The Texas Observer

Self-described Jesus Freak, Galveston lawyer, Cabeza de Vaca buff, and bleeding-heart nature-lover Bob Moore has a dream. He wants the Chicago developer trying to turn one of the last open stretches of Galveston Island into a resort community to pack up and leave. In place of Marquette Land Investment’s 1,000 acres of golf courses, resort condos and hotels, Moore envisions a beach-to-bay nature preserve, protecting the area’s ecologically-intact network of marshes and uplands.

“It’s not just a chunk of land,” Moore told me in September while I was working on a story about Galveston. “It’s an endangered species unto itself.”

He also sees on the property, amidst the freshwater ponds and salty wetlands, an ecumenical Cabeza de Vaca Spiritual Center, a place where people of all faiths can come together near where the Spanish explorer broke bread with the Karankawa in the 16th Century.

“The powerful spark of the divine is out there everywhere,” Moore says.

Photo by Daniel Carter

You may say he’s a dreamer but he’s not the only one. A growing number of folks in Galveston have been agitating against the Marquette development since it was announced last year. Most people have more pedestrian complaints - traffic, marred views, etc - but at the heart of the outcry is a sense that Galveston’s unique barrier island habitat is close to being lost.

The Galveston City Council is making Moore’s dream a lot harder to realize. On Thursday, despite an outpouring of opposition from citizens, the council voted unanimously to approve the project. The Galveston County Daily News reported that the audience of 200 sat in “stunned silence” as the decision was announced.

Members of the Beach to Bay Preserve, a group formed to spearhead opposition to the development, brought a stack of petitions containing 1,329 signatures asking the council to halt Marquette’s plans.

One woman described the property as Galveston’s irreplaceable treasure, likening it to the Mona Lisa.

“People come here because our landscape is beautiful,” said Karla Klay. “We have to consider that this is our masterpiece and take care of it. We don’t have to promote this type of development.”

Although Moore writes sentimental prose about waterfowl, he also is a hard-nosed lawyer and committed organizer. In 1984 Moore scored a major legal victory against uber-developer George Mitchell (of The Woodlands fame).

In that case, Moore successfully argued that Mitchell and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were ignoring the cumulative effects of development on wetlands on Galveston Island and that a comprehensive environmental impact statement was required before Mitchell’s project, the Lafitte’s Cove subdivision, could be permitted. The legal precedent established by that suit, titled Fritiofson v. Alexander, has been used 57 times since, according to Moore. Now, Moore plans on building on Fritiofson in a new lawsuit challenging island development. His Mitchell lawsuit spent five years in court.

“I told [Marquette principal] Sloniger you better bring your sack lunch ’cause you don’t know what you’re fixin’ to get into,” he said.

Democrat Dan Barrett says he feels confident he will win the December 18 runoff for Texas House District 97.

“I’m pretty sure I’m going to win it,” Barrett told me. He argues that much of the combined GOP vote was generated by groups dedicated to individual candidates — votes less likely to show up in the runoff. “A lot of that vote was a personal vote. I don’t think that’s going to be repeated.”

Here are the final vote totals from the special election according to the Texas secretary of state:

(D) Dan Barrett 5,575
(R) Mark M. Shelton 4,049
(R) Bob Leonard 3,294
(R) Craig Goldman 2,947
(R) Jeff Humber 925
(R) Chris Hatch 515
(R) James Dean Schull 375
Total Votes: 17,680

Barrett came in on top of a whole passel of Republicans in the Nov. 6 special election called for Anna Mowery’s old district — which is carved out of southwestern Tarrant County and southwest-central Fort Worth. HD 97 was considered a safe Republican seat.

The conventional wisdom says whatever Republican lands in second place is going to pick up the votes from all those other GOP candidates — and then he/she/it will handily beat Barrett in the general election.

But, Barrett warned, now that Democrats think they can win, they will turn out — offsetting the GOP advantage in numbers. Barrett has picked up the endorsement of the Texas Parent PAC and he is getting a lot of attention especially from Texas blogs.

