Dateline Houston

Meet Helena Brown. The zany rookie Houston City Council member from District A has made the news again, this time for the resignations of her two highest ranking staff members. It’s just the latest in the saga of the council’s most conservative and outspoken member, a 34-year-old former receptionist who lives with her parents and sticks to her guns.

The Houston Chronicle reported Monday that Brown’s chief of staff, Leticia Ablaza, and chief deputy director, Rasuali Bray, have resigned. Another staffer resigned in March.

Brown had previously garnered press for having the council’s only part-time staff, two of whom worked 22 hours a week and five of whom worked 39, classifying all as part-time employees, which denies them health insurance, pensions, or vacations.

A statement from her office at the time characterized this as fiscal conservatism, claiming, “The Council Member and all her staff were offered benefits but declined, choosing to opt for their own health care coverage in the private sector where it is more cost effective for employees, and let us not forget, for the City too!”

That enthusiastic budget hawkery has been Brown’s hallmark in the first few months of her two-year term. By February, she had already voted against spending on “the renovation of a women’s shelter, a street’s reconstruction, the purchase of a police boat, payment to caregivers for the chronically ill, a study on people at risk for HIV infection, gas cards and the cleaning of public pools,” noted the Chronicle.

District A is the Spring Branch area, a multi-ethnic blend of working-class and middle class homes, townhomes, and apartments. In its endorsement of the one-term incumbent, Brenda Stardig, the Chronicle observed that Spring Branch is poised for economic growth but struggles with traffic, drainage, and public safety problems. Houston blogger Charles Kuffner wondered presciently, after Brown won the 2011 election with eight percent turn-out, “It will be interesting to see how CM-Elect Helena Brown reconciles her professed political beliefs with the sort of things that constituents tend to expect to get done. Maybe there is such a thing as a Republican pothole.”

Or not.

For someone in city government, Brown seems to have a very limited, tea party-flavored idea of what the government should do. At a recent meeting, she voted against two energy-efficient building projects because she felt they were part of the U.N.’s Agenda 21, a non-binding resolution to combat city sprawl passed in 1992. Conspiracy theorists on the far right have trotted out Agenda 21 as a bogeyman equating green initiatives with foreign control.

“This is the United States of America. We don’t answer to anyone but the good old U. S. of A.,” Brown said during the April 11 meeting, teetering on self-parody. “By this vote, we’re giving $26 million to a non-American initiative and interests.” She also voted for another LEED-certified project because it came in under budget, but intoned, “Let the citizens of Houston hereby know that promoting expensive artwork and conforming to Agenda 21 has priority over their well-being.”

Such pronouncements are common, made for an audience but having little effect, since Brown’s is often the only “no” vote. At the same meeting where she invoked Agenda 21, Brown also voted against funding for a long-standing program that provides birth control and education to low-income women. Her remarks, taken verbatim from video of the meeting, are worth reading in full.

“This item, number 12, an authoritarian type item here. First of all, we do not have the money. We don’t have a printing press at City Hall. The city’s broke, the state is going broke, the federal government is going broke, and to continue throwing money, hard-earned constituent tax dollars on stuff such as this, um. How about showing our young people how to free themselves from the slavery of sexual promiscuity and empowering them through abstinence education? Perhaps for some that’s a shocking consideration, but, you know, our nation needs to return to our foundation of Biblical principles being taught in schools, versus the government trying to educate folks on how to plan a family when they can’t even define a family. Rather sterilize our young girls. My vote’s no on this.”

Brown is a “real conservative,” which is the kind of conservative that questions other conservatives’ conservatism. The Chronicle’s Chris Moran, who’s been on top of the Brown beat, reported in March, “Councilman Mike Sullivan, until January by far the Council’s most conservative member, was so outflanked from the right by a Council newcomer Wednesday that he found himself uttering into his microphone: ‘I am not a communist.’”

At issue was a proposed denial of an electric rate increase in Sullivan’s district. “I understand the folks in Kingwood are conservatives,” Brown said. “They do not believe in the regulation of rates of businesses. That’s communism.”

Sullivan snapped, “Truthfully, I don’t think you have a clue what Kingwood believes in.”

Besides her no votes, Brown has also become notorious for tags. Council members can put an item of city business on hold for a week for any reason simply by tagging it. By the end of February, Brown’s colleagues were so fed up with her frequent tags that they twice voted to override them, a rare parliamentary procedure characterized as a “nuclear option” by Council member Mike Laster.

