TXDOT data reveals San Antonio’s worst spots for wrecks
Remember the Alamo – and don’t forget to use your turn signal as you drive past it.
The area around San Antonio’s popular Riverwalk District – an attraction for locals and tourists alike — is one of the three most wreck-prone spots in downtown San Antonio and one of the six most wreck-prone spots in all of Bexar County.
That’s according to a Texas Watchdog analysis of nearly three years’ worth of wreck data from the Texas Department of Transportation – data that our partners at WOAI-TV Channel 4 in San Antonio fought for two years to access under state public records laws.
Even though the Riverwalk and its restaurants, shops and scenery are on an all-pedestrian level below that of the city’s automobile traffic, much of the touristy surrounding area – and the several blocks stretching north to Travis Park — have one of the highest concentrations of wrecks in the county for 2007, 2008 and most of 2009. And the most wreck-prone spot in San Antonio is in that neighborhood, near the corner of St. Mary's and College streets.
Most of the Bexar County wrecks in TxDOT’s database for the given time period included latitude and longitude coordinates of the crash, recorded by the police officers who investigated the wrecks. At the request of WOAI, Texas Watchdog used special mapping software to plot the wrecks on a map and analyze the results to find the areas with the highest densities of wrecks.
Aside from the Riverwalk area, another major wreck hotspot was a section of the South Pan Am Expressway – a conjoined section of interstates 10 and 35 between West Martin and West Commerce streets, not too far from Christus Santa Rosa Hospital — as well a third area around Methodist Hospital and Interstate 35.
The most wreck-prone spots in Bexar County’s suburban areas were the Loop 410 exit for Ingram Park Mall, at Wurzbach Road; the intersection of I-10 with Loop 1604, near Six Flags Fiesta Texas theme park; and the U.S. 281 junction with Loop 1604.
WOAI investigative reporter Brian Collister, with whom I serve on the board of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, first asked TxDOT for access to its wreck database two years ago.
I’ll let Brian tell how it played out from there. Here’s an excerpt from a blog post he wrote earlier this year:
My fight to get these records started back in 2008 when I filed an open records request for the entire database. The Attorney General ruled it was public, but TXDOT challenged the ruling in court. It feared the ruling would mean that ambulance chasing attorneys and chiropractors would have access to the names and address of crash victims. (Ironically, they already get that information from our local police departments.)
To calm those concerns, our attorney reached a deal with TXDOT. The state would provide the data without any personal information and we would withdraw our request. But for some reason, the agency at the time was slow to finalize the deal… the reason now is clear.
This is when TXDOT decided to get sneaky.
Late one Friday afternoon last March, while the lawsuit was still going on, I stumbled across a bill filed in the legislature that would make the entire crash database secret!
It turns out that TXDOT officials had quietly gone to Senator John Carona of Dallas, the head of the Senate's Committee on Transportation and Homeland Security, and begged him to file a bill to ban release of the data – forever. The TXDOT officials decried the AG ruling and claimed it would spell disaster for accident victims who will be further besieged by rogue lawyers and doctors.
But TXDOT conveniently forgot to tell the senator about our lawsuit and the compromise it had agreed to. It also conveniently forgot to tell our lawyer that they had gone behind our back in a shameful attempt to shut off the data with a new law.
Once we learned what was going on, we sprung into action. I testified to the senate committee along with representatives of several open government and media groups. Luckily, the lawmakers listened and the governor eventually signed a bill making the data public – minus the personal information.
So why would TXDOT fight so hard to try and keep this information from you? I don't know and could never get an honest answer from anyone at TXDOT.
I’ll add that FOIFT was among the open government groups that pushed for the release of the information. You can also read another summary of Collister's fight for the TxDOT wreck database, and all its twists and turns, written by the San Antonio Express-News' John Tedesco.
Photo of wrecked Corvette from flickr user TexasDarkHorse, used via Creative Commons licensing. Contact Jennifer Peebles at jennifer@texaswatchdog.org or 281-656-1681. Follow her on Twitter at @texaswatchdog and @jpeebles.
HISD posts campaign finance reports online but obscures addresses, other information first
The Houston school district says it’s protecting donors’ privacy by marking out addresses, but an open government expert says it’s an unnecessary use of taxpayer money.
The Houston Independent School District publishes trustees’ campaign finance reports on its website but marks out significant details, including donors’ addresses and campaign treasurer’s phone numbers and addresses.
But the online omissions contrast with what Superintendent Terry Grier has pledged will be a transparent approach to running the district and drew criticism from one expert in government transparency.
”HISD should be commended for posting redacted campaign forms online even though they are not legally obligated to do so,” Joe Larsen, a specialist on open records for the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, said in an interview with Texas Watchdog.