The lucky Republican in the runoff is Dr. Mark Shelton. His victory over the other GOP contenders has been tainted somewhat by accusations about a late-in-the-game robo-call message — as well as the fact that his campaign hired Jason Johnson, an associate of Dr. James Leininger.

As I’m sure you know, Leininger is Texas’ one-man brass band trumpeting the golden oldies of school voucherism, eliminating a woman’s right to choose, and tort reform.

According to Harvey Kronberg’s Quorum Report, Shelton has voiced support for Craddick and at one point supported vouchers that would help Texas students attend private schools — on the public dime. Kronberg also “connects the dots” and suggests the robo-calls in question were made on behalf of Shelton’s campaign.

QR: As the dust settles, here is how the HD97 special election looks. The semi-official Craddick candidate was Craig Goldman. When it became evident that he would not make it to the runoff, chess pieces were moved and Shelton became the anointed candidate. Shelton’s campaign consultant shows no consulting fees on either of the two campaign finance reports but his largest lobby client is a PAC funded exclusively by James Leininger. Shelton’s support of both Craddick and vouchers apparently firmed up by the early October candidate forum. Potentially illegal phone calls were made on behalf of candidate-Shelton on election day.

–It must be noted, however, that QR has subsequently posted a denial from Leininger that he was involved in any way:

QR: (Leininger spokesman Ken) Hoagland also said that Dr. Leininger knew nothing about the controversial robo-calls attacking Bob Leonard and Craig Goldman until the issue was brought to his attention.

Dan Barrett says something similar about the robo-calls.

“That robo-call — I didn’t learn about that until a couple of days after the election,” Barrett said. “I don’t have a clue who did it.”

I asked Barrett point-blank if he had engineered the dastardly campaign trick to throw his six Republican opponents into disarray. He stuck to his story and said no.

I do think the ugliness wrought by the affair will change what Barrett calls “the dynamics in the district” — and I think Dan Barrett has a good shot to beat Dr. Mark Shelton, especially if Democrats and independents in the district, fed up with business-as-usual in Austin, take a break from their Christmas shopping to go and vote on Dec. 18.

“I’m not worried about myself, I’m worried about how we can take care of those low-income kids.” So said our junior senator, John Cornyn, as quoted in today’s Dallas Morning News. But when it comes to Cornyn, actions speak louder than words.

He made the remark during a tour with reporters of an Austin call center that enrolls kids in the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

One in five Texas children lack health insurance — by far the highest rate in the nation. Roughly 60 percent of those uninsured kids are eligible for CHIP or Medicaid, but for one reason or another (some because of the state’s bungling of its enrollment system), they just haven’t signed up.

Cornyn has been criticized for voting against an expansion of CHIP in late August and September. The bill, vetoed by the president, would have provided health coverage to more than three million kids nationwide.

Cornyn’s photo-op seemed designed to blunt a potential campaign issue.

Still his challengers got their shots in. “He can use all the semantics and misdirection he wants. At the end of the day, he had an opportunity to vote for working families and he chose not to,” said Democratic senate candidate and Houston state Rep. Rick Noriega told the Morning News.

Ray McMurrey, a second Democrat who jumped into the race last week, said Cornyn “should be embarrassed” by his inaction.

Cornyn defended his vote against a CHIP expansion. “There are still hundreds of thousands of low-income children across the state who are going without essential health care services,” he told the Austin American-Statesman. “My goal is to try to make sure…we get them enrolled before we take our eye off the ball and we then look at perhaps growing the program.”

Seems to us that his goal of getting kids enrolled counts as “growing the program.” But there’s a bigger flaw in Cornyn’s position. Many of the three million kids who would have been covered under the CHIP expansion bill that Cornyn helped scuttle already are eligible for the program. Like Texas, many states simply can’t afford to enroll all the kids who are currently eligible for CHIP. The vetoed bill would have addressed that problem.

If Cornyn’s goal is to cover those uninsured kids who are already eligible, then voting against the CHIP expansion in Congress was self-defeating.