Brown led the charge against the mayor’s controversial restrictions on feeding the homeless, often chatting with and extending time for the dozens of speakers who attended three City Council meetings to oppose the ordinance. In a press release following the proposal’s passage, Brown stumped for the downtrodden and warned of the dire consequences of their neglect. “This ordinance will discourage an already discouraged people who give and it will further disadvantage an already disadvantaged people who are homeless. Crime will increase as the homeless become hungry and desperate and resort to criminal activity to survive,” she said in the statement.

But at the following week’s meeting, she voted against accepting $1.1 million in federal grants to provide housing and supportive services for the homeless. During her remarks, she claimed that the taxpayers of Houston spend $500 million annually on services to the homeless.

Her office hasn’t responded to requests for comment.

Brown has 20 months left in her term.

Gov. Rick Perry was in Houston today to unveil his Texas Budget Compact, five fiscal tenets that he hopes will influence the coming primary season and carry over into next year’s legislative session.

Subtitled “Principles for a Stronger Texas,” they were:

- Practice truth in budgeting;

- Support a Constitutional limit of spending to the growth of population and inflation;

- Oppose any new taxes or tax increases, and make the small business tax exemption permanent;

- Preserve a strong Rainy Day Fund;

- Cut unnecessary and duplicative government programs and agencies.

Standing in front of a pristine blue semi truck inside a New World Van Lines warehouse in northwest Houston, Perry addressed the press and a crowd of about a hundred supporters, who burst into hearty applause repeatedly during his half-hour speech. Arriving fifteen minutes late, Perry looked confident and clear-eyed in a dark grey suit and cornflower blue tie, his hair graying at the temples.

His remarks, and those of state Sen. Dan Patrick, a Houston Republican, and two supporters who followed, formed a kind of conservative bingo: “True conservative,” check. “Job creators,” check. Derision of Washington, Obamacare and California, check.

Michael Quinn Sullivan of Texans for Fiscal Responsibility explained that being the most fiscally conservative state was no great accomplishment for Texas, “like being the least drunk person at the bar. California is sitting in the corner drooling on itself and muttering about ex-girlfriends.” He also said it was nice to be out of “the People’s Republic of Austin.” Texas, he said, is “the shining city on a hill” that Ronald Reagan talked about. Check twice.

Perry warned that some would want to use the increased tax revenue from Texas’ recovering economy to restore budget cuts. “Going on a spending spree here in Texas is the single worst thing we can do,” he said. “We have to treat each dollar as respectfully and carefully as we can.”

Perry suggested being less careful with Medicaid recipients.

“The cost of Medicaid is a ticking time bomb,” Perry said, adding that “this process will accelerate if the Supreme Court doesn’t find Obamacare unconstitutional.” Hauntingly, he called for Washington to allow Texas to “take care of our citizens as we see fit,” by distributing Medicaid funds to the state in block grants.

In a very brief press conference afterward, Perry answered two questions from a Fox affiliate. “We’re starting to hear another round of wailing and gnashing of teeth from school districts,” one question began. Did the Governor think they “will mind” the Texas Budget Compact?

Perry replied that things were tough all over, saying this was the “same as in 1985. We managed to make our ends meet.” He added, “The school boards will prioritize what’s important and they’ll fund that.”

Perry declined another reporter’s request to name any of the programs he considered “unnecessary and duplicative,” steering clear of a familiar minefield.

He said he wasn’t going to ask for anyone to actually sign a pledge to uphold his Budget Compact—but that other organizations might. But if Perry isn’t going to ask anyone to actually sign the pledge, one might wonder just what the whole thing was about.

Photo op for a weakened politician coming off a disastrous presidential run? Check.

Update: I was in error. As wise readers alerted me, the ordinance discussed in the original post below applies to all of Houston, not just the central business district. Also: stay tuned for news on the petition drive opposing the ordinance.

For over a month, angry Houstonians have pummeled City Council with questions about why the mayor is trying to severely restrict feeding the homeless. Of the many answers offered, the most honest came on Tuesday afternoon, during the Council’s third multi-hour session of public comment. Sandra McMasters, general manager of the downtown Spaghetti Warehouse, spoke in support of the ordinance, which would require anyone feeding more than five homeless people at a time to first obtain written permission from the property owner, including the city in the case of public areas. She said her restaurant had been negatively affected by its proximity to an overpass where charitable groups often feed the homeless, causing a semi-permanent encampment with attendant “aggressive panhandling,” for which she often called the cops, and potential customers having “to walk past the smell of urine and feces.”

“I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t with my customers,” she said. Some of them want to help the homeless and some of them, she said, “It’s an out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing.”

