rights are paramount to the safety and well-being of a child,” Patterson said in a Jan. 3 tweet introducing his bill. “Therefore, I filed HB 1155 to ensure no school teaches radical gender ideology to any child from K-8th grade, and where parents must review and sign off on any health-related services.”

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has signaled that he would support passing a Texas version of the Florida law — even before these bills were filed.

“I will make this law a top priority in the next session,” he said in a campaign email last April.

Critics of the legislation argue that the bills’ vague nature would suppress discussion related to LGBTQ issues and representation.

“The reality is that everybody has a gender identity and sexual orientation; avoiding those conversations is incredibly difficult,” Adri Pérez, an organizing director with Texas Freedom Network, told The Texas Tribune. “What it becomes is a tool to be leveraged specifically against LGBTQIA+ people, because what stands out is not the people who fit in but the people who are being specifically targeted and attacked as being different.”

[…]

Chloe Kempf and Brian Klosterboer, attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said the bills could pose explicit risks to teachers and school districts in the form of lawsuits from parents who believe they’re not following the law.

Toth’s bill outlines a mechanism for parents to sue school districts for violating his proposals, which includes the parental notification portion of that bill. Experts say that part of these bills could require teachers to potentially out their students, and parents could sue districts if teachers don’t comply. School districts would be saddled with the cost of those lawsuits, experts say.

More broadly, Kempf said, the bills would pose risks to schools and educators in the form of potential ultra vires claims, which enable citizens to sue public officials who violate state laws. Although it’s not clear if these types of lawsuits would be successful, Klosterboer said, the larger impact is more confusion and headaches for schools.

“When a law is vague, it allows for discriminatory and targeted enforcement. And it also creates a very hostile and chilling atmosphere where people … go out of their way to self-censor,” Kempf said.

The bills’ vague language could also present challenges for schools trying to protect teachers from potential lawsuits.

“[Schools] might not even know what to tell teachers and staff how to actually protect themselves and protect the school district,” Klosterboer said.

Klosterboer added that it seems “very likely” that if Gov. Greg Abbott signs one of the bills into law, it would invite legal challenges.

[…]

Ultimately, LGBTQ advocates argue that these legislative actions are just another attack on an already marginalized population. As of last week, Texas Republican lawmakers have already filed 35 anti-LGBTQ bills for the 2023 session, far outnumbering the number of such bills that were filed ahead of the 2021 session, according to [Ricardo Martinez, CEO of Equality Texas].

“The legislation is meant to stigmatize LGBTQ people, isolate LGBTQ kids, and make teachers fearful of providing safe and inclusive classrooms,” he said.

There is ongoing litigation over Florida’s “don’t say gay” law. It will eventually be decided by SCOTUS. So yeah, that’s going great, too.

I would like to say something encouraging here. For sure, plenty of smart and passionate and dedicated people will do everything they can to fight these terrible bills, and you should do everything you can to help them. But the reality is that the Republicans have the numbers. They can pass whatever bills they want. This is what they want to do, and they believe they have a mandate after the 2022 election. They’re not going to stop until they’re voted out. Again, I wish I could tell you something else, but I can’t. It’s going to be a very rough six months. The Observer has more.

Posted in That's our Lege | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Lawsuit filed to keep The Former Guy off the 2024 ballot

Posted on January 10, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Good luck with that.

Former president Donald Trump is facing a legal challenge to his 2024 bid for the presidency from a fellow Republican.

John Anthony Castro, an attorney from Texas and long-shot candidate for president in 2024, filed the lawsuit in federal court on Friday arguing that Trump was constitutionally ineligible to hold office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Known as the “Disqualification Clause,” the section prohibits anyone who engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States from holding “any office, civil or military, under the United States.” Castro is arguing that Trump’s involvement in the January 6th insurrection should disqualify him from holding public office again.

“The framers of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment intended the constitutional provision to be both self-executing and to provide a cause of action,” Castro, who’s representing himself, wrote in the complaint. “More specifically, the Union sought to punish the insurrectionary Confederacy by making their ability to hold public office unconstitutional.”

The Disqualification Clause mostly sat dormant since 1869 until last fall, when a New Mexico judge ousted Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin from his position on the Otero County Commission for breaching the Capitol complex on Jan. 6.

Several advocacy groups, including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), have vowed to pursue similar legal action against Trump during his 2024 run.

“The evidence that Trump engaged in insurrection is overwhelming,” CREW President Noah Bookbinder wrote in a letter to the former president on Nov. 3, before he declared his candidacy. “We are ready, willing and able to take action to make sure the Constitution is upheld and Trump is prevented from holding office.”

Castro was among the giant herd of candidates who ran in the CD06 special election in 2021. He won 5.51% of the vote, which was probably in the top half of performers. I saw another story about this that described him as a “long shot candidate”, and I’d say that’s accurate. He filed this lawsuit in Florida, and ironically drew the Trump-toadiest judge out there, Aileen Cannon; he says he plans to disqualify her from hearing the case, which checks out. He also noted that the advocacy groups that intend to file their own lawsuits will do so later in the year, and he wanted to get out ahead of things. I don’t expect anything to happen with this lawsuit, but it ought to be fun to watch regardless. Bloomberg has more.

Posted in Election 2024, Legal matters, The making of the President | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lawsuit filed to keep The Former Guy off the 2024 ballot

March Madness could get bigger

Posted on January 10, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Here’s the story you probably heard about.

A recommendation by the NCAA’s Division I Transformation Committee issued Tuesday would expand the NCAA basketball tournaments to 90 teams.

The committee tasked with finding “opportunities to modernize college sports” issued several recommendations in a 39-page report, most notably the expansion of postseason tournaments. From the report, the committee issued the following recommendation:

Accommodate access for 25% of active Division I members in good standing in team sports sponsored by more than 200 schools.

This would include both the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments and expand both fields. Each tournament currently invites 68 teams. There are 358 Division I men’s basketball programs and 350 women’s programs. A field of 25% would break down to roughly 90 teams for each tournament, assuming the NCAA would seek to keep both fields the same size.

