The Texas Observer

This is truly startling. Houston Democratic Senator John Whitmire, the Dean of the Senate, said that in his 34 years in the Senate he had never seen the legislative body move so quickly. Tonight, a little less than two weeks after the Observer broke the story on sexual abuse at the West Texas State School in Pyote, the Senate reversed its adjournment of this afternoon to return to session with one purpose — to call for the immediate convening of a Legislative Audit Committee to begin the process of putting the Texas Youth Commission under conservatorship.

The grounds for putting a state agency under conservatorship is “gross fiscal mismanagement.” On the floor, Whitmire highlighted the allegations of abuse and the internal cover-up that followed once they started to come to light, detailed in Nate Blakeslee’s Observer article. “A reasonable person would agree that this was gross fiscal mismanagement,” Whitmire said.

The audit committee will forward its recommendation to the governor. If the governor puts the agency under conservatorship, the leadership of the agency will be fired and replaced.

Whitmire’s resolution, SR 384, was adopted unanimously.

Highways for sale or rent

Tolls set at whatever cents

Sixteen lanes and no exits

Can’t get off for cigarettes.

After a few months behind closed doors

TXDOT’s gonna let the billions pour

They’ll be men of means by all means

Kings of the road.

****

The folks over at TXDOT have got to be feeling like they’ve been “kicked in the asphalt,” as one lawmaker gingerly put it this week.

In hearing after hearing, they’ve been savaged by legislators who’ve been savaged by their own constituents for the toll roads being planned for the state.

Ric Williamson, the grizzled chairman of Transportation Commission and an ex-legislator himself, has taken the worst flogging. Right about now, Williamson should be popping handfuls of Rush Limbaugh pills. Instead, he resembles an old lion resting on the veld, digesting a belly full of fresh springbok. He’s courteous, cordial, and still coherent.

Williamson seems have resigned himself to the notion that these next few months are going to be a wild ride. But the real test of his self control will come tomorrow when the Legislature hosts its first public hearing ever on the Trans-Texas Corridor. Presiding over the hearing will be Dallas Republican John Carona, chair of the Senate’s Transportation and Homeland Security Committee.

Williamson acted like a coy schoolgirl a couple of weeks ago when Carona asked him if he would be willing to meet with him. The “artful dodging,” as Carona put it, led to an ugly confrontation. Williamson has apparently decided that bluntness is the best policy. On Tuesday, he delivered some startling information to the House Appropriations committee

Under rapid-fire questioning from Dan Gattis, a Republican from Georgetown, Williamson revealed that TXDOT’s paid roughly $30 million dollars in legal fees to the Nossaman Guthner Knox & Elliot law firm in Los Angeles.

“They’re a unique firm,” Williamson said.

“I’m sure they are, Ric,” responded Gattis. “What’s their hourly fee?”

“In excess of $500 an hour.”

That led to a collective gasp followed by speculation about what law schools the Nossaman lawyers attended.

TXDOT officials also admittted that the department has spent about $90 million dollars for environmental studies, preliminary engineering work and public hearings related to the TTC-35 and the TTC-69 corridors.

Those numbers will undoubtedly add fuel to tomorrow’s hearing. Lawmakers say the Trans-Texas Corridor was sold as a way to get highways built quickly without any tax dollars. But the $90 million only confirms their suspicions that plenty of public money is being used to underwrite the private ventures. (Don’t they remember the old saying about no free lunches?)

Lawmakers are also concerned about the non-compete clauses in the toll-road contracts. Those clauses could force the state to compensate a developer if a free road was constructed that pulled traffic off a tolled highway.

“Is there any way we could put this horse back in the barn?” one legislator asked plaintively.

Sounding more like a mobster than a king, Williamson snapped his fingers and said, “We can take those guys out just like that.”

You may remember that a while back newspapers across the state bemoaned, often on A1, the beginning of the end of the license plate frame. Yes, that innocent piece of plastic, favorite of car dealerships and churches alike, was in dire peril thanks to a poorly written law that, unintentionally, made it a crime “if that frame obscures even the tiniest bit of the doo-dad design details of the standard-issue Texas license plate,” as one judge wrote.

Luckily, the Senate committee on Transportation and Homeland Security stepped in this morning, quickly passing out of committee a bill that gets back to the original intent of the law: to forbid any coverings that obscure the actual license plate. Whew, that was close.