The crowd booed. The overwhelming majority of speakers had opposed the ordinance, and they hailed from the whole political spectrum. The Food Not Bombs kids had alternated with tea partiers and clergy. Homeschooling moms, immigrants’ rights activists and several of the formerly homeless decried the new rules as an enemy of freedom, goodness, and the American Way. So why didn’t the mayor drop the rules after the first few hours of public outcry?

Ms. McMasters told us why, though she may not have meant to: visibility. The homeless ordinance, which was originally presented with a host of other stipulations and justified as, among other things, protecting the homeless from food poisoning, was really about visibility. Offering food to groups of homeless people encourages grouping, and groups are harder to ignore than individuals, even when their clothes match the color of the pavement.

The proof is in the ordinance’s evolution. The original, brought by Mayor Annise Parker, was elaborate. It required those who would feed the homeless to register with the city, prepare the meal in a commercial kitchen, serve it within four hours of preparation, have a member of their group take a food safety class, and leave serving areas as clean as they were found. The registration, she said, was intended to promote coordination and prevent waste, “so that churches, for example, don’t show up on top of each other trying to feed the same group of 20 guys,” Parker said when the ordinance was first presented in early March. The food service standards were to make sure the homeless weren’t fed less safely than restaurant diners. The original ordinance, it’s worth noting, was supported by the largest local groups who feed the homeless, including Star of Hope and SEARCH Homeless Services. But smaller groups, churches, and many individuals questioned the reasoning, asking for data on the rash of food poisonings among the homeless that must have prompted mayoral action.

In response, Parker made all elements of the ordinance voluntary except the securing of written permission by the property owner, and lowered the fine from violations from up to $2000 to up to $500. When opponents pointed out that trespassing was already illegal, making the ordinance redundant, the mayor countered that she was providing a lesser penalty than a trespassing arrest. Still, the justification didn’t satisfy.

So it was almost a relief to see the ordinance amended and passed yesterday, stripped of pretense, making perfectly plain what and for whom it really was. The amended ordinance, which takes effect July 1st, still demands that those who would feed the homeless first get written permission from the property owner—but it only applies to the central business district.

The state is pushing back against a court order that would force it to move more than 150 inmates into psychiatric hospitals by June 1, reports the Austin-American Statesman.

Dateline Houston applauded the January decision that demanded the Department of State Health Services move forensic inmates—prisoners deemed incompetent to stand trial—into a state mental hospital within 21 days of a judge’s order.

It’s a problem that gets written about periodically, but was never a priority until state District Judge Orlinda Naranjo’s order.

Now, state officials have responded with a resounding, “We can’t.”

The problem is this: forensic inmates, who are often arrested for nonviolent offenses and have to be in pretty acute psychological distress to be deemed incompetent, must be made competent, usually through medication, before they can be tried. These prisoners are sick and not yet convicted of anything, but because of their sickness, they can’t move through the system like others can. Some facilities, like the Harris County Jail, have the resources to treat incompetent inmates in-house, but most don’t—which means sick prisoners are waiting untreated, often for several months, for a bed to open up at a state mental hospital so they can begin treatment. Many prisoners wait for a bed for longer than their sentences would have been had they been healthy enough to be sentenced right away.

Judge Naranjo’s order stemmed from a 2007 lawsuit brought by Disability Rights Texas, which advocates for the disabled, including people with mental illness. The lawsuit claimed that the delay in getting prisoners into hospitals violated their rights to due process, and Judge Naranjo agreed. “The relevant state interests do not outweigh the Incompetent Detainees’ liberty interest,” she wrote. In other words, a shortage of state beds isn’t a good enough reason to deprive someone of his liberty.

The Texas attorney general’s office has asked Judge Naranjo to review the decision and also appealed the ruling with the Texas Third Court of Appeals.

“The short timelines set forth in the court’s order makes it physically, fiscally, and logistically impossible for DSHS to comply and indicates a lack of appreciation for the magnitude of the task and the complications inherent in implementing the order,” the state writes in the motion for a new trial.

It estimates that compliance would cost between $39 million and $55.2 million.

Beth Mitchell of Disability Rights Texas tells the Statesman, “Money cannot be a reason to let people languish in jails.”

When Cindy Sheehan sprang into the public consciousness in 2005, it was as an everymom, a former youth minister now the grieving parent of a young soldier killed in Iraq. Sheehan set up camp outside President George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford on the first day of his five-week vacation, demanding an audience with Bush to ask for what her son had really died. The media dubbed her “Peace Mom,” she was embraced by the anti-war movement, and hundreds of other activists joined in her vigil. Members of Congress and celebrities visited her at “Camp Casey,” named after her dead son.