Tuesday’s recommendation is strictly that — a recommendation. It will go to the Division I board of directors for consideration at next week’s NCAA convention. Expansion would also require approval of each sport’s governing body. The committee called for final recommendations to be made by January 2024 in time to be implemented for the 2024-25 seasons.

The report has a lot more stuff in it about things like medical coverage, mental health services, degree completion and more, but the possible tournament expansion was the subject of the headlines. It’s also not likely to happen anytime soon.

There was some predictable, dismayed reactions to the NCAA Division I Transformation Committee’s official set of recommendations released on Tuesday. The most notable proposal is the option for D-I sports with 200-plus teams to allow championship brackets to fill by as many as 25% of that sport’s membership. In college basketball, this means the bracket could grow as large as 90 teams.

But the NCAA Tournament isn’t going to expand to 90 teams.

I doubt it’s going to expand at all — at least any time soon. My belief is buttressed by conversations with a handful of high-ranking sources across the industry.

“Going to 90, you’d roll on the floor laughing at the quality of teams,” one NCAA source said. “It’s unfathomable that someone could think that’s a good idea.”

There is stern belief among many NCAA Tournament power brokers that significant expansion (say, anything north of 80 teams) isn’t desired and won’t be happening, according to my sources. Minor expansion (going to 72 or 76) doesn’t carry temptation right now either but would theoretically be more plausible way down the road if push ever came to shove.

“There’s been no consideration, despite opportunities multiple times, for expansion,” another source said. “It’s never gotten a serious consideration. Not even remotely.”

That’s one part missing from this discourse. The NCAA didn’t need the Transformation Committee’s permission to consider expansion. It’s always an option. The fact it’s never grown beyond 68 speaks volumes, especially after a trial balloon about a 96-team tournament was roundly ridiculed in 2010.

Expansion isn’t something that can be done over a few lengthy Zoom meetings. It would take years of planning and thousands of hours of coordination between dozens of very important people. Who ultimately decides? The Division I men’s basketball committee (i.e. selection committee members), which has logically opted against expansion in the past 12 years. NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt, who oversees that committee, would be the biggest voice in the room, in addition to other senior NCAA staff. From there, the men’s basketball oversight committee would have to approve any changes before a vote went to the Board of Directors.

But that’s not in the plans right now.

There’s more, and however you feel about this idea the case that it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon and maybe shouldn’t happen at all (or only at a more modest level) is compelling. I had forgotten about the 2010 proposal that went nowhere; there had been some rumblings about expansion before that as well. I’ll be honest and say that I’d love to see the tournament expand out to 96 teams – the top 32 seeds would get a bye in this scenario, which ought to reduce the concerns about having more non-competitive games. I’d like to see more teams from the non-power conferences get a shot. There are 40 teams in the NIT every year, the big bracket can accommodate a larger field. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for it, but I hope that someday it will happen.

Posted in Other sports | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Precinct analysis: County executive offices

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

PREVIOUSLY
Beto versus Abbott
Beto versus the spread
Hidalgo versus Mealer
Better statewide races
Not as good statewide races

County races appear towards the bottom of the ballot, after all of the federal and state races. With the exception of County Judge, which is the first county office to appear, the other county races come after any county judicial elections, which we know in a non-presidential year is another two dozen, on top of all of the state judicial races you’ve just slogged through. In addition, unlike Presidential years when higher profile county offices like Sheriff and County Attorney and Tax Assessor appear (District Attorney is a state office), the ones on this ballot are low profile and mostly clerical in nature. You’d think this would be a recipe for a lot of indifference, but you’d be wrong.

District Clerk


Dist   Daniel  Burgess
======================
HD126  37,324   21,321
HD127  40,530   24,529
HD128  32,461   12,922
HD129  38,729   24,583
HD130  46,537   18,686
HD131   6,206   24,390
HD132  36,431   23,448
HD133  36,406   22,666
HD134  34,947   43,974
HD135  17,150   22,829
HD137   8,475   12,264
HD138  33,169   22,469
HD139  12,722   30,247
HD140   6,030   12,441
HD141   4,753   20,212
HD142   9,326   24,514
HD143   8,856   14,935
HD144  12,051   13,606
HD145  14,698   29,537
HD146   9,455   31,723
HD147  10,255   35,167
HD148  16,522   19,677
HD149  12,365   18,661
HD150  35,089   21,326
						
CC1    76,230  193,216
CC2    99,401  100,543
CC3   227,842  132,864
CC4   117,014  119,504
						
JP1    69,316  114,700
JP2    22,682   28,410
JP3    36,215   40,683
JP4   175,012  119,960
JP5   149,310  134,380
JP6     5,571   16,529
JP7    12,934   64,034
JP8    49,447   27,431

Dist  Daniel% Burgess%
======================
HD126  63.64%   36.36%
HD127  62.30%   37.70%
HD128  71.53%   28.47%
HD129  61.17%   38.83%
HD130  71.35%   28.65%
HD131  20.28%   79.72%
HD132  60.84%   39.16%
HD133  61.63%   38.37%
HD134  44.28%   55.72%
HD135  42.90%   57.10%
HD137  40.87%   59.13%
HD138  59.62%   40.38%
HD139  29.61%   70.39%
HD140  32.65%   67.35%
HD141  19.04%   80.96%
HD142  27.56%   72.44%
HD143  37.22%   62.78%
HD144  46.97%   53.03%
HD145  33.23%   66.77%
HD146  22.96%   77.04%
HD147  22.58%   77.42%
HD148  45.64%   54.36%
HD149  39.85%   60.15%
HD150  62.20%   37.80%
		
CC1    28.29%   71.71%
CC2    49.71%   50.29%
CC3    63.17%   36.83%
CC4    49.47%   50.53%
		
JP1    37.67%   62.33%
JP2    44.39%   55.61%
JP3    47.09%   52.91%
JP4    59.33%   40.67%
JP5    52.63%   47.37%
JP6    25.21%   74.79%
JP7    16.80%   83.20%
JP8    64.32%   35.68%

