We have a statewide flood plan

Posted on August 23, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Good. Now let’s see what we do with it.

Texas officials adopted their first-ever statewide flood plan Thursday, recommending $54.5 billion worth of strategies and studies to protect the 1 in 6 Texans who live or work in flood hazard areas.

The delayed “Ike Dike,” a series of gates, floodwalls and dunes proposed to protect the Houston-Galveston region from storm surge, ranked first on the state’s final list of flood mitigation projects. It also accounted for nearly half of the plan’s budget.

The full sum dwarfed typical flood prevention investments made by state lawmakers, which totaled about $1 billion in the last legislative session.

More than 3,000 of the plan’s 4,609 recommendations were to fund research that will evaluate new solutions, suggesting the strategies’ ultimate costs will be much higher.

“The intent is that it will be funded by any and all possible sources, not just by the state,” said Reem Zoun, who leads the Texas Water Development Board’s Flood Planning Division and oversaw the planning process.

[…]

The Texas Water Development Board will submit the flood plan to the Legislature on Sept. 1. Lawmakers are expected to consider the agency’s recommendations when making funding decisions for flood mitigation strategies.

The plan also made five direct legislative recommendations, distilled from hundreds proposed in the 15 regional strategies. It recommended the state set up ongoing flood mitigation funding, establish targeted assistance for remote or disadvantaged communities, expand funding to mitigate low water crossings, set up regional early warning systems and develop a levee safety program.

The board was mandated by law to create a plan as a “guide to state and local flood control policy,” but its advice is not binding: Elected officials at the state level retain control of which suggestions they will put into practice.

The agency’s own flood work did not end with the finalized plan. From now on, it will assemble an update every five years.

So the Water Development Board has a plan, which the Lege will then have to fund and put into action. I don’t have a lot of good things to say about our Legislature, but this is within their capabilities, if they don’t get too distracted by other bullshit. We’ll see how it goes. At least with all this money involved there will be plenty of groups pushing for things to happen.

The Ike Dike is high on the priority list, which is nice. Climate change is…not explicitly mentioned anywhere, giving rise to fears that the plans are inherently skewed, and that’s not so nice. As noted above, this is intended to be a living document, so things can be fixed and revised as we go. It’s a start, there’s a lot of potential benefit, and there’s room for improvement. All things considered, this is about as good as it gets around here.

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DPS will no longer update gender on drivers licenses

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

What the hell?

Transgender Texans will not be able to change the sex listed on their driver’s licenses, according to a policy change rolled out this week.

Under the new policy, Texans will not be able to change the sex on their licenses unless it is to fix a clerical error. Sheri Gipson, the chief of the Driver License Division at the Texas Department of Public Safety, confirmed the change when reached by phone on Wednesday.

The change comes as conservative states across the country move to make it more difficult for transgender Texans to update their documents with the sex that matches their gender identity. Similar steps have recently been taken in Florida, Kansas and Montana.

Civil rights advocates in Florida argue the move violated federal laws meant to keeping license rules consistent across states, according to The 19th*.

Transgender Texans could previously change the sex listed on their driver’s license by bringing an original certified court order or an amended birth certificate verifying the change, according to an archived version of the Department of Public Safety license website.

As of Wednesday, this information was no longer on the website.

[…]

According to this email, the policy went into effect Tuesday.

“Effective immediately, August 20, 2024, the Department will not accept court orders or amended birth certificates issued that change the sex when it differs from documentation already on file,” Gipson wrote, according to a screenshot of the email sent to The Texas Newsroom.

The email noted that the Office of the Director was reviewing the “validity” of “such documents … to ensure that all state and federal guidelines are being met.”

“For current DL/ID holders, the sex established at the time of original application and listed in the driver record will not be changed unless there was a clerical error. The sex will reflect the sex listed on the primary document presented upon original application that is already on file,” the email read.

“If a first-time applicant presents conflicting documents, such as a birth certificate with a court order requiring a sex change, the sex listed on the original birth certificate will take precedence to record the sex.”

The idea that a state agency could on its own just decide to ignore a class of court orders absolutely blows my mind. I mean, there’s so much about this that’s screwed up it’s hard to know where to begin, but that’s what stood out to me.

I have to assume there’s a lot more to come. This directive came from someone, it didn’t come from a vacuum. I assume there will be litigation, though it’s hard for me to feel any optimism about it, whether it goes via state or federal court. One also has to wonder what effect this could have on people’s ability to cast a ballot, if their drivers license doesn’t accurately reflect their gender. That may not turn out to be relevant, but I’m going to worry about it until I am reassured otherwise. There are also concerns about DPS collecting data to be weaponized against transgender individuals. You may recall Ken Paxton’s unsuccessful fishing operation from two years ago for how that might play out. The Trib gets into that.

Transgender Texans are now effectively barred from obtaining an accurate foundational government document and could become especially vulnerable to discrimination and harassment, said Ian Pittman, an Austin attorney who works with transgender Texans. The change has also raised privacy concerns from advocates of transgender people who worry their personal information will be used with malicious intent.

The internal email directs driver license employees to send the names and identification numbers of people seeking to change their sex on their license to a particular email address with the subject line “Sex Change Court Order.”

Employees are also instructed to “scan into the record” court orders or other documentation relating to the sex change request.

[…]

Pittman, the attorney who represents transgender people, is advising his clients to hold off on submitting court orders to the state because he worries they could be targeted.

“It will put people on a list that could interfere with their health care,” Pittman said. The state has already passed a gender-affirming care ban for minors, and Pittman worries that could be expanded to adults in Texas.

This is scary stuff. I’m stunned and outraged that over 90K adult Texans are essentially being told that they don’t exist. If the DPS feels empowered to do this, who might they go after next? The Chron and the Current have more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Asking the fox to audit the henhouse

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I’m not sure if that’s the best metaphor, but it’s what I came up with when I read this.

Houston Democrats asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Monday to investigate a charter school network founded by Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles, after Spectrum News reported in May that Third Future Schools moved money from its Texas public charters to Colorado campuses while Miles was CEO.

Spectrum News reported that Third Future Schools charged its Texas schools fees that fed into a general fund, which, in part, subsidized one of its schools in Colorado before it closed. A 2022 audit also reported that Third Future Schools Texas ran a deficit due to debts to “other TFS network schools and to TFS corporate.”

Miles denied in May allegations of illegal financial practices at his former charter network. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath had said he referred the issue to the Texas Education Agency’s complaint team, but that initial reports did not show evidence of wrongdoing.

[…]

Nine area lawmakers asked Paxton to conduct a financial audit, review Texas Third Future schools’ compliance with state laws, and investigate potential conflicts of interest. They also asked the Attorney General to ensure Third Future Schools keeps an administrative office in Texas as required by law rather than a mailbox.

The letter also called for the office to scrutinize Houston ISD’s $4.4 billion bond, which the district’s Board of Managers voted to place on the November ballot, and that such scrutiny should include explanations of the district’s budget deficit.

See here and here for some background on that news report, and here for a copy of the letters. For a variety of obvious reasons, I don’t expect anything to come of this. I get why this was sent – you pull the levers that are available to you and hope for the best. Maybe someday when we get a real Attorney General, it may be possible to have an investigation, if one is warranted. Until then, you keep moving forward.

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From the “Definition of insanity” department

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

We’re just gonna keep doing this, aren’t we?

Photo by Joel Kramer via Flickr creative commons

Undaunted by legislative defeat more than a year ago, Las Vegas Sands, one of the world’s biggest casino operators, is gearing up for another push to legalize casino gambling in Texas and is reaching out to local leaders across the state to build support in advance of the next legislative session in January.

Sands lobbyists are making their case at a statewide series of roundtable forums arranged by the Texas Association of Business to build momentum for another run at gambling legislation in 2025. Nearly 50 municipal officials and business representatives from Fort Worth, Arlington, Dallas and other North Texas cities participated in one of the sessions recently in Tarrant County.

Sands leaders have expanded their North Texas footprint significantly over the past year with the purchase of the Dallas Mavericks and more than 100 acres in Irving near the former Texas Stadium site — large enough to build a destination casino resort.

Their community outreach is just one element in a multipart strategy that also includes hefty political donations and intense lobbying by Sands and other gambling interests to overcome resistance to high-end casinos and legalized sports betting.

[…]

“(Their chances) haven’t improved at all. In fact, they’ve gotten worse from last session,” Rob Kohler, a consultant for the Texas Baptists Christian Life Commission, said of efforts to legalize gambling. Legislative opposition to gambling among Republicans increased after the March primaries, Kohler said.

Sands’ latest efforts to gear up for the next session reinforces statements made by Sands chief lobbyist Andy Abboud shortly after the 2023 outcome, when he vowed to “continue to press forward with our efforts in Texas.”

[…]

Chris Wallace, president and CEO of the North Texas Commission, said his group has formed an exploratory committee to examine the issue and helped organize the conference as part of an effort to “really get our arms around” all sides of the argument over legalized gambling before lawmakers act.

He said he’s “doubtful” that the Legislature will take final action in the next session, predicting that the push for legalized gambling may require a “multi-session strategy” possibly stretching into the biennial sessions of 2027 or 2029.

See here for some background. Why they think doing the same thing but even harder will work in the future when it has failed so many times in the past is a question I cannot answer. I will once again point out that nowhere in this story does the name “Dan Patrick” appear. Until such time that either Dan Patrick says that expanded gambling is A-OK with him, or such time as Dan Patrick is no longer Lite Guv, I will continue to bet on their failure. I will also once again note that maybe a strategy of electing more people that support their cause might be the better path forward, but that would involve ousting some number of Republican incumbents, including as noted Dan Patrick, and these guys ain’t gonna do that. So they will keep running it back, and you can insert your own “Lucy and the football” joke here.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of August 19

Posted on August 22, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance is working on its hotdish recipe as it brings you this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

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HISD releases its accountability ratings

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Here they are.

About half of Houston ISD schools saw their state-issued accountability rating jump by one or more letter grades this year, a dramatic improvement in scores following a turbulent first year under state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles.

HISD released its projected campus accountability ratings Monday, though the grades remain preliminary because a Travis County judge issued a temporary restraining order last week blocking the release of the Texas Education Agency’s official 2024 ratings.

Out of HISD’s roughly 265 schools with ratings, 149 improved their A-through-F scores by one or more letter grade, while 87 saw no change and 29 saw their score slip, according to data released by the district.

“We are incredibly proud of what we’ve been able to achieve in one year,” Miles said in a press release. “Across the district, schools delivered significant improvements in student achievement on state assessments. … We will continue to provide high-quality instruction that builds on this growth.”

[…]

HISD said it used the state’s methodology to calculate its scores, and chose to release them despite the wider legal challenges. In early August, HISD released its preliminary scores in aggregate form, but did not publish individual campus scores until Monday.

See here and here for some background. HISD did the same thing last year, and you can see those grades as well in the searchable database in this story and in the Chron story. As I said before, I’m glad to see these improvements (though as the story notes, some schools including NES schools got worse grades this year) – we need to get these improvements, for the students and for our goal of getting rid of this guy – but the price we are paying is far too steep. I don’t have anything else to add to that. The Press has more.

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Parents of Santa Fe school shooter found not negligent

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Of interest.

The parents of the accused gunman in the 2018 Santa Fe school shooting were found not liable for negligence by a Galveston County jury Monday.

The civil case was filed shortly after the shooting by parents of the victims and several wounded survivors. They accused Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos of failing to recognize their son’s deteriorating mental health condition and inadequately securing the family’s firearms, ultimately leading to the shooting that left eight students and two teachers dead.

“If someone commits a crime, we hold that person responsible for the crime they committed, not the parents,” said Lori Laird, an attorney for the defense. “What we should be looking at is what’s reasonable in a case like this.”