“However, there is no reason for it to redact publicly available and information from these forms before posting them, as this redaction process unnecessarily consumes taxpayer money, and the redacted information is of legitimate public interest—which is why it is required on the forms in the first place,” the Houston attorney said.
Texas Watchdog noticed that certain information was redacted after viewing the documents online and at HISD’s headquarters on West 18th Street. The latter is an option available to any member of the public wanting to see the complete forms though a busy daytime schedule could make it inconvenient.
In their online iteration, the reports are missing the phone numbers and addresses of campaign treasurers, addresses of companies like AT&T and the Houston West Chamber of Commerce that were paid by the campaigns for services, and addresses of individuals and companies who donated to trustee campaigns, all of which have been “whited out.”
HISD spokesman Norm Uhl said the district posts the documents redacted to preserve the privacy of individuals.
“HISD does not want to put it online for anyone to see,” Uhl said. “It is about protecting them, mainly the individual donors’ privacy online.”
According to the Texas Ethics Commission, HISD is not violating any laws.
“Since there is not a law that requires a school district to post the forms online, there are not any laws that pertain to the action of redacting certain information before posting them,” Tim Sorrells, a lawyer and commission spokesman, said.
While it may not be against the law, is HISD being transparent to the public?
“Yes,” Uhl said. “The information is available upon request.”
Uhl was referring to the public’s right to view and request copies of the documents under the Texas Public Information Act.
But obscuring the details in the online documents makes it difficult for the public to identify who is giving money to trustees’ campaigns, since many people share the same names. Without having additional details about a person, like an address, it is hard to determine whether the John Doe donor is the same one whose company was just awarded a contract. (That’s not just a hypothetical; see our story here.)
And what’s more, the posting of incomplete documents seems incongruous with statements by Grier, who has stressed the need for transparency in HISD many times.
“It's very important to be transparent so our taxpayers, our community and everyone knows what we're doing and why we're doing it,” Grier said at a board workshop in May.
Watch his comments in the video below.
Diana Dávila (resigned in August)
Anna Eastman
Carol Galloway
Paula Harris
Mike Lunceford
Larry Marshall
Greg Meyers
Harvin Moore
Manuel Rodriguez
Support the posting of public documents like these, even when government officials have made them hard to access otherwise. Donate to Texas Watchdog today.
Do you think HISD is being transparent? What would you like to see the Houston district do to be more transparent? Let reporter Lynn Walsh know via e-mail at lynn@texaswatchdog.org or on Twitter: @LWalsh. Be sure to search for #HISD on Twitter for up-to-the-minute updates from board meetings.
Weather forecasting for Venus funded by federal stimulus — as well as a survey on your feelings about the stimulus
Texas researcher studying weather on Venus with stimulus grant says work will further understanding of weather on Earth. But the project doesn't create jobs, Sen. Tom Coburn's office says.
Like most of the thousands of scientists doing research with taxpayer-funded federal grants every year, Mark Bullock and Rick Wilson toiled in anonymity.
Bullock and Wilson worked for more than a year without a single call from a reporter interested in or even aware of their research. Bullock was in the midst of studying weather patterns on the planet Venus. Wilson was gathering surveys that asked people how they felt about the $862 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the same stimulus pool that was funding Bullock and Wilson's research.
Sens. Tom Coburn and John McCain changed all that earlier this month. The senators identified examples of waste, inattention and mismanagement in stimulus programs around the country in a report,
Summertime Blues:100 stimulus projects that give taxpayers the blues. According to Coburn and McCain, the work of Bullock and Wilson represented two important reasons why the stimulus was a failure."Want to know if it’s going to rain this week . . . on Venus? According to scientists at the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) in Texas, you absolutely do. So the government has given them nearly $300,000 in stimulus funds to satisfy the American taxpayer’s profound need for interplanetary weather info. The atmospheric forecasting of weather and climate on other planets has great public appeal, insist the SWRI researchers in their grant summary. Therefore, they will boldly go where few meteorologists have gone before: the lower atmosphere of Venus."
Singled out, it might be easy for people with political motives to mock many of the research projects funded through the National Science Foundation, Topousis said. Such criticism ignores the mission of the foundation and how it approves grants.
Both Bullock and Wilson made their proposals well before Congress passed the stimulus bill, Topousis says. Both projects were subject to the usual independent peer review, recommended to the foundation and made possible by the additional funds made available through the additional stimulus funding, she said.
Bullock's proposal to study wind patterns on Venus is an extension of his 11 years of planetary study at the Southwest Research Institute's office in Boulder, Colo. Much of the institute's work since its founding in 1948 in San Antonio have been to provide basic research for NASA space missions, Bullock said.
Realizing he might be providing additional fuel for critics, Bullock said his stimulus grant will pay to send him to Hawaii in December and January. Bullock has reserved telescope time at the famed Mauna Kea Observatories to capture infrared images of the planet's cloud system and an atmosphere that moves 60 times faster than the wind systems on Earth.
"I know people saw the report and said, 'Gee, they're studying the weather on Venus. What is that all about? They can't even figure out the weather here on Earth,'" Bullock said. "But this is what science has always done. When you look at another planet with curiosity, you learn something about Earth."
In its genesis and goal, the project Wilson and a colleague, Catherine Eckel, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas, put together has been even more distorted in its isolation in the Coburn and McCain report, Wilson said. Should the data the researchers have collected so far prove out, the result is likely to be the opposite of the cheerleading accusations leveled at the project.
The pair used questionnaires to gauge how residents of two small towns in Texas would react when stimulus funding largely bypassed small towns for metropolitan areas, Wilson said.
Wilson admits that there was some sentiment among his academic colleagues who support the stimulus to craft questions that might elicit favorable responses. Wilson, who is also the editor of the American Journal of Political Science, dismissed the talk out of hand.
"Weirdly, I think the results of this study might play into Sen. McCain's hands," Wilson said. "The results may suggest that the public may not be as apt to need earmarks as politicians seem to think it does."
Hart said that rather than picking on two relatively small projects, the report suggests there are probably many more stimulus projects of specious or no value.
"Most honest observers will admit these examples are the tip of the proverbial iceberg," Hart said. "The stimulus contains thousands of projects that are not true economic stimulus.
Thousands of voter registrations from Houston Votes called fraudulent, incomplete
Voter registration group Houston Votes has inundated the county voter registrar's office with faulty registrations, including multiple applications for the same voters and for noncitizens, registrar Leo Vasquez said. He likens it to ACORN.
Two Texas activist groups, Houston Votes and Texans Together Education Fund, were accused Tuesday of an organized voter fraud campaign by Harris County Voter Registrar Leo Vasquez, who likened the groups to the now-discredited ACORN.
“The integrity of the voting rolls in Harris County, Texas, appears to be under an organized and systematic attack by the group operating under the name Houston Votes,” Vasquez said at a 2 p.m. press conference at his office, where he also released copies of applications in some of the most egregious cases.
Houston Votes is the get-out-the-vote arm of the Texans Together Education Fund.
“Evidence shows that the Houston Votes and Texans Together organization are conspiring on a pattern of falsification of government documents, supporting perjury in a deliberate effort to overburden our processing system," he said.
Vasquez said he is turning evidence over to the Secretary of State’s office and the Harris County District Attorney’s office for further action. He called into question more than 5,000 voter registration applications.
Vasquez' office announcement was based in part on research by a conservative-leaning citizens' group, the King Street Patriots, which had presented his staff with documentation of questionable voter registrations, a leader of the Patriots group said.
Texans Together head Fred Lewis said that he has worked with Vasquez to clear up any discrepancies until recently.
"He is a liar and a political hack," Lewis said. "We are going to the Justice Department to make sure he doesn't make a mockery of the voting process."
Lewis and several others from his group seeking to help register voters attended classes offered by Vasquez' office. The group took more than 50,000 voter registration forms, Vasquez said.
But “after observing consistent and repeated patterns of apparently fraudulent or excessively sloppy work,” Vasquez and his deputies called Lewis and other group members into the office for a conference. The parties went over the troubling elements of the registrations.
Among the problems were multiple applications for one voter, some registered voters being signed up again and voters who claimed to have no Texas ID, driver’s license or Social Security card.
Lewis confirmed the meetings and said that some of his field people charged with registering voters were let go.
“We sat down and said, ‘Let us know of these problems, and we will take care of them,’ Lewis said. “We fixed every problem they brought to our attention. We cooperated.”
Vasquez contends they did not rectify enough issues and his office spent “thousands of dollars in taxpayer money” to go over the submitted documents in an attempt to straighten things out.
He alleges Lewis and his operations have violated Texas Election Code, submitted falsified documents and “possibly violated federal election laws.”
No wrongdoing: Houston Votes
Sean Caddle, the director of Houston Votes, admitted that there may have been “mistakes made” by his vote gathering team, but said Houston Votes did nothing wrong and called it a legitimate program.
After Caddle was shown examples of Houston Votes workers registering one name – Carmella Bellazer – with the same date of birth six times on the same day, he said “that probably would be a clear case of fraud.”
Caddle is a former Service Employees International Union worker from New Jersey and also recently worked in Colorado as part of a voter registration effort there linked to the effort that turned the Centennial State from a solid red state to a Democratic stronghold.
Catherine Engelbrecht, the leader of the King Street Patriots, said she became interested in digging into voter fraud after working the polls in November and seeing the potential for fraud.
“That set things into motion,” she said. “It stood to reason where the was smoke there was fire. It didn’t seem the process was tight at all.”
In the coming months, she and hundreds of other volunteers decided to start digging into public records and the group's True the Vote initiative was born.
“We’re just digging it up and passing it to the proper authorities,” Engelbrecht said.
King Street Patriots' research
First, the group looked at all homes with more than six registered voters. They zeroed in on one congressional district, she said, that had more of these homes than others: District 18, home of Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee.
Engelbrecht said, though, that the group's efforts were not about partisan politics. She also says her group has begun examining every single voter on the registry – not just those in a particular Congressional district.
“This is so not about party,” she said. “This is about maintaining the integrity of our voter rolls.”
Lewis said he was aware that a right-leaning group had submitted documents to Vasquez, though he didn't know of the Patriots by name. He said he felt Vasquez' action was politically driven.
While Lewis maintains his group is nonpartisan, its board is decidedly liberal-leaning, according to research by blogHouston, which noted earlier this month that the Texans Together board included a Bill Clinton appointee, Democratic consultants and an aide to former Gov. Ann Richards.
Lewis said that he and Vasquez, a Republican lame duck, had a meeting scheduled for Wednesday at 10:30 a.m., but he is now not sure it is on, in light of Vasquez' announcement.
Contact Steve Miller at 832-303-9420 or stevemiller@texaswatchdog.org. Contact Trent Seibert at 832-316-4966 or trent@texaswatchdog.org.
Photo of election signs by flickr user meltedplastic, used via a Creative Commons license.
Can Austin lawyer Howard Wolf remake a dysfunctional TxDOT?
As if to prove just how urgent the message, Howard Wolf stuck the first decoration to his office wall with a four-cornered welter of wide blue painter's tape.
"It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out," the framed quote from Machiavelli's The Prince begins, "nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things."
Dangerous? Perhaps not. But Wolf doesn't underestimate the difficulty or overestimate his chances for success in remaking the Texas Department of Transportation. The job is as politically fraught as any in state government. The agency, employing 11,000 people statewide with a budget of nearly $9 billion a year, is as entrenched as any in state government. And while everyone seems to agree change is long overdue, there is little consensus from without and within as to what to do or how to do it.
WOLF
Wolf says he knows of only one way to start. "As I see it, my job is to get the Texas Department of Transportation to see their own future, to see the future of mobility in Texas," Wolf says. "I can show people my vision for Texas but if people at TxDOT don't buy it, what good is it? Any change that is going to come is going to come from within TxDOT."
This theme of changing from within has been sounded over the past several years by a growing chorus of critics. In 2008 the state's Sunset Advisory Commission issued a report to the Legislature charging that the Department of Transportation was no longer trusted by its political overseers and the public. Sunset Commission staff called for sweeping reforms from the top down, recommending the Texas Transportation Commission be replaced with an appointed transportation commissioner and a legislative oversight committee.
The Sunset Commission went on to say the Department of Transportation had no long-term plan and that its short-term project planning was indecipherable. Public trust was at a low ebb because the planning process rarely included public input, the report said.
These criticisms were elaborated upon in a $2 million study by the government analysis company, Grant Thornton, commissioned by TxDOT. The 628-page report said the culture of the department developed around engineers rather than long-range planners. New senior leadership – change agents, the report called them – were needed to help develop a vision for Texas transportation in the future, to establish an environment of trust inside and outside the department and to help reconnect with the Legislature and the public.
The question of what to do with the Grant Thornton findings was answered in early July when the Transportation Commission went looking for someone to head an implementation committee. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst recommended to Deirdre Delisi, the Transportation Commission chairwoman, his 75-year-old friend, corporate attorney and the man who headed his transition team when he was elected Texas Land Office Commissioner in 1999.
Wolf, who began practicing law in 1959, had long established a reputation for complicated corporate reorganizations. At one point in the 1970s he found himself the president of the Texas airline that would become Continental.
But because of the close relationship between Wolf and Dewhurst, the commission sought more political balance by persuading Jay Kimbrough to sign on as Wolf's chief of staff. As a favorite of Gov. Rick Perry, Kimbrough developed his own reputation as a reformer with the Texas Youth Commission and at Perry's alma mater, Texas A&M University. This week, at the suggestion of House Speaker Joe Straus, David Laney, a Dallas attorney and former Transportation Commissioner, will join Kimbrough and Wolf in the offices of what Wolf is calling the Restructure Council on the eighth floor of the Sam Houston State Office Building next door to the Capitol.
While Kimbrough is working on a contract for the Transportation Commission valued at $303,000 for the next 14 months, Wolf says he wanted to make a statement about his independence by accepting $1 for his work. It is just the sort of gesture that won Wolf admirers when Dewhurst made him his citizen appointee to the Sunset Advisory Commission in 2003.
Wolf also made enemies of some lawmakers when he issued a position paper attacking the system of liquor regulation as corrupt. He and Sunset Chairman Kim Brimer, the former Republican state senator from Fort Worth, stopped talking to one another when Wolf insisted that Brimer attach his paper to the Sunset's final report. Instead, Brimer issued no final report to the Legislature.
Joey Longley, who served as executive director of the Sunset Advisory Commission when it produced the critical report on the Department of Transportation, says that if anyone can pierce the nearly impenetrable department it is Wolf. Longley, who left the commission after 30 years, said Wolf was one of Sunset's best and most outspoken citizen members.
"In my opinion he was the quintessential public member of the commission," Longley, now a lobbyist, says. "He challenged the legislative members of the commission to do the right thing. He was very outspoken, but nonpolitical. He's taking on a department that isn't trusted by the Legislature, that doesn't want to listen to the Legislature. I'd expect him to handle himself in the same way with this new committee as he did on Sunset."
Rep. Joe Pickett, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has no quibble with Wolf's qualifications. Nor does he argue with the need for changes to be made with how the Department of Transportation operates. His quibble is with a Transportation Commission made up of Republican political appointees who have no more credibility in some legislative quarters than the Department of Transportation. Pickett says he expects there to be as much discussion in the next legislative session of Transportation Commission reform as there is TXDOT reform.
However effective Wolf, Kimbrough, Laney and the rest of the council when it is selected are, they will not effect change if Delisi's Commission won't permit it.
Wolf says he does not intend to be distracted by political interference. And he believes he has an ally in forecasts that say Texans will not be able to afford to simply keep adding miles of new highways. The 2030 Committee, formed by Delisi, estimated in 2008 that Texas needed to spend $315 billion, or $14.3 billion a year, between 2009 and 2030 just to keep up with the state's needs. The Department of Transportation currently spends less than half that on construction, planning and maintenance, according to figures provided by TxDOT spokesman Chris Lippincott.
Wolf calls this the perfect storm tsunami. Politicians don't take it seriously because they exist in two- and four-year election cycles. TxDOT doesn't take it seriously because the department exists in three- to five-year planning cycles.
On a month-long vacation to Maine after his appointment, Wolf picked up "The Power Broker," a long and intensely reported biography of Robert Moses by Robert Caro, biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson. Moses ruthlessly realized a dream, spending billions of dollars to pave New York City with highways, creating gridlock and debt wherever he imposed his will.
The book was a revelation to Wolf. The best news for Texans, Wolf says, is that there won't be enough money to do here what Moses did and that the Legislature will not have the political courage to impose new taxes to get the money.
What Wolf will try to do in the coming months, he says, is to encourage Department of Transportation leaders this coming storm presents tremendous opportunity to transform the way they think about how people are connected to one another in Texas and the role of technology in that connection.
"This will not be easy. But the fact that it is difficult only amplifies its importance," Wolf says. "I want to get in there and work with these people. I'll consider it a victory if I can get them to think beyond the next legislative session."
Can Austin lawyer Howard Wolf remake a dysfunctional TxDOT?
As if to prove just how urgent the message, Howard Wolf stuck the first decoration to his office wall with a four-cornered welter of wide blue painter's tape.
"It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out," the framed quote from Machiavelli's The Prince begins, "nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things."
Dangerous? Perhaps not. But Wolf doesn't underestimate the difficulty or overestimate his chances for success in remaking the Texas Department of Transportation. The job is as politically fraught as any in state government. The agency, employing 11,000 people statewide with a budget of nearly $9 billion a year, is as entrenched as any in state government. And while everyone seems to agree change is long overdue, there is little consensus from without and within as to what to do or how to do it.
WOLF
Wolf says he knows of only one way to start. "As I see it, my job is to get the Texas Department of Transportation to see their own future, to see the future of mobility in Texas," Wolf says. "I can show people my vision for Texas but if people at TxDOT don't buy it, what good is it? Any change that is going to come is going to come from within TxDOT."
This theme of changing from within has been sounded over the past several years by a growing chorus of critics. In 2008 the state's Sunset Advisory Commission issued a report to the Legislature charging that the Department of Transportation was no longer trusted by its political overseers and the public. Sunset Commission staff called for sweeping reforms from the top down, recommending the Texas Transportation Commission be replaced with an appointed transportation commissioner and a legislative oversight committee.
The Sunset Commission went on to say the Department of Transportation had no long-term plan and that its short-term project planning was indecipherable. Public trust was at a low ebb because the planning process rarely included public input, the report said.
These criticisms were elaborated upon in a $2 million study by the government analysis company, Grant Thornton, commissioned by TxDOT. The 628-page report said the culture of the department developed around engineers rather than long-range planners. New senior leadership – change agents, the report called them – were needed to help develop a vision for Texas transportation in the future, to establish an environment of trust inside and outside the department and to help reconnect with the Legislature and the public.
The question of what to do with the Grant Thornton findings was answered in early July when the Transportation Commission went looking for someone to head an implementation committee. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst recommended to Deirdre Delisi, the Transportation Commission chairwoman, his 75-year-old friend, corporate attorney and the man who headed his transition team when he was elected Texas Land Office Commissioner in 1999.
Wolf, who began practicing law in 1959, had long established a reputation for complicated corporate reorganizations. At one point in the 1970s he found himself the president of the Texas airline that would become Continental.
But because of the close relationship between Wolf and Dewhurst, the commission sought more political balance by persuading Jay Kimbrough to sign on as Wolf's chief of staff. As a favorite of Gov. Rick Perry, Kimbrough developed his own reputation as a reformer with the Texas Youth Commission and at Perry's alma mater, Texas A&M University. This week, at the suggestion of House Speaker Joe Straus, David Laney, a Dallas attorney and former Transportation Commissioner, will join Kimbrough and Wolf in the offices of what Wolf is calling the Restructure Council on the eighth floor of the Sam Houston State Office Building next door to the Capitol.
While Kimbrough is working on a contract for the Transportation Commission valued at $303,000 for the next 14 months, Wolf says he wanted to make a statement about his independence by accepting $1 for his work. It is just the sort of gesture that won Wolf admirers when Dewhurst made him his citizen appointee to the Sunset Advisory Commission in 2003.
Wolf also made enemies of some lawmakers when he issued a position paper attacking the system of liquor regulation as corrupt. He and Sunset Chairman Kim Brimer, the former Republican state senator from Fort Worth, stopped talking to one another when Wolf insisted that Brimer attach his paper to the Sunset's final report. Instead, Brimer issued no final report to the Legislature.
Joey Longley, who served as executive director of the Sunset Advisory Commission when it produced the critical report on the Department of Transportation, says that if anyone can pierce the nearly impenetrable department it is Wolf. Longley, who left the commission after 30 years, said Wolf was one of Sunset's best and most outspoken citizen members.
"In my opinion he was the quintessential public member of the commission," Longley, now a lobbyist, says. "He challenged the legislative members of the commission to do the right thing. He was very outspoken, but nonpolitical. He's taking on a department that isn't trusted by the Legislature, that doesn't want to listen to the Legislature. I'd expect him to handle himself in the same way with this new committee as he did on Sunset."
Rep. Joe Pickett, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has no quibble with Wolf's qualifications. Nor does he argue with the need for changes to be made with how the Department of Transportation operates. His quibble is with a Transportation Commission made up of Republican political appointees who have no more credibility in some legislative quarters than the Department of Transportation. Pickett says he expects there to be as much discussion in the next legislative session of Transportation Commission reform as there is TXDOT reform.
However effective Wolf, Kimbrough, Laney and the rest of the council when it is selected are, they will not effect change if Delisi's Commission won't permit it.
Wolf says he does not intend to be distracted by political interference. And he believes he has an ally in forecasts that say Texans will not be able to afford to simply keep adding miles of new highways. The 2030 Committee, formed by Delisi, estimated in 2008 that Texas needed to spend $315 billion, or $14.3 billion a year, between 2009 and 2030 just to keep up with the state's needs. The Department of Transportation currently spends less than half that on construction, planning and maintenance, according to figures provided by TxDOT spokesman Chris Lippincott.
Wolf calls this the perfect storm tsunami. Politicians don't take it seriously because they exist in two- and four-year election cycles. TxDOT doesn't take it seriously because the department exists in three- to five-year planning cycles.
On a month-long vacation to Maine after his appointment, Wolf picked up "The Power Broker," a long and intensely reported biography of Robert Moses by Robert Caro, biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson. Moses ruthlessly realized a dream, spending billions of dollars to pave New York City with highways, creating gridlock and debt wherever he imposed his will.
The book was a revelation to Wolf. The best news for Texans, Wolf says, is that there won't be enough money to do here what Moses did and that the Legislature will not have the political courage to impose new taxes to get the money.
What Wolf will try to do in the coming months, he says, is to encourage Department of Transportation leaders this coming storm presents tremendous opportunity to transform the way they think about how people are connected to one another in Texas and the role of technology in that connection.
"This will not be easy. But the fact that it is difficult only amplifies its importance," Wolf says. "I want to get in there and work with these people. I'll consider it a victory if I can get them to think beyond the next legislative session."
South Texas DA, AG’s office clash on approach to voter fraud cases
McALLEN, Texas – Gloria Barajas has an automatic security gate and a chain link fence surrounding her small frame house. “No trespassing” is her wish, conveyed via a red and black sign.
In the community here, Barajas is a known and esteemed politiquera, who can deliver voters to the polls, hand out literature and sometimes help elderly voters cast their mail-in ballots.
Hidalgo County has seen 13 separate investigations of elections procedures in Hidalgo County between 2002 and 2008, or an average of two per year.
The indicted women allegedly told voters how to vote, failed to sign forms attesting to witnessing votes, and mishandling ballots.
Payments to travel firm growing in 2010; HISD insists services being scaled back
While the Houston Independent School District's finance head insists it is striving to cut fees paid to a travel agency, the district has instead nearly doubled payments this year compared to 2009.
Chief Financial Officer Melinda Garrett claims the use of Advantage Travel is being reduced – yet the payments are on pace to increase more than threefold this year over last, when the district paid almost $6,200 to the Houston-based firm. The district pays Advantage a fee of $20 to $30 for each ticket booked, records show.
The district's bills are increasing despite the hiring of two dedicated travel employees since 2007 — and the use of a third worker who spends some time on employee travel.
Superintendent Terry Grier has refused to answer questions about the district's travel practices, and Garrett has declined to discuss the arrangement with Advantage. In June she offered a written statement regarding the service.
GARRETT
“Several years ago, the district changed from charging out-of-district airfares to the district’s American Express Card to a central MasterCard in the district’s ProCard program used by the district. This change enabled the district to earn a rebate under it MasterCard contract [sic] with J.P. Morgan Chase. These funds enabled the district to add a second travel clerk. A second position was critical if the district was going to start purchasing tickets via the Internet. At the same time, the district made the decision to have tickets purchased directly through the Internet and to start reducing the services the district uses with Advantage Travel. This current fiscal year, over 60% of tickets have been purchased online. In 2010-2011, the district will continue to reduce the need to use the travel agency firm.”
Which does not explain the fact that travel expenses paid to Advantage through July 12, at $11,198, already exceed what it paid in the previous year-and-a-half: $4,293 from June through December 2008 and $6,194 in 2009, according to the district check register.
Many times, the fees are paid on routine ticket purchases that are first found by district employees, a Texas Watchdog investigation earlier this year found. And district records show the travel agency is not leveraging deep discounts beyond what any user of an online price-comparison service might find.
The district pays Advantage without a contract, which appears to be in violation of district policy: Service contracts over $10,000 "require a formal, written, competitive solicitation method," according to HISD's financial procedures manual.
The district has refused to discuss the parameters of its contracting procedures.
After submitting multiple public information requests to HISD and having administrative workers search HISD board agendas dating back to 1996, not a single contract, ratification document or request for proposal for the travel services Advantage Travel provides was found.
But Carol Embesi, vice president of Advantage, said there may be a contract that was signed when Advantage was first formally brought on by HISD “over 10 years ago, maybe 15.”
“The district put contracts out for bid, and we bid,” said Embesi, who cofounded Advantage in 1985. “There was a lot of interest in that contract, 30 to 35 people from travel agencies at the meeting for the contract. But I think we are the only ones that bid their requirements.”
She said HISD had strenuous requirements and wanted whoever was going to take the deal to work on account and be paid monthly, which was not agreeable to other agencies.
Advantage, with five employees, was one of the smallest agencies at the meeting and could be nimble in response to the contract rules, Embesi said. She said she does not recall the terms of the contract, but that the district invoices her firm each month.
"We had done the travel booking for the district at the time of the big meeting," Embesi said. "We did not have a contract for that. But I would think that there would have been one after the meeting, and we were chosen to continue."
Doing any district business without a contract impedes transparency in addition to being a poor business move, said HISD board president Greg Meyers.
MEYERS"I'm a little taken aback," Meyers said. "I know there are certain things that legally need to go out for bid. … I am one that even if it doesn't have to go out for bid, I have always thought that although we don't have to, it is in good practice. There needs to be as much transparency as we can show when we are dealing with money and the public's trust."
Meyers said the board would review district travel as part of a larger financial review this fall.
The district's legal firm, Thompson & Horton, did not respond to questions about the district doing business without a contract.
Contact Steve Miller at 832-303-9420 or stevemiller@texaswatchdog.org. Contact Lynn Walsh at at 713-228-2850 or lynn@texaswatchdog.org. Follow news about the Houston Independent School District on Twitter, #HISD.
Photo of plane tickets by flickr user uncleboatshoes, used via a Creative Commons license.
San Antonio stimulus program investigated; one of 5 in TX fraught with problems
State investigators are looking into allegations of mismanagement in a $15 million stimulus weatherization program in San Antonio after the director of the program was forced to step down.
Department investigators came to San Antonio at the request of Gloria Arriaga, executive director for the Alamo Area Council of Governments, who last week placed Rose Jackson, her housing director and head of the Weatherization Assistance Program, on administrative leave. Arriaga told officials she suspected administrative mismanagement and asked the state for a complete audit of the weatherization program's books. Texas Watchdog left a voicemail Thursday afternoon for a Rose V. Jackson in San Antonio, and we'll update this story if we hear from her.