County Clerk


Dist  Stanart Hudspeth
======================
HD126  37,148   21,466
HD127  40,320   24,703
HD128  32,499   12,847
HD129  38,545   24,668
HD130  46,489   18,687
HD131   6,108   24,414
HD132  36,340   23,537
HD133  35,551   23,419
HD134  33,450   45,266
HD135  17,148   22,783
HD137   8,351   12,378
HD138  32,881   22,695
HD139  12,541   30,343
HD140   6,042   12,353
HD141   4,662   20,252
HD142   9,132   24,642
HD143   8,824   14,858
HD144  12,065   13,483
HD145  14,403   29,681
HD146   9,172   31,975
HD147   9,910   35,410
HD148  16,397   19,705
HD149  12,239   18,708
HD150  34,989   21,381
						
CC1    73,858  195,066
CC2    99,209  100,166
CC3   226,675  133,751
CC4   115,464  120,671
						
JP1    67,346  116,157
JP2    22,622   28,241
JP3    35,962   40,821
JP4   174,354  120,349
JP5   147,642  135,687
JP6     5,490   16,504
JP7    12,417   64,481
JP8    49,373   27,414

Dist Stanart%Hudspeth%
======================
HD126  63.38%   36.62%
HD127  62.01%   37.99%
HD128  71.67%   28.33%
HD129  60.98%   39.02%
HD130  71.33%   28.67%
HD131  20.01%   79.99%
HD132  60.69%   39.31%
HD133  60.29%   39.71%
HD134  42.49%   57.51%
HD135  42.94%   57.06%
HD137  40.29%   59.71%
HD138  59.16%   40.84%
HD139  29.24%   70.76%
HD140  32.85%   67.15%
HD141  18.71%   81.29%
HD142  27.04%   72.96%
HD143  37.26%   62.74%
HD144  47.22%   52.78%
HD145  32.67%   67.33%
HD146  22.29%   77.71%
HD147  21.87%   78.13%
HD148  45.42%   54.58%
HD149  39.55%   60.45%
HD150  62.07%   37.93%
		
CC1    27.46%   72.54%
CC2    49.76%   50.24%
CC3    62.89%   37.11%
CC4    48.90%   51.10%
		
JP1    36.70%   63.30%
JP2    44.48%   55.52%
JP3    46.84%   53.16%
JP4    59.16%   40.84%
JP5    52.11%   47.89%
JP6    24.96%   75.04%
JP7    16.15%   83.85%
JP8    64.30%   35.70%

County Treasurer


Dist    Scott    Wyatt
======================
HD126  37,264   21,436
HD127  40,378   24,663
HD128  32,433   12,955
HD129  38,523   24,788
HD130  46,578   18,647
HD131   6,062   24,496
HD132  36,413   23,479
HD133  35,705   23,303
HD134  33,479   45,200
HD135  17,156   22,790
HD137   8,369   12,377
HD138  32,829   22,780
HD139  12,576   30,341
HD140   5,929   12,518
HD141   4,682   20,256
HD142   9,167   24,621
HD143   8,706   15,000
HD144  11,924   13,703
HD145  14,410   29,702
HD146   9,159   31,995
HD147  10,015   35,364
HD148  16,333   19,766
HD149  12,214   18,772
HD150  35,168   21,262
						
CC1    74,077  194,887
CC2    98,597  101,176
CC3   227,110  133,538
CC4   115,688  120,613
						
JP1    67,326  116,212
JP2    22,460   28,561
JP3    35,972   40,808
JP4   174,785  120,166
JP5   147,814  135,680
JP6     5,410   16,643
JP7    12,496   64,441
JP8    49,209   27,703

Dist   Scott%   Wyatt%
======================
HD126  63.48%   36.52%
HD127  62.08%   37.92%
HD128  71.46%   28.54%
HD129  60.85%   39.15%
HD130  71.41%   28.59%
HD131  19.84%   80.16%
HD132  60.80%   39.20%
HD133  60.51%   39.49%
HD134  42.55%   57.45%
HD135  42.95%   57.05%
HD137  40.34%   59.66%
HD138  59.04%   40.96%
HD139  29.30%   70.70%
HD140  32.14%   67.86%
HD141  18.77%   81.23%
HD142  27.13%   72.87%
HD143  36.72%   63.28%
HD144  46.53%   53.47%
HD145  32.67%   67.33%
HD146  22.26%   77.74%
HD147  22.07%   77.93%
HD148  45.25%   54.75%
HD149  39.42%   60.58%
HD150  62.32%   37.68%
		
CC1    27.54%   72.46%
CC2    49.35%   50.65%
CC3    62.97%   37.03%
CC4    48.96%   51.04%
		
JP1    36.68%   63.32%
JP2    44.02%   55.98%
JP3    46.85%   53.15%
JP4    59.26%   40.74%
JP5    52.14%   47.86%
JP6    24.53%   75.47%
JP7    16.24%   83.76%
JP8    63.98%   36.02%

Despite appearing so much lower on the ballot, the per-district vote totals in these races are about the same for the two major parties. They’re lower overall because there are no third party candidates in these races, and that lack of mostly Libertarians does seem to be better for the Republicans than the Democrats. Not enough to swing any individual district – only the two swing Commissioners Court precincts are that close to begin with, and the Dems prevailed in all three races here anyway.

The simple fact is that despite the lack of straight-ticket voting, and the often-complained-about length of the ballot, people voted to the bottom of it anyway. There were more people who skipped these races than did so for Railroad Commissioner, the last of the statewide executive offices, but not that much more. About 40K people on average skipped these three races, compared with a bit less than 23K for RRC. That looks like a significant difference, but it’s still less than four percent of the total turnout. Putting it another way, more than 96% of the people who cast a ballot in November of 2022 cast a ballot in these three races.

That is slightly less than it was in 2018, the last year of straight ticket voting, when nearly 97% of the people who voted cast ballots in these races, plus the two countywide HCDE races; to put it another way, the undervote rate in these races was generally between 2.5 and 3 percent. Some people will skip races that are not of interest to them, I will absolutely stipulate to that. I’m just saying it’s not as much as you might think.

