The Texas Observer

We may be close to knowing the fate of the Christmas Mountains, a near-10,000-acre tract of sensitive wilderness in that fearsome, beautiful part of Texas just north of Big Bend National Park.

The School Land Board meets February 5 to consider whether or not to accept one of two active bids from private parties. The board has waited 90 days to allow a proposal to be put forward by the National Park Service to either buy the land or engineer some other way to take over the property — as many are urging.

For people who don’t want the land developed, or parceled, there is a strong desire to see the range folded into the National Park Service’s domain. Once it becomes a national park, the idea goes, either in conjunction with Big Bend, or on its own, it will have secured permanence — lasting boundaries, rules, and caretakers.

The fact is, most of the people that care think they can trust the National Park Service to keep the Christmas Mountains in as close to a pristine state as possible — as well as accessible.

The problem with that argument is that, because of the permanent encumbrances put on the land by its donor, the Conservation Fund, in private hands the land would also remain undeveloped — and according to Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, at least one of his private bidders promises to allow public access and, perhaps more importantly, to facilitate access to a mountain range which all parties agree has no easy access.

Patterson says the tract is surrounded by private property on all sides except one southern edge, where it abuts Big Bend. He took two reporters to the site two weeks ago, he said, just to demonstrate how one would have to hike to get into the mountains from the national park. He said it took him, a Texas Monthly reporter, and a reporter for the Big Bend Gazette four-and-a-half hours to trek from Big Bend to the edge of the Christmas Mountains — and at that point, he said, the terrain is impassable.

“I’m looking for the best public access,” Patterson says.

The problem for Patterson — government watchdogs, environmentalists, and much of the press find it hard to believe that the land would be better maintained and preserved under private ownership than as a park. Apparently the Conservation Fund felt the same way. The organization stipulated in the deed that they must approve any transfer of the property to a private owner. Patterson has said he won’t abide by that provision because in his estimation it wouldn’t stand in a court of law, an assertion that has been met with strong disagreement.

One of Patterson’s most able critics is my colleague Forrest Wilder, who wrote first for the Observer about the proposed sale, and who has pointed out the weaknesses in Patterson’s argument that difficult access is a problem.

Wilder wrote: Anyone who has ever been to Big Bend, like any other park, will tell you that you can’t really understand the majesty of the place until you actually explore on foot. It’s called hiking. And the last thing anyone wants to see while hiking is some gun-slinging yahoo on a four-wheeler.

Wilder failed to convince Patterson, of course. I think Patterson really believes a private steward and allowing hunting would be better for the mountains. As far as I know he has not suggested allowing four-wheelers as yet — but guns? Hell yes.

He says it’s a mistake to assume this mountain range is a park waiting to be certified. And he says the lack of access matters.

“This perception is out there that this is public land or park land — and that’s just bogus,” Patterson told me. “The bottom line is this is not public land, but if it were public land, nobody could get there.”

He says one of his bidders has suggested he would buy adjacent property in Terlingua Estates, build a road up to the border of the tract, facilitate habitat for game therein, and allow public access — including hunting. And, by God, Patterson thinks that is the brightest future for the land. The problem is he has to convince another land board member to go along with him — depending, of course on what the National Park Service ultimately offers.

Patterson did say the board decided that there will be access from Big Bend into the Christmas Mountains. “No matter what happens, we’re going to implement a perpetual, irrevocable easement to allow access from Big Bend National Park,” he said. “This is never going to be a park, but it is a wilderness area.”

Patterson bristles when he is reminded that many feel he is making a point about guns at the expense of the public’s right to enjoy a pristine patch of Texas. But, he insists, this is not about public lands.

“You know what?” he says. “I am making a point about guns… If I thought it was about public lands, I wouldn’t be making a point on this one.”

At bottom, this one is about trusting a private landowner to provide access and preserve the land. Patterson says, regardless, the land will be protected. In a way, one’s position on the sale of the Christmas Mountains may come down to whether or not you trust Jerry Patterson.

