Floor Pass

Copyright Google Earth 2013.

A trailer home in the Spanish Palms colonia near Mercedes, Texas. Google Earth image taken March 2011.

Manuela Luna’s colonia near Mercedes, Texas is no suburban paradise. Spanish Palms, a small low-income community of 25 people, lacks paved roads, but at least there’s running water, electricity and septic systems on the inhabited lots — basic services absent at many of the hundreds of other colonias along the Texas-Mexico border. Luna pays about $200 a month for her half-acre lot and the mobile home she’s lived in since 1997.

Spanish Palms is a step up from the first colonia lot Luna bought in 1979. Back then, unscrupulous developers haphazardly carved up cheap rural land and sold lots to low-income buyers without the usual legal niceties or the basic services expected in subdivision development.

Luna is worried that legislation filed by one border lawmaker could undo much of the progress she’s seen in her life.

Rep. Ryan Guillen’s (D-Rio Grande City) House Bill 611 would loosen several restrictions lawmakers placed on border developers in the 1990s in an effort to stop the proliferation of new colonias. Specifically, the bill would:

• allow border developers to advertise lots before basic infrastructure is complete. (Currently, no advertising is allowed before a plot is appropriately developed.);
• allow potential buyers and sellers to enter into earnest money (or pre-sale) contracts of up to $250; (Currently, no money may change hands until a plot is ready to be sold and has basic services);
• create a 90-day “cure period” for developers that make “minor” mistakes without immediate penalty (Currently, any infraction is followed up with a penalty.)

In a recent committee hearing, Rep. Guillen argued that the current laws are too restrictive and are hampering new, low-income development desperately needed in the fast-growing border region.

Current laws mandate that developers must inform buyers and provide basic infrastructure for any new residential subdivisions within 50 miles of the border, to avoid the proliferation of new colonias.

“We have made every effort to make sure that wrong-doers are going to be sought after and prosecuted,” Guillen  told the House Land and Resource Management Committee. “We’re just making reasonable changes to things that just went a little overboard.”

Some advocates, including Emily Rickers from the Alliance for Texas Families, a fair housing advocacy group, are worried that Guillen’s bill could weaken colonia regulations.

“I think that it’s mostly about developers wanting to cut corners and… start to roll back these rules in ways that are much bigger and deeper than what you see in this bill,” Rickers told the Observer. “This is just the beginning.”

Rickers said corrupt land developers continued selling land until the Legislature passed reforms in the 80s and 90s. The unchecked development created a legal mess that’s taken decades to untangle.

“People didn’t have legal descriptions for the lots they had purchased. Maybe the seller would get one legal description and then try to use that over and over again so you’d have a whole neighborhood of people that technically purchased the same lot,” Rickers said. “It was a real mess.”

Before the government will pay to retrofit such colonias with water and sewer services, ownership has to be straightened out.

Manuela Luna said she didn’t know what she was getting into when she bought her first lot. She didn’t know until she read the contract for deed that she had only paid for the land and would have to pay out-of-pocket to get electricity hookups as well as water and sewage services. When she sold her lot for the current smaller one at Spanish Palms, new regulations ensured that the community would have basic services.

“I don’t want the bill to pass because we could return to the old times,” she told the Observer.

Ann Cass of Proyecta Azteca, a self-help colonia advocacy group, said that there’s no need to give developers a 90-day grace period to fix mistakes. “A good developer is a developer who can work with the rules. And if they aren’t able to work with the rules then they aren’t a good developer,” she said. “These rules are not so outlandish that they can’t be followed. They’ve been followed for 20 years.”

But Rhonda Tiffin, executive director of the Webb County planning department, said the laws are too restrictive in some ways. “I don’t think we need to take out a sledgehammer to swat a fly,” she said. “Some counties have suffered… because the good developer, the good subdivider has been scared away from doing development.”

Tiffin said HB 611 will help to ease regulations just enough to bring the good developers back to the high-demand housing areas that need them the most.

“Not one shoe fits everybody. The areas may be on the border but they are unique unto themselves. We have different issues, different things that impact us,” Tiffin said. “I think we have a law… that doesn’t always work in every part of the border.”

Guillen told the Observer he does understand why advocates are worried, but said his bill is only making a few minor changes to laws that will improve the local housing market.

“[HB 611] will put more folks from the border into a home… It will bring about more competition in the market which will make purchasing a home easier and more affordable for folks who are trying to do that.”

As of March 4, HB 611 is pending in the House Land and Resource Management committee. Guillen said he thinks the bill will pass this session. Last session Guillen’s similar bill got caught up in the Senate and didn’t make it to a full Senate vote before the session ended.

The Lead:

We’ve reached the halfway point of the session, and the wild ride is just beginning. Last week the Senate Finance Committee approved the state budget, which the Senate is expected to take up on Wednesday. The House will finally begin debating bills more substantive than honorary resolutions this week. Now the workload at the Capitol will start to increase.

