The Texas Observer

In an article last week in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas House members Patrick Rose (D-Dripping Springs) and Rob Orr (R-Burleson) were quoted criticizing the notion that the state’s General Land Office ought to be able to keep certain information secret while involved in buying and selling real estate.

The Observer has touched on the merits of the practice here.

The secrecy gives the Land Office an edge — since important details like how much the state paid for a given piece of property as well as how much it’s worth can be kept from prospective buyers and the public for a certain period of time. The problem is, Texas decades ago embraced the idea that government should be transparent in its operations and that sunshine can and must illuminate the dark corners of the state’s freewheeling deals — if only to keep the voters informed and to serve as a check on powerful bureacrats and influential interests.

According to the Star-Telegram, Rose echoed this ‘open government’ rationale, saying, “The state’s business is the people’s business… To take this out of the sunshine of open records just doesn’t make sense. It makes a problem that’s bad, I think, worse.”

The paper says Orr argued a similar point, saying, “I don’t really believe that government, no matter whether it’s local or state government, should be in the business of competing against private interests… I think they should be into more-conservative investments.”

Sounds like both are ready to gear up and exercise at least a little oversight into the Land Office’s deals — right?

Wrong. The talk and the walk aren’t quite in sync. In fact, a cursory check of the votes cast on the various ‘confidentiality of contracts’ bills in 2005 and 2007 shows that Rose and Orr both voted ‘aye’ — they joined an overwhelming majority of house members in passing HB 2217 in 2005 and SB 596 and HB 3699 in 2007 — the very pieces of legislation that enable the Land Office to keep the information confidential.

According to Star-Telegram reporter Jay Root,Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson makes no bones about what he sees as part of his job.

“I’m not in the park business,” he said. “I’m in the moneymaking business.”

Some Texans think the state owns certain real estate because people want those properties preserved (like the Christmas Mountains near Big Bend National Park or even the Governor’s Mansion) There are some things that only the state can do — and protecting a unique mountain range from development is one of them.

Maybe Mr. Rose and Mr. Orr can clarify their position on ‘confidentiality of contracts.’ As soon as they do, we’ll have it here.

With the announcement by Representative Kirk England of Grand Prairie that he will be switching parties and running for re-election as a Democrat, the week’s news has gotten that much worse for the Texas GOP and for House Speaker Tom Craddick (R-Midland).

House heavyweights Dianne Delisi (R-Temple) and Fred Hill (R-Dallas) both said they would not seek another term this week, leaving seats wide open in what have always been solidly conservative districts. Without an incumbent, they could turn into races to watch.

Hill is a former candidate for Speaker (one of eight who filed papers). The remaining candidates for speaker include, of course, Craddick, as well as his erstwhile opponents Jim Pitts (R-Waxahachie) and Brian McCall (R-Plano), and other GOP leaders like Jim Keffer (R-Eastland), and Delwin Jones (R-Lubbock). Two Democrats have filed papers in the race: Senfronia Thompson (D-Houston) and Speaker Pro Tempore Sylvester Turner (D-Houston).

With England’s switch, the balance in the Texas House becomes 79 Republicans to 70 Democrats. (A special election to fill Fort Worth Republican Anna Mowery’s seat will be held in November.) Five seats have to switch parties to tie. It would take six changing hands for Democrats to take over — still a stretch in this reddest of red states.

Says Rep. Garnet Coleman (D-Houston): “Since 2003, when Craddick became Speaker, it was 88-62… There are two different things going on here: clearly, we would prefer to have a majority. But as Texans, we would prefer to have a new speaker… People are not ashamed to be Democrats… Now, people perceive the Republicans have moved way too far to the right.”

Garnet’s point is well taken. Whether or not the Democrats can regain the Texas House is secondary. Conceivably, if Craddick continues to lose his staunchest supporters (like Delisi), combined with enough Democratic victories to punch a hole in the speaker’s already weak pledge list, a more moderate Republican speaker could take the dais in 2009.

For more on Turner’s entry into the speaker’s race and Craddick’s woes during and since the raucous 2007 Regular Session, take a look at what’s been posted here.

As late as 5 p.m. on Thursday, congratulations were still pouring in from Democrats for Kirk England. It’s been a long time since Texas Democrats have had such a good news day.

England’s statement is pretty straightforward:

I made a promise to the hardworking families in our community to fight for our public schools, fight for affordable health care and to fight for us on pocketbook issues. After one session in the House, I found that the Republican leadership in Austin had no tolerance for the values and priorities of the folks I represent.

Look for more news on House races and the speaker’s marathon here soon.

The Bush administration apparently decided it was tired of looking like the bad guys trying to cut health care for poor kids. As even probably they know, that’s bad politics.

So today the White House amped up its rhetoric on the Children’s Health Insurance Program. President Bush and Michael Leavitt, the Health and Human Services secretary, held separate news conferences. (here’s the transcript of Bush’s presser, and here’s Leavitt’s). You can read some background on the CHIP debate here.