Speaking on behalf of the plaintiffs, attorney Clint McGuire said that, while the verdict was disappointing, it still helped to raise awareness about the shooting and firearm safety.

“This is one of the largest verdicts in Galveston County history,” McGuire said. “We didn’t get the ultimate outcome we wanted, but we made progress.”

McGuire said there are currently no plans to appeal the jury’s verdict.

[…]

While the family escaped unscathed, Dimitrios and Lucky Gunner, a Tennessee-based ammunition company, were found liable for the shooting. Lucky Gunner previously settled with families out of court, but the jury nonetheless found the company partially responsible for the shooting.

Since Lucky Gunner previously settled the claim, the jury’s findings were purely a matter of legal procedure and did not grant the plaintiffs anything extra in compensation. The company sold the then 17-year-old more than 100 rounds of ammunition used in the shooting. At no point did they request identification from Dimitrios.

It remains unclear how plaintiffs intend to collect the millions owed to them by Dimitrios, who is currently in a state mental health facility.

See here for a bit of background; as noted in that post, I had not followed this particular shooting closely. I’m okay with this verdict – while there are times when the parents of a mass shooter can and should be held responsible, this didn’t look like a clear case of that to me. I’m glad that the ammunition supplier will have to pay out – I very much favor lawsuits against the profit-seeking enablers of these massacres.

All of this is against a backdrop of the extreme need for legislative mitigations, beginning with the corrupt Supreme Court and going from there. Lawsuits like this have become the only means for finding any kind of accountability, and that’s among the many, many things that are wrong with this picture. We have a long way to go, but we can get there. The Trib and Texas Public Radio have more.

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Everything you wanted to know about trees in Houston but were afraid to ask

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

A good overview.

In the weeks following the storm, Houstonians had to dodge fallen trees, branches, debris and more across the region. In fact, Hurricane Beryl potentially impacted about 50 percent of urbanized-area trees, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service.

“Hurricanes don’t discriminate,” said Aaron Stottlemyer, head of the forest analytics department at Texas A&M Forest Service.

Despite what many think, strong winds aren’t the sole reason many of Houston’s trees were damaged. Lack of maintenance, wind levels, and the biology of trees all have an impact on the strength and health of Houston’s trees.

Here’s what we know about what causes damage to trees and how public entities provide maintenance:

[…]

City departments cannot enter private properties for trimming, pruning or removing trees. Property owners are responsible for the maintenance of their trees.

“Regarding how trees could be impacted by the next event, it really depends on a lot of factors including wind speed and duration, amount of rain, soil conditions at that time, and how well trees were maintained leading up to the event,” Stottlemyer said.

Eric North, a certified urban forester with Arbor Day Foundation, said owners need to remember trees are a long-term investment and are living organisms – they must be planted, pruned, maintained and inspected.

Healthy trees can better withstand storms and recover from damage.

He recommends residents hire certified arborists to inspect a tree before and after a storm.

Trees at risk of causing dangerous situations include those that might have been standing straight one day and then leaning over the next day, those whose soil seems to be off, or those with large branches hanging off.

If a property owner plants a new tree, they need to consider its position in 10-20 years, North said.

Most trees can’t handle floods for a long time and can go into drought-like situations. To help the trees, owners can manage water resources beforehand by not overwatering or underwatering a tree, he said.

If a tree is flooded, there isn’t much an owner can do but watch the tree over time and then have a professional make an assessment.

“We don’t want to save trees that can be dangerous,” he said.

Trees for Houston, a nonprofit committed to planting, protecting and promoting trees, provides a list of resources for tree maintenance before and after storms. Click here to check them out.

The main point to understand about the storms from this year is that the drought of 2011 really did a lot of damage, both to individual trees and to the canopy as a whole. Trees that might have been healthy enough to withstand these two storms had there been no drought were sufficiently weakened as to be vulnerable. The story also covers how the city and utilities like CenterPoint do tree maintenance, and as this section notes, the rest is on us. If you’ve got a big tree on your property, it’s a good idea to call an arborist out once a year or so for inspection and maintenance as needed, so you can get rid of the branches that might become falling objects before that can happen. Read the rest for more.

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The Miles exodus continues

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Brutal.

Sarah Malik used to think Houston ISD’s Lantrip Elementary School was a great fit for her daughter.

But after the state takeover of the district in June 2023, Malik said the environmental science magnet school in Eastwood, which they loved for the tenured teachers and welcoming community, began to change. Her child’s art teacher was reassigned, and students were discouraged from reading books after finishing their work, she said.

After the school’s principal and several teachers departed in the spring, Malik knew they had to go. Her daughter is now enrolled in The Kipling School, a private campus.

“We were blindsided all year with the changes that were happening,” Malik said.

Malik is one of thousands of parents who pulled their child from HISD this year. Several told the Chronicle they were leaving the district due to the stringent reforms, plummeting morale, principal and teacher departures or cookie-cutter lessons that they said did not account for a child’s individual learning needs during the previous academic year.

“I don’t want to risk another year of her being frustrated with learning,” Malik said.

HISD’s reported “membership,” or the number of students enrolled in the district on a specific day, was about 170,800 on Thursday, down by about 9,000 students, or 5%, compared to the fourth day of school last year, according to district data. The early data, however, does not reflect the official enrollment count of the state’s largest school district.

The district’s official enrollment will not be finalized until Oct. 25, but it appears to be on track to drop below 180,000 students this year. It reported an enrollment of about 184,000 students last year, and budget documents project enrollment to drop to about 179,600 this year, which would be its lowest enrollment in at least a decade.

State-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles said “people have different circumstances” so HISD enrollment will fluctuate for the first few weeks of the school year, which started two weeks earlier than last year. He said during a news conference last week that he is going to see where the dust settles before analyzing enrollment or retention strategies.

“Just like every year, students enroll over the next two or three weeks,” Miles said. “We will have kids coming to school all the way until Labor Day. I wish every kid would come on Aug. 12 or the very first day of school, but that doesn’t happen. The numbers are changing every day … but we feel confident that we’re going to keep growing in our enrollment until September.”

[…]

Virginia Snodgrass Rangel, an associate professor in the University of Houston’s College of Education, said although HISD saw improved performance on the reading and math State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, the culture changes in the district’s schools have driven some students out — and it will be tough to convince them to come back.

“Culture is probably an important reason to consider why families might leave, and I hope that the district can figure out how to ensure a basic level of quality, while also making sure schools continue to be a good place to learn and a good place for teachers and principals to work,” Snodgrass Rangel said.

Similarly to last year, the district’s data shows membership declines are largest within schools in the New Education System program that was implemented last year, although the number of students at non-NES schools has declined as well. The NES model includes standardized curriculum that teachers must follow, extended campus hours, timed lessons and the conversion of libraries to Team Centers.

NES campuses reported an 8% decline in the number of students enrolled on the fourth day, while membership at non-NES campuses decreased by less than 3%. The starkest divide was among middle schools, where NES programs lost about 11% of students compared to less than a 1% decline at non-NES campuses.

The district’s declining enrollment, however, is not new this year, but a yearslong trend faced by several large urban school districts, and it predates the appointment of the board and superintendent to the 274-campus district. Measured every October, enrollment in the last decade peaked in the 2016-17 school year at 216,106.

“I don’t know that HISD is unique overall (in its enrollment decline,) but when you disaggregate these numbers, the numbers are clearly driven by the NES schools, and that suggests that there’s something unique that’s happening in HISD that likely is connected to the reform,” Snodgrass Rangel said.

A precipitous enrollment decline, led by the parents who have the means to take their kids elsewhere, has long been one of my main fears about the effects of the Miles takeover. Turns out that the more you make a place unpleasant to be, the more that people don’t want to be there.

Miles is right about one thing, that the Day One numbers are always lower than the final tally will be. Some number of students do indeed not show up right away, for a variety of reasons. We’ll get a more accurate count in a few weeks. But the fact remains that HISD projected a mild decline in the population, with Miles even speculating that the recent STAAR results might lure some people back. At this point, it would take a miracle to get close to that optimistic assessment.

We may have another year of improved performance on the metrics that Miles was brought in to improve. That would be good, and also bring us a step closer to kicking his ass to the curb. Whatever does happen there, it’s nearly impossible at this point for me to call this experience “successful”, even if it does succeed by its own standard. It’s going to take a long time to undo the damage. I will forever be furious about that.

Posted in School days | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A free word of advice for Fort Bend County

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Start building out a real mass transit network, like, now.

In just one year, Fort Bend County gained 27,000 residents – cementing its position as one of the fastest growing counties in the nation, according to the most recent U.S. census data.

This trend of rapid growth will continue into the coming decades as projections show Fort Bend doubling in size, reaching nearly 2 million residents by 2050.

[…]

The goal is to try and stay ahead of the population that’s coming, but [Fort Bend County’s economic development director Carlos] Guzman says that’s proven to be a difficult task.

“The challenge is always keeping up with the infrastructure, because you cannot build roads fast enough to accommodate all this growth,” he said.

One of the major developments is plans to expand the Fort Bend County Toll Road over the Brazos River at Sienna. The goal is to help the flow of traffic throughout the county and open up more opportunities for development on the west side of Brazos River.

“If it takes you 30 minutes to get anywhere then it takes away from the charm.” Guzman said.

While [County Commissioner Dexter] McCoy applauds efforts to increase mobility, he wants to ensure that the county is taking an intentional approach that will increase transportation options for all residents.

“It can’t just be about expanding concrete, it also has to be about what are the other modes of transportation that we’re going to employ to get people around?” he said.

Angie Wierzbicki, a Missouri City resident, said she’d like to see more multi-modal transportation models.

“Obviously, we have a huge growth in numbers. We do need roads, but I wish there was also emphasis on other transportation,” she said.

The demand for alternative transportation is clear. According to data from Fort Bend Transit – the county’s park and ride service – the organization made more than 11,700 trips in the month of May with an average of 536 trips per day.

McCoy said his office wants to move Fort Bend Transit from a demand response system to a fixed route system. But as the county continues to grow, it will take intentional planning to ensure the transit systems buses can easily navigate through new neighborhoods and reach residents.

Start. Planning. For. That. Now. Take it from your older cousin over in Harris County, the best time to build a transit network is before you get to be too big and crowded and built on all-car-all-the-time assumptions. It is not possible to build enough car lanes. Even if you could for your highways – and again, and speaking from decades of painful, expensive experience, you absolutely cannot – all that traffic eventually dumps out onto your surface roads and into your parking lots, which will not be able to handle all that extra throughput.

Start doing it now, while there’s still time to plan for that growth and room to accommodate bus lanes or even (heaven forfend) rail lines. I guarantee, if you wake up some day in the 2040s without having done any of this and realize just how screwed you now are, it still won’t be too late to start, but it will be much harder and more expensive and disruptive, and there will be larger and more powerful entrenched interests to fight you over it. The best time to build out transit is always “twenty years ago”. Well, congratulations, that’s where and when you are now. Don’t screw it up.

Whether you decide to scale up Fort Bend Transit or work to expand Metro into Fort Bend – I know, Metro cannot be trusted right now, but that won’t be the case forever – is your call. You’ll obviously want to factor in connectivity with Metro, and that can be messy, but deal with it anyway. Do what we didn’t do when we were in your position and think long term. I wish you the best.

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Not that Bill White

Posted on August 20, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

The curse of a common name.

Bill White

Former Houston Mayor Bill White said he has never been to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, after a New York Times report erroneously included his photo in a list of visitors to the ex-president’s Florida resort, calling the mix-up “embarrassing” for himself and his wife.

A Democrat who served three terms as Houston’s mayor, from 2004 to 2010, White said he and his wife, Andrea White, have received at least a dozen calls since his image was used in a story last month examining the Trump resort’s ties to conspiracy theory promoters, election deniers and ultra-right-wing personalities. He was incorrectly identified as a frequent Mar-a-Lago visitor since Trump left office in 2021, instead of the correct Bill White, a prominent conservative figure in Atlanta.