Two more things: One is that the undervote rate was higher in judicial races. I’ll go into more detail on those in subsequent posts, but even there it topped out at about five percent. I’m here to tell you, because I’ve looked at this before, the undervote rate in City Council races is much higher than that, and that’s a much shorter ballot. The other thing, and this may be my favorite bit of data from this election, is that there were about 800 more votes in the Treasurer race than there were in the County Clerk race, which was immediately before the Treasurer’s race on the ballot. Carla Wyatt, the Treasurer-elect, won more than 60% of those 800+ extra votes. Why did those eight hundred and some people vote in the Treasurer’s race but not the County Clerk’s race? I have no idea. But they did, and finding little oddities like that always delights me. I hope it at least amuses you. Let me know if you have any questions.

Posted in Election 2022 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Texas Department of Agriculture sort of recognizes climate change

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

It’s a start, I guess.

On the heels of a historic drought that devastated crops from the High Plains to South Texas, a new Texas Department of Agriculture report released Tuesday linked climate change with food insecurity and identified it as a potential threat to the state’s food supply.

The food access study, coordinated by the TDA and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, notes that “climate instability” is strongly associated with soil loss, water quality, droughts, fires, floods and other environmental disasters. 2022 was one of the driest years on record for Texas, and about 49% of the state was still in drought conditions at the end of December. The drought resulted in failed crops, low yields for farmers and diminished grazing, which forced ranchers to cull their cattle and led to the highest amount of livestock sales — nearly $2.7 million — in more than a decade.

“From the agricultural perspective, concerns were expressed regarding droughts, drying up of artisanal wells, water use restrictions, fire threats and dangerous conditions for farm workers,” the report says.

Extended dry periods devastated Texas’ agricultural production, said Victor Murphy, a climate service program manager with the National Weather Service.

“We’re seeing longer periods without any precipitation, then when it does come, it’s in shorter, more intense bursts,” he said.

In total, Texas received a similar amount of precipitation in 2022 as in 2021, but most of that precipitation came all at once at the end of the summer.

Much of the state went through the worst of the drought conditions from June to August, during the high heat of the summer while plants are still growing. This was a sharp contrast to the torrential rainfall totals that followed. At the end of August, the Dallas-Fort Worth area was hit with a 1,000-year flood that brought 13 inches of rainfall in 18 hours.

[…]

The report recommends several actions, including having farmers work alongside researchers and policymakers, creating more food forests that allow trees to restore soil health and improve water quality, and strengthening bonds between local farmers and businesses to boost the farm-to-school infrastructure.

The report, which was submitted to the Texas Legislature on Dec. 31, also points to other factors that are making it harder for Texans to access and afford food, such as wages falling behind rising costs of living and lack of access to food in rural areas. Another issue is organizations being unaware of others with similar goals; for example, the report notes that certain grocers are interested in expanding delivery services into rural markets, while several food banks have acquired trucks to do the same.

The study includes suggestions that lawmakers could consider to help more Texans have consistent food access, such as expanding online and delivery options for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program participants and allowing more stores to accept those benefits.

Lawmakers have already filed some bills to address food insecurity during this year’s legislative session. State Rep. Shawn Thierry, D-Houston, filed House Bill 1118, which would offer tax credits to grocery stores that open in food deserts.

There’s no link to the report in the story, and I couldn’t find anything obvious on the TDA homepage or Twitter feed, so you’ll have to take what this story gives you. I wouldn’t expect the Lege to do much about this – they’re no more likely to care about the food insecurity of poor folks than they are about climate change – but at least they’ve been told about it.

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Texas Department of Agriculture sort of recognizes climate change

Driverless taxi service arrives in Austin

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Brace yourselves, Austinites.

A rite of passage as an Austinite is feeling bewildered at other drivers’ choices behind the wheel, but that’s starting to change. Cruise, a driverless ridehailing app, has completed its first driverless rides in Austin, marking its official launch.

It was a quick turnaround for the company, which announced its intentions in the Capital City in September, calling the feat “going from zero to driverless in about 90 days.” The service is only in three cities so far — based in San Francisco and expanded out to Austin and Phoenix — but given the success of that timeline, it’s reasonable to expect much more as soon as the company announces it.

“Folks, we are entering the golden years of [autonomous vehicle] expansion,” tweeted Crusie CEO Kyle Vogt while announcing the achievement on December 20.

Vogt seems to be right, at least in Austin. News about driverless vehicles keeps popping up, from pioneering autonomous Lyft rides to independent delivery robots for Chick-fil-A and Ikea. A major difference is the patron; while most other autonomous driving news is centered on using the technology for a well-known company providing value in other spaces, Cruise is driving for itself. (It has, however, received investment funds from companies like Honda and Walmart.)

Rider testimony focuses on safety with an aura of giddiness. Even amid the novelty displayed in a video Vogt shared, riders talked about the vehicle’s caution and smoothness. A safety page on the company’s website claims several measures including constant 360-degree vision, a sensitivity to even very light external touch, and communication between fleet vehicles to assist in machine learning. And if all else fails, the company emphasizes “end-to-end redundancy,” meaning that the system can compensate for failures.

See here for some background and a bit of caution about the actual experience. I don’t really know what the appeal of a driverless taxi is, but whatever it is, Austin would be the first place I’d look for it in Texas, too. If this is something you feel you must try, go here and get on the wait list. And please, please tell us all about it after.

Posted in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Driverless taxi service arrives in Austin

Weekend link dump for January 8

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

“Not only did Greta Thunberg destroy Andrew Tate with her tweet, she made him so angry he inadvertently tipped off Romanian authorities of his presence in Romania with his lame comeback video.”

“Why can’t we make remote controls thick and heavy again?”

“Let’s talk about the real problems with rural America”.

“Google’s embrace of publisher confidentiality means roughly 1 million publishers can remain anonymous to companies and individuals who buy ads on its network to reach customers. This opens the door to a range of abuses and schemes that steal potentially billions of dollars a year and put lives and livelihoods at risk due to dangerous disinformation, fraud and scams.”

RIP, Anita Pointer, Grammy-winning singer with the Pointer Sisters.

Time once again to vote for the Worthy Awards.

Advice on the minimum amount of work needed to protect your data and privacy.

RIP, Cliff Gustafson, longtime baseball coach at the University of Texas, two-time College World Series winner, formerly the winningest baseball coach in the NCAA.