Department specialists are also working with Tri-County Community Action Inc., a nonprofit doing work in nine East Texas counties, and Community Services Agency of South Texas, a nine-county nonprofit, to fix administrative problems that are threatening their weatherization programs.
"We have spent a lot of time with these organizations and have sent a loud and intense message that administrators need to grab their staff by the throat and fix these problems," Gerber said.
Abilene's troubles may make it impossible for the agency to meet the federal deadline in August 2011 to finish the houses it agreed to weatherize and spend its total. In that event, Gerber said, the money would be wrested from the agency and given to a program that could meet the 2011 deadline.
Considering the huge sums given to these agencies and the heightened levels of regulation and oversight by the federal and state governments, Gerber said he thought the number of agencies in trouble was modest. He pointed to Sheltering Arms Senior Services of Houston, which was
plagued early on with administrative and workmanship troubles, as exemplary of the willingness of agencies to learn from sometimes pointed criticism from the department.While Gerber said he was pleased that contractors in Texas have now weatherized more than 11,000 home and apartment units, Housing and Community Affairs is still scrambling to catch up
from a very slow start. Although Texas received the second largest amount of money for weatherization next to the $394.7 million granted the state of New York, the state has spent $52,558,254, or just 16.7 percent of its total, through the first half of this month.California, with $185.8 million, continues to lag well behind Texas, but Texas lags well behind states with much smaller programs like Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. And while Texas has completed less than a third of the units in its projections, Mississippi has completed 65 percent of the 5,468 units in its estimated total.
"All in all, I'm generally pleased with where we are right now," Gerber said. "Almost all of the agencies we're working with have stepped up to get us where we need to be."
Jobs estimates in federal stimulus program 5 times true figure: Audit
A federal stimulus program to employ low-income youth created just 124 jobs, state auditors say, cautioning against the measures used by the Capital Area Workforce Development Board, which said it put 681 people to work.
The directors of a $2.3 million stimulus-funded summer youth program reported the program created or retained 556 more jobs than the 124 found in a review by the State Auditor's Office, a difference of more than 440 percent.
In a report released today, the state auditor said the Capital Area Workforce Development Board reported the summer employment jobs for low-income people aged 14 to 24 as full-time positions, although the program was designed to run eight to 10 weeks and be discontinued.
Alan Miller, executive director for Workforce Solutions for the Capital Area Board, defended the way the board reported to the Texas Workforce Commission the creation or retention of 681 jobs during the three months ending Sept. 30. He said the differences with the state auditor over the numbers demonstrates the confusion and disagreement created by a system of reporting jobs at the federal level that has changed several times since the $862 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was passed in February 2009.
If his board's experiences are any indication, Miller said he believes getting accurate or realistic estimates of how many jobs stimulus spending has created will be difficult.
"This isn't just a problem with us or in Texas, it's everywhere in the country," Miller said in an interview today. "We followed the instructions provided to us, but the rules have been confusing and subject to change. Let's just say that the state auditor's view of the reporting shows how subjectively the rules can be interpreted."
In their report, state auditors concluded the Capital Area Board chose to do a head count of the people hired for the summer youth employment program, rather than use a formula for calculating full-time employees by the number of hours worked in a given period. The report goes on to say the board made changes that reduced its overreporting to about 12 percent.
Miller countered that the board was told by the federal government the program was temporary, but believed the federal reporting guidelines encouraged counting the jobs as having been created by the program.
"In this case they were all temporary jobs. We knew that," Miller said. "But I guess you can say they were jobs created, because they didn't exist before the program. This is the conundrum we're operating under here."
The audit made the same critique of the board in its hiring of 10 full-time staff for training at career centers through a $1.6 million stimulus program for dislocated workers and an $893,000 low-income adult training program. The staffing is considered temporary based on the stimulus grants. The board reported having created 10 jobs. The state auditor calculated the board had created 4.13 jobs.
The Government Accounting Office in a report issued in November 2009 acknowledged the scope of the confusion and criticized the federal Office of Management and Budget for a lack of clarity.
"Problems with the interpretation of this guidance or the calculation of FTEs (full-time employees) were one of the most significant problems we found. Jobs created or retained expressed in FTEs raised questions and concerns for some recipients. While reporting employment effects as FTEs should allow for the aggregation of different types of jobs—part-time, full-time, or temporary—and different employment periods, if the calculations are not consistent, the ability to aggregate the data is compromised."
Miller said that although the Capital Area Board has a clearer view of the auditor's interpretation and did not formally object to the auditors' findings, he isn't certain the state's view of job creation and retention matches that of the federal government. "I can tell you, in the future, before we file our reports," Miller said, "we're going to run them by the Auditor's Office."