The Texas Observer

Poor Bob Perry. What’s millions in political contributions worth these days if you can’t protect your own agency from the slings and arrows of the Sunset Commission?

Today the commission’s staff recommended what thousands of Texans have been begging the Legislature to do for five years: scrap the Texas Residential Construction Commission.

Back in 2003, when the TRCC was created, it was hailed as the consumers’ friend. If your brand new home was riddled with cracks and leaks, you, the Texas consumer, would have the TRCC on your side to act as mediator with the home-builder.

It sounded good on paper, but like many regulatory agencies in Texas, the TRCC is dominated by the very industry it’s supposed to regulate.

The Sunset Commission staff sums up the TRCC in its report: “Current regulation of the residential construction industry is fundamentally flawed and does more harm than good.”

No need to read the entire 75 pages. You’ll get the gist of just how rotten the agency is from the two-page summary at the beginning of the report.

In 2005, the Observer wrote about the homebuilding industry’s lavish donations to the Republican Party — more than $8.9 million to candidates and political action committees. Bob Perry, head of Perry Homes, the top contributor of them all, gave more than $6.9 million from 2001 to 2005. In 2007, the Observer reported that the TRCC couldn’t enforce its own permitting decisions — builders who had lost their permits were still openly working.

The TRCC, stacked with home-builders and builder-friendly appointees, forces homeowners to wait for months for relief that most often never comes. Homeowners must file a complaint with the agency. They also have to complete the agency’s “dispute resolution process” before they can get on with their lives and file a lawsuit or go to arbitration.

When the TRCC does rule in favor of a consumer, it has no power to compel a home-builder to repair the damages

I wouldn’t say goodbye to the TRCC just yet. The Legislature will have the final say on the Sunset recommendations next year. And Bob Perry is still the state’s top political donor.

by Melissa del Bosque

A new study finds that unaccompanied children are being abandoned on the Mexican side of the border at an alarming pace.

In the last seven months, U.S. authorities have deported at least 90,000 children to Mexico, according to a study by the Mexican Government’s Commission on Population, Border and Immigration Affairs.

At least 13,500 of these children ages 17 and under were deported to Mexican border states but never reconnected with their parents or legal guardians. Many of these children have resorted to begging with the hopes of crossing into the United States again to be reunited with family members, according to the study. Other abandoned children are being cared for by churches and non-governmental organizations.

Many of these children were caught while being smuggled into the United States. U.S. authorities typically funnel the children through an “expedited” deportation process — sending them back to Mexico in a matter of hours.

The study cites another disturbing statistic: for every three adults deported to Mexico, one child is left abandoned in the United States.

Mexican border governors met with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff about the deportations in February in Washington, D.C.

One of the biggest problems is lack of coordination between the U.S. and Mexican authorities. Jose Guadalupe Osuna Millan, governor of Baja California, told Chertoff that many children end up homeless because Mexican authorities are not advised when the children will arrive and don’t have time to find appropriate housing for them.

Eugenio Javier Hernandez Flores, the governor of Tamaulipas, said that his state receives 35,000 deported immigrants a year, many of them children. “Our governments need to work on a procedure for these undocumented children,” he said.

The Mexican governors said that among the children there were also South American and Central American children being deported to Mexico.

Edmundo Ramirez Martinez, Secretary of the Commission on Population, Borders and Migrant Affairs, told Mexican legislators that the International Convention on the Rights of Children requires that children be “repatriated” to their home countries rather than “deported.”

Repatriation means that the United States would return the child back to his or her specific home rather than abandon the child at the border.

Repatriating children, however, would cost the U.S. more time and money.

Money and effort the Bush administration thus far isn’t willing to invest.

by Melissa del Bosque

The Texas Education Agency has approved the expansion of an online charter school that allows students to skip lessons on evolution, the Observer has learned. With the addition of several new regions (Corpus Christi, Austin, and San Antonio), the Texas Virtual Academy at Southwest now can enroll up to 1,500 students in the eastern half of Texas for grades K-8.

The school, which receives public funding and operates under state rules, uses a curriculum developed by K12 Inc, a publicly traded company co-founded by Bill Bennett, the conservative former secretary of education and drug czar. (Bennett served as the chairman of K12 Inc. until 2005, when he stepped down over remarks he made suggesting that aborting black babies would reduce the crime rate.)

According to K12 and the Virtual Academy’s Web site, learning evolution is optional:

How does K¹² teach Evolution?

The concepts of evolution and creationism do not come up in grades K-2. In later grades, we teach evolution as a theory broadly accepted in the scientific community as an organizing theory of biology. We believe that a complete education includes understanding the basics of what this theory is about, even if one disagrees with it. K¹² emphasizes that parents have every right to explain to their children why they do or do not accept the theory and what they believe instead, including the concept of creationism. If parents aren’t interested in any teachings surrounding the theory of evolution, they can skip these lessons.