Another “wellness to QAnon pipeline” example.

RIP, Walt Cunningham, Apollo 7 astronaut who was on the first crewed Apollo flight.

RIP, Orion Know, Jr, one of the discoverers of Natural Bridge Caverns.

“Five things to expect from the incoming House”. You’ve already seen plenty of the chaos, and there’s so much more to come.

To put it another way, the worst people you know are having a fight.

“There are other critical functions that the House of Representatives executes that can’t take place until there’s a Speaker in place. Without a Speaker, committee assignments can’t be finalized.”

“An ancient wooden sarcophagus that was featured at the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences was returned to Egypt after U.S. authorities determined it was looted years ago, Egyptian officials said Monday.”

RIP, James “Buster” Corley, co-founder of Dave & Buster’s.

The next Benoit Blanc film will not have Muppets in it. Sadly.

“Kevin is a man with many flaws, but on this day his fatal one was not heeding the lesson of the leopard-eating-faces allegory.”

“The longtime partner of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died after the Jan. 6 riot, filed a wrongful death lawsuit Thursday against former President Donald Trump and two men involved in assaulting Sicknick.”

RIP, Nate Colbert, former MLB first baseman and still the all-time home run leader for the San Diego Padres.

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A walk through four districts, part 3: Try this at home!

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

In Part One I described my weird idea to take a stroll into four Congressional districts, something I decided I could do after taking a close look at the new map in Houston. In Part 2, I took you on that walk with me. Now I’m going to show how this could be done elsewhere and with different types of districts.

We do redistricting every ten years, so you might wonder why I picked Congressional districts as the object of this little obsession. Congressional redistricting had national implications, of course. As this recent DMN story points out, Texas Republicans squeezed out four more districts than the overall electoral numbers suggest they were entitled to, giving them nearly all of the seats needed to achieve a majority in the House. I wasn’t thinking of that a year ago, of course, but I definitely spent more time thinking about the Congressional map than about the others. It was that new Congressional map that I had zoomed in on, to see what things looked like in my immediate area, that gave me the inspiration.

But what about those other maps? How about in the State House, where the districts are smaller and there are 24 of them in Harris County? (There ought to be 25, but that’s a whole ‘nother thing.) In the previous map, my neighborhood was sliced in half for no particular reason, which meant that I’d travel between HDs 145 and 148 every day walking my dog. Our neighborhood has been reunited under the new map, so I would need to travel a little farther to cross State House boundaries. That made me think, which State House districts did I pass through as I did Wednesday’s walk? Let’s take a look!

I started in HD145, entered HD147 when I turned south on Heights after walking along the boundary once I passed Studewood, and then reached the boundary with HD134 at Washington. I was fully in HD134 once I was west of Shepherd.

But look closer! With a slight modification, I could have started in HD142, on Jensen south of Lorraine, walked north to Quitman, then followed the same route to eventually get to HD134, with a terminus at the HEB just south of Washington. I didn’t fool around with Google Maps for this, but that looks like a roughly equivalent distance. I’m not surprised that this was doable in such close proximity, but I would not have guessed that these would be the four districts involved. This is why it’s fun to play with maps, kids.

That wasn’t where I had picked for what may be the shortest walk needed to be in four State House districts. Take a look at this:

Just start on Yorktown and walk till you’re past Fayette. Google Maps shows this as 1.6 miles because it won’t let you cross San Felipe or Westheimer at Yorktown – it insists on making you hike all the way to Sage, then doubling back on Westheimer to return to Yorktown – so as the crow flies it’s probably not much more than a mile. Someone who knows that area better than I do will have to tell me why you can’t just walk all the way down Yorktown. Be that as it may, even with the detours, it’s a pretty short walk.

By the way, why is that tiny rectangle south of Westheimer and east of Chimney Rock in HD137 and not HD134? I have no idea. Either it’s a super-optimization of whatever evil redistricting software the Republicans used, or someone asked for that specific change for some reason. I’ll throw the question out to you if you think you know the answer.

There are a couple of other possibilities in Harris County. Zooming out a bit, south of I-10 and east of US59 you could get from HD142 to HD147 via HDs 142 and 145, and north of 610 you could get from HD141 to HD145 via HDs 140 and 142, though you’d have to cross US59 to do it, which might be dicey on foot.

Looking elsewhere in the state, I see possibilities in San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas, where I even see a possible five-district walk:

Start in that weird southern finger of HD108 and head south-ish to wind up in HD104, passing through HDs 114, 100, and 103 along the way. You have to cross the junction of I-30 and I-35, which sounds like a nightmare, but maybe it’s doable. Point is, these districts are all right up against each other.

You might think that State Senate districts would be too large for this, as there are eight fewer of them than there are Congressional districts. Challenge accepted:

Start on Piney Point Road near San Felipe and head south as it becomes Fondren, and go a few blocks south of Richmond, to have visited SDs 07, 17, 15, and 13. There may be other possibilities elsewhere, but I was happy enough with that to quit looking.

Going back to Congress for a minute, I see opportunities again in San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas as before. That DMN story highlights a couple of places where the distance between one district and another, with a third in between, is ridiculously thin, like less than a quarter mile in the Dallas case. But just to finish this post, let me show you what my original walk route looked like under the old map:

Starting a bit farther east on Quitman in CD29, I could have headed on Quitman to White Oak to either Studewood or Yale, then gone south to Allen Parkway and east to Shepherd to visit CDs 18, 02, and 07 along the way. That might even have been a slightly shorter walk. Just a reminder that this was a thing before I ever decided to try it out, and will likely continue to be a thing ten years from now when we do this all again. Now go play with those maps and plan your own walk.

PS: I should have noted sooner that John Nova Lomax did a great series of articles some years ago when he wrote for the Houston Press in which he walked the entire length of a well-known Houston thoroughfare – Richmond and Shepherd are the two I remember from the series – and wrote about the experience. Some of the walks he took were in excess of ten miles and took him all day; he had planned meal and bathroom stops along the way, out of necessity. I don’t have that on my itinerary any time soon, but I was thinking about it as I did this walk.

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HISD asked to hold off on redistricting

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

There are still concerns about the proposed map.