This morning Bush cast himself as a committed supporter of CHIP–even though he’s trying to cut it. He argued paradoxically that Congressional Democrats, who want to expand CHIP, are actually endangering the program by insisting on a funding increase that the president has threatened to veto. In other words, Bush, who’s trying to cut the program, is actually on the side of the poor kids; and those wicked Democrats, by pushing to grow the CHIP program, will harm children.

We’ll say this, the man has gall.

The rhetoric doesn’t match reality. We spotted two blatant misrepresentations in just the second paragraph of Bush’s opening remarks:

“I have strongly supported S-CHIP as a governor, and I have done so as President,” Bush said. “My 2008 budget proposed to increase S-CHIP funding by $5 billion over five years. It’s a 20 percent increase over current levels of funding. Unfortunately, instead of working with the administration to enact this funding increase for children’s health, Democrats in Congress have decided to pass a bill they know that will be vetoed.”

Let’s parse that statement, shall we, beginning with the very first sentence. Bush wasn’t exactly CHIP’s biggest supporter as governor of Texas. In fact, when the Legislature designed the program during the 1999 session, Bush worked hard behind the scenes to limit CHIP as much as possible. After he lost that fight, Bush famously told then-Austin Democratic state Rep. Glen Maxey that they had shoved CHIP “down our throat.”

As for Bush’s support of CHIP as president, his $5 billion (or 20 percent) boost over five years for CHIP sure sounds good. But it’s actually such a meager increase that it would likely cut the number of kids off health insurance.

Here’s why: Due to rising medical costs, the government will have to increase spending just to cover the kids currently on CHIP. It will require a five-year increase of about $14 billion — three times Bush’s proposal — to maintain current CHIP enrollment, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. Anything less amounts to a cut.

As state Rep. Garnet Coleman (D-Houston) put it this afternoon, “Everything [Bush] has done on CHIP the last two or three months, is designed to cut and to permanently limit that program. It’s as simple as that.”

Gov. Rick Perry has repeatedly scoffed at the notion that humans are causing global warming. His latest remarks came during a recent speech to Republicans in California.

And since when did the field of science become the sole purview of left-wing politicians? I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard Al Gore talk about man-made global warming so much that I’m starting to think that his mouth is the leading source of all that supposedly deadly carbon dioxide.

Virtually every day another scientist leaves the global warming bandwagon, but you won’t read about that in the press because they have already invested in one side of the story. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be good stewards of our environment. We should. I am just saying when politics hijack science, it quells true scientific debate and can have dire consequences for our future.

That scientists are daily fleeing the “global warming bandwagon” is an extraordinary assertion that even the most strident climate change doubters rarely make anymore. We wanted to know what empirical basis Perry had for this claim so naturally we called his office. After all, this was the year the global authority on climate change, the IPCC, concluded that man-made global warming is a near certainty. If Perry had the goods on a counter-revolution we wanted the scoop.

“The governor certainly stands by [his] statement,” said Krista Moody, a Perry spokesperson. “He doesn’t accept that theory, the theory of man-made global warming.”

Perry, she said, had worked with U.S. Sen. James Inhofe’s office in preparation for the speech. A Republican from Oklahoma who previously chaired the Environment and Public Works Committee, Inhofe’s understanding of climate change can be summed up in his now-infamous claim that global warming is the “greatest hoax ever perpetated on the American people.” Moody said that she could not produce a list of scientists repudiating human-caused climate change, but cited the work of Inhofe’s right-hand man, Marc Morano, as the source.

Before going to work for Inhofe, Morano toiled as a “reporter” for such science savants as Oliver North, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity. He has no scientific expertise. Rather, Morano is a professional obfuscator, a hack who has made a dark art out of exploiting science’s built-in respect for uncertainty for partisan purposes. “[Morano] is absolutely one of the leading [climate] denialists,” wrote Ross Gelbspan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported extensively on global warming, in an email to the Observer.

We called Morano to ask him to send us his list of scientists who are bailing on climate change. He talked a mile-a-minute about Greenland’s cooling trend, Al Gore’s alarmism, and the media’s embargo against climate change truth. As far as an impressive list of scientists fleeing the climate consensus, Morano pointed to a May round-up he put together that totaled - count ‘em - 12 new skeptics. Morano promised that he would have a more comprehensive list in October, when the season for skeptics apparently begins.

As to his relationship with Perry, Morano said he’s never had any contact with the governor’s office… until yesterday. Perry’s people responded to our inquiry about his speech by calling Morano to ask for his most up-to-date list of climate skeptics. That’s called a loving attention to detail.

We asked Gelbspan, the journalist, to comment on Perry’s belief in flip-flopping scientists. “That’s absolute crap,” he wrote in an email. “If anything, there were a number of scientists who were reluctant to commit until about 5 years ago. Since then, there’s been a groundswell of scientists beating the drum.”

The folks at Walgreens corporate headquarters rang us this afternoon to make one thing clear: They won’t open a store on the site of the beautiful old Denison High School building.