Online schools often cater to homeschooling parents, many of whom are Christian conservatives who believe in creationism. The Virtual Academy appears to be marketing its evolution-optional policy as a selling point. Nonetheless, the Texas Virtual Academy receives public funding and must abide by Texas’ education standards known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). It’s the law. The TEKS require that each “student knows the theory of biological evolution.”

“Parents could opt out of those classes but their child is still held responsible for learning the curriculum,” said TEA spokeswoman Debbie Graves Ratcliffe. “[T]hey need to do so with the understanding that their child could still be tested over that material.”

She said she’s never heard of a public school advertising an opt-out policy for evolution.

by Forrest Wilder

The Texas Education Agency and Commissioner Robert Scott have answered the federal lawsuit filed against them by former science curriculum director Chris Comer. (Comer was forced out in December over an email she sent to science teachers announcing a talk by an evolution expert.) In her suit, Comer alleges that she was fired for violating an unconstitutional TEA policy of “neutrality” on evolution.

The fatal flaw in Comer’s argument, according to TEA’s Motion to Dismiss (.pdf), “arises from a fundamental misconception of the relationship between the Texas Education Agency, headed by defendant Scott, and the State Board of Education.” The 15-member elected board of education develops curriculum, including what Texas schoolchildren learn about evolution, the motion states. TEA only administers that curriculum and provides oversight. “TEA staff, in their capacity as state employees, must not take positions, even by implication, on contested curriculum issues the State Board will be called upon to resolve,” the motion states.

TEA’s motion lists a number of other controversial curriculum issues on which TEA staff may not voice an opinion in public:

• Whether schools should teach “whole language” or “phonics” in English Language Arts;

• Whether schools should have grammar as a separate section of the English curriculum or embedded in the overall curriculum;

• How schools should present the treatment of minorities in U.S. or Texas history;

• Whether schools should have required reading lists in English or other subjects (and if so what books should be included on them);

• Whether schools should emphasize scientific processes or content;

• Whether schools should require laboratory instruction in science courses;

• How schools should integrate the Spanish-language grammar or decoding skills into English TEKS for students with limited English proficiency (LEP);

• Whether to include instruction on contraceptives along with abstinence, in the presentation of human sexuality in health education.

TEA stresses in its court filings that the “neutrality” policy only applies to its employees, not classroom teachers, who must follow the direction of the board of education.

The agency may have the upper hand, legally speaking — I haven’t a clue about the law in this area — but what a sad thought that career educators and public servants are effectively muzzled on any issue the conservative majority on the SBOE deems “controversial.” Consider what the far-right members of the board of education has done to textbooks over the years. The L.A. Times summarizes a few choice samples:

In a nod to those who believe God created the Earth 6,000 years ago, a sentence saying the ice age took place “millions of years ago” was changed to “in the distant past.” Descriptions of environmentalism have been attacked as antithetical to free-enterprise ideals; a passage describing the cruelty of slavery was derided as “overkill.”

Still, the teaching of evolution is the official policy of the state. If TEA staffers generally, and the science curriculum director in particular, are tasked with administering the state’s policy on science, how can they reasonably be expected to remain “neutral” on evolution? What does that even mean?

by Forrest Wilder

It appears that more radioactive waste will be dumped in West Texas.

We’re the first to report that Waste Control Specialists, Harold Simmons’ radioactive waste outfit, received a key license today from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The agency didn’t even bother to put out a press release on this important regulatory decision. I learned about it from a Waste Control press release picked up by MarketWatch. To their credit, Waste Control posted the license on their Web site — something TCEQ inexplicably failed to do.

Waste Control has been angling for years to build a national radioactive waste dump near Andrews, Texas. You might remember that TCEQ’s own experts stated in internal memos — and later to the press — that the landfills were “highly likely” to leak into the groundwater. In May, TCEQ issued a final license for one of the landfills, the so-called byproduct rad-waste dump. Waste Control will begin construction of that landfill shortly.

Today, the agency issued what it terms a “final draft license” for the larger and more radioactive of the two landfills - the “low-level” radioactive waste facility. The license as it’s written now would permit Waste Control to dispose of 2.3 million cubic feet of waste from other states and a whopping 26 million cubic feet of federal rad-waste, largely from the Department of Energy’s Cold War-era weapons programs. Those volumes are unchanged from the “initial draft license,” an earlier version which TCEQ shared as a “courtesy” with Waste Control last December. Along with the license, TCEQ issued a voluminous (382 pages) environmental assessment. Sources close to the agency say the TCEQ engineers and geologists have been under tremendous pressure from their bosses to produce a sanitized environmental report.

I haven’t had time to read either the license or the environmental assessment in any detail yet, but one thing did catch my eye. As noted, the issue of whether radionuclides will eventually leak into the groundwater has been a major point of contention. Waste Control has said the “redbed” clays underlying the landfill are virtually impermeable. The staff have pointed out that the company’s own data show that groundwater is within fourteen feet or less of the sides of the landfill. Not too comforting considering the agency must consider the flow of water 50,000 years into the future. The environmental assessment, one would assume, would make a final determination on this matter.