The former Houston mayor didn’t realize the error until it ran in the Times’ print edition Friday.

“It was embarrassing,” White said Sunday. “I do not have much respect for Mr. Trump because he disrespected the office of the presidency. … I was worried that many people in both parties who share my views on Mr. Trump would think that somehow I had gone to the dark side.”

I would have used stronger language than that if it had been me, but that’s how Bill White is. He made his point, as did Andrea White:

The NYT has since issued the correction. Glad we got that cleared up. This is of course not the first time there’s been a “not that Bill White” situation. That one was funny, this one is indeed embarrassing. Hopefully that will be the end of it.

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We’re stuck with CenterPoint’s useless generators

Posted on August 19, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

So what can we do about them?

No longer seen at I-10 and Sawyer

CenterPoint Energy executives said Thursday the company cannot terminate its lease for barely used generators that have already cost the utility $800 million, shocking regulators who are now turning on the investment after approving it last year.

Jason Ryan, CenterPoint’s executive vice president of regulatory services and government affairs, told the Public Utility Commission of Texas that the contract can’t be terminated unless the vendor, Life Cycle Power, fails to meet its contractual obligations. The lease ends in 2029, he said.

A provision that could’ve allowed CenterPoint to terminate the contract if regulators found the investment to be not prudent expired at the end of 2023, Ryan said at a regularly scheduled PUC meeting.

“You entered into a contract you can’t terminate unless there’s vendor non-performance. And of course, these large units seem like (they) largely haven’t been run, may not ever be run, so we don’t even know they’ll not perform,” Commissioner Lori Cobos said in response. “It just seems like we’re in this circular place where y’all are coming across like your hands are tied to this contract.”

Ryan said CenterPoint could try to negotiate with Life Cycle Power to switch out the types of generators it leases “if we believe we don’t have the right assets.” CenterPoint is also willing to discuss extending the time it takes to recover its costs for the generators through rate increases. Customers are also expected to cover the company’s costs restoring power following the May derecho and July’s Hurricane Beryl, he said.

CenterPoint is allowed by law to lease generators to mitigate the risk of widespread power outages, but Ryan said the company is open to discussing whether that policy should change.

“We think we have the right tools in the toolbox for the various risks that we uniquely face in Houston, but we’re open to having that dialogue on whether or not we should continue to mitigate those risks with these tools,” he said.

[…]

Consumer advocacy groups and municipalities immediately protested when CenterPoint tried to pass on $200 million of its generator lease costs to customers in 2022. The issue ended up in front of the State Office of Administrative Hearings, and subsequent hearings revealed that the large generators had never been used and couldn’t power facilities such as hospitals if distribution systems went down in severe weather events such as hurricanes.

A pair of administrative judges found that CenterPoint’s process for assessing bids from vendors to provide the generators on a short-term basis was not competitive, citing emails between Wells and representatives from Life Cycle Power before CenterPoint issued a request for bids. Thus, the judges ruled in early 2023 that CenterPoint shouldn’t be allowed to pass on its generator costs to customers.

State Sens. Phil King and Carol Alvarado wrote letters to the PUC urging them to approve the deal anyway. In a 4-1 vote in 2023, commissioners, including current commission members Cobos and Kathleen Jackson, did just that. Only current Commissioner Jimmy Glotfelty dissented.

The generators CenterPoint leased have already added $2.39 to the average residential customer’s monthly electric bill. CenterPoint still has a few hundred million in generator costs it could seek to recover from customers in future rate increases.

If we’re going to ask the question, a couple of ideas come to mind in answer.

1. Absolutely, do not let CenterPoint recover the costs of this boondoggle. Let their investors take a haircut. Whether that’s best accomplished via legislation or just having the PUC overturn its earlier decision (more on that in a minute) or some other mechanism, I don’t care. If there are no consequences for bad decisions, there’s no incentive to avoid them.

2. Let’s also review what got us here in the first place. Why did CenterPoint think these generators were a good idea? What changes should they make to their processes to avoid that mistake in the future? Why did Sens. King and Alvarado think it was a good idea to intervene with the PUC on CenterPoint’s behalf? They owe us an explanation. Why did the PUC fold under that pressure? Are there safeguards in place to allow them to stand behind an objectively correct but potentially unpopular (if only with certain stakeholders) ruling? If not, what can we do about that?

3. What other reform ideas should we be looking at? Other states have vastly outperformed Texas in responding to utility-related disasters. Why do we keep finding ourselves in this same position? What should we have learned by now that we haven’t?

I’m open to other ideas, but this should be plenty to get us started.

Posted in Hurricane Katrina, That's our Lege | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Paxton special prosecutors get bad pay ruling

Posted on August 19, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Bummer for them.

Still a crook any way you look

A pair of lawyers who prosecuted Attorney General Ken Paxton on securities fraud charges won’t be paid more than a couple thousand dollars for their work on the case since 2016, a Houston-based appeals court ruled Thursday.

The decision is a major blow to the special prosecutors, who have been fighting for years to be paid a higher rate.

They cut a deal with Paxton in March just weeks before the case was set to go to trial. In exchange for having his charges dismissed, Paxton agreed to do 100 hours of community service, complete 15 hours of legal ethics classes and pay about $300,000 in restitution to the alleged victims.

The fight over pay is the only unfinished argument in the nine-year-long case, one of the longest-running in Texas history.

Harris County District Court Judge Andrea Beall in October ruled that the special prosecutors should be paid $300 an hour. On Thursday, a three-judge panel of the 1st Court of Appeals overruled the decision.

It’s unclear if the prosecutors, Houston attorneys Brian Wice and Kent Schaffer, will appeal. Neither immediately responded to a request for comment. In October, Schaffer estimated that he alone is owed about $150,000 for about 500 hours of work.

[…]

The county says the prosecutors must be paid according to a fee schedule that sets a cap of $2,000 for pretrial work in noncapital cases.

The Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, in 2018 had ruled that the $300-an-hour rate was outside the legal limit. That might have been the end of the issue, but when the case was assigned to Beall last year, she ruled the county fee was “not reasonable” for a case of this complexity.

Collin County appealed. The Houston appeals court on Thursday said that judges do not get to decide what is a reasonable fee and must abide by fee schedules set by local judges.

Chris Kratovil, an attorney for Collin County, said he was pleased with the ruling.

“This is a win for the taxpayers of Collin County, Texas, and I’m happy to have and honored to have been part of the team to deliver that win,” Kratovil said.

Kratovil said this case should serve as an example of why private sector attorneys should not be appointed as special prosecutors when local district attorneys recuse themselves.

“If the state district judge in question had done that rather than appointing private sector lawyers from 250 miles away, none of this litigation would have been necessary,” he said. “A couple assistant district attorneys in Dallas County or Tarrant County or Denton County or Kaufman County could have handled this at no additional expense to the taxpayers.”

See here and here for the previous updates. I’ve lost any interest in this cursed case, but I’ll offer a few thoughts.

– Whatever the law says, this is ridiculous. The fee schedule in Collin County is unreasonable, and was weaponized by its County Judge and other Paxton cronies in an ugly attempt to derail the prosecution. That should not be rewarded, and lawyers should be paid fair value for their time.

– That said, if we had to do this all over again, I would agree that asking another District Attorney’s office to take the case would have made sense and almost certainly would have led to a faster resolution. (Though one should not underestimate the ratfucking capabilities of Paxton and his enablers.) Handing it off to another DA would invite allegations of unfair politics, regardless of how that was handled. I don’t think there’s any way to avoid that, but maybe there’s a better way to minimize it. I fear that requires a broader level of trust in the system as a whole, and in the age of Trump we’re not doing well or getting better on that score. I’m open to ideas here.

– We also could have avoided the lengthy pay battle if we still had and used the Public Integrity Unit in the Travis County DA’s office, for the purpose of handling criminal charges against elected officials. The reason that’s no longer a thing is because of the huge political hissy fit thrown over the Tom DeLay campaign finance saga of the Aughts; you can search my archives for the relevant links if you want. I’ll stipulate that this would be at least as controversial if the Lege hadn’t kneecapped the PIU after the DeLay situation. Again, I’m open to other ideas here.

We’ll see if they keep pursuing this despite their differences. (UPDATE: According to the Press, they will appeal.) In the meantime, there’s the matter of Paxton serving his sentence.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton will work at a food bank as part of a deal he struck with prosecutors earlier this year in his recently closed fraud case, his attorney Dan Cogdell said Thursday.

Cogdell declined to provide more information about where or when it’s taking place, citing privacy and security concerns.

“I’m not going to get into the weeds of it because I don’t think it’s anybody’s business,” Cogdell said. “I don’t want protestors showing up.”

Paxton reached a deal in March just weeks before his criminal case on securities fraud charges was set to go to trial. In exchange for having his charges dismissed, Paxton agreed to do 100 hours of community service, complete 15 hours of legal ethics classes and pay about $300,000 in restitution to the victims. He did not admit any wrongdoing.

That’s fine, I’m sure the food bank that gets saddled with him won’t want to deal with that either, but if someone tweets it out while he’s there, well, what are you going to do? I hope that someone has to sign off on Paxton actually doing real work while he’s there and that this part of his sentence is not completed until he does all 100 of those hours in a satisfactory fashion. I also hope someone is checking up on the other parts of the agreement. If this is all we’re going to get out of this madness, let’s make sure we actually get it.

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Rep. Nehls sued for allegedly having a homophobic workplace

Posted on August 19, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

It sure has been a year for Rep. Troy Nehls, hasn’t it?

Rep. Troy Nehls

A gay former staffer for U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Richmond, sued the congressman’s office Friday, saying he was effectively forced from his job after a history of homophobic behavior by the lawmaker and his chief of staff.

Alex Chadwell, who served as a legislative correspondent and field representative for Nehls from 2021 to 2023, alleged he was subjected to homophobic comments and lost responsibilities after Nehls confirmed Chadwell was gay.

“The Representative, his Chief of Staff and his Special Advisor all regularly made offensive comments about gay people, directed toward Plaintiff,” Chadwell’s lawsuit said. “Considered as a whole, the hostile environment was sufficiently severe and/or pervasive to change the terms and conditions of Plaintiff’s employment and it resulted in a constructive termination.”

Nehls’ office denied the allegations.

[…]

Chadwell’s family was friends with Nehls and Chadwell worked in Nehls’ Washington office, according to the lawsuit. During that time, he said Nehls’ chief of staff, Robert Schroeder, often made derisive comments about gay people, including “gays go to hell” and that men who were not “manly” or “masculine” were more likely to be gay. Schroeder also told Chadwell not to engage with gay constituents, according to the lawsuit.

Schroeder once said of gay men having sexual relations: “I don’t mess with that at all— I don’t like that lifestyle,” according to the lawsuit. He also said that the office would not support pro-LGBTQ legislation and also made disparaging remarks about Muslims and Indian Americans.

Nehls also made homophobic remarks, according to the lawsuit, which was first reported by Politico, including that the Office did not support gay people.

Chadwell transferred to Nehls’ district office, citing the environment in the Washington office. Chadwell said he would have otherwise remained in the Washington office. The lawsuit said Schroeder encouraged Chadwell to leave the office because he was gay.

“Mr. Schroeder soon began telling Plaintiff he had no future or growth potential with the Office and should explore other opportunities,” the lawsuit said. “Schroeder did this because Plaintiff is gay, and Schroeder did not want him working for Rep. Nehls.”

Schroeder told Chadwell on his last day of employment that his “lifestyle” made him incompatible with the office, according to the lawsuit.