It was a minor part of a forgettable speech, but President Bush touched on his second-favorite fossil fuel during Monday’s State of the Union Address: coal. “Let us fund new technologies that can generate coal power while capturing carbon emissions,” he said to applause.

How ironic then that the day after Bush’s soft-focus call to action, his Department of Energy pulled out of its signature “clean coal” project. Years in the making, the optimistically-named FutureGen coal-fired power plant was Big Coal’s answer to climate change - a “zero-emissions” plant that would capture carbon and store it underground. Coal-burning utilities, including TXU (now Luminant, et al), talked the project up endlessly.

States fiercely competed to win the project, with Mattoon, llinois besting runners-up Odessa and Jewett, Texas last year. Environmentalists suspected that FutureGen was little more than an expensive greenwashing tactic to delay real action to curb carbon emissions from coal. They’ve been proved partially right. The AP:

The Department of Energy, after weeks of complaining about rising costs, told members of Illinois’ congressional delegation that it wants out of the project. Three-quarters of the money was to have come from the agency, with the rest from power and coal companies in the alliance.

Illinois power-brokers are royally pissed, but Texas smells opportunity. The AP again:

And Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison seemed poised to try to swoop in and snag some of whatever clean-coal project the DOE might now have in mind.

“With the overall cost of FutureGen nearly doubling, the Department of Energy is wise to review the project to ensure the best use of taxpayer dollars,” said Hutchison spokesman Matt Mackowiak.

“The state of Texas and our private industry have a lot to offer if DOE decides to competitively bid this project,” he said.

Meanwhile, coal is cooking the planet. Hands-down, the black rock is the most carbon-intensive fuel for generating electricity available. Globally, coal power pumps almost 10 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. More important, if all the plants on the drawing board are built they will, by 2030, emit more carbon than all the coal burned since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, according to Scientific American. That scenario will doom any effort to halt runaway climate change. And them’s the facts.

Yet, the utilities and their friends in Washington - and Austin - have little to offer other than a half-baked boondoggle that has descended into an interstate squabble over pork-rich scraps.

A dust-up following our recent story on the race for Travis County district attorney has led one of the candidates, a prosecutor in Ronnie Earle’s office, to quit his job. The Austin American-Statesman followed our reporting with a story in today’s paper about the race to replace the retiring Earle as DA. You can read our story from last week here. In it we revealed publicly for the first time the dissension within Earle’s office prior to the 2005 indictment of Tom DeLay, then the House Majority Leader.

The controversy caused by our story led Rick Reed, one of four Democrats running to replace Earle, to resign from the Travis County DA’s office, the Statesman reports. Reed had told the Observer that he was the only prosecutor who pushed to present the DeLay case to the grand jury. He said others in Earle’s staff, including DA candidate Rosemary Lehmberg, wilted at the prospect of indicting a powerful political figure like DeLay. (Lehmberg and Earle denied this, but refused to comment on the specifics of internal office discussions.)

After our story appeared, Earle sent memos to the staff instructing them not to discuss pending cases (the DeLay case has yet to reach trial) and reminding them not to use government space for campaign activities. Reed resigned rather than restrict his campaign rhetoric.

The Travis County DA is perhaps the most important prosecutor’s office in the state, and the race has drawn statewide attention. Texas law grants the prosecutor in Austin, as the seat of state government, the jurisdiction to criminally investigate state politicians, making it the watchdog of Texas politics.

It looks like Conservator Richard Nedelkoff is ready to name an executive director over at the Texas Youth Commission. The state’s juvenile justice department posted the job on its web site on Thursday, Jan. 24. Only GritsforBreakfast noted the posting, pointing to a Dallas Morning News editorial criticizing the agency’s diversion of funds for correctional officers to office renovation.

On Sunday, however, Austin civil rights watchdog Jim Harrington took issue with the job posting — noting that applications are only being taken for five business days and alleging that the commission had “buried” the posting on its site.

The job posting is not prominently displayed on the TYC site. You have to search the jobs alphabetically to find it. And the window from job posting to closing is, clearly, small. The job pays up to $160,000 per year and suggests applicants have the “ability to maintain high tolerance to mental stress.”