No such luck, it seems.

In the assessment, the author merely notes that “predictive modeling” must be relied upon to “demonstrate” that groundwater will not leak into the dump over the next 50 millennia. The license requires Waste Control to “predict” future hydrological conditions to “assure” that the landfills remain dry. [Italics mine]. Shouldn’t this sort of modeling have been done already? Isn’t the whole point of a regulatory review - especially a gargantuan environmental report — to determine risks before a license has been issued that would allow for more radioactive waste?

More to come.

by Forrest Wilder

Readers of David Theis’ August 8 Observer feature, “A Poet Without Borders,” about acclaimed Houston poet Fady Joudah, may have noticed the connection between Joudah and internationally renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Joudah translated Darwish’s poem “The Butterfly Burden” from the original Arabic, garnering Joudah the Saif Ghobash-Banipal prize.

The 67-year-old Darwish died Saturday in Houston from complications due to heart surgery, The New York Times reports.

Darwish was known for his strong, and oftentimes political voice representing both the Palestinian cause and the human spirit. Growing up in a village near Haifa, Israel, Darwish and his family were forced into exile, but he eventually made his way back to Palestine in the mid-’90s, settling in Ramallah. He developed his taste for political activism early, and is credited as the writer of the Palestinian declaration of independent statehood in 1988.

The most-translated Arab poet, Darwish will be remembered as an influential shaper of Palestinian cultural and national identity.

He will be buried in Ramallah after a state funeral service in the West Bank on Tuesday.

—Reported by Mary Tuma

by Mary Tuma

Did anyone catch state Rep. Myra Crownover’s op-ed in the New York Sun on Friday? I doubt there are many readers of the Sun in Crownover’s North Texas district, but the piece wasn’t really intended for her constituents anyway. In her op-ed, Crownover, who co-owns a drilling company, joins the chorus of Republicans screaming “Drill Here, Drill Now.” Even in that crowd — in which pandering and misinformation have been commonplace — Crownover manages to distinguish herself. Crownover argues that Texas has much to teach the nation about “energy, the economy, and the environment.”

Among her boldest assertions is that oil drilling in Texas has had no environmental impact. Crownover writes:

There is debate in Congress right now as to whether the Atlantic and Pacific Coastlines should be opened to offshore drilling. In Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, we have been producing millions of barrels of oil for years with no environmental consequences. Offshore drilling safety is so advanced that even during Hurricane Katrina not one drilling rig in the Gulf experienced a significant environmental event.

You heard the representative: there have been NO environmental consequences from oil production in the Gulf. Zero. Crownover goes on to state that Hurricane Katrina didn’t cause any “significant” environmental problems related to drilling rigs either.

Both assertions are flatly contradicted by numerous media accounts and reports from the federal government, only a Google search or phone call away. Just take hurricanes Katrina and Rita, events that happened in the last three years. For example, a Houston Chronicle investigation found:

[T]he two storms caused at least 595 spills, incidents that released untold amounts of oil, natural gas and other chemicals into the air, onto land and into the water. The quantity and cumulative magnitude of the 595 spills, which were spread across four states and struck offshore and inland, rank these two hurricanes among the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. Some have even compared the total amount of oil released — estimated at 9 million gallons — to the tragedy of Exxon Valdez.

I called Wilma Subra, the technical assistant for the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN), to get her assessment of Crownover’s belief that Katrina produced no major oil problems. “There were a large number of rigs totally lost,” she said. “They’re not there anymore. There were a large number of spills. There were pipelines that run from the rigs to the shore that were disrupted. The oil had an impact on aquatic organisms… You can go along the coastal areas and still find residual oil.”

While it’s true that drilling rigs are safer and cleaner than they used to be, spills still occur with some regularity. In 2006, a pipeline linking a rig to the land leaked 21,000 gallons of oil offshore of Galveston. Sometimes oil outfits intentionally and illegally discharge waste into the Gulf. And what about the barge on the Mississippi that recently leaked hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel oil into the river? Or how about the oil spill from a leaking pipeline in San Leon, Texas that happened just today?

It’s as if Crownover is living in some alternative universe.

But you can’t really blame her. The drilling-is-safe/”not-one-drop-spilled” meme has caught fire in the GOP ranks, bandied cavalierly about by John McCain, Fox News talking heads, and a hundred others who’ve read the talking points. Texas elected officials, who speak with some authority about the oil bidness, have gotten in on the act. For example, Railroad Commissioner Elizabeth Ames-Jones, whose agency regulates the oil and gas industry, writing in the Washington Post, urged federal policymakers to “cast off ’70s thinking and learn from the recent experiences of energy-producing states such as Texas.” The impacts on sensitive areas like ANWR, she said, would be “minuscule.”

Contrary to the belief of some, repeating something that is untrue over and over does not make it true.

by Forrest Wilder