Warren Chisum has been a busy man the past few days. So when he called us this morning to respond to our Friday story about an omission on his 2007 ethics form, we couldn’t help but ask about the most pressing issue in state politics.
“Well, you know, as a Republican, I have a little problem with having the Democrats decide who our speaker is,” said Chisum, a key ally of incumbent House Speaker Tom Craddick.
I asked him about Rep. Joe Straus, the Republican from San Antonio who has garnered enough votes to claim the speaker’s post.
“I have nothing against Rep. Straus. He seems to be a very decent guy,” Chisum said.
Craddick hasn’t said much publicly lately, since he officially threw in the towel in his bid to retain the speakership. I asked Chisum how the speaker is taking it. “He’s a realist,” he said. But Craddick will work, he said, with “the new speaker, whoever he is, in making the transition as seamless as possible. As I will.”
“It’s politics,” he said. “Win some, lose some … There’ll be another election in two years.”
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The list of people who were running for Tom Craddick’s job as speaker seemed like it was a mile long just the other day. Now, it’s dwindling as more and more candidates get behind relative newcomer Joe Straus, a Republican from San Antonio.
We’re continuing to update our interactive Google Map looking at the candidates and the key players. We’ve converted the icons for the dropped-out candidates to cloudy-sky icons. We’ve also added a line to each mapped person’s detail screen to summarize their role in the race and their most recent status. Rep. Senfronia Thompson, for instance, is still represented by a blue balloon and not a cloudy-sky picture — we haven’t seen anywhere that she’s formally backed out of the race — but we note that she’s remarked to the AP that she was “delightfully shocked” that Republicans were backing Straus.
As always, we welcome comments, thoughts and suggestions about our map. And you can embed our map in your own blog or Web site.
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Calling all bloggers in Houston and the surrounding area: Do you ever blog about local politics? How about your kid’s school? Or new roads that you think need to be built to your town? Or a pollution problem in your neighborhood?
Texas Watchdog wants to help you.
We want to put on a meetup — an informal, casual get-together — in mid-January.
Come on out and hang with our staff. We want to know how we can help local bloggers and citizen journalists in reporting and using freedom of information laws in the Houston area — and find out how we can better investigate and keep an eye on local and state government agencies in the Houston area.
We’re aiming for 2 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 17. As for location — anyone have any suggestions? Leave us a note in the comments or shoot me an e-mail at jennifer@texaswatchdog.org.
Bring your story tips, your questions, your complaints — and let’s have a refreshing beverage and relax some, too!
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The Bush library foundation says it won’t disclose its donors — but for a peek at what the group has to disclose, here are the foundation’s tax forms for 2007 and 2006.
The Dallas Morning News has the news of the library’s plans not to make public its donors:
The nonprofit foundation that aims to raise $300 million for President George W. Bush’s library in Dallas won’t disclose the names of past or future donors, organizers say.
The George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation, which will oversee construction of the facility at Southern Methodist University, had raised less than $3 million when the latest tax reports were filed in August.
The story goes on to point out that the foundation will not take foreign donations until after Bush leaves office, then offers this peek at the library foundation’s finances.
So far, the Bush foundation has spent money primarily on consultants, the tax documents show. It paid $294,382 to a Houston firm for project management services, $237,202 to a Virginia firm for planning, and $132,972 to Robert A.M. Stern Architects, which was previously selected to design the library complex. Stern is dean of the Yale School of Architecture.
Bush library foundation’s tax docs:
*** 2006 Form 990 for The George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation
*** 2007 Form 990 for The George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation
Bloggers and citizen-journos: Documents such as these 990s for nonprofits are available at the GuideStar Web site. You do have to pay a fee for some documents, but much of what GuideStar gathers is available for free download. Happy downloading!
Photo: Image of the George W. Bush Presidential Library homepage.
Looks like Texas will have a new state House speaker soon. Incumbent Speaker Tom Craddick is dropping his bid for re-election to the speaker’s post. More at Dallas Morning News, El Paso Times, Star-Telegram. And don’t forget to keep checking our (ever-updating) Google Map for the House speaker’s race.
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One of the many Texas political blogs we read — can’t remember which one (e-mail me if you do) — recently observed that it would just be easier to list the state House members who AREN’T running for House speaker, rather than list the ones who ARE running.
The same could be said for our interactive map of House speaker candidates.