“Mr. Chadwell was deeply offended and disturbed that, up until his last day in the Office, the Office continued to isolate, ostracize and harass him because of his sexual orientation,” the lawsuit said.

So just checking the scoreboard, that’s one ethics investigation, one allegation of stolen valor, and now one hostile workplace lawsuit. Quite the trilogy, and it’s all happened since March. I’m sure it must be exhausting.

This is where I would like to say that this has “heated up” the race in CD22, or whatever other trope we like to use in horse-race politics. That possibility hasn’t come up in any of these stories, and I doubt it will outside of my own mention. On the one hand, while CD22 was redistricted to be redder than it had become by 2020, it’s still not ridiculously red. It really shouldn’t be competitive, but given a combination of a strong Democratic candidate, a national environment that favors Democrats, and a scandal-tainted Republican incumbent, it’s surely not too hard to imagine a race with the potential to be a lot closer than one might have expected. Elections always have the capacity to surprise, though as often as not one can at least see the possibility from a little ways out. I’m saying that could be the case here.

Now to be sure, we don’t know what the environment will be. The vibes and the momentum are on the Dem side, and we still have the convention to build on it, but the Dems started in a hole that they’re still climbing out of, and if we’ve learned one thing from this cycle, it’s that things can change dramatically in a hurry. So let’s light a candle for the vibes but not count on them just yet. Marquette Greene-Scott is a perfectly fine candidate, but she’s not raised any money, which is the surest way to be overlooked that there is. I find that very frustrating, in the sense that it should be possible for coordinated campaigns or other campaign super-structures to notice these possibilities and invest a little venture capital into them – why not throw $50K or $100K at Greene-Scott, to build some infrastructure that might also benefit Colin Allred, or the 2026 challenger to Nehls? – but that’s just not how it works. It is what it is.

Anyway. Whatever else happens, I’ll be very interested in seeing what the precinct data looks like in CD22. It’s a district I expected to make its way into the conversation over the course of the decade. Maybe we should start talking about it now.

Posted in Election 2024, Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Weekend link dump for August 18

Posted on August 18, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

“Vice President Kamala Harris’ announcement of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate has introduced an unexpected issue into our high-stakes political discourse: casual wear.”

“How Paul Wellstone Helped Give Us Tim Walz”.

“It may be that the effort to actually apply this test that the court has handed down will only further illustrate just how fundamentally lawless this opinion is. It’s not only, in my view, wrong as a matter of constitutional theory; I don’t think it sets forth anything like an administrable test, and I think that this next phase will only underscore that set of failings.”

“What is it about Orbán that right-wingers are supporting when they say that they like what he’s done in Hungary?”

“However, a growing body of evidence shows school vouchers have the potential to wreak deep monetary and academic havoc on the children those programs claim to serve.”

“The underlying idea of the internet of animals is to tune into the planet’s hidden phenomena — the flight paths followed by sharp-shinned hawks, the precise fates befalling Arctic terns that die young, the exact landscape requirements of critically endangered saiga antelope — by attaching tiny, solar-powered tracking devices, some weighing less than a paperclip, to all kinds of organisms and even some inanimate objects (glaciers, ocean plastic debris). The inexpensive, globe-spanning system of animal tagging is meant to help scientists understand the precise drivers of global change, and much more, by tracking thousands of tagged animals from space and tying their experiences to the broader impacts facing whole populations or even species.”

“The family of Isaac Hayes is suing Donald Trump and his campaign for continued unauthorized use of the Sam & Dave hit song “Hold on, I’m Coming,” which was co-written by the late soul icon.”

RIP, Maurice Williams, lead singer of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, whose #1 hit “Stay” was featured in the movie Dirty Dancing.

“I’m not sure what there is to analyze about how the Kamala Harris campaign is different. What’s different is right there in front of us. I don’t think we can remove from the mix that winning, or at least having an energy that makes it seem like you’re in the hunt is transformative.”

I’d watch a CSI variant on public health officials tracking down the source of a foodborne illness.

“J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk have both been named in a criminal complaint filed to French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment” against Algerian boxer and newly crowned Olympic champion Imane Khelif.”

Lock her up.

RIP Frank Selvy, former college and NBA basketball star who in 1954 scored 100 points in a game, still the NCAA men’s record.

“The biggest voting gap is not between never-married men and women, much less married couples. It’s between divorced men and women. Divorced men are 14 points more likely to vote for Trump than their female counterparts. In contrast, single men prefer Trump by 9 points over single women, and married men are only 5 points Trumpier than married women.”

RIP, Wally Amos, better known as Famous Amos, talent agent turned cookie mogul who created those well-known chocolate chip cookies. Mark Evanier shares a memory of him.

RIP, Gena Rowlands, two-time Oscar nominated and three-time Emmy winning actor, wife of the late director John Cassavetes.

RIP, Floyd Newsum, visionary artist and cofounder of the Houston nonprofit Project Row Houses.

RIP, Greg Kihn, singer and guitarist best known for “The Breakup Song” and “Jeopardy”, later famously parodied by Weird Al as “I Lost On Jeopardy”. That’s Kihn himself as the driver of the car at the end of the video.

RIP, John Lansing, former CEO of NPR.

RIP, Peter Marshall, Emmy award winning host of the great game show Hollywood Squares.

Posted in Blog stuff | Tagged | 1 Comment

Beware the voter registration attacks

Posted on August 18, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I have three things to say about this.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

County election departments across Texas are trying to reassure voters amid a flood of formal challenges questioning whether their registrations are valid.

The challenges, filed by conservative groups and individual activists, seek to remove tens of thousands of voters from the rolls on the grounds that they don’t live in the county, are not citizens or have died.

Election officials say the challenges are complicating the work they’re already doing to keep their voter rolls updated. They want voters to know that they’re following state and federal laws that protect voters from being improperly removed from the rolls if someone questions their eligibility.

Multiple election officials told Votebeat that the majority of the challenges they’ve received are against voters whose status their offices had already flagged through their daily voter list maintenance. In a few cases, the challenges start a process that could lead to careful removal of voters after the November election.

“Even though a challenge is filed, doesn’t mean that you will be automatically dropped,” said Trudy Hancock, the Brazos County elections administrator. “There is a process in place to protect the voter who’s been challenged.”

At this point in the election cycle, voters aren’t at risk of being dropped from the rolls because of a challenge. Under federal law, election officials can’t cancel a voter’s registration in the period 90 days ahead of Election Day, except for voters who voluntarily cancel their registration or who are convicted of a felony.

Still, election officials are required to process the voter eligibility challenges they receive, and act on valid ones. Election administrators in Collin, Travis, Hays, Brazos, Tarrant, and Denton counties and others have been sifting through large volumes of these, which they began receiving in June, targeting thousands of voters.

The large-scale challenge effort is being led by Houston-based right-wing group True the Vote, which has been working for years to purge the rolls of voters it perceives as ineligible ahead of the November presidential election. It’s part of a wave of challenges aimed at voters in several states, including such battlegrounds as Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania.

The group is using an online tool called IV3 that matches voter data with change-of-address records from the U.S. Postal Service. Activists relying on that tool have been delivering stacks of challenges to election offices, or emailing election administrators with spreadsheets listing voters’ names. True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment.

The effort has drawn criticism from election officials, courts and voting-rights advocates. For one thing, they say, the postal database that True the Vote relies on is outdated and not a reliable source for determining voter eligibility. For another, they say, the effort gives credence to false claims that large numbers of people are voting illegally by exploiting deficiencies in registration records.

A federal judge in Georgia found this year that True the Vote’s 2020 list of voters to challenge “utterly lacked reliability” and “verges on recklessness.”

“The Court has heard no testimony and seen no evidence of any significant quality control efforts, or any expertise guiding the data process,” he wrote.

Such efforts to challenge voters’ eligibility en masse are “inadequate to address voter eligibility by themselves and also redundant to the work already done by election officials,” according to research on the rise of mass voter challenges by Protect Democracy, a national nonpartisan group promoting fair elections and anti-authoritarian policies.

The report added: “These efforts are based on unsubstantiated and false claims that the rolls are replete with dead voters, voters registered in other locations, and, most recently, noncitizens. Furthermore, they falsely imply that any inaccuracy in the voter rolls equates to or otherwise enables voter fraud. In reality, voter registration rolls are being continuously updated by election officials.”

1. True The Vote sucks. They are horrible people, doing horrible things, lying all the time. I hope they spend their lives being attacked by mosquitoes.

2. It’s never a bad time to check your voter registration status. Look yourself up on your county website or call your county elections office if you have any questions. If you haven’t changed addresses, even temporarily, you’ve probably not got anything to worry about. The main problem with TTV’s approach is that they mix up people with the same name and/or birth date, so if your name is remotely common you could be caught up in their deceit. These are the challenges that county officials are best at detecting, but again, it’s never a bad time to double check.

3. If you have moved, even temporarily, make sure you or someone at the address where you are registered can respond to any mail from the elections office that may be sent to verify your location. That’s the situation that can legitimately trip you up, though again it’s usually only an issue for people who are not regular voters. Check with the people like that in your life and it should be fine.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Paxton to investigate CenterPoint

Posted on August 18, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Whatever.

We need a “PaxtonPointLess” graffiti

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Monday his office will investigate CenterPoint’s conduct during Hurricane Beryl, which wiped out power to millions of the utility’s Houston-area customers last month.

“My office is aware of concerning allegations regarding CenterPoint and how its conduct affected readiness during Hurricane Beryl, a storm that left millions of Texans without power,” Paxton said in a statement. He did not detail what laws CenterPoint might have violated, but said his office would investigate “allegations of fraud” and improper use of public money.

CenterPoint spokesperson John Sousa said the company would cooperate fully with the attorney general’s investigation.

[…]

After the winter freeze in February 2021 that knocked out electricity to millions statewide and left more than 240 people dead, Paxton announced investigations into a dozen power and utility companies, including CenterPoint, for potential price gouging or other deceptive trade practices. His office filed a lawsuit against Griddy soon after the storm, but he has not provided public updates on the other inquiries, including whether they are ongoing or have been closed.

I would keep my expectations very low here. That’s partly because of his track record following Uri, partly because I think the bulk of the fixes for this need to be legislative and regulatory, and partly because Paxton is an opportunistic grifter who’s chasing headlines above all else. Will anyone be surprised if down the line he claims that “DEI” is the reason for CenterPoint’s failures? He got his name in the papers making it look like he’s Doing Something. He can now move on back to the things he actually wants to do.

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More on the cryptomining noise problem

Posted on August 18, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

It does sound like hell.

Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks. At least 10 people went to urgent care or the emergency room with these symptoms. The development of large-scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new, and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one. But there is an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage. And one local doctor—ears, nose, and throat specialist Salim Bhaloo—says he sees patients with symptoms potentially stemming from the Bitcoin mine’s noise on an almost weekly basis.

“I’m sure it increases their cortisol and sugar levels, so you’re getting headaches, vertigo, and it snowballs from there,” Bhaloo says. “This thing is definitely causing a tremendous amount of stress. Everyone is just miserable about it.”

Not all data centers make noise. And industry insiders say they have a technical fix for the ones that do, which involves replacing their facilities’ loud air fans with much quieter liquid-based cooling solutions. But some of their touted methods, including “immersion cooling” in oil, are expensive and untested on a large scale.

A representative for Marathon Digital Holdings, the company that owns the mine, did not answer questions about health impacts, but told TIME that it is working to remove the noisy fans from the site. “By the end of 2024, we intend to have replaced the majority of air-cooled containers with immersion cooling, with no expansion required. Initial sound readings on immersion containers indicate favorable results in sound reduction and compliance with all relevant state noise ordinances,” they wrote in an email.