Community members and advocates are asking the Houston ISD board to redraw its redistricting plans to keep communities in southwest Houston together so that the votes of Latinos and immigrants are not diluted.

The Gulfton, Mid-West, Westwood, Braeburn and Sharpstown neighborhoods are split among three different districts in the proposals being made to rebalance the district’s nine trustee districts to account for 2020 census figures.

“We believe southwest Houston is compact enough to keep it in one district,” said Juan Cardoza-Oquendo, director of public policy for Houston in Action. “It’s not big enough where these immigrant communities would have power in multiple districts.”

[…]

Maria Benzon, a parent who works at Sugar Grove Academy, a middle school in Sharpstown, urged the board to not vote until these concerns are addressed.

“I’m here today to ask that you delay any votes on the district plan, and consider a more equitable version than (the proposed plans),” Benzon said. “I know these areas. Historically, these communities have had voting power diluted by three districts — 5, 6 and 7, and they have not been represented by people with similar backgrounds and experiences.”

This is the first time advocates have asked the board to delay. In December, the sent a letter to the board to hold off on voting claiming informational meetings were not well publicized and were at inconvenient times.

“As you can see by the majority of speakers, there is still some concern about redistricting,” Trustee Patricia Allen, who represents District IV said. “I think we need to take time to listen to the community in case we need to adjust.”

See here and here for the background, and here for the HISD redistricting page, which includes the two proposed maps. I don’t know enough about the area to comment on the feedback, but I favor HISD taking the time to iron out as many points of conflict that they can. The realistic deadline for getting this done, to allow time for the elections office to update all of its files and give potential candidates the opportunity to consider their options before the late August filing deadline, is in February. I’m hopeful we can get it done.

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Don’t Musk my rural Texas

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

For your perusal.

In August 2021, a handful of Bastrop County residents noticed something big unfolding on quiet Walker Watson Road.

The two-lane road, about a quarter-mile long from end to end, bisects cow pastures, corn fields and woods. It’s lined by 15 homesteads, most on lots of 1 acre or more. Farmers have lived there for generations. Other residents are newcomers looking to escape the hassles of city life.

What they had in common was an appreciation for the area’s peacefulness.

Then the cement trucks, backhoes and tractors arrived.

Seemingly overnight, an 80,000-square-foot warehouse and on-site modular homes for employee went up on the south side of the road, towering over the fields. The construction frenzy brought noise at all hours, light pollution and heavy traffic.

Residents soon learned that the newcomer was The Boring Co., a tunnel firm owned by Elon Musk, one of the richest men on Earth.

One year later, the commercial rocket company SpaceX, another Musk-owned firm, started building a 521,000-square-foot structure across the street from The Boring Co. property.

Emails between SpaceX and Bastrop County officials indicate that the company plans to build a manufacturing plant at the site for Starlink, a subsidiary that’s creating a global broadband internet network via satellites. Construction began in May 2022.

Neighbors say the companies have created nuisances besides noise and strong nighttime lighting, including water runoff spilling onto the roadway. Records obtained by the Express-News back up those claims. The documents also reveal that the companies have pressured Bastrop County officials to approve numerous permits at breakneck speed, and that The Boring Co. has been cited for two code violations and issued three warnings of noncompliance.

On June 22 of this year, then-county engineer Robert Pugh complained in a letter to Bastrop County Commissioner Clara Beckett about the heavy demands both companies had placed on the county’s Development Services Department, which has a dozen employees in engineering and development-related jobs.

Pugh wrote that staff had been “regularly hounded” by Boring Co. and Starlink employees and consultants to “expedite and approve permit applications that are incomplete and not in compliance with the Commissioners Court (CC) regulations.”

[…]

“Sooner or later, I knew either my health or urban sprawl would take this little spot of nature away from me. I never dreamed it would be industry,” said Lynn Collier, who owns a ranch on the road with her two brothers. “I never dreamed that a factory would just come and buy all this up.”

So far, The Boring Co. has dug a tunnel between the two companies’ properties — which total about 100 acres — and built a miniature neighborhood on its site, complete with a soon-to-open Montessori school.

Collier sees strong similarities between her corner of Bastrop County and Boca Chica, near Brownsville in South Texas, where SpaceX has snapped up many residential properties near its spaceport. The company ceremoniously renamed the community “Starbase.” The Boring Co. has offered to buy out homeowners in Bastrop County, too.

“If you are someplace in rural Texas, and somebody has enough money, they just take over,” she said. “If it can happen here, it could happen anywhere.”

I’m not a rural person, and I would have expected there to be a lot of growth and construction in Bastrop County because of its proximity to Travis County. As someone who has driven to Austin via State Highway 71, which goes through Bastrop, for over 30 years, anyone can tell you that it is vastly different than it used to be. I don’t doubt that things are more frenetic than ever and that this can be chaotic and unpleasant for residents there. I also don’t doubt that anyone in Elon Musk’s orbit will do whatever they can to game things in his companies’ favor, whatever the cost to others may be. I don’t have any prescriptions here, I just thought this was an interesting read. Good luck to all those that have to deal with this.

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A walk through four districts, part 2: Now with pictures

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

In yesterday’s post I described my weird idea to take a stroll into four Congressional districts, something I decided I could do after taking a close look at the new map in Houston. On Wednesday, a bit more than a year after I first conceived of this silly idea, I finally did it. Here’s a little photo essay of my journey.

I started out as noted at the Leonel Castillo Community Center, on Quitman at South, just east of I-45.

CD29_LeonelCastilloCenter

This was in CD29, but I wasn’t going to be there for long. I intentionally started at a point near the boundary with CD18 – this walk was going to be long enough, I didn’t need to make it any longer. As I walked over the Quitman bridge, at some point I passed from CD29 into CD18. Where exactly that line is I have no idea – I have joked before about the crazy way that CD35 is drawn between Austin and San Antonio, and that you can cross into other Congressional districts by changing lanes on I-35 – but it’s there somewhere. We’ll discuss this a bit more later, as it’s a bit more relevant when there are houses and businesses there along the border. Here it’s just traffic.