Since then, Sheehan has made a life as a full-time activist, speaking regularly at anti-war events and producing a radio show which she airs on her website, cindysheehanssoapbox.com. She’s published three books and self-published two more. She’s in Texas this week promoting the most recent of those, Revolution: A Love Story, about Venezuela.

Tuesday night, she’ll hold a town-hall style meeting and book discussion at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Pecore Hall in Houston at 7:00 p.m. She’ll continue to Austin for events at Book Woman and Brave New Books, then to a Camp Casey reunion.

We spoke on Sunday about her disillusionment with the Democratic Party and her discovery of socialism, her unsuccessful run against for Congress against Nancy Pelosi in 2008 and the unlikely friendships she’s made along the way.

On life as an activist

“My whole operation is a very grassroots, seat-of-the-pants kind of thing. I don’t have health insurance. There’s no way I would be able to afford it. I’ve cut back on everything enormously to be able to do this. I rent a room. I don’t have a car. I just have my clothes, and my computer is my most valuable possession, and I have a cell phone. That’s about it. I try just to live very simply so I can do this full time. So I do a lot of fundraising, I sell my books, people contribute to the cause and everything, and so that’s how I’m able to survive. Do I fear being homeless? No. I’m sure there’s probably about 10,000 people I could crash with if it was between sleeping in a bed and sleeping on the street. But it’s much harder to be an activist now than it was when Bush was president.”

On the military

“In our Constitution—which is something that I have a lot of problems with—it says that we can’t have a standing military. If there is a real threat to the United States, then it’s supposed to be, you know, the militias or a draft to draft people into the military to respond to these situations. I am for self-defense and defending your communities, if that’s necessary, but if you have a standing army or military, they have to be used. They give the war profiteers and the globalists their tools to spread imperialism. I am against the military we have now and I’m against the way that it’s used. I think that if there’s a situation and we do need to defend the United States, then it should be a universal draft: men, women, rich, poor, whatever. It should be 100 percent. No exemptions or anything.

“If there are wars, they have to be first declared by Congress, and then there’s like a hierarchy of people who go to war. The first people who go to war would be the people who profit from war or their children, if they’re within the age range. And the next people would be congresspeople or senators, and the president. And then the lower you are on the economic scale, the lower you are in draftability. That’s the Cindy Sheehan National Defense plan.”

On public office

“[In 2007] my two employees and I decided that we were going to concentrate more on humanitarian work and people who were harmed by the U.S., because it seemed like people here just weren’t getting it. Then, Nancy Pelosi—first she refused to hold George Bush accountable, but then he commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence and I was like, Okay, are you going to do something now, Pelosi? I was ready to just retire or whatever but then I had this ‘brilliant’ idea to run against Pelosi.

“I really learned so much in that campaign about how unrealistic it is… Even then, after all the trouble and hurt and everything I’d been through, I still thought that somebody who really cared and had this brilliant platform would have a chance. That somebody that really had this burning desire to make things better would have a chance, but no. We really don’t.

“I’ve tried to stay more local and do smaller bits of the puzzle. I really believe the answer to the world’s problems is localization. We can be just as active locally and make more [of] a difference, and have more satisfaction and more success, more celebrations. I talk about getting into your city government, your school boards and stuff like that as really it’s better than trying to run for Congress, or run for president or senator or whatever, because that’s where you have the most effect on the things that we really should care about as a community.”

On Obama and the Democrats

“It’s so frustrating to me. Barack Obama has done so many things that, if it was John McCain or George Bush doing the same thing, people would just be flipping out, totally upset about it. And they’re not. Most of them support it and rationalize it. I honestly think it shows an immense lack of integrity, vision, and purpose. We were against the wars when Bush was president but now we’re not so much against them. I think we get so wrapped up in this mythology—one of the myths in [Sheehan’s fourth book] Myth America is that there’s a difference between the Democrats and Republicans on the national level. We have so much invested in it that we lose the ability to be critical thinkers and stay focused on what’s important. If you like Obama, I don’t really care, but if you oppose war and you oppose other oppressions, then you have to be vocal and you have to protest. They’re so afraid that if they do that they’re going to get a Republican in office or something. They need to realize that it’s not the president of the United States who’s in charge of anything anyway.