Meanwhile, committees continue to craft legislation and are beginning to meet longer and later, though the big debates are still to come.

Weekend Headlines:

1. Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston) will have to make a good case for charter schools if he wants his major Senate Bill 2 to pass. The Texas Tribune reports that charters aren’t a cut and dry partisan issue but may greatly depend on the inclinations of rural House districts that tend to be wary of public funds going to privately run schools.

2.  Immigrant rights groups and the business community are coming together to support House Bill 3206. Dallas Democratic Rep. Roberto Alonzo’s bill would give undocumented immigrants the chance to get a driver’s license, as the Rio Grande Guardian reports.

3. It looks like people in both parties are getting a little tired of the Reign of Perry. Some legislation filed recently aims to keep officeholders—cough Perry—from “double dipping.” Under this practice Perry draws $90,000 per year in state retirement, in addition to his $150,000 salary, The Dallas Morning News writes.

Line of the Day:

““For taxpayers, it’s a lot more expensive to treat them in the criminal justice setting [than state-funded community mental health centers]. And it’s wrong for society. There are no outcomes. It becomes a revolving door.” —Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, as quoted in the San Antonio Express-News.

What We’re Watching Today:

1. The House Government Reform Committee will hear a few bills that would exempt records from the open records law.

2. The House International Trade Committee plans to discuss the ongoing Rio Grande water dispute between Texas and Mexico.

3. If you want morbid, then you’ll find the Senate Open Government Committee interesting. The committee will be talking about which parts of an autopsy report should be confidential.

Beth Cortez-Neavel

John Woods testifies against campus carry bills Thursday.

The House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee heard hours of testimony Thursday on four controversial ”campus carry” bills, the latest episode in a recurring effort to remove gun-free laws around college campuses.

Higher education leaders have long opposed the idea, and former Sen. Jeff Wentworth—for years, its most ardent supporter at the Capitol—isn’t around to carry the banner anymore. A slew of conservative House members stood Thursday to take his place, though, including Conroe Rep. Brandon Creighton, The Woodlands’ Steve Toth, and Giovanni Capriglione of Southlake.

Professors, students, police, small business owners, concealed handgun license holders and others unloaded their thoughts on House Bill 972, HB 1313, HB 1078 and HB 706, all of which would let CHL holders carry guns to public university buildings and grounds. HB 1313 would let private universities opt-in. Current Texas law bans concealed weapons on all public higher education campuses.

The committee took testimony on all four bills at once, which still lasted more than four hours.

Claire Wilson James recounted the loss of her unborn child when Charles Whitman shot her and her boyfriend from the UT-Austin bell tower in 1966. John Woods, a senior at Virginia Tech during the 2007 massacre whose girlfriend was killed, advocated for background checks and said letting guns on campus is no solution to mass shootings.

Alex Ferraro detailed last year’s movie theater shooting in Colorado, giving a play-by-play of one victim’s last moments.

“What do you recommend should have happened in that theater?” Rep. Ron Simmons (R-Carrollton) asked Ferraro. “If there had been 10 or 15 people in there armed … don’t you think somebody would have had a chance to do something rather than be defenceless?”

“Maybe, but if—” Ferrarro said, before Simmons cut him off.

“Maybe sometimes ‘maybe’ is all we need. Sometimes ‘maybe’ would have saved somebody’s life,” Simmons said.

After a few more heated lines Ferraro finally added, “I would say that it’s just as likely that it could have made it worse.”

Austin Police Assistant Chief Troy Gay said his department wouldn’t support letting students carry guns around campus. “We feel that it would just add more to the confusion,” he said. “There’s immaturity and there’s things that take place in these locations where our emotions sometimes might get the best of us.”

Rachel Malone, a musician and small business owner, recalled a night she walked alone across the UT-Austin campus. “I realized that it was actually my duty … to be prepared to defend myself,” Malone said. “It’s not about whether or not we want guns on campus—more guns or fewer guns. … It’s about our ability to protect ourselves.”

Michael Cargill, a small business owner and in support of all the bills, pointed out that he was carrying two licensed concealed handguns on him at the moment. He recounted how his 70-year-old grandmother went back to college to get her degree and was mugged and raped on the campus. “People will say that college universities are a sacred—it’s a sacred institution. It’s a sacred place. And so are churches. And we’re allowed to carry in a church,” he said. “This is about protection.”

Many witnesses passed out copies of their written testimony but Mary Dean with the Texas Faculty Association brought something more substantial. At a recent meeting faculty were told to “never let students get between them and the door,” Dean said, but it’s hard to do that in offices the size of closets, where the faculty desk is often facing the doorway. If these laws were to pass, Dean said faculty would be “sitting ducks” for any student with a concealed handgun.

“I brought a visual aid, which we are going to leave with you,” Dean said, as a helper passed out small yellow rubber duckies to the committee members. “All I ask is when you think about your vote, look at your duck,” she said.

All four bills were left pending in the committee.