The number of commercial-scale Bitcoin mining operations in the U.S. has increased sharply over the last few years; there are now at least 137. Similar medical complaints have been registered near facilities in Arkansas and North Dakota. And the Bitcoin mining industry is urgently trying to push bills through state legislatures, including in Indiana and Missouri, which would exempt Bitcoin mines from local zoning or noise ordinances. In May, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a “Bitcoin Rights” bill to protect miners and prevent any future attempts to ban the industry.

While some Granbury residents are fiercely protesting the mine, many others feel powerless to alter the will of a company with legal, political, and financial might. And the data center industry at large is only growing more dominant, thanks to the twin forces of Bitcoin mining and AI, the latter which spends a vast amount of energy training generative models to find patterns in data sets. According to a recent report, data centers will use 8% of total U.S. power by 2030, up from 3% in 2022. And if operators continue to locate the centers near existing communities and prioritize profits above all else, then the story of Granbury could become the story of countless small towns across America.

[…]

Dr. Bhaloo, the ENT doctor in Granbury, says he’s seen an uptick since the new year in patients whose ailments—including ringing in their ears, vertigo, and headaches—could be related to the mine. “These people here, they’re good country folks, and Bitcoin, to them, is almost a foreign alien thing,” he says. “They don’t understand it. And [the noise] is detrimental to their health and anxiety.” Dr. Stephen Krzeminski, another Granbury ENT, agrees. “Sonic damage is real, there’s no disputing that,” he says. Krzeminski says he believes the mine is causing “mental and physical” health issues. “Imagine if I had vuvuzela in your ear all the time,” he says.

The level of noise is appalling to Dr. Thomas Münzel, a German cardiologist who is a leader in the growing field of scientific researchers measuring the impact of urban and industrial noise on humans. For the last 15 years, Münzel has studied how transportation and urban noise, especially at night, can be debilitating stressors on the heart, brain, and cardiovascular systems. In one study, he exposed young, healthy students to noise events up to 63 decibels, and found that their vascular function diminished after just a single night. In other studies, he’s found that nighttime noise pollution directly leads to heart failure and molecular changes in the brain, which may lead to impaired cognitive development of children and make some people more prone to developing dementia.

“The European Environmental Agency tells us that everything above 55 decibels is making us sick,” he says. The fact that the Granbury Bitcoin mine is emitting 70 or even 90 decibels on a nightly basis is “like torture,” he says. “The most spectacular cardiovascular diseases will develop. They have to stop the machines.”

There’s a lot more, so read the rest. The noise issue was touched on in that earlier post about the sudden concern about how much electricity all these cryptominers that Greg Abbott has welcomed into the state are gobbling up. While the science here is still emerging, we do know that loud noise has deleterious effects on people, and these mines generate a ton of noise. This should be a concern to all of us, which adds on to the energy-usage case against these monstrosities. It’s also a political opportunity, as there is common ground to be found with these folks who are very much not being served by their state government. (The municipal and county folks are taking action, but we all know how limited that’s going to be.) I mean, Hood County went 81% for Trump in 2020. The best we can hope for is not going to be much. But you’ve got to start somewhere. Hood County is a growing place, and this is an issue where Dems can be the candidates who are actually listening to the voters. It’s the right thing to do, and what do we have to lose?

Posted in The great state of Texas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on More on the cryptomining noise problem

Paxton finds a new target to bully

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Vile, disgusting, authoritarian – one quickly runs out of adjectives.

Still a crook any way you look

Attorney General Ken Paxton is trying to shut down an immigrants rights group in Houston, alleging it is “systematically” flouting nonprofit rules by advocating too aggressively against state laws and political candidates.

It is the latest attempt by the Republican attorney general to shutter groups aiding immigrants in Texas. Paxton has sought, unsuccessfully so far, to close a handful of Catholic-affiliated migrant shelters along the border, alleging they are engaged in human trafficking.

But the drive against FIEL Houston, a longtime nonprofit advocating for immigrants, takes a new tact, arguing the group has run afoul of federal rules governing how far nonprofits can go in seeking to influence legislation, and barring certain nonprofits from backing political candidates.

“FIEL openly flouts these rules,” Paxton’s office said in a lawsuit filed this summer.

The suit, which was not reported, points to a series of social media posts in which the group deemed former President Donald Trump “El Hijo Del Diablo,” or “son of the Devil,” called Gov. Greg Abbott “a violent racist Fascist man,” and advocated repeatedly against SB4, the state’s migrant deportation law that has been blocked by the courts.

Paxton is asking Harris County District Judge Ravi K. Sandill to revoke FIEL’s corporation and “dissolve its existence.” Sandill heard arguments in the case on Thursday.

FIEL argued in court filings that Paxton is retaliating after the group challenged state election laws in court, including in one lawsuit that specifically names Paxton as a defendant. They argue it is the latest example of what a judge in July deemed “outrageous and intolerable” behavior by Paxton to “selectively interpret” laws to advance his own political agenda.

“Paxton has filed a series of unsuccessful lawsuits targeting non-profit organizations with whose content or mission he disagrees,” the group said in court filings. “These are not ‘content neutral’ state actions across the political spectrum or based on conduct.”

[…]

“When it is an election year, if an organization makes public statements that are overwhelmingly negative toward one candidate and does not do the same with respect to other candidates, that is a factor strongly indicating participation in, or intervention in, a political campaign,” said Johnny Buckles, a law professor at the University of Houston.

While the Internal Revenue Service polices nonprofits’ tax statuses, Buckles said state attorneys general do have jurisdiction over them because they are incorporated in the states. However, he said state attorneys general typically go after nonprofits for misusing money, rather than engaging in politics.

“This is not a common type of proceeding,” he said of the Paxton suit.

Indeed. And it’s impossible to imagine Paxton taking similar action against a rightist 503(c). His only aim is political, and he always acts in the same interest.

Obviously, we need to vote his ass out. Easier said than done. We could get a temporary boost from the FBI and a grand jury, but while that could take Paxton himself off the board, Greg Abbott would get to appoint a replacement until that next election. All roads lead to the ballot box. Maybe there is some federal intervention that could help, I don’t know. I cordially invite every Democratic member of Texas’ Congressional delegation to ponder that question. And be as ruthless about it as Paxton has been. The Trib and the Houston Landing have more.

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

Heat mapping

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Pretty cool. Or hot. Kinda both. Your choice.

Chris and Rachel Powers were ready for their second drive of the day when they parked outside a bakery in Houston’s East End. They cracked the passenger-side window of their Audi and fastened a thermal sensor to it.

“It’s science in motion,” Chris said as the couple began driving their route at 3 p.m. sharp.

The Powers participated in a community-led project by the Houston Harris Heat Action Team, or H3AT, which deployed more than 100 volunteers to find Houston and Harris County areas most susceptible to the urban heat island effect. The volunteers drove on predetermined routes throughout the city and county at three different times of day: from 6-7 a.m., 3-4 p.m., and 7-8 p.m.

According to the H3AT, volunteers covered 1,261 miles across Houston and Harris County, making it the largest heat-mapping campaign in Texas and the United States.

The campaign’s organizers were looking deeper into how Houston is affected by the urban heat island effect, a phenomenon in which areas of the city become hotter because natural landscapes, such as trees, vegetation and soil, are being replaced with artificial materials that absorb heat, such as concrete and paved surfaces.

Hotter temperatures can worsen air quality, cause higher electricity bills, and increase the risk of deadly heat-related illnesses. Houston was ranked as the fourth-worst urban heat island in the country by Climate Central, a nonprofit climate watchdog group.

H3AT previously completed a heat-mapping campaign in 2020. Saturday’s campaign was intended to be more comprehensive and focus on lower-income communities, which research shows are more susceptible to the urban heat island effect than wealthier neighborhoods.

“This isn’t our first rodeo,” said Meredith Jennings, the senior program manager of the Houston Advanced Research Center. “We learned a lot from that first campaign, it helped us identify several places where we wanted to do tree-planting events. We were only able to go so many places in 2020, so this is an opportunity for us to replicate that effort and expand it so that we can use this data in more places.”

The Houston Advanced Research Center, and its partner organizations, was awarded $15 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service last year to increase tree canopy — the layer of tree leaves and branches that provide shade — across Houston and Harris County. The grant is part of a five-year program to assess and monitor urban tree canopy, conduct another heat island mapping campaign, provide youth employment, water and maintain tree plantings, and create jobs for urban and community forestry.

Although tree canopy is typically considered a remedy for the urban heat island effect, Harris County’s overall tree canopy shrank by almost 10% between 2011 and 2021, according to federal satellite data analyzed by Rice University’s Kinder Institute. Recent severe weather events, like the May 16 derecho and Hurricane Beryl last month, also uprooted many trees across the region.

[…]

The results of H3AT’s 2020 campaign measured a 17-degree difference from the map’s coolest to the hottest areas in the afternoon. It also found that areas closer to the coast receive more of a coastal breeze than areas closer to downtown or with a high concentration of buildings.

“That’s where the urban heat island effect really takes place,” Jennings said. “By expanding this campaign, we can have even more of that effect. We’re going more north and west than we did the first time.”

This is also cool for me because Chris and Rachel Powers are friends of ours and it’s always nice to see your friends in the news like this. You can go to the H3AT homepage to learn more, including other recent coverage of this effort. Learning about where the hot spots are in more detail will inform how to mitigate them – planting trees is an obvious means to that end but not the only one. Looks like this event was a one-timer, but I suspect there will be future opportunities. The Houston Advanced Research Center has more.

Posted in Elsewhere in Houston, Technology, science, and math | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Heat mapping

How Houston-area students are taking on conservative school boards

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Good stuff.

Rather than giving in to the common case of “senioritis,” recent Spring Woods High School graduate Cristopher Melendez spent his senior year determined to make his fellow classmates’ voices heard by Spring Branch ISD leaders.

Melendez created a student organization called the American Latino Advocacy Society — abbreviated to ALAS, or “wings” in Spanish — where students worked together to resist controversial changes in the district, often by contacting trustees and attending board meetings. The club soared to roughly 60 members when district leaders eliminated all librarians and unveiled budget cuts that closed programs and schools on the district’s majority-Latino northside.

“I think it was at the perfect time because of everything that was happening just this past year,” Melendez said. “As news came out about the (budget) deficit, it kind of fueled the fire and motivated people to join. … It was crazy motivation.”

Many teenagers probably couldn’t fathom willingly spending an evening at a school board meeting. But for Melendez and an increasing number of students across the Greater Houston area, it’s becoming a routine — and a guaranteed way to make their voices heard.

As conservative school board trustees in several districts — including Conroe, Cy-Fair and Katy ISDs — have introduced policies that rankle the region’s more liberal youth, it has sparked a growing movement of students finding their voice by organizing to push back against their district’s leadership.

Generally, student opposition hasn’t done much to influence trustees’ decision-making. But students take pride in other wins, such as getting more young people involved in local governance and encouraging broader scrutiny of their districts.

Here’s what students across the Houston region told us about finding their voices this year, in their own words. Their responses were lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Read on to see what these kids (seven in all) had to say about their experiences. There are many others like them around the country, sadly forced into this kind of activism by the extremist bulldozing of civil rights and free speech in too many school districts. I salute them all, and I encourage everyone reading this to find a way to help them. The one missing piece in this story, which may have just been the way these conversations went, is that at some point the way forward will necessitate beating enough of these fanatics now serving on those school boards in elections. It may be possible to persuade some of them, on some matters, some of the time. But for the most part, the best (and likely only) solution is to replace them with better board members. That’s very much something that the rest of us can help with, and it’s something I want to see the HCDP and its associated groups put some effort into, once we get past this election.

Posted in School days | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I got those “Same old HGAC” blues

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I don’t see this resolving any time soon.

Nearly seven months after Houston missed a deadline to increase its role in regional planning, negotiations with the Houston-Galveston Area Council have stalled indefinitely, despite a mandate by Houston voters in last November’s elections to renegotiate the body’s structure or withdraw from the organization entirely.