“I think it’s really scary. Obama has been able to further the agenda, whatever that agenda is—you know, I’m not an Alex Jones, I don’t think it’s the Illuminati or whatever—but whatever the agenda is and whoever makes the agenda, it’s been able to go much farther during Obama than it was during Bush.

“People told me things [at Camp Casey] that I didn’t believe or listen to, like, ‘Oh, you’re being used by the Democrats.’ ‘But the Democratic Party promised me that they would help end the wars!’ ‘But you don’t know the Democratic Party. They’re going to betray you.’ I wish I had listened to that. Because we worked really hard to get Democrats in power and then they did, and they were just being themselves. I had been warned that was what they were going to do, but I didn’t want to believe it.”

On socialism

“I always get offended when people call Obama a socialist. Like, why are you giving socialism a bad name? Socialism is a good thing!

“After the campaign, I wrote Myth America. I wouldn’t have identified myself as a socialist back then, but I reviewed my platform when I was running against Pelosi, and Myth America is sort of this organic Marxism where we belong to cooperatives and collectives to make things better, where the people have control over the system. I didn’t even really know then that a lot of my ideas were Marxist in nature because by that point I hadn’t read Marx. I did this real class critique and I thought that I had all these brilliant ideas that I was making up myself. So when I went on tour with that book, that’s when I started to realize that yeah, I was a socialist, and what I was proposing wasn’t that different from what they were doing already in countries like Venezuela and Cuba.”

On Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

“I was invited to Caracas to go to the World Social Forum and Chavez had a big rally and invited some people from the Social Forum to sit up on the dais with him. I was one of those people. But then when I was in one of the workshops they came and got me and I went to the presidential palace to meet with him. That’s the first time we really had one-on-one talk. But you know, the only thing I knew about him at the time was he was very vocally opposed to George Bush and the U.S. empire.

“This was 2006. After I got back, I got attacked for meeting with him. Not just by the right-wingers—they attack everything I do—but by so-called people on the left. I thought, wow this is really weird, I wonder what they have against him. So I started doing more research and I researched about the Bolivarian Revolution that he’s been leading, and about Venezuela, about him, about socialism. And just really became more and more and more an admirer of Chavez and what he’s doing in Venezuela. So as part of my radio show, I put through the proper channels to interview him. Six weeks later I found out that my request had been approved and I could go to Venezuela. So I got to spend more time with him on that visit, there was this big event that I was invited as a special guest, and I flew down to Uruguay with him on his presidential plane. He was attending an inauguration of the new president of Uruguay and I got to interview him in Uruguay.

“I think the relationship is one of mutual respect and admiration. He nicknamed me. He used to call George Bush ‘Señor Peligro,’ Mr. Danger. He used to call me, ‘Señora Esperanza,’ Mrs. Hope. He’s an amazing person, really. I‘ve met with all of the main politicians in the United States and get nothing but—here, Sheehan holds her hand out in front of her face]—they have this shield. But he’s not just brilliant thinker, not just courageous, but he’s a real warm human being.”

On what’s next for her

“I’m really seriously considering running for governor of California in 2014. The population of Venezuela and California are very similar. We could lead the way of sustainability and education, of health care, of making corporations pay their fair share, corporations and rich people. We have the potential, we have done it before. It could be a real leader again. Now we lead, we have the biggest deficit. Education is, I don’t even know what number it is in education, but I just heard and I was shocked and appalled that California was so low in education.

“I would like to move California back to the left. But just talking about right and left, what we’re talking about is humanity, human issues. The right to healthcare, the right to education, the right to, if you want to work, to get a livable wage, not a minimum wage, all these things, the right to be able to breathe clean air, drink clean water. They’re human rights. But in the U.S. we consider them privileges. But these countries in Latin America consider them human rights.

“Venezuela has this big movement for housing now, because they have a shortage of housing. So what they’re doing is something that would never happen in the U.S. They’re taking property owned by banks that hasn’t be used for, you know, so many years, appropriating it, and building housing on it. And they’re giving it to the people for either like no interest rate, no down payment, so it’s based on what you can afford.

“Here in the U.S., we have about 2-3 million homeless people and about 18 million vacant housing units. How is that? If every homeless person got their own house, which a lot of those are families and children, there’d still be 15 million vacant housing units in the U.S. It’s appalling! Hello! It’s really simple.

“Governor Cindy says that corporations will be taxed more and if they threaten to leave then that’s fine, we’ll just take their assets and their means of production and give it to the people of California because it really belongs to the people of California anyway, right? So, if people hear that and they say, ‘Hmmm,’ and they start thinking about things like that, then that’s a successful campaign.”