All kidding aside, Republican Tommy Williams, who’s carrying the bill, reminded the committee of the serious side effects of the sloppy statute: “In a concurring opinion, Judge Cochran called the law ‘uncommonly bad’ and said that it is a ‘gotcha law’ because it allows police to arbitrarily stop, ticket, arrest, and search anyone who is in violation. Pretty strong language from a court of criminal appeals justice.” Yeah, I’d say so.

Every so often in our research we stumble across an invaluable public information resource that demands to be passed on. Today it’s the archived collection of crooks, knaves, sickos, and just plain idiots who get swooped up by the U.S Attorney’ office. In particular, we’re talking about the press office for the Western District of Texas, which lays out a treasure trove of PDFs documenting the offenses, some heinous, some hilarious, of the baddest and dumbest that Texas and the West have to offer. Our favorites.

First up, Alvaro Larios, who offers a gentle reminder that trading cocaine for hand grenades is ill-advised, even if your “people in Mexico” need them to advance their business interests. A barter of two ounces for 15 grenades cost him 25 years.

Next, the dynamic duo of Amlee and Priddy. The moral of their story is that, when pillaging historical treasures from the Fort Davis area, never forget the important stuff: “The last burglary occurred … at the Lajitas International Airport in which a 42″ Gateway plasma television, two boxes of medals, a ‘Mexican Border Service’ banner, a grey and black bag, several shirts with the ‘Lajitas Resort’ emblem and a quantity of Tylenol and No-Doze medication were stolen.” Special bonus lesson: Stealing an 1895 Winchester rifle comes with the added perk of a weapons charge.

There are the cases of good guys gone bad, be it a county jailer with a sawed-off shotgun or an FBI special agent with a crooked tongue.

But the releases also provide practical answers to some of life’s troubling questions. We all, for example, might exchange the occassional burned CD or ripped DVD, but how many does it take to turn you into a bonafied pirate? Turns out, 5,000. Or how many carjackings constitute a spree? Answer: two. There’s even some business advice for potential thieves, such as, it’s probably not a good idea to use eBay to launder fraudulent credit card purchases. It’s that restitution — $576,642.51 in one case, traceable down to the cent — that gets you. Also: choose your eBay identity wisely, lest you end up in an affidavit with a dumb alias like “edollaz.”

And, finally, there’s even some politics splashed among the releases, where you can find a succinct, effective rebuttle to a stupid right-wing hissy fit months before the spasm breaks out. All in a day’s work.

During a House committee hearing yesterday afternoon, legislators grilled parties to the TXU buyout for more details on the deal. Lawmakers especially wanted to how the new company was going to be different than TXU, which has been under severe legislative attack for high electric prices and plans to build 11 coal plants. Briefly, some interesting items that emerged in testimony:

-Buyout discussions began “late fall, early winter” of last year, according to Fred Goltz, a KKR executive. Detailed negotiations started in January. In other words, while TXU was threatening an energy crisis lest they get permission to build 11 coal plants they were really thinking about selling off their company.

-The 10 percent rate reduction the new owners are promising to some TXU consumers is in fact mostly a repackaging of two pre-existing $25 “customer appreciation bonuses.”

-The current management team, including CEO John Wilder, is staying on for the time being.

-Under “the current regulatory system” the new owners will commit to holding a “majority of [their] ownership interest” in TXU for at least five years, Goltz revealed. However, the five-year commitment apparently hinges on the Lege not tampering with the current deregulated scheme. Specifically, Goltz said bills that would limit TXU’s market share sponsored by Sen. Troy Fraser and Rep. Phil King would “obviate” the commitment. Sounds like a threat. (I guess that explains the language in the merger agreement that allows the companies to walk away from the deal if the Legislature passes legislation requiring TXU to “divest or submit to capacity auctions for baseload solid fuel generation capacity.” That’s an apparent reference to a provision in one of the Fraser/King bills that would force TXU to sell of some of its power plants.)

-It appears that the promise to not build eight of TXU’s 11 proposed coal-fired power plants does not constitute a future ban on all coal plants. “We did not commit for any time period to a complete moratorium on coal plants,” said the private equity rep.

-Rep. Sylvester Turner told the committee that if the deal is finalized then he will regret ever voting for electricity deregulation.