Spanning 13 counties and representing over 100 local governments, H-GAC is responsible for distributing federal funds for infrastructure, climate mitigation and workforce development projects, among other things. Houston voters approved a ballot measure last year that required the city’s membership in H-GAC to hinge on a “population proportional” voting structure based on the population of members’ jurisdictions.

Proposition B, as the ballot measure was known, was meant to rectify what advocates said was Houston and Harris County’s underrepresentation on the board and the organization’s Transportation Policy Council, which oversees regional transportation projects. If negotiations failed after 60 days, the measure dictated that the city must withdraw from H-GAC and the TPC altogether.

Since an H-GAC committee’s proposal for a new, two-layered voting structure was shot down in January, however, discussions on a compromise have been non-existent. The city has also not moved to leave either group, opening itself up to legal challenges.

“There has not been progress,” said Houston City Councilmember Sallie Alcorn, who serves as chair of the H-GAC board and supported the proposal. “It was very clear from the majority of both boards that they would not entertain more discussion on board composition.”

[…]

Organizers with Fair for Houston, the grassroots advocacy group that developed Proposition B and gathered over 20,000 signatures to get it on the ballot, said city officials had worked hard to find a compromise with skeptical board members and were disappointed that a solution was never reached.

“It’s disappointing that it died because we still believe that this is the right thing to do for all parties,” said Fair for Houston organizer Michael Moritz. “We were excited about the negotiations that occurred and thankful to most of the people on the board … who were playing ball until the very end, when they rejected it.”

Chuck Wemple, executive director of H-GAC, said that the board members did “a lot of good faith work” negotiating the rejected proposal. He said that the organization prioritizes regional cooperation, and that the nature of the board’s composition — spanning urban, suburban and rural jurisdictions — meant that there would always be instances in which some members may be dissatisfied with a decision, especially on major funding.

“Each time we’ve done this, it’s always a challenge, it’s always difficult, and there will always be entities who feel they didn’t get what they deserve,” Wemple said. “The path this stuff takes, we just do our best to be transparent about it and go forward, learn from the past and move into a better space next time.”

Montgomery County Judge Mark Keough, who sits on both the H-GAC board and transportation council, said he voted against the proposal because it would have given Houston and Harris County representatives outsized influence by giving their votes added weight, rather than holding all votes equal and adding more seats to the boards based on population.

Keough noted that while Houston and Harris County are the densest population centers in the region, growth in the suburbs far outpaces that of the city. Montgomery County’s population grew by about 14% between 2020 and 2023, according to U.S. Census population estimates, compared to 2% growth in Harris County and growth of less than 1% in Houston.

The Montgomery County judge said Proposition B was “unfair” and that he believed it to be driven by “special interests.” When asked to elaborate, he named the transportation equity nonprofit LINK Houston.

“You’d have 7 million people in the region who now have to capitulate to a very small group of people in Houston who would be determining funding for roads and bridges when there is an ideological difference between many of the outer counties and the city of Houston,” Keough said.

Gabe Cazares, executive director of LINK Houston, said Houstonians “have a vested – not special – interest in decisions made at H-GAC that affect their daily lives” and called Keough’s remarks a “distraction.”

“We encourage everyone to come back to the table, negotiate in good faith, and deliver a solution to the voters who demanded one,” Cazares said.

Moritz said the idea that Houston was trying to stifle suburban and rural input was a misconception, and noted that Fort Bend and Montgomery counties would have also received at least one additional vote each under the proposal.

“Some people had an expectation that Houston would seek to strong-arm the region if it had passed, and that was not the intent. The intent was to modernize the voting structure in a way that accounted for population,” Moritz said.

See here for the previous update. The way this has played out is exactly why so many of us felt that this reform was needed. HGAC is not representative of the people it serves, and it doesn’t care about that. Those who have the power like having that power. The likes of Mark Keough and the rural counties claim to fear being steamrolled by Houston and Harris County, when they have been doing exactly that to us.

As I said, I think we’re stuck with this for the foreseeable future. I do not expect Mayor Whitmire to rock the boat, and while litigation by the Fair for Houston backers is an option, it would be time-consuming, expensive, and not guaranteed to win. I’m not sure there’s a better way forward than continuing to point out the inequities, pledge to be a better and fairer steward of the funds than the current majority, and look for other ways to get out from under this if no progress continues to be made. It sucks, but it’s where we are.

Posted in Election 2023, Local politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Uplift Harris 2.0

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

If at first you don’t succeed…

Harris County will relaunch its guaranteed income initiative with added restrictions following Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit challenging the legality of the Uplift Harris program.

Though the Uplift Harris legal battle is still making its way through the courts, the clock is running out to move forward with the $20.5 million program because it’s funded by federal pandemic recovery dollars that must be allocated by the end of the year.

Around 1,900 participants were selected earlier this year to receive $500 monthly payments for 18 months, following a similar guaranteed income model that has been used around the country.

[…]

Paxton’s office has argued the program violates a state law prohibiting the gift of public funds to any individual, does not serve a public purpose and lacks sufficient controls on how the funding can be spent. The county has defended the initiative, arguing that it will alleviate poverty and the participants were selected by a common method of distributing public funds, a lottery system with eligibility requirements.

San Antonio and Austin have previously implemented similar programs without facing legal challenges from the state.

Under the new plan approved Thursday, the households that were already awaiting payment will receive pre-loaded cards that restrict spending to approved categories.

“That’s not the spirit of a guaranteed income program,” Hidalgo said. “That’s why this is Uplift Harris 2.0, not Uplift Harris. But it is a way to keep our promises to these families and we do think it will have a benefit and something that we can study.”

If the state challenges the modified program, the county plans to reallocate the funding to existing programs that support people living in poverty, Hidalgo said.

See here for the previous update. I will note that I thought of the “Uplift Harris 2.0” title before I read through the article and saw Judge Hidalgo’s comment. Great minds think alike, and also that was an obvious possibility. This addresses the lack of controls on how the money is spent – which, as noted, largely defeats the purpose of the program, which was intended in part to see how it performed versus other types of assistance – but whether that’s sufficient to overcome the earlier ruling remains to be seen. Now we wait for further input.

Posted in Local politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Dispatches from Dallas, August 16 edition

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

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

This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth, we have a grab bag that starts with some important news about the November election in the Metroplex, including how a familiar set of fingerprints is on some of the charter amendments. We also have the brouhaha about banning guns from the State Fair; Dallas County jail and budgeting woes; what Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare is up to; suburban school district news; a death at the CrossFit games in Fort Worth; more cricket in DFW; Dr Phil lays off folks from his new network; the Dallas Cowboys are worth more than $10 billion; and an Infinity Room is coming back to the Dallas Museum of Art. And more!

This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Harold Budd, the pianist, composer, and collaborator with both Brian Eno and the Cocteau Twins.

Let’s start with election news, and not the sort that involves calling anybody weird.

While everybody should be checking their voter registration on the regular, folks in North Texas are in particular danger as elections administrators in Collin, Rockwall, and Denton counties have been flooded by challenges to voter eligibility. True the Vote is the main suspect.

Meanwhile, in Tarrant County, Civera voting software is going to be used to allow residents to view images ballots online, with personal identifying information redacted. The Star-Telegram article discusses the privacy issues; I have to admit my first reaction is “there’s no way anything could go wrong with that!” But making the ballot images available is required by state law, and you know how we change that.

One of the big ballot categories in Dallas in November is going to be the much-discussed charter amendments. The Dallas Morning News has an op-ed piece by former mayors Mike Rawlings, Tom Leppert, and Ron Kirk on which amendments they oppose and why. They don’t like twelve of the fifteen proposed by the council nor any of the four petition amendments.

That last category is of real interest to me. One of the four petition amendments is about loosening marijuana enforcement. Two of other three are detailed in this KERA article about the massive budget cuts the amendments would cause. The three measures would increase Dallas PD by 1,000 officers (about a third of the number of current officers per DPD) and dictating that some new city revenue be used to fund the police department; and basing the city manager’s pay to a resident survey. The third would allow Dallas residents to sue the city to enforce the charter, ordinances, or state law.

KERA tells us who’s behind those three amendments: a group called Dallas HERO, who I’m sure are familiar with the history of that term in Houston city management. The article names several people as members: Pete Marocco, a Trump administration appointee; Stefani Carter, former Republican representative to the Texas House (HD 102) and current board member of Braemar Hotels and Resorts; and local hotelier Monty Bennett of Braemar Hotels and Resorts, whose name you will have read before in these pages.

It sure seems like Bennett and his cronies have figured out how to run the city and want to do it without the pesky necessity of “getting elected”.

In other news:

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Erica Lee Carter to run in the special election for CD18

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

She says she’s in.

Erica Lee Carter

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s daughter Erica Lee Carter announced Monday that she is running to finish out her mother’s term in Congress.

Jackson Lee died July 19 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She represented the Houston area for more than 30 years.

In a statement posted to Jackson Lee’s Instagram Monday evening, Lee Carter wrote that the people in the 18th congressional district had re-elected her mother to protect their interests and uphold their values, and that her mother had their best interest in mind until her death.

Lee Carter said that since her mother died, community leaders and Democratic activists had requested she finish her mother’s two-year term, which ends in January.

“After careful consideration, the answer is YES,” Lee Carter said in her statement.

Lee Carter called her mom the “ultimate finisher” who never took ‘no’ as a final answer.

“I cared for her until the end and if the people of the 18th Congressional district entrust me with their vote, then it is my desire to finish the 118th Session in the way that she would have, by supporting justice, equality, healthcare, human rights and economic opportunity for all,” Lee Carter wrote.

See here for some background. As discussed in the comments to this earlier post, the full-term nominee cannot run in the special election because state law (generally) forbids a candidate from appearing twice on the same ballot. I personally don’t see any value in one of the runnersup for the nomination filing for the special – this is for two months, with usually not all that much to do; the symbolic value of Lee Carter serving out the remainder of her late mother’s term outweighs the other considerations. I’ll be happy to vote for her, and I hope she wins outright so she has as much time as possible in office.

The main concern was that an election like this would draw a large field of mostly indistinguishable candidates and end up in a runoff. Lee Carter should be able to avoid that, and this development helps.

One person who has already pledged his support is Dr. James Dixon, pastor of the Community of Faith Church and head of Houston’s NAACP.

On Aug. 9, Dixon held a press conference officially announcing his intentions to seek that “interim” special election seat. However, he added a specific caveat.

“If, however, the Congresswoman’s daughter, my little sister Erica Lee Carter, decided to enter that race to fill her mother’s term, I would immediately acquiesce and put 1,000% of our support behind Erica Lee Carter,” said Dixon. “I would never find myself running against my family, friends and certainly not the daughter of the beloved, our precious one, Congresswoman Lee.”

That works. The filing deadline is August 22, which is to say next Thursday, so the potential for a surprise or two is still there. I’ll keep an eye on it.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

The great timesheet caper has been foiled

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

We can all sleep better at night knowing this guy is off the street.

The Texas Rangers concluded an investigation into Harris County’s highly scrutinized November 2022 election, finding no evidence that there was an attempt to sway the results, District Attorney Kim Ogg announced Tuesday.

The election, marred by a ballot paper shortage that impacted voters at some polling locations across the county, sparked state legislation and more than 20 lawsuits based partly on Republican claims that county officials had deliberately allocated an insufficient amount of ballot paper to polls in conservative areas in an effort to disenfranchise GOP voters.

“Some have said this (shortage) was directed at one party,” Ogg said Tuesday. “Our investigation has not found that to be so.”