I love Texas but let’s be honest: We elect some dumb politicians. Take for example one Al Jamison, Colorado County Judge. This guy’s against studying climate change because cavemen were against it.

“The Cro-Magnons 10,000 years ago didn’t sit around and say, ‘Let’s have a committee meeting on when the icebergs melt,’” said Jamison at a public meeting last week, according to Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chonicle. “Personally, I think we should take the same approach.”

You just can’t make this stuff up. Let’s credit Jamison, a Republican, as the first admitted follower of the “What-Would-Cavemen-Do? Principle,” a touching tribute to the wisdom of the earliest Homo sapiens.

Jamison was speaking on a proposal before the Houston-Galveston Area Council to form a committee of experts. These experts will study the effects of climate change on the Gulf Coast Region and what to do about it. Not a bad idea since scientists project that climate change will lead to rising seas, a hotter and dryer climate in Texas, and more intense weather. Much of Galveston Island, as I detailed recently, could be under water with only a couple meters of sea-level rise.

The fact of human-caused global warming is no longer in dispute. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea leve,” states the latest assessment from the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change, the global authority on the issue. Most of the increase in temperatures is “very likely” from human causes, the panel wrote.

The assessment, which includes recommendations for dealing with climate change, is geared for decision-making bodies like the Houston-Galveston Area Council. But Jamison and his colleagues were more concerned with avoiding reality.

Falkenberg of the Chron:

Other members wanted to make sure the panel’s recommendations would be completely toothless, that there would be absolutely no responsibility on the part of local governments to mitigate the effects of global warming or address any other impacts we may have on our environment.

There’s more!:

Meanwhile, Brazoria County Commissioner Jack Harris was concerned about the public learning too much about the experts’ foresight on climate change, and — heaven forbid — getting access to any report prepared by the panelists.

“What if this committee decides to issue its own report to the public, being under our purview, so to speak, but at the same time we have no guarantee that we, this board, will be able to say ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ to what is released to the public?” Harris asked.

In the end, the council approved the creation of the committee but with the proviso that they can change the focus of the group should the political climate change.

And in other climate change news, the United States is now the only industrialized nation in the world to refuse to sign the Kyoto Protocol. What millennium are we living in, anyway?

We reported earlier this month on Milwaukee’s John Washburn’s automatically generated open records requests for the emails sent to and received by Gov. Rick Perry’s office. Yesterday, we noted that Perry has sent Washburn a bill (actually an estimate) for $568.

That covers the first half-a-week’s worth of emails. The emails for a whole month will cost Washburn a whopping $2,300 or more. We also promised to relay what exactly Perry’s spokesman says will cost so much.

Robert Black told me, as the “itemization” of the estimate details, staff time is indeed the chief cost element. The office’s letter to Washburn states that $472.50 of the cost will be incurred by 31.5 hours of staff time (at $15 per hour) required to comply with the request. Another $94.50 is listed as “Overhead at 20% of staff charge.” Then there’s the $1 cost for the CD.

Black says every staff member will have to spend time printing, preparing the emails for clearance through office counsel, and getting the emails ready eventually for copying to CD.

“Every staff member has to stop what they’re doing, and save it, and print those off, and send it over to general counsel,” Black said. “We haven’t gotten to the copying part yet.”

Black said it was the governor’s intent to abide by Texas’ open government laws, and despite my goading, he could not be made to even grumble about the nature of the request, or the fact that it was being made by someone out of state who was apparently doing it simply because he was offended by the fact that the emails were being regularly deleted.

“It’s the law,” Black said. “We are all for open government and government in the sunshine.”

Black added that the governor’s records retention policy has been approved by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission and that the former policy of deleting emails after seven days was not resulting in the destruction of pertinent records.

“It’s important for people to understand that email is not a filing system,” Black said. “Information that is required to be saved is being saved. It’s like saying we’re not saving every post-it note.”

He said, for now, the governor’s office will be working on getting Washburn the information he has requested.