CD29_OverI45

West of I-45 on Quitman and I am unquestionably in CD18. The White Oak hike and bike trail beckoned me to the south.

CD18_QuitmanNorth

As I passed Houston Avenue and Quitman became White Oak, I had a choice to make. As you saw on my Google map, my walking path was along White Oak. But the sidewalk isn’t consistent, there’s a lot of cars whooshing past, and the hike and bike trail will get me where I want to go as well. What would you choose?

CD18_PathNotTaken

The choice was easy for me, though I should note that the path to the left that led down to the trail wasn’t paved all the way and I had to step carefully to avoid getting all muddy. But it was worth it.

CD18_BikePathAndHeron

I didn’t even notice that heron as I was taking the picture. I only saw him later as I was putting this all together. Going this way gave me another excuse to walk across the new trail extension. The view of downtown from where the extension meets the MKT trail, especially on a gorgeous morning like Wednesday was, just can’t be beat.

CD18_MKTTrail

Don’t ever let anyone trash Houston’s aesthetics. The MKT trail put me back on White Oak the street, and soon enough I reached Heights Boulevard, which is where CD18 ends and CD07 begins. But unlike the CD29/CD18 boundary along I-45, the exact location of that invisible line matters. As in, my belief was that the east side of Heights was still in CD18 while the west side was in CD07. I know these things have to exist somewhere but that will always be weird to me.

CD07_YaleStreet

Yale Street, to my immediate right and visible as I crossed over the bayou again just south of I-10, is fully inside CD07. I started on the CD18 side of Heights but crossed to the CD07 side a bit before I reached I-10. When I reached Washington Avenue, I was at the southern border of CD18 and was going to be fully in CD07 for most of the rest of the trip.

CD07_HeightsWashington

I have to say, the sidewalks along this stretch of Washington Avenue were atrocious, especially after having been on the hike and bike trails as well as on Heights. Broken and occasionally missing, with utility poles right in the middle of a much narrower space – I could have only done this as a fully able-bodied person. I may do a separate post on that, but go see it for yourself if you can. One corollary to this is that I could have both shortened my walk and dodged fewer obstacles if I had taken a slightly different path. West of Shepherd, CD38 was only a few blocks to the south. I could have turned down Sandman, for example, and been in CD38 just before Shepherd and Durham merge together at Feagan.

CD07_SandmanShortcutToCD38

But I stayed the course, and soon enough I had reached the traffic circle at Westcott.

CD38_WashingtonTrafficCircle

That was the view from the west side of the circle, on what I believe was Arnot, though I didn’t see a street sign. It’s in CD38, whatever it was. Again, the boundary was likely somewhere in the middle of the road, in this case Westcott. Maybe if state law required that the state pay to create and install signs at every district border, we’d get slightly less goofy districts. Be that as it may, this is the end.

I’ll have a brief wrapup and a suggestion for further pedestrian research if you’re interested. Let me know what you thought of this little tour.

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Additional Losing Candidates File Election Contests in Harris County

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

That’s the subject of the following email I got in my inbox yesterday, and I can’t do any better than that for a post title.

Additional Losing Candidates File Election Contests in Harris County

Houston, Texas – Today, several losing Republican candidates filed election contests to void the more than 1 million votes cast in Harris County’s November 2022 election. Thus far, the Harris County Attorney’s Office has identified filings by (and we expect more filings to be made today):

  • Mark Montgomery, former candidate for Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 6 (lost to Judge Kelley Andrews)
  • Matthew Dexter, former candidate for Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 12 (lost to Judge Genesis Draper)
  • Brian Staley, former candidate for Harris County Civil County Court at Law No. 4. (lost to Judge Manpreet Monica Singh)
  • Mark Goldberg, former candidate for Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 8 (lost to Judge Erika Ramirez)
  • Bruce Bain, former candidate for the 269th District Court (lost to Judge Cory Sepolio)
  • Michelle Fraga, former candidate for the 281st District Court (lost to Judge Christine Weems)
  • Elizabeth Buss, former candidate for the Harris County Criminal Court at Law No. 5 (lost to Judge David Fleischer)
  • Chris Daniel, former candidate for Harris County District Clerk (lost to Marilyn Burgess)

These filings are in addition to previously announced contests by:

  • Erin Lunceford, former candidate for the 189th District Court (lost to Judge Tamika Craft)
  • Tami Pierce, former candidate for the 180th District Court (lost to Judge DaSean Jones)
  • Alexandra Mealer, former candidate for Harris County Judge (lost to Judge Lina Hidalgo)
  • Mike May, former candidate for State Representative District 135 (lost to Representative Jon Rosenthal)

Below is the statement from the County Attorney released this morning:

“This is a shameful attempt by a group of losing candidates who couldn’t win the hearts and minds of Harris County voters and are now throwing nonsensical legal theories at the wall to see what sticks. Each of them should be deeply embarrassed and these claims should not be taken seriously by the public,” said Harris County Attorney Christian D. Menefee. “These losing candidates are finally laying bare what we all know to be true – for them, it’s not about improving elections or making sure our elections are secure, it’s about playing games with our democratic systems and refusing to accept the will of the voters.”

The contests being filed request that the more than one million votes cast in Harris County be voided and the county hold another election for the races being challenged (e.g., Harris County Judge, 189th District Court, 180th District Court, etc.).

“These election contests are frivolous attempts to overturn the votes of more than a million residents in the third largest county in the country. The county will now have to spend substantial resources handling these contests, time that could instead be spent serving the people of Harris County,” added County Attorney Menefee. “Voters have moved on. Public servants have moved on. These losing candidates should move on too.”

See here and here for the background. The judge in the Lunceford contest was assigned on December 13, I don’t know what has happened since then. I do know that at least one more loser has filed a loser’s contest, but I don’t care to give any of this any more validity. You can read the Chron story here and their explainer about election contests here. I think the Trib story contains the most relevant bit of information:

The Election Day problems were unlikely to have been substantial enough to swing the results of the Harris County judge’s race, according to Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University.

Nearly 70% of voters cast their ballots during the early voting period, but Mealer only cites issues on Election Day itself.