However, a former county election employee now faces charges of theft and tampering with government documents. Ogg said investigators found that Darryl Blackburn, who oversaw supplies, was working two full-time jobs during the 2022 election, which she said led to his failure to properly allocate ballot paper — a conclusion that Democratic party leadership swiftly disputed.

“Mr. Blackburn not only stole thousands of dollars from Harris County, in the sense that he lied on time sheets,” Ogg said. “Much more importantly, he stole individuals’ right to vote, a basic constitutional right in our democracy, because people on both sides were delayed in their voting, halted in their voting, rerouted in their voting.”

[…]

Harris County Democratic Party chair Mike Doyle, who attended Ogg’s news conference, blasted the district attorney for arguing that Blackburn’s alleged crime affected the election.

“This guy may well have double dipped,” Doyle said, “but it’s just another way to repeat the lie that there was an election that somebody didn’t get to vote at, which we know after weeks of testimony and years of digging, they never came up with anybody.”

According to investigators, Blackburn held a full-time job in the oil and gas industry while also working full-time for Harris County, signing false time sheets and submitting a false application for paid parental leave. On Election Day, he claimed that he worked 18 hours with the county while also getting paid for his job in The Woodlands, clocking a total of 26 hours of work that day, investigators said.

Blackburn’s attorney, Charles Flood, called the charges against his client an “abuse of power” by a district attorney who is “cynically playing politics with people’s lives.”

“This case isn’t about the election — it’s about timesheets,” Flood said in a statement. “The Texas Rangers made clear that the evidence shows no intent or attempt to influence the 2022 election, so it seems Ms. Ogg’s only motivation is to try and claim my client as some sort of consolation prize. My client is not guilty, and we look forward to defending his innocence.”

Boy, the difference between the windup and the pitch here is substantial. The only reason this is even a crime is because he was a government employee; his other company will have at most a civil complaint if they want to pursue one. And it took a year and a half and the full might of the Texas Rangers to ferret this out. Typical of the entire “election fraud” grift. Imagine if public schools had that big a disparity between their budgets and their results. Put a bow on this, and we’ll await the likely plea deal Mr. Blackburn makes with the next DA.

Posted in Crime and Punishment, Election 2022 | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Council sends Whitmire’s anti-protest ordinance to committee

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Good, but until he backs down it’s not good enough.

Mayor John Whitmire

Houston City Council tabled Mayor John Whitmire’s proposal to ban targeted protests near residential homes after fierce opposition from pro-Palestine groups, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and others over its potential impact on free speech.

The new ordinance seeks to ban picketing within 200 feet of the residence of an individual being targeted by a protest. If passed, it would also prohibit the city from issuing permits for any demonstration in front of a home.

The proposal has sparked backlash from local activists and some council members since it first appeared on the agenda two weeks ago. Many worry it appears to single out a specific group — the pro-Palestinian coalition that has been demonstrating outside the mayor’s own home for the past few months. They also noted existing tools, such as the city’s sound ordinance, already act as safeguards against overly disruptive protests.

Whitmire has vehemently defended the plan, saying the repeated demonstrations outside his residence have raised safety concerns for him and his neighbors. The mayor, however, acknowledged the proposal’s sensitive nature and gained the council’s support on Wednesday to send it to the public safety committee for further discussions.

“In my 50 years of passing legislation and voting on thousands of bills, I’ve never seen a piece of legislation that couldn’t be improved, and this certainly falls in that category,” Whitmire said Wednesday.

[…]

The proposal has also sparked outrage among other advocacy and civil rights groups, including the ACLU of Texas, the Houston branch of the NAACP, the Houston LGBTQ+ Political Caucus and Emgage Action, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering Muslim voters.

Carunya Achar, an engagement coordinator at the ACLU of Texas, said the proposed law would not only impose an unnecessary restriction on free speech but also divert the city’s attention away from more pressing local concerns.

“The ordinance is a poor use of our time and our resources in a city that should be prioritizing disaster recovery and care for all of its citizens,” Achar said. “It is inevitable that people will disagree with one another … It is our responsibility to defend free speech when we vehemently disagree with it because that is the nature of democracy and the crux of it.”

See here for the background. I would hope that over those fifty years the Mayor has also recognized that some bills, no matter what one thinks of their intentions, just don’t need to be passed. We have existing ordinances in place to handle issues with noise, trash, and blocking roads or sidewalks. Let them serve their function. The Houston Landing has more.

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Texas blog roundup for the week of August 12

Posted on August 15, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

The Texas Progressive Alliance got some advice on changing its car’s oil from Tim Walz while putting together this week’s roundup.

Continue reading →

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Turner wins CD18 nomination

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

It was very close.

Sylvester Turner

Several dozen precinct chairs Tuesday night elected former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner to be the Democratic nominee for Congressional District 18, replacing the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee on the Nov. 5 ballot.

The vote means Turner is likely to be the district’s representative for at least one two-year term beginning in Jan. 2025. Turner will face Republican Lana Centonze in the Nov. 5 general election for the heavily Democratic district.

Turner narrowly defeated former At-Large City Council Member Amanda Edwards in a runoff election with 41 votes to Edwards’ 37.

Acknowledging his age of 69 and previous battle with a form of bone cancer, Turner promised to be a bridge candidate to a younger generation and said he would serve only one term.

“I don’t intend to be there forever, but this is a critical moment and it demands experience and relationships right now,” he told the precinct chairs and audience at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church.

Edwards is 42 and had pitched herself as part of a new generation of younger leaders.

It took only two rounds of voting to select Turner from a field of seven nominees.

The final vote by just 78 precinct chairs from the congressional district ends an uncommon, but not unheard of, process to replace a political party nominee on the ballot after they had won the primary election.

[…]

At least 12 local Democrats threw their name in to the contest, including Turner, Edwards, state Rep. Christina Morales, state Rep. Jarvis Johnson and At-Large City Council Member Letitia Plummer.

​​Those five, along with Houston chef and businessman Robert Slater, were the only six candidates officially nominated during the meeting.

Slater briefly ran in this year’s Democratic primary against Jackson Lee, along with Edwards, but he dropped out before Election Day and endorsed Jackson Lee.

The candidates participated in individual interviews with a small committee of precinct chairs last week, and the precinct chairs’ top 7 candidates participated in a forum Saturday leading up to Tuesday’s meeting.

Turner was selected after two rounds of voting.

Following a roll call vote, Turner narrowly won the first round with 35 votes. Edwards finished in second with 34 votes.

Ten other precinct chairs voted for other candidates, and one precinct chair, the meeting’s secretary, abstained.

Just a minor correction, the meeting secretary was not a precinct chair and was not eligible to vote. She announced that she was abstaining at the end of the roll call vote, and then Chair Linda Bell-Robinson (who did an outstanding job leading this convention) clarified that she couldn’t vote and had been mistaken to say that she was abstaining. Wouldn’t have mattered in the end anyway.

As this vote is a matter of public record, I’ll state that I supported Amanda Edwards. I thought she had the best combination of vision and experience and I had been excited about her candidacy in this last primary. I think Mayor Turner will do a fine job – he does have the connections, I believe he will hit the ground running, and I congratulated him after the race was over. He says he will serve two terms, which would mean an open primary in 2028. I suspect he will draw a primary challenger in 2026, because someone will either be sufficiently dissatisfied with this result or strategic enough to think that they might have better odds in that scenario than a 2028 feeding frenzy. That’s all for the future, and who knows what will happen. For now, Turner is poised to be the next member of Congress from CD18. I wish him all the best. The Trib and the Chron have more.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Another complaint filed over abortion denial

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Not a lawsuit but a federal complaint about improper emergency care.

Two women have filed complaints with the federal government alleging that Texas hospitals denied them abortion care necessary to treat their ectopic pregnancies.

The complaints were filed August 6 by Kelsie Norris-De La Cruz and Kyleigh Thurman against Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital and Round Rock-based Ascension Seton Williamson Hospital, respectively. Both women are represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Both say the hospitals denied them appropriate stabilizing medical care, which hospitals that accept federal Medicare funding are required to do under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, also known as EMTALA.

Ectopic pregnancies, which happen when a fertilized egg implants outside the pregnant person’s uterus, can be fatal to them and cannot result in birth. Both women had ectopic pregnancies that implanted in their fallopian tubes, which connect ovaries to the uterus.

The women say that they were initially sent home without receiving appropriate care, which in this case should have been terminating the pregnancy. The women say they continued to seek follow-up care: Norris-De LaCruz sought a second opinion hours later with a different doctor who diagnosed her ectopic pregnancy and had her brought in for surgery. Thurman returned days later after experiencing continued vaginal bleeding. But by the time both could receive abortions, their pregnancies had ruptured. Both women had to have their affected fallopian tube removed.

These are administrative complaints filed with the US Department of Health and Human Services, which if upheld could result in penalties against the hospitals. I have no idea how this sort of thing proceeds or on what timeline, so we’ll go on this journey together.

The Associated Press had a long story on these complaints, including this key bit.

In Texas, where doctors face up to 99 years of prison if convicted of performing an illegal abortion, medical and legal experts say the law is complicating decision-making around emergency pregnancy care.

Although the state law says termination of ectopic pregnancies is not considered abortion, the draconian penalties scare Texas doctors from treating those patients, the Center for Reproductive Rights argues.

“As fearful as hospitals and doctors are of running afoul of these state abortion bans, they also need to be concerned about running afoul of federal law,” said Marc Hearron, a center attorney. Hospitals face a federal investigation, hefty penalties and threats to their Medicare funding if they break the federal law.

[…]

Conclusively diagnosing an ectopic pregnancy can be difficult. Doctors cannot always find the pregnancy’s location on an ultrasound, three separate doctors consulted for this article explained. Hormone levels, bleeding, a positive pregnancy test and ultrasound of an empty uterus all indicate an ectopic pregnancy.

“You can’t be 100% — that’s the tricky part,” said Kate Arnold, an OB-GYN in Washington. “They’re literally time bombs. It’s a pregnancy growing in this thing that can only grow so much.”

Texas Right to Life Director John Seago said the state law clearly protects doctors from prosecution if they terminate ectopic pregnancies, even if a doctor “makes a mistake” in diagnosing it.

“Sending a woman back home is completely unnecessary, completely dangerous,” Seago said.

But the state law has “absolutely” made doctors afraid of treating pregnant patients, said Hannah Gordon, an emergency medicine physician who worked in a Dallas hospital until last year.

“It’s going to force doctors to start creating questionable scenarios for patients, even if it’s very dangerous,” said Gordon. She left Texas hoping to become pregnant and worried about the care she’d get there.

Gordon recalled a pregnant patient at her Dallas emergency room who had signs of an ectopic pregnancy. Because OB-GYNs said they couldn’t definitively diagnose the problem, they waited to end the pregnancy until she came back the next day.

“It left a bad taste in my mouth,” Gordon said.

Both complaints call for a complete investigation of the two hospitals, remediation of any violations of the rules, penalties as appropriate, monitoring the resulting agreements to ensure continued compliance, and whatever else may be needed. Again, I don’t know how this will play out, but I will keep an eye on it.

Couple things to keep in mind. One is the ongoing EMTALA litigation, which is very much in the atmosphere here. Technically, as noted in the first story, Texas law expressly allows for ectopic pregnancies to be terminated, so in that sense EMTALA is not in play. But the uncertainty surrounding it, both in terms of what SCOTUS will eventually say and the egregious risk that doctors and hospitals face when confronted with these situations given the harshness of Texas’ law, will surely be a big part of the defense.

Do not get caught up in the forced-birthers’ rationale that all of this is the doctors’ responsibility, because they claim the law is clear and they should just do their jobs. The law is quite deliberately broad and vague in addition to be extremely punitive, and the so-called guidance provided by the Texas Medical Board is no help. I want to see these plaintiffs win, but it’s not the doctors or the hospitals we should be mad at, even if we ultimately agree that in these instances they acted with too much caution at the plaintiffs’ expense. It’s the Lege, and Greg Abbott, and Ken Paxton, and both SCOTUS and the State Supreme Court that are ultimately at fault.