It’s been a quiet month or so since members of the faculty at Southern Methodist University decided that, maybe, just maybe, it’s not a good idea to let the Current Occupant set up a propaganda mill on campus.

So how is that fight going? “Pretty much everyone seems to have lost interest now that the semester is fully underway,” our sources at the school said this week.

To be expected, I guess, when the faculty doesn’t have a direct seat at the negotiating table with Bush’s site-selection committee. Only SMU president Gerald Turner, a staunch supporter of the library, enjoys that privilege.

But that’s not to say that there isn’t important, riveting, slow-motion drama playing out inside the bureaucracy. Okay, maybe not riveting, but the Faculty Senate is taking what steps it can internally to curb the possible damage Bush’s institute could do.

Last week a Senate committee recommended formal hiring practices that require employees who work for both the Bush Institute and SMU to be hired by a specific department and to go through the same screening process as any applicant to that department. The guidelines explicitly “disallow appointments that are University-wide,” said a memo penned by faculty member Tom Tunks. In other words, the committee doesn’t want to someday see Karl Rove collecting paychecks via the SMU Centennial Chair of Truthiness.

Earlier this week, the Senate also called on Bush to relinquish control over his presidential papers. Nearly everyone agrees that the university stands to gain from housing W.’s archives. But those benefits could be negated by Executive Order 13233, which, in effect, gave Bush license to scrub his own record. Aligning with Society of American Archivists, the American Library Association, and the SMU History department, the Senate “calls on President Turner to ask President George W. Bush to rescind Executive Order 13233.” That’s the kind of forceful rhetoric a Democratic congressman would love, but it’s really about all the faculty can do at this point to prevent the library from becoming the George W. Bush Presidential [REDACTED].

Watch for the library to hit the news again this week, with Congressional hearings scheduled on the Presidential Records Act and transparency in funding presidential libraries. The useful Bush Library Blog will be on the case for the blow-by-blow.

Administrators for the troubled Texas Youth Commission are in front of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee at this hour attempting to explain what went wrong at the West Texas State School in Pyote, where a hushed up sex abuse scandal has finally broken open, as we reported ten days ago.

 Executive director Dwight Harris resigned in the wake of the scandal last Friday, so the job of fielding the panel’s questions fell to long-time general counsel and acting executive director Neil Nichols. Things got off to a rough start when Chairman John Whitmire asked Nichols who was present from the agency and quickly discovered that not a single board member had come to the hearing. “I find it astounding with the condition of your agency and the seriousness of these allegations that you don’t have single board member here,” Whitmire said, singling out board chair Pete Alfaro by name.

 Things went downhill from there. Whitmire pulled agency spokesman Tim Savoy up to the mike and demanded to know who authored the glowing review of outgoing director Harris’ career in his resignation press release. “Right in the middle of a storm I don’t think we need state employees putting out propaganda on what a fine job this agency is doing,” he said.

 Senator Juan Hinojosa laid out his bill, SB 103, which he described as just the beginning of an effort to reform the agency (see this description of the bill on Grits for Breakfast). Hinojosa then gave the floor back to Whitmire, who did the heavy lifting on the interrogation of Nichols.

 Whitmire demanded to know why Chip Harrison, the superintendent at Pyote when the alleged sex abuse occurred, had not been fired, despite the fact that numerous staff members had tried to warn him about the two alleged perpetrators. “How in the world do you tell this panel that this person is still with the agency?” When Nichols admitted that Harrison had actually been promoted, and was now supervising three or four institutions like Pyote, their was an audible gasp and collective head shaking from the packed gallery, which included some parents of TYC inmates.

Whitmire all but demanded that Harrison be fired sometime this afternoon. “Why, why would you leave somebody like that in a position of responsibility at the agency?” he said. “That’s totally unacceptable and indicates to me that you still have a broken system.”

 “I’m about to call for changes, or a restructuring, or possibly conservatorship,” Whitmire said. Perhaps the most radical move the legislature can make to reform an agency, conservatorship involves appointing an outside panel to oversee every important decision a state agency’s director makes. It’s a tool the lege only pulls out when an agency is utterly beyond repair, and usually is accompanied by a complete housecleaning of all senior staff.

 Plenty of media was there; look for this on the 6 o’clock news and in tomorrow’s papers, maybe including some national press.