“I’m extremely doubtful that there is a legitimate legal challenge here,” Stein said. “It’s not like voters were told they couldn’t vote or that they had to go home. They were discouraged because the lines were long, or because they were told they’d have to wait.”

Those challenges do not amount to voter suppression, Stein said, but merely suggest that Harris County should operate fewer, better-resourced polling locations.

To make its case, Mealer’s legal team will have to find evidence that more than 18,000 voters were unable to cast ballots on Election Day, and that all of those voters planned to vote for Mealer, Stein said.

And every voter who might have been discouraged by issues at one location could have gone to another one, which would have been at most a couple of minutes away by car. Even at the highest end of the estimate of locations that had issues, more than 90% of them did not. We have multiple locations at which anyone can vote precisely as a hedge against problems at any one specific location. In the old days, when you had to vote at your precinct location, you really were screwed. Now you can just go somewhere else. Even in the case of the loser who lost to DaSean Jones by 449 votes, it’s extremely hard to imagine there could have been enough people who encountered problems and could not vote anywhere else and would have voted for the loser to make a difference. This is all bullshit and should be seen as such. Campos and the Texas Signal have more.

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The road construction chaos that we know of for 2023

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Forewarned, forearmed, etc.

A new year will mean major developments for some of the biggest highway projects in the region, but drivers should not expect them to be finished until 2024.

The largest projects by the Texas Department of Transportation in the Houston region – the Loop 610 interchange with Interstate 69 near Uptown, widening Interstate 10 west of Katy and enlarging Interstate 45 to Galveston – all will not be done until 2023.

Here is a look at some expected changes drivers may notice:

The story goes into the gory details of these three projects, which will go on for the rest of the year, but basically this is what you need to know. Avoid the Loop around the Galleria, I-10 west of Katy, and I-45 south of 610. If you can actually do all of those three, congratulations. If not, may the Lord have mercy on your soul.

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A walk through four districts, part 1

Posted on January 6, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

As you know, I draft stuff before I publish it. Sometimes, things I draft that aren’t particularly time-sensitive can get lost in the shuffle when there’s a lot of news of interest. Those things may get taken from the pile during slower times, like the holidays. Sometimes I start something then don’t finish it. Once in awhile, a newer story comes along that directly relates to such a post and I go back to it. Sometimes, I finally get around to finishing what I started.

This is one of those times. After the Lege finally finished off redistricting in late 2021, I was taking a close look at the Congressional map – specifically, I had zoomed in on Houston near where I lived, and I realized that I could probably take a walk that would have me passing through four different districts. This Chron story was the inspiration for that.

The Texas Legislature on Monday put the finishing touches on a redistricting proposal that has major implications for millions of people who live in and around Houston. Here is a summary of how Harris County’s nine Congressional districts are changing for 2022.

You can go back and read the story, I’m not that interested in the details at this point. What I was interested in was seeing how easy it is to pass from one district to another, which all of us are likely doing any day we get out of the house, without realizing it. Let me start by showing the area I had zoomed in on:

From there, I used Google maps to sketch out a route for my walk:

According to Google maps, I’d get from the beginning in CD29 to the end in CD38 in one hour and 34 minutes, which would be a bit more than four miles. I walk about seven miles a day on average, and thus the idea took shape.

The thing about doing something like this, though, is that you can’t do it alone. I knew I could walk from point A to point B easily enough, but I had to get to point A and then get home from point B. Doing that all by myself would mean a heck of a lot more walking, and a lot more time. My plan was to get my elder daughter to drop me off at point A, basically at the Leonel Castillo Community Center, and then pick me up later near the traffic circle on Washington at Westcott. We would have done this over Christmas break last year. But for one reason or another it didn’t happen, and once school and work started up there was never a good time for it. So the idea, and the post that I began that included that Chron link and those pictures, got put on the shelf.

And then this Christmas rolled around, and I saw the old entry in my drafts, and I said hey, what about this year? Elder daughter was game, the weather was great for walking, and the plan came together. Wednesday, January 4 was a gloriously sunny day with morning temperatures in the 60s. I reviewed my route, coordinated the dropoff and pickup, told my ever-patient wife about the shenanigans I was about to get up to, and set out. I took some pictures along the way. I will tell you all about it and show you the pics of interest tomorrow.

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New year, new omicron variant

Posted on January 6, 2023 by Charles Kuffner

Stay safe out there.

A new omicron COVID-19 variant is spreading fast across the United States and beginning to make inroads in Houston, where the positivity rate continues to rise.

The new strain, XBB.1.5, was first detected on the east coast in late October and gained traction in December. Over the last four weeks, it has quickly edged out the previously dominant strains to make up 40 percent of cases nationally. It appears to be more transmissible than its predecessors, based on early lab results, with properties that help it evade vaccine immunity, said Dr. Luis Ostrosky, chief of infectious diseases with UTHealth Houston and Memorial Hermann Hospital.

Ostrosky and other experts say the new strain is likely contributing to the rise in cases throughout Houston, where the percentage of positive tests jumped from 8.1 percent to 11.1 percent last week, according to the most recent data from the Texas Medical Center. The average number of weekly COVID hospitalizations also saw a sharp uptick last week, from 529 to 663, including intensive care unit admissions.

The numbers are still a far cry from the original omicron wave one year ago, but infectious disease experts worry how waning immune protection will factor into the surge.

“We are at a moment in the pandemic where a lot of people got sick over the summer and immunity is going down from natural infection,” Ostrosky said. “Vaccine rates are not great and boosting rates are abysmal in this country … It does appear we’re converging into this immunity cliff.”

Only 15 percent of Americans over 5 years old have received the updated booster shot, first authorized for adults in August. About 30 percent of the country’s population has yet to complete the primary series, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While the updated booster shot may not prevent infections from the newest variant, public health experts still say it’s the best way to prevent severe disease from COVID.

Same song, next verse. The good news for now, as Your Local Epidemiologist notes, is that this latest version of omicron, like all of its predecessors, isn’t any more virulent or deadly than before. Thus, hospitalization rates remain fairly stable, though they are currently going up. Flu and RSV infections are also declining, which helps. None of this matters if you or a loved one are getting sick. Get that bivalent booster and take the usual precautions. We will get through this.

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