We’ve just added three more people to our map this afternoon: Declared candidates Brian McCall of Plano and Joe Smithee of Amarillo, and another key behind-the-scenes player, Rep. Charlie Geren of Fort Worth. (All three men are Republicans.) We added Rep. Joe Straus on Saturday — he’s the San Antonio Republican who may be the leading candidate among the Anybody-But-Craddick members of his party.
So, I now count 10 Republicans in the race, including Craddick himself, and five Dems. They’re represented on our map by balloon icons. We also have plotted three other key players working behind the scenes — two Republicans and one Democrat.
We’ll keep adding to our map if more candidates declare or other legislators take a prominent role in shaping the race.
But here’s one other cool thing you might not know about our Google Map: If you like it, you can embed our map in your own blog or Web site. Yes, totally for free. (How to do it: When you’ve got the Google Map up on your screen, look in the upper-right corner for the “link” link. Copy the “paste HTML to embed in Website” code and put it in your site. Or, you can hit the “customize and preview embedded map” to make the map appear larger or smaller on your site.) In fact, you can embed any or all of our Google Maps on your blog in the same fashion, including the map we did in October linking to all the state legislators’ personal finance disclosure forms. And as we update our map, the version of the map embedded on your site will update as well.
Even if you can’t embed our map on your site, we still want to hear from you about it. Are there other behind-the-scenes players we should plot on the map? Other information we should include? Do you think the map itself is useful? Got an idea for another map we should do? We want to know what you think. Feel free to leave us a comment below, or shoot me a message at jennifer@texaswatchdog.org or on Twitter at texaswatchdog.
Speaking of Twitter, don’t forget that we’ve suggested two new hashtags for Twitter users: #txspkr for the House speaker’s race, and #txlege for the upcoming legislative session.
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We’ve added Rep. Joe Straus to our interactive map of the “who’s who” in the race for Texas Speaker of the House.
We’ll be adding to the map about the race for Texas House Speaker as the weekend continues.
The map is chock-full of information about the people running for Speaker, as well as some key players in the race. Readers can use the map to quickly see biographical data about the candidates, access links to their ethics forms and campaign finance data, and view their contact information. In addition, we’ve added ratings from various interest groups, including Americans for Prosperity, Empower Texans, Environment Texas and TexPIRG.
Joe Straus, a San Antonio Republican and a relatively new member of the Texas House of Representatives, is the latest contender in the effort to topple House Speaker Tom Craddick.
There’s lots of chatter in the blogosphere about the race… some of the best is at Paul Burka’s blog at Texas Monthly’s website.
Let us know who else should be on our map. (E-mail us at trent@texaswatchdog.org or jennifer@texaswatchdog.org)
And, as always, check out by clicking here he personal financial disclosures of any member running for House Speaker, or of any member of the Texas House (and the Texas Senate, for that matter) which we’ve published on the Texas Watchdog website.
Also, a quick wrap-up of the news reports about the Speaker’s race as of Saturday evening:
The Houston Chronicle’s take, via the AP’s Jay Root is here.
Here’s the latest from the San Antonio Express-News, Straus’ hometown paper.
From the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.
And here’s a piece from the Austin American-Statesman.
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State Rep. Charlie Geren is supposed to be meeting sometime — maybe even right about now — with his “ABC” Republicans in the state as they try to craft their strategy for the House speaker’s race, the Star-Telegram’s Dave Montgomery reports:
Geren, R-Fort Worth, is one of the leaders — some say the leader — of a group of dissident Republicans hoping to oust House Speaker Tom Craddick, a Midland Republican seeking his fourth term in running the 150-member House.
Known as the ABC Republicans — Anybody but Craddick — the 11 dissidents plan to meet late Friday afternoon to unite behind a consensus candidate to challenge Craddick when House members elect their speaker on the opening day of the Legislature on Jan. 13.
The gathering at an undisclosed location is part of a pre-session frenzy that could decide whether Craddick retains his hold on the speaker’s chair or succumbs to a widening bipartisan rebellion waged by dissident Republicans and at least 64 of the 74 House Democrats.
We’re going to aim to add Geren this weekend to our new interactive Google map profiling the contenders for state House speaker.
And remember, Twitter users — we’re calling on Twitter-ites to use the “hashtag” of #txspkr for tweets about the Texas House speaker’s race. We’re also positing #txlege for the upcoming legislative session.
Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, join our group on MySpace, follow us on Twitter, fan us on Digg, join our network on de.licio.us, and put our RSS feed in your newsreader. We’re also on NewsVine, tumblr, FriendFeed and YouTube.
InstantNewsKaty.com is reporting today that the state attorney general’s office has sided with the Katy Independent School District in allowing the school system to keep private police reports in the cheerleader hazing case that made national news last fall.
InstantNewsKaty had filed an open records request to review the police report and other investigative materials complied by the Katy ISD Police Department during its investigation of the incident.
The district requested the ruling, citing two exceptions to the Texas Public Information Act as basis to withhold the documents. In the district’s request to the AG’s Office, Public Records Manager Leslie Garvin cited a provision in the public records law that allowed documents to be withheld “if the release of the information would interfere with the detection, investigation or prosecution of crime.”
InstantNewsKaty.com says the AG ruled on Dec. 22 that the site couldn’t have the records because of the cheerleaders’ ages. (Nor, we assume, could other requestors including The Houston Chronicle and Inside Edition.)
InstantNewsKay also made this point:
The ruling to protect the identify of those involved appeared to directly conflict with the fact that all of the accused were 17 or 18 years of age and charged in adult criminal court. Additionally, the names of all seven, as well as details of their probation, were released by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.
With the year coming to a close, it’s time to get all misty-eyed about all things 2008. So here’s a wrapup of our most popular stories from this year, in case you missed any:
+ Ballots cast in Houston using dead voters’ names (Posted Oct. 9)
+ Public can take closer look at legislators’ finances via interactive map (Posted Oct. 2)
+ Top state worker pay last year: $530,595 (Posted Dec. 16)
+ Banking crisis puts Kim Brimer and his bad loans back in the spotlight (Posted Sept. 25)
+ Full disclosure: Houston leaders’ financial statements get a full airing (Posted Oct. 1)
+ Dead voters may have cast ballots in Dallas County (Posted Oct. 30)
+ Extended sentence: At the Dallas County Jail, where guards work 70-hour weeks, overtime costs millions and poses dangers (Posted Sept. 18)
+ Dallas politico Adrain Noe accused of credit card theft in Iowa and Texas (Posted Oct. 27)
+ Eppstein: Fort Worth Republican plays both sides of the fence (Posted Sept. 11)
+ Houston money-man had deep connections to Bush (Posted Aug. 24)
Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, join our group on MySpace, follow us on Twitter, fan us on Digg, join our network on de.licio.us, and put our RSS feed in your newsreader. We’re also on NewsVine, tumblr, FriendFeed and YouTube.
The staff here at Texas Watchdog is visiting family over the Christmas season and during the New Year’s celebration. There may be some occasional posts on our blog, but please come back after January 1 when we will continue our featured reports and original reporting.
As always, if you have any ideas concerning where (or who) we should be investigating, please shoot us an e-mail at trent@texaswatchdog.org. I’ll be checking my e-mail fairly often.
Best wishes to you and yours from the Texas Watchdog team.
Trent Seibert, Editor
Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, join our group on MySpace, follow us on Twitter, fan us on Digg, join our network on de.licio.us, and put our RSS feed in your newsreader. We’re also on NewsVine, tumblr, FriendFeed and YouTube.
You might have seen our story last week on how some 1,700-plus state workers made $100,000 or more in 2007. We paired with it a database of those workers’ names and total pay amounts.
I couldn’t help but notice that the state comptroller’s office’s “Where the Money Goes” Web site — which shows you, for instance, that the state House of Representatives paid $4.98 to Ace Mart Restaurant Supply Co. on April 2 of this year — does not show how much state workers make.
I wondered why that was. So I asked Allen Spelce of the comptroller’s office (note: the comptroller’s office helped me with the state worker pay records database after I asked for it under the state public records law).
Here’s his e-mailed note to me about that.
The legislation that put into place Where the Money Goes was HB 3430. That bill requires us to post expenditures and link them to the warrant or check register level. In the case of state employees’ salaries, this would require us to post net salary amounts of employees. The AG in the past had determined that employees’ net salary amounts were confidential while gross salary amounts were public. Also, the House authors of the bill stated that it was never their intention that individual state employees’ net salaries be posted as a result of HB 3430. We also asked the AG for a ruling regarding whether net salary amounts were public, and again the AG ruled that net salaries are confidential because the net amounts reveal personal financial decisions of employees. Based on the AG ruling, the language of the bill, and the statement of intent by the House authors, Where the Money Goes contains the amount of employee salaries expended by each agency, but not net individuals’ salary amounts linked to individuals’ names.