Nedelkoff was appointed in December by Gov. Rick Perry. He replaced former TYC Conservator Jay Kimbrough. The conservatorship was put in place by legislation passed in 2007 after Nate Blakeslee broke the story in the Observer of alleged abuse at the Pyote TYC facility — a story that moved a shocked Texas legislature into action. Blakeslee writes about three legislative staffers that shaped the reform legislation here.

“The posting is actually unnecessary,” said TYC spokesman Jim Hurley. He said the conservatorship statute directs Nedelkoff to hire an executive director, and he said Nedelkoff’s reputation has attracted the attention of professionals in the juvenile justice field. “Mr. Nedelkoff is a national figure. He knows national figures.”

Hurley said the fact that Nedelkoff will be hiring is and has been obvious. “It’s not like we haven’t been in the news,” he said.

Another point to consider, Hurley noted, is the fact that once the conservatorship ends, the executive director will be in charge, and needs to be in place. Until recently, Demetria Pope has been acting as executive director but doesn’t seem to be in the running for the permanent job.
“When the governor’s ready to move this thing out of conservatorship, the conservator goes away,” Hurley said.

Still, as Harrington says on the Texas Civil Rights Project web site, “When a job opening like this is only posted for 5 workdays — and not even prominently displayed, but buried deep in general employment listings — one smells duplicity and that a ‘fix is in’ for a particular candidate.”

In recent years, the voices of religious moderates and progressives have been lost amidst the din raised by the yelpings of the religious right.

(Case in point: As I was writing this post I received a “weekly update” by email from Christians United for Israel, the lobbying outfit of Christian Zionist and San Antonio pastor John Hagee, who has of late been agitating for war on Iran. “It is not a matter if war is coming,” Hagee thundered in the email. “It’s only a matter of when!”)

But people of faith concerned with matters other than speeding Jesus’ return or stoking the nation’s cultural wars have never really gone away in this era of fundamentalism. They’ve been here all along, trying to be heard, trying to regroup.

Tonight I attended a dinner at the United Methodist Women in Texas’ 20th Annual Legislative Event in Austin. The event is officially nonpartisan but the coins of the realm are social justice and the common good - those abused, but still useful and necessary ideas. Texas Impact, an interfaith organization that marries progressive religious values with political action, is hosting the conference. The women learn the nuts and bolts of the political process while brainstorming ways to make education, the environment, and health care top priorities again.

Tonight the women heard from two men - branding guru and former Bushie Matthew Dowd and Texas campaign finance expert Fred Lewis - who both see a state and nation that is in dire need of spiritual, political, and social mending.

Dowd described the current zeitgeist. “Nearly every major institution in this county - the American public, the people of Texas have lost faith in them,” said Dowd. Scandal after scandal has discredited corporations, government, churches, even the Boy Scouts and sports. This crumbling of the traditional social order has “created tremendous anxiety and disconnected us from each other,” said Dowd.

“We don’t feel part of a community, we don’t know where to turn.” Americans don’t trust either major political party to represent our dreams, though we do respond to leaders who at least seem authentic. (This authenticity, or appeal to “gut values,” is the rallying cry of Applebee’s America, a book which Dowd co-authored with Douglas Sosnik.) Young people are simultaneously plugged in (read: Facebook, MySpace) and tuned out. The mostly silver-haired audience gasped at the statistic that the average working person now has nine jobs before they turn 30.

This all adds up to a crisis. But a crisis that will precipitate a great “turning” - something that only happens every four generations in Dowd’s estimation. Dowd didn’t say exactly what this turning would look like but stressed the opportunities for organizing at the “local” level.

“When you look at that landscape you see a great, great fertile ground for people like you in this room,” he told the Methodists.

Fred Lewis reminded the audience that what draws them together is community and a faith in the common good. “You can have too much community and you can have too much individualism,” Lewis remarked. “Right now in this county we don’t have a problem of too much community. We have individualism run amuck.”