We can do something about all that this November, and again in two years. You know what we need to do. The Trib, the Chron, and the Current have more.

Posted in Legal matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Another complaint filed over abortion denial

Anti-endorsement watch: Houston LGBTQ+ Political Caucus, LULAC Council to oppose HISD bond

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

It’s officially campaign season here now.

The Houston LGBTQ+ Political Caucus and the League of United Latin American Citizens Council 60 are both urging voters to reject Houston ISD’s $4.4 billion school bond proposal in November.

In separate, recent statements, leaders of the two local civil rights organizations have urged Houston residents to vote against the largest school bond in state history in the upcoming Nov. 5 election, citing a lack of trust in the district after the Texas Education Agency replaced the elected board members and superintendent with appointees in June 2023.

[…]

Austin David Ruiz, president of the Houston LGBTQ+ Political Caucus, said the organization’s members voted nearly unanimously during their endorsement meeting Saturday to oppose the bond due to a lack of faith and trust in Miles and the unelected school board. He said only one person in the caucus voted against the motion to oppose the bond.

“Our members’ concerns echo that of parents, teachers, and community advocates, and reiterates the overwhelming opposition to the ongoing state takeover,” Ruiz said in a statement. “Our children and teachers deserve better than the havoc they have endured under Miles’ leadership. No trust. No bond.”

LULAC Council president Rachel Cevallos de Gonzales said while the organization recognizes the need for infrastructure improvements in HISD schools, it strongly opposes the current bond measure. She said HISD leaders have “failed to demonstrate accountability and transparency” and eroded “confidence in the decision-making processes that impact our children’s future.”

“We urge our fellow community members, parents and educators to join us in opposing the upcoming bond election,” Cevallos de Gonzales wrote in a letter to state Rep. Christina Morales Thursday. “Let us send a clear message that we demand accountability, transparency and a genuine partnership between HISD and the communities it serves.”

See here for some background. As the story notes, some other organizations such as the Houston chapter of the NAACP have come to the same position, though there is organized support for the bond as well. You know where I stand, and you know I will not criticize anyone who opposes it. At this point, I am mostly interested to see who puts up the money and organizes the campaigns for the pro- and anti-bond camps. I’ll also be very interested in the 30 day campaign finance reports for each. Money speaks louder than words.

Posted in Election 2024 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Anti-endorsement watch: Houston LGBTQ+ Political Caucus, LULAC Council to oppose HISD bond

A checklist for CenterPoint

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

I’ve said on multiple occasions as various officeholders have (correctly and justifiably) dumped on CenterPoint that they owe us a list of actual things they intend to do about them. This op-ed by Sandra Haverleh of the Texas Consumer Association is what I’m talking about.

No longer seen at I-10 and Sawyer

I hope the city and state will identify many potential actions from their investigations. But here is the minimum that we Texans should demand:

  • First, CenterPoint must recognize that customers are not ATMs. CenterPoint stock is up nearly 23% since Winter Storm Uri caused the last big outage. In the opinion of many lawmakers, that increase is due to the company’s relentless focus on investors and not customers. The utility can start by emphasizing the swift delivery of information. Tools such as the outage map and restoration map need to be working and accurate.
  • CenterPoint must also be transparent and truthful. The company promised that the $800 million it charged customers for massive grid-scale emergency generators large enough to power multiple neighborhoods would help minimize outage impacts. However, on July 11, CenterPoint executives told the PUC that most of those generators aren’t effective in storms such as hurricanes. The generators CenterPoint purchased and that customers are paying for, the CEO recently told lawmakers, are most effective during rolling blackouts, not when lines are lying on the ground.
  • The PUC must hold CenterPoint accountable for its failures, starting with forcing the company to move forward with the rate case filed in March. Experts with coalitions of cities served by CenterPoint and other intervenors submitted evidence the company is overcharging customers by about $100 million per year. If the PUC stops the rate case, the overcharging will continue. Additionally, the commission should require CenterPoint to demonstrate that customer payments go toward improving reliability and safety.
  • CenterPoint has requested and received multiple rate increases, including two in less than a year. The process to request and approve rate increases is hurried and unclear for ratepayers, the public and even those who work for the regulatory agencies. Reform for this process should start within the PUC.
  • The Texas Legislature can’t ignore the big-picture concerns with allowing utilities to increase their rates. State lawmakers can start by repealing SB 1015, written by state Sen. Phil King (R-Weatherford) and strongly supported by CenterPoint. That bill not only made it easier for utilities to increase their rates twice per year, it eliminated any in-depth review by the PUC. At the very least, CenterPoint should have to prove the rate increases are being invested wisely.
  • The Legislature should also reform the rate recovery process for electricity-distribution such as CenterPoint. The Legislature granted each of them a monopoly, a generous gift that guarantees them a profit and forces customers to pay them. The timelines for rate cases are too short, the process is antiquated and opaque, and there are no real avenues for public input.
  • Lawmakers should also set minimum standards for equipment weatherization and communication that CenterPoint and other electric delivery companies adhere to.

Houstonians must keep consistent pressure on local, state and federal elected officials. Tell them what you expect from your ratepayer dollars. Infrastructure must be built to higher standards, with capable managers and multiple avenues of communication that function at a high level and are easy to understand.

CenterPoint made $6.7 billion in gross profit just last year. The customers have paid more than necessary and deserve reliable infrastructure in return.

That may not be everything you might want, but it’s a fine starting point. Talk to your legislators and your candidates for the Lege and ask them if they will repeal SB1015. Remember that Greg Abbott appoints every member of the PUC. Don’t let this go down the memory hole like too much of Winter Storm Uri appears to have done. We get a chance to do something about this every other November.

Posted in Hurricane Katrina, That's our Lege | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Accountability ratings release halted

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Welp.

A Travis County judge has blocked the Texas Education Agency from releasing its ratings of the state’s school districts and campuses for a second year in a row.

Judge Karin Crump on Monday issued a temporary restraining order after Texas school districts filed their second lawsuit over changes to the metrics that are used to measure their performance.

[…]

The lawsuit filed Monday is the second legal battle over the A-F rating system.

Last fall, a Travis County judge temporarily blocked the release of the 2023-24 ratings. The judge sided with more than 120 school districts who had filed a lawsuit contending the stricter standards would bring unfair drops to their ratings. The judge still has to make a final ruling but has said she will likely side with school districts. The TEA has already said it plans to appeal the judge’s decision.

Families have had five years without a complete set of school ratings. Texas schools and districts did not get ratings in 2020 or 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And in 2022, struggling schools set to get a D or an F got extra relief: Senate Bill 1365 directed TEA to forgo official ratings for those schools to give them time to respond to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Chron adds some details.

“The Commissioner radically changed the way the new STAAR test is being administered by replacing human graders with AI grading. This change was made without ensuring that this radical change would not impact the new STAAR test’s validity and reliability,” said the lawsuit, which was filed on Monday. “In fact, it appears that AI grading has resulted in a test that is not ‘valid and reliable’ and cannot lawfully be used to assign A–F ratings for school districts and campuses.”

Test results this year showed a sharp uptick in the number of zeroes scored on essay questions, prompting some critics to question whether the increase was due to the computer scoring. TEA has said the shift is unrelated to the new grading system and attributed the change to new scoring rubric and a higher test difficulty.

The lawsuit is the latest brought by Nick Maddox, the same attorney who helped about 100 districts block last year’s A-F ratings. The plaintiffs in the latest lawsuit are a group of independent school districts, including Pecos-Barstow-Toyah, Crandall, Forney, Fort Stockton and Kingsville.

“We believe that our arguments are valid. They obviously made sense to the judge and our sense of urgency because once you let the cat out of the bag and release those scores, it’s too late,” Maddox said.

A spokesman for TEA said in an emailed statement that the agency is “reviewing the finding and will evaluate appropriate next steps.”

“The A-F accountability system is good for kids. It is why the legislature adopted a strong A-F framework to help improve the quality of student learning across the state, give parents a clear understanding of how well their schools are performing and establish clear expectations for school leaders so they can better serve students,” the statement said. “It is disappointing that a small group of school boards and superintendents opposed to fair accountability and transparency have once again filed a lawsuit aimed at preventing A-F ratings from being issued and keeping families in the dark about how their schools are doing.”

Last year, the districts argued that the TEA had unfairly increased standards in such a way that would depress school ratings, and a judge agreed to block the 2023 A-F scores.

The TEA’s more rigorous formula raised the threshold for high schools to earn an “A” in college readiness, which is determined by the percentage of students who score well on Advanced Placement exams, obtain certain industry certifications or enlist in the military. Schools that previously earned the minimum college readiness score for an A in 2022 would receive a D in 2024.

I assume all this will step on Mike Miles’s messaging a bit. I assume at some point this litigation will be resolved, and it will probably not be great for a non-trivial number of districts once that happens. That’s all too far out for me to think about at this time. If you’re wondering where the full ratings listing is, now you know.

Posted in Legal matters, School days | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Nasal vaccine for flu and COVID in the works

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Charles Kuffner

Pretty cool.

A team of researchers from the University of Houston have developed a new vaccine to treat and prevent the spread of flu and multiple coronavirus strains.

Through two nasal sprays — an immune activating therapeutic treatment and a new vaccine — the team of UH researchers have not only broken ground on vaccinating against SARS-CoV-2 and the flu virus, but also on creating a universal coronavirus vaccine.

Dr. Navin Varadarajan, who leads the lab behind the nasal sprays, said the new vaccine will be a game-changer to the “major obstacle” of current vaccines, which can prevent people from serious illness, but not stop them from spreading the disease to others.

“They can (current vaccines) keep you out of the hospital, but it doesn’t stop you from spreading it to vulnerable people,” Varadarajan said.

On top of providing a way to stop the spread of COVID to those most at risk — the elderly and immunocompromised — the new nasal vaccine is a crucial step forward in the goal of fighting viral evolution.

It’s natural for viruses to change and evolve — and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is no exception. As viruses spread farther and faster, they can better adapt to their environment. Successful variants beat out weaker ones, which can lead to easier transmission or worsened disease.

While many viral variants have minimal impact, over time viruses become stronger against existing vaccines. SARS-CoV-2 resides in the nose, and since existing vaccines are intramuscular, meaning they are administered through a shot in the arm, the virus is not actually eliminated from the body.

NanoSTING-SN, on the other hand, hits “the last mile” of the nose, which prevents the disease from spreading, Varadarajan said. It’s also a pan-coronavirus nasal vaccine, meaning it works against the infection and disease of all viruses in the coronavirus family.

In animals, the nasal vaccine was 100% effective in stopping transmission of the Omnicron variants of concern to unvaccinated hosts.

[…]

Before starting the process of approving the nasal vaccine with the FDA, Varadarajan’s startup, AuraVax Therapeutics, is prioritizing the researchers’ second nasal spray, NanoSTING. The spray is a therapeutic treatment for influenza strains more resilient to viral evolution than existing treatments. Through an immune-boosting ingredient called cGAMP, the formula puts cells in an intensified state of alert to fend off respiratory viruses.

Prescription treatment for viruses like the flu often run into the obstacle of resistant or sensitive strains of influenza. UH researchers say NanoSTING has the potential to be a broad-spectrum therapy, as it can override these resistant strains, unlike drugs such as Tamiflu.

Like I said, pretty cool, and happening here in Houston. You can read more about it on this UH press release, and you can learn more about AuraVax here. It sounds to me like this is still a couple of years away from being approved, but maybe I’m overestimating that. In any event, it’s good to see this in the pipeline.

Posted in Technology, science, and math | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment