The Texas Observer

My colleagues are starting to hound me with these Puddles blogs. I keep thinking it will be my last one — please gawd please. That’s what I get for assuming Alice Mayor Grace Saenz-Lopez will come out of her political nosedive before hitting rock bottom. By the way, in Texas politics, rock bottom still hasn’t been charted by geologists. At this rate, Saenz-Lopez might discover it first.

The downfall of the Mayor’s political career? — a lovable shih tzu mop named Puddles. For previous back story on the tragic tale of the mayor’s obsession with her pint-sized pet see a previous Observer blog post.

The nation loves its kooky Texas stories — and the mayor has been willing to oblige by sending her identical twin sister Graciela Garcia and the shih tzu to the Big Apple to appear on a talk show to relate the Puddles predicament. On the Mike and Juliet Show, Tuesday, the Mayor’s sister and her lawyer, Homero Canales, say Puddles’ previous owners, the Gutierrez family, mistreated the pup. The family on the other hand, says the Mayor wrongfully stole their pet.

The citizens of Alice seem to be siding with the Gutierrez family. A recall petition is circulating to replace the mayor. On Monday, the City Council voted in a symbolic gesture in favor of a no confidence motion against the Mayor. The Council also passed a measure accepting the mayor’s resignation should she offer it, according to an Alice Echo-News story.

“I think we’ve sat aside on this issue for a while, trying to have respect to afford the mayor time to do the right thing and get this matter resolved on her own. But this has spilled over and is starting to encroach on city business. I don’t have any faith in the mayor’s ability to hold the proceedings and carry out her duty as the mayor,” said Valverde. ” I sincerely hope she does the graceful thing, the honorable thing and resigns, so she shows that she puts the city first, as she has done for her whole career.”

Besides possibly losing her job as Mayor of Alice, Saenz-Lopez is also in trouble with the law. Last Friday she was indicted by a grand jury on two felony charges of tampering with evidence after the mayor allegedly attempted to hide Puddles at her twin sis’ house on the outskirts of town. Being a loyal identical twin — her sister, Graciela, is also being indicted for tampering with evidence. Their charges are third degree felonies, which carry a sentence of up to 10 years each — no laughing matter, folks.

But hey, my co-workers want to know if anyone has asked Puddles where he would like to live? Maybe Dr. Phil, on the rebound from his unsuccessful intervention with Britney Spears, could stick his nose into this one?

Can a pint-sized pooch end the career of a political veteran? The battle over the lovable Puddles/Panchito is still dogging Grace Saenz-Lopez, the Mayor of Alice. For the past few months, the Mayor has been in a protracted legal battle with the Gutierrez Family, neighbors of the Mayor, who say they left a Shih Tzu, whom they called Puddles, in the care of the Mayor while on vacation.

When the family phoned to check in on their pet, the Mayor dropped the bomb that the puppy had died. For the back story see a previous Observer blog post.

Things heated up from there, and a hearing was set last week for the Gutierrez family’s lawsuit before Judge Richard Terrell. Two days later Panchito/Puddles disappeared.

The police searched the Gutierrez Family home for any sign of the cuddly mop, which the Mayor calls Panchito. Keeping the voters in mind, she also had her own home searched to avoid any accusations of foul play.

Christopher Maher, the lucky reporter for the Alice Echo-News, who has been covering the saga for several months said both parties are now accusing each other of having stolen the dog.

Meanwhile, disgruntled citizens of Alice are petitioning for a recall election for the Mayor. “If you can steal a dog, you can steal our taxes,” commented one unhappy citizen to the Alice Echo-News.

Maher said he wasn’t sure where the twisted saga would lead next. “The dog disappears two days after the hearing is set,” said Maher. “You can draw your own conclusions.”

One thing is for sure, Judge Terrell will not stand for this kind of foolishness, said Maher. “The Judge doesn’t have a high tolerance for Shenanigans,” he said

Quite a conversation is going on over at the Burnt Orange Report about Dawnna Dukes, Las Vegas, and the fact that the East Austin Democrat will face challenger Brian Thompson in the March 4 primary.

Thompson, a 27-year-old Austin lawyer, says he will file Tuesday for Texas House District 46. Dukes is the incumbent. She is a ‘Craddick D’ — which as you know means she is one of the dozen or so Democrats that helped Speaker Tom Craddick (R-Midland) overcome multiple attempts on his chair in the last regular session.

BOR Editor Matt Glazer and Dukes Campaign spokesman Colin Strother spent most of last Wednesday trading arguments and accusations after Glazer posted on BOR that Dukes had missed a Medicaid Reform and Legislative Oversight Committee meeting so she could play slots in Vegas (and the post came complete with a camera-phone image of Dukes at a slot machine). Strother and Glazer have posted the majority of the 37 comments to the original article, and the Austinist this weekend picked up the thread, using the gotcha tease, “State Rep. Dawnna Dukes caught playing hooky in Vegas.

It turns out the “gotcha” wasn’t exactly true. Dukes missed the committee meeting because of a prior engagement — attending a National Conference of State Legislatures convention in La Jolla, California. According to Strother, Dukes stopped over in Vegas on her way back, on her own dime. She was in La Jolla when the meeting was held on Thursday, and she was in Vegas on Saturday. An NCSL representative confirmed she was at the conference.

Glazer admits in the thread that he took the picture on Saturday, but he insisted that the incident indicates “a pattern” when taken with Dukes’ unbelievably poorly timed vacation to France in 2005 (which allowed once and current Speaker candidate Jim Pitts (R-Waxahachie) to cast the deciding vote for Rick Perry (and John Sharp’s) property tax cut/school finance plan). Hmmm. This is definitely truthiness at work. Interesting standard for an information source…

Here are a couple of excerpts from Glazer and Strother’s unhappy dialogue:

Strother: I know you don’t like Dukes or approve of her vote for Speaker, but I’m shocked that you would use incorrect information, supposition, and baseless conjecture to say “I don’t like Dawnna”. Maybe it is because you… have an interest in her opponent. I don’t know. I would tell you that you are well respected as a blogger, but not for garbage like this.

Glazer: Why don’t you talk about why she voted for Speaker Craddick. As the chief spokes person for Turner, Pena, Flores, Dukes, and other Craddick D’s what is the reason all of them voted for the ultra-conservative Craddick? Was it because nobody in their district knows who Craddick is or because they don’t care what their constituents think? Our readers would like to know.

BOR contributor ‘Pedro’ makes a decent plea in the midst of the back-and-forth between Glazer and Strother:

You guys gotta grow up a little too. Legislators miss committee meetings all the time. You can ding someone for it. But you can’t act like it’s the most vile betrayal an elected official has ever perpetrated on his or her constituency.

Strother says Glazer recruited Thompson to run against Dukes, and he notes the facts that HD 46 is a majority African-American district and Dukes is literally the only African American representative from Travis County, while Thompson is Anglo.

“We can’t control who gets conned into filing against her,” Strother told me last week. He called Thompson “a young, impressionable guy” and said Thompson had been “sold a bill of goods.”

Glazer says Dukes’ support for Craddick along with missteps like the vacation to France are examples of her poorly serving the district. Thompson told me last week that he believes Dukes’ support for Craddick was ample reason for the voters in HD 46 to turn her out of office.

“I believe every minority group deserves representation, with one exception — Craddick Democrats. I believe being a Democrat and supporting Tom Craddick are mutually exclusive,” Thompson said.

Strother, a former campaign manager and staffer for U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Laredo), has something of a reputation for being rough and tumble with his quotes — but he also has been associated with winning — which generates its own kind of respect in political circles. There is even a list of memorable Strother quotes.

Look for more fireworks from HD 46 between now and March.

If you are trying to look busy in the office today, the Higher Education Coordinating Board’s Committee on Academic Excellence and Research is scheduled to hear a pitch from the Institute for Creation Research at its monthly board meeting. The ICR wants to be able to grant graduate degrees in Texas. To check out the board meeting currently underway click here.

The ICR certainly is cutting edge. According to the institute, based in Dallas, “flexible blood vessels” discovered in dinosaur bones proves that dinos have only been around for centuries instead of millenia. Also, in the ICR’s December issue of Acts & Facts, the ICR’s director of research, Dr. Vardiman, discusses his scientific project called RATE (that’s radioisotopes and the age of earth for the uninitiated). His findings have led to the major conclusion that the Earth is thousands — not billions of years old. Dr. Vardiman admits he’s still struggling with some pesky scientific questions, however, such as how Noah and his family could have survived the massive dose of radiation unleashed from “accelerated decay” of organic matter during the Genesis Flood.

Uncanny canine coincidence or something more biting? Remarkably, two South Texas mayors have recently become enmeshed in squabbles with their constituents over lovable mutts.

For Grace Saenz-Lopez, the mayor of Alice, the scrape involves her neighbor and a shih tzu puppy named Puddles. According to local media reports, the mayor agreed to babysit Puddles while her neighbors were on vacation. When Rudy Gutierrez and his family phoned Mayor Saenz-Lopez to check in on their puppy, she broke the news that Puddles had met his maker while they were enjoying their vacation. Lo and behold, since Alice has a population of about 19,000 people, it didn’t take long before a friend of Mr. Gutierrez’ noticed a puppy with a striking resemblance to Puddles at a groomers downtown. An angry Rudy Gutierrez demanded his dog back. The groomer called the cops. In the end, the shih tzu was released to the mayor and has been rechristened “Panchito.”

The Puddles/Panchito scandal does not look like it will resolve itself anytime soon. A group of citizens has already stormed two city council meetings demanding that Mayor Saenz-Lopez return Puddles/Panchito to its rightful owner. The mayor’s lawyer has muzzled his client and she refuses to comment. We wonder if this will dog her into the next election?

Needless to say, the story has resulted in a number of questionable leads and headlines at the local Alice Echo-News – our favorites being the “Shitzu Hits the Fan” and “Council Meeting Pawsed by Puddle Protestors.” If you care to vote on whether Puddles/Panchito should be returned to the Gutierrez Family or stay with Mayor Saenz-Lopez you can participate in an Echo-News‘ online poll. So far Mayor Lopez-Saenz is trailing badly.

Meanwhile, southeast of Alice in Brownsville, Mayor Pat Ahumada Jr., a well-known animal lover, escaped bodily harm by a whisker when his efforts to rescue a dog went awry. Ahumada, who recently had to give up several dogs because he exceeded the city’s pet ordinance, grabbed what he thought was a stray he encountered while driving the streets of his hometown. Before scooping up the Labrador mix, he left his business card at a nearby home and tried to contact a number on a pest control truck parked in the driveway. According to Ahumada, no one returned his call so he placed the dog with a neighbor.

A few days later, a Daniel Chapa arrived at the neighbor’s door demanding that his dog “Rocky” be returned to him. The neighbor called the cops who decided to release Rocky to Chapa. That night, Ahumada went to Chapa’s home to confront him about Rocky. “ I’m the one that rescued the dog,” he announced, according to his account in the Brownsville Herald.

Chapa got aggressive, says the mayor, who fled the scene for fear of being hurt. Chapa jumped in his truck following in hot pursuit. The mayor called the police. This would be one of at least four calls made to the cops in the tug-of-war over Rocky’s fate.

Fortunately, this story has a tail-wagging ending. Rocky, now named “Chiquilin,” is under the permanent care of his foster home and the mayor says it’s for the better. “We’re glad Mr. Chapa made the right choice about giving up the dog,” he said. “He’s a very beautiful dog. He’s got long legs like a faun.”

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?

The majestic old Denison High School building — one of North Texas’ most historic structures — has finally been demolished. We’ve chronicled the rush by city leaders in Denison to tear down the beautiful structure that dates to 1913 to make way for redevelopment. A group of Denison residents valiantly fought the demolition. (You can read our previous coverage here and here. You can see a video of the old building, via YouTube, here.)

Activists’ last-ditch efforts to save the structure — including an offer to buy the building from the city — were refused. A demolition crew flattened the last remnants of the high school in mid-October. All that remains on the site is the detritus of the Mission Revival structure and, oddly, the white clock tower.

Before the wrecking ball took its final swings, the Denison city council decided it wanted to preserve the wonderfully detailed clock tower as a memorial to the old building. It’s not clear why the council got sentimental about the clock tower when they easily could have saved the whole structure.

The city purchased the clock from the demolition crew for $38,000 (typically in demolitions, the crew gets to sell off the remnants). Before the final demolition, a large crane removed the clock tower and carefully placed it in a fenced-off corner of the lot, where it sits.

The word in Denison is that the city plans to build a new library on the site in the Mission Revival style. The old clock tower may be part of the new building. Why would the city tear down one historic Mission Revival building only to replace it with, um, another Mission Revival? We’ll put that question to Denison city leaders early next week.