If demography is destiny, Texas is in trouble. While 87 percent of Anglos in the state graduate from high school, only 75 percent of African-Americans and 49 percent of Hispanics do. Today, one in two babies born in Texas are Latino. Yet the state leaders seem to have little interest in improving public schools.

“If that continues and we don’t do something to change that by investing in early education, good teachers, health care for our kids and their families, our standard of living will decline,” Lewis said.

The answer is bringing low- and middle-income people into the political process. Lewis described a project he is involved in called Houston Votes. It is estimated that one million Houstonians are eligible to vote but not registered. The goal is to reach out to people - mostly people of color - living in the older, marginalized suburbs of Harris County. So far, the group has knocked on 20,000 doors.

“The people there over and over again have told us that what they care about is education and health care for their families,” Lewis said.

Look for more coverage of faith in action tomorrow from my colleague Dave Mann.

The National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Commission recently delivered another of those tone-deaf, asinine, typical-of-a-commission recommendations that have no respect for what is politically tenable in the real world.

Created by the GOP Congress in 2005, the NSTPRC concluded that the federal government should raise the gas tax by 40 cents over five years (and then tie it to inflation), and it suggested states like Texas should ramp up their own state gas taxes even higher, in order to invest in transportation infrastructure.

Mary E. Peters, Bush’s Secretary of Transportation and a member of the commission, wrote about the recommendation in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal a week ago. The headline read, ‘Gas Taxes Are High Enough.’

I must admit to a weakness for anti-gas-tax invective (from any source). I believe the tax on fuel, while it masks a host of policy disasters and environmental nightmares, has an overwhelmingly disproportionate effect on working men and women. It’s a tax that takes its toll chiefly on the backs of the poor and middle class. It’s very much like a toll fee. For those that have plenty of dollars, it is of little concern. For those that do not, the tax can take away the last resource of an economic unit living paycheck to paycheck. People still have to drive to work, despite all the commuter rail initiatives in Texas. The used and abused model of urban and suburban sprawl in Texas has tied us to our vehicles and to the daily use of several gallons of gasoline — even if you or somebody you know bikes to work.

So, I was sympathetic, sort of, when Peters wrote how she and two other commissioners “declined to support the report’s central recommendations.” A huge gas tax increase would definitely raise some revenue, and it might even discourage some people from driving, but it would be political suicide for any politician or political party that tried it. Peters and the rest of the commission knew damn good and well that no such 40 cent increase in the tax would ever become policy.

What the commission’s recommendation did, instead, was provide an opening for conservatives like Gov. Rick Perry to look like moderates and express outrage at the idea of higher taxes — in particular, higher gas taxes — which affect everyone regardless of ability to pay. Of course, Rick’s solution is toll roads.

Should there be an increase in the gas tax? It’s important to remember that the tax on fuel serves several purposes. It gives both consumers and producers a voice in public policy — a say, that is, in just how much gasoline consumption is reasonable. The tax also serves as a tool which governments can use to discourage consumption (and driving) — and encourage better mileage standards — not to mention raise revenue.

The fact is, the oil industry is and has been subsidized by American budget policy as well as foreign policy — government has been dumping cash into this industry since Franklin Roosevelt and his foreign counterparts realized they had to have gasoline to keep their armies moving. It’s the most subsidized industry in America.

According to a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists the subsidies are diverse and generous:

Direct subsidies include government-funded energy research and development. Indirect subsidies include the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, military expenditures related to the Persian Gulf, and police and fire protection related to highway use. Although “user fees” in the form of gas taxes, registration fees, and tolls pay for a portion of the infrastructure services, large government outlays remain that must be covered by general revenues.

The environmental costs are obvious in many ways, but they are not calculated into the price of fuel.

The scientists say: Pollution costs are borne by society in the form of increased health care costs and loss of wages due to illness and premature death (i.e., morbidity and mortality costs), reduced agricultural output, loss of visibility, and damage to buildings.