You can hear more about the Where the Money Goes Web site and the philosophy behind it in an mp3 interview posted just the other day that State Comptroller Susan Combs did with David Guenthner of the free-market Texas Public Policy Foundation.
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What do you make of this? Government is the fastest-growing business sector in the Houston area, even as Houston’s jobless rate inches up. That’s according to this weekend piece in The Chronicle.
In the most recent report, government added the most jobs locally, putting on 11,900 new positions, for a 3.3 percent jump. The second-fastest growing sector is professional and business services, which was up 9,100 jobs, a 2.3 percent increase. The bright spots in that category include architectural, engineering services and personnel staffing, according to officials.
Wonder where those jobs are being added? Are they in the social services departments created to help folks during hard times? Crime and justice, since some observers say crime rates go up during tough economic periods? Or simply throughout government according to its historic pace of growth?
Are the positions the type that fill a job demand in the Houston area? In other words, are the nurses and doctors laid off from UTMB at Galveston able to compete for new government jobs in the medical profession? Are they the jobs Houstonians want? Do they fill a public need?
Is it a good idea for government growth to outpace that in the rest of the economy?
I blogged last week on how open government laws can help people learn about both big things and little things when it comes to what their government is doing. Oftentimes, it’s us professional journalist folks using the open government laws. But regular folks can use them, too, and some do — and I wish more of them did.
Here’s one example from just the other day. Some folks in Nacogdoches don’t want a federal prison to be built in their town. So they’ve filed an open records request for correspondence, including e-mails, about the proposed prison. They’ve sent the requests to the city, the county, and the local economic development authority. (Hat tip to the Texas Prison Bid’ness blog, where we spotted this. The original story was from TV station KTRE.)
If you or someone you know is using the open government laws to find out more about what’s going on in their town, we’d love to get a note from you. You can e-mail me — I’m jennifer@texaswatchdog.org — or just drop us a line in the comments section below.
Houston-area homeowners should plan to chip in more than $400 each over 12 years toward a system of “smart” meters aimed at making homes more energy-efficient, the Houston Chronicle reports today.
The Texas Public Utility Commission OKed the CenterPoint Energy plan at its Thursday meeting. The fee works out to $3.24 per month beginning in February, dropping to $3.05 after two years, according to the Chronicle’s Tom Fowler.
Supporters tout the potential savings to homeowners, saying they will be able to monitor their power usage and adjust accordingly — like turning down the temperature when it’s hot and the utility company says there’s peak demand. Homeowners will be able to access the information over the Web. They’ll also eventually be able to purchase appliances to communicate with the meters.
“They’re putting chips inside new equipment that this chip can talk to,” said CenterPoint Energy’s Floyd LeBlanc, vice-president of corporate communications. “In addition, companies are making adapter plugs” for older appliances. The technology is called the ZigBee chip.
ZigBee Alliance spokesman Kevin Schader said the adapters are not widely available in the Houston area yet but should eventually be available either through the utility providers or in stores.
“They’re coming,” Schader said. “Probably, people should just wait until they’ve heard from their (utility) rep. This is brand-new stuff.”
Houston customers will shell out a dollar more per month than DFW residents will pay for a similar plan. From Fowler’s earlier reporting:
Oncor, the operator of the power grid that serves Dallas and Fort Worth, will begin rolling out smart meters to its 3 million customers on Jan. 1. Oncor customers will pay $2.21 per month over 11 years, or a total of $291.72.
CenterPoint Energy’s LeBlanc said one major difference is volume — Oncor has 3.4 million meters while CenterPoint has 2.2 million. Oncor is using some money from their base rates to fund the project, and CenterPoint’s system is superior, LeBlanc said.
“Our system will come out with more functionality than theirs has,” he said.
We also called the Texas Public Utility Commission this morning and asked why the Dallas-Fort Worth plan worked out cheaper. A spokesman said he would research the issue.
UPDATED AT 2:36 P.M.: CenterPoint has about 1.86 million residential customers in the Houston area, while Oncor has about 2.63 million residential customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, said Terry Hadley, spokesman for the Texas Public Utility Commission. “That spreads the cost more for Oncor.”