As we reported yesterday, Denison city officials have rushed to tear down the classic 1913 structure. The demolition was rumored to make way for a new Walgreens. Several sources said the city has had conversations with Walgreens about the site. (City leaders haven’t returned calls for comment from the Observer).

But the company says no. “We have been looking in the Denison area, but we have no interest in [the old Denison High School] site,” said Carol Hively, a spokesperson at Walgreens corporate headquarters in Deerfield, Illinois. “We will not build a store there.” She said she didn’t know if the company had ever had conversations with city leaders about the site.

Walgreens’ firm denial only deepens the mystery of what the city plans to build on the school site. One comment to our previous post mentioned a rumor in town about a new library. Either way, the area is about to lose a grand, historic building.

The board of trustees over at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas voted last week to institute a new salary plan for its chief investment officers, despite the fact that the current plan was less than a year old. The move will make TRS’ chief investing officer, Britt Harris, eligible for a 125 percent bonus that could bring his annual salary to just over $900,000. Before the new plan, Harris was already the highest-paid state employee.

The two superintendents on the board (the only educators with any say) cast the only two ‘no’ votes. Another board member abstained. One has to wonder about the merits of such a pay increase. Sure, investment professionals need incentives. And as Harris has pointed out, a big fund requires a lot of attention.

But as a recent Austin American-Statesman article notes, a similar fund in California pays its chief officer significantly less (and still seems to be performing for its teachers).

Rep. Tommy Merritt (R-Longview) has been out front against the bonus plan. Merritt says he’s received a strong response from teachers and others in his northeast Texas district and from across the state thanking him for speaking out against the plan. But Merritt says the conversations usually do not end there.

“Then they lit into me about the type of investments,” Merritt says. “All these risky opportunities.”

TRS is undergoing an overhaul. It will move 29 percent of its $111 billion fund from safer investments like stocks and bonds into hedge funds, purchasing real estate, and providing money for venture capital. In short, the overhaul will make the huge amount of money managed by TRS more like the cash being tossed around by big, private equity firms. TRS is making this change just as the real estate and hedge fund markets are tanking.

The new annual salary for the investment chief can’t help but rub many retired teachers the wrong way — particularly when the fund provides the majority of their retirement income.

Merritt says there’s got to be a better way of handling the fund — and he noted that he doesn’t just want to be picking on Mr. Harris — but “the teachers are still suffering.” In the last legislative session lawmakers chose to borrow money to help fund the system, when “we could have put more money in the fund. You don’t go borrowing money to gamble.”

According to its current ‘Strategic Plan’ the TRS Mission includes the responsibility:

…to prudently invest and manage the assets held in trust for members and beneficiaries in an actuarially sound system administered in accordance with applicable fiduciary principles.

I’m not sure if prudence is in any way legislatively enforceable, but it seems that the new investment overhaul and top-heavy incentive pay plan are running afoul of the system’s mission. Maybe they’ll pull a rabbit from the hat and surprise us all with miraculous and quick growth, but with the way the market is currently it seems unlikely.

As Merritt says, “We need to step up as a state and find a way to fund TRS without taking all these risks.”

Imagine San Antonio knocking down the Alamo to build a Walgreens in its place. Or Fort Worth demolishing its old city hall. Or Houston getting rid of….well, never mind about Houston.

The town of Denison is about to raze one of the grandest old buildings in North Texas reportedly to clear the way for a Walgreens. It doesn’t take a history geek or an architecture expert to appreciate the old Denison High School building, which dates to 1913.

You can read a history of the building and see pictures of it here.

Denison–population 22,000–sits north of the Metroplex and neighbors Sherman, near the Oklahoma border. The old high school building on main street is a beautiful relic, replete with a white clock tower, towering chimneys, rounded archways, and a detailed amphitheater. Though abandoned for more than 15 years, the building remains structurally sound and easily could be refurbished.

And in fact, preservationists raised roughly $2.2 million in donations to fix up the place. The Texas Historical Commission spent the past year meeting with and writing letters to urge Denison officials to save the unique structure, says Brad Patterson in the Historical Commission’s architecture division.

None of it dissuaded city leaders, even though the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Despite their dogged fight, local residents and historical preservationists from around the state and country appear to have lost their battle.

Last Wednesday, a district judge denied the preservationists a temporary restraining order, and demolition began on the high school that afternoon. As of this morning, roughly 60 percent of the structure had been destroyed.

The ruling, by District Judge Lauri Blake, was an odd one. It doesn’t usually take much to win a restraining order, especially as in this case, when the preservationists seemed to have such solid argument. Their attorney, Ben Baker, says the high school sits in a historic district, and the city didn’t apply to the Historic Preservation Board for demolition, as required by city ordinance. Yet Blake denied the request.

Blake hasn’t exactly distinguished herself on the bench. She’s the same judge who gained international notoriety two years ago by sentencing a teen-ager to abstain from sex until she finished school.

After Blake’s ruling, few legal avenues remain, says Baker. The Observer called the City Manager Larry Cruise’s office and the Mayor Robert Brady for comment, but we haven’t heard back. When we do, we’ll post again.

You can reach Denison city officials at (903) 464-4454.