To my surprise and chagrin, however, Peters’ piece leads you in complaining about the gas tax and by the time she lets you go, you’re likely paying a toll to drive on the same highways your gas taxes already paid for. And she’s proud that the administration is pushing tolls as the only other option.

…a clear alternative has emerged… some form of electronic tolling that will both reduce congestion and generate needed revenue for transportation projects. Thanks to new open-road technology, these pricing programs can be put in place without forcing a single driver to slow down to pay a toll or have their transponder “read”… With the kind of encouragement we’re recommending, many more states could soon be able to pay for new transportation projects…

Peters would have us believe that we must choose between $4 a gallon gas and a maze of toll roads that tax us every quarter mile, just to get the same level of infrastructure that the federal and state government have maintained for 50 years as a public trust.

And her argument does not even address the gross dependence of the oil, gas, and auto industries on government subsidies and the debasing of our air, water, and quality of life.

There’s got to be a better way.

House Elections Committee Chairman Leo Berman struck an upbeat, philosophical note in his closing words last night: “Some people are hell-bent on seeing voter ID passed, and some are hell-bent on not seeing it passed. Perhaps there’s middle ground somewhere.”

Speaker Tom Craddick had charged the committee with sleuthing out the scope of Texas’ problems with voter fraud, and considering what, oh what, might ever be done about it — photo ID, anyone?

It took nine hours and thirty minutes, and how did the committee fare?

Of course, there was plenty of time for the old favorite lines about voter ID: You need a photo ID to rent a movie, but not to vote? asks one side. Why not ask for a blood sample while we’re at it? asks the other. At one point, committee chairman Leo Berman held up a voter’s license card bearing both a photo and a thumbprint on the back. Perhaps sensing Democrats’ sympathies for all things south-of-the-border, he asked if anyone knew where the card came from. “Mexico!” he said, “You can’t vote in Mexico without a photo ID.”

Berman was surprisingly receptive not only toward the Mexican electoral system, but also toward a proposal for a photo ID law that would let voters without a driver’s license sign their name as proof of identity, instead.

The plan would avoid adding extra paperwork or expense to voting, while adding an extra level of security to the process. After the hearing, Dallas Democratic Rep. Rafael Anchia — the committee’s most outspoken opponent of past voter ID bills — called it an interesting proposal, and wondered at why the Republican leadership seemed so receptive. Past legislation had given voters the chance to vote a provisional ballot without a photo ID, but Anchia and other critics have repeatedly pointed out that most provisional ballots are never counted. This time, though, Berman was talking about dropping the provisional requirement.

For months last year, folks from groups representing Mexican-Americans, women, the elderly and disabled testified about the risk of disenfranchising voters by requiring a photo ID at the polls, to which Republican leaders would smile, sometimes politely, and disagree. Tonight, those same groups’ representatives were guardedly receptive to signature-verification as a backup measure in a photo ID bill.

It’s not clear whether Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst or Republican Party of Texas Chairman Tina Benkiser would go for such a plan, which sets looser requirements than other voter ID bills pushed nationally by the GOP. Maybe it’s just a camel’s nose under the tent kind of thing.

Anchia worried about creating a double-standard for people who vote by mail-in ballot and about passing a voter ID bill in the House with a special exception for people without photo ID’s. The way these things play out, the exception could simply be stripped once the bill hits the Senate floor. “We’d need assurances from the Senate to ensure it’d come back without voter-suppression amendments,” he says.

According to testimony from the Secretary of State’s office, there are 100,000 people in Texas who registered to vote without a driver’s license or a social security number, and the U.S. Supreme Court seems willing to let states decide how readily those without photo ID’s should be allowed to vote.

Today’s testimony painted a dreary picture of the effectiveness of Texas’ elections system, from the troubled statewide voter database to documented cases of voter fraud — through mail-in ballots and vote harvesting. If the 81st Legislature is going to tackle the state’s elections infrastructure, there’s plenty of room for improvement. How about a verifiable paper ballot, anyone? But the stakes are high if the Legislature’s solution does more harm than the system we’ve already got.