Hadley also said that even though the CenterPoint system will function in the same way Oncor’s will, CenterPoint’s meters have more features.
“In general, those are better ways, or more ways, for the customer to get information both to CenterPoint and from CenterPoint, so it’s a little better product,” Hadley said. Hadley said the commission would monitor costs as the project is implemented.
Photo: By flickr user redjar. Used via the Creative Commons license.
Should public employees’ home addresses be public record?
Texas Watchdog says yes. But a state lawmaker has pre-filed a bill for the upcoming legislative session that looks like it would make state workers’ home addresses, and other information, confidential.
Public employees don’t like us journalists snooping in their businesses, knowing where they live or their phone numbers. It’s a sensitive subject, we know — when we published an online database of pay records for state workers making $100K and up earlier this week, we specifically noted that we didn’t ask the state for the state workers’ home addresses.
We didn’t need workers’ home addresses to post those pay records. But I can foresee many legitimate stories about state government where reporters would need workers’ home addresses. Home addresses are often the only way to verify that the John Smith who gave money to Mayor Doe’s re-election campaign is also the John Smith who then got promoted into a big cushy city job.
I know this from personal experience, because I was an editor on a story at my old paper (not in Texas) in which state workers’ home addresses were crucial to showing how promotions were being given to those who gave big bucks to the governor’s campaign. Not only were state workers giving money — the maximum amount allowed by state law — but contributions were also being made in the names of their wives, parents and siblings, connections that we could not have made without address records.
I’ve just been quickly reading over Senate Bill 331, and it looks to me like it would generally close off public access to government employees and government officials’ home addresses and home telephone numbers.
Looks to me like the rejiggered subsection B of Section 552.024 would allow the records to be open only if the employee/official “request(s) in writing that the main personnel office of the government body open access” — changing the law from an opt-out setup to an opt-in setup.
As a journalist, I think we can safely predict that very few government workers are going to want to write a letter demanding their records be made public to anyone who wants to see them.
But there has to be a check on government, and that check is us.
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Thank goodness for freedom of information laws. Without them, there’s all kinds of stuff we wouldn’t know.
Without them, folks in Detroit wouldn’t know about all the shady deals their (now-former) mayor was doing. Americans wouldn’t know much of what they know about what’s going on at Guantanamo Bay. And here at home, Texans wouldn’t know that the renovations to the Texas state House lounge have cost $140,000
Those are all big things. But freedom of information laws have bearing on lower-profile controversies as well — they’re lower profile to the rest of the world, but they’re probably a huge deal to the people directly involved.
Here’s an excellent example in the Watchdog column (no relation to Texas Watchdog) in this morning’s Star-Telegram, about a beloved Fort Worth-area school softball coach who quit coaching suddenly. Watchdog columnist Dave Leiber writes:
Several parents asked The Watchdog what happened to (Coach Maureen) Fritz. I filed an open-records request with the Keller school district and received access to a foot-high stack of documents. But the district had other records that it didn’t want to release and asked the Texas attorney general’s office to rule that they were exempt from the Texas Public Information Act.
But the office said that the records — e-mails and memos — were public information. It also scolded the school district for missing the legal deadline to file its appeal.
The e-mails show that in her final days as head coach, Fritz, once a top collegiate player, ran into one opponent she couldn’t beat: the Keller school district bureaucracy.
The e-mails detail a strained relationship with her boss, longtime district Athletic Director Bob DeJonge.
I’m going to stop here and tell a story related by my mentor, a former editor of mine who taught me to share his passion for open government.
Several years ago, my boss had a neighbor who really didn’t like us press folks — we’re too this, we’re too that. He didn’t care for us. Didn’t like us poking into people’s private matters. We should keep our noses out of everyone’s business. Yada, yada, yada.
Then one day the neighbor related his frustration with his high-school daughter’s math teacher. His daughter was a smart girl who made really good grades, but she was making bad grades in math class. She was convinced she was putting down correct answers on her tests, but the teacher marked them wrong. What was going on?
My former editor remarked that most of a teacher’s personnel file was public in that state, and the math teacher’s file would probably include his college transcript.
The neighbor took the advice and went to see the math teacher’s records — he’d made Ds in math classes in college. The neighbor’s suspicions were confirmed, and he had the ammunition he needed to complain to the school.
One more real-world example from right here in Texas before I close. Thanks to public records, folks in Fort Worth learned that the city schools’ lunchroom workers were shorting