“It certainly takes up a lot of their time,” Black said. “But it’s the law, and we’re going to comply with the law.”

Black said Washburn has a few options, including paying the $568 and awaiting the next bill and the emails on CD. Or he can narrow his request, which has been suggested several times by the governor’s office, and he has so far refused. Or Washburn can complain about the cost estimate to the Texas attorney general.

An email from Washburn early Tuesday indicated he has sent a complaint to AG Greg Abbott’s office about the staff time and overhead charges. He also sent Perry a check for $2.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
- Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”

Artists taking offense to the proposed 70-mile border wall in South Texas have come together in an exhibit appropriately titled “Art Against the Wall.” Rachel Brown, the exhibit organizer and arts instructor from South Texas College, says the project stemmed from an urge to speak out before it’s too late.

“I firmly believe artists are usually the first people to suffer when you have any kind of political regime that’s trying to oppress people,” she said, “because we are the ones trying to speak freely and free speech is usually one of the first things to go.”

Brown shared some of the pieces from the exhibit, currently at UT-Brownsville, with the Observer.

-”Mariposas” by Alma Casso (McAllen)

-”International Friendship” by Monica Ramirez (McAllen)

-”Build Bridges Not Walls” by Chris Van Dyck (McAllen)

-”Walls Kill Migrants” by Guadalupe Victoria (Monterrey, Mexico)

If built, the border wall itself - like the Berlin Wall and the Israeli security fence that Palestinians call an “apartheid wall” - will undoubtedly become a canvas for expression. Even the humorless Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr has urged Iraqis to paint “magnificent tableaux” on concrete barriers the U.S. has erected in Baghdad to protest the occupation. Brown and the other artists hope that day will never come.

A previous post described the open records battle being waged by Milwaukee software professional John Washburn versus the governor of this great state, Rick Perry.

Mr. Washburn’s requests would not have been possible without Elise Hu’s blog series, The Purge — which set about investigating the public records retention policies of Texas government agencies. She and Jay Root with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram deserve credit in terms of finding and following this story.

Washburn has now been sent a bill by Perry that estimates the cost of “locating, compiling, and reproducing” four days’ worth of emails to be $568. There’s a warning about redaction costs as well. And, once again, Perry’s office suggested narrowing Mr. Washburn’s public records request.

At that rate, Washburn could be looking at an open records request fee total of more than $2,000 per month — and Perry’s office also noted that a failure to receive the funds would result in automatic withdrawals of outstanding requests, along with a note that no disclosure of the records requested would begin until the governor’s office receives a “deposit.”

What was Washburn’s reaction?

“I laughed at it, to be honest with you,” he says. “It is exorbitantly high.”

Washburn says he knows exactly what he asked for, and he knows that it can be easily obtained.

“How hard can email extraction be from a server?” he asked. (I must admit thinking about that for a minute. Perry’s office is claiming 31.5 hours of staff time at $15 per hour, which results in the bulk of the $568 figure. What will those staff members be doing during those hours? We called Perry’s office and they said they’d get back to us with more details.)

Washburn asked for the emails in their original, digital format. There is a question as to how such documents can be redacted, and for that matter, what is the logic of the redactors?

Washburn, who has a history of open records activity in Wisconsin, Florida, and now Texas, says he has never before encountered a charge for staff time, although it is standard in the Lone Star state.

He did tell me that he was surprised by what he called Perry’s ‘gambit.’ He said he thought Perry would take the ‘drag-it-out’ approach to stifling records requests.

“Before, I thought it was just going to be stretched out,” Washburn says. “Now, they’re hoping that I won’t come up with the money.”

So far, Washburn has requested the governor’s emails from preceding days on Nov. 6, 9, 13, 20, and 23. The objective, Washburn said, was to stop a pro-forma email destruction policy that Perry’s office had in place — and which it said it inherited from Governor George W. Bush.

Washburn does have a plan to thwart Perry’s latest move, but it will take another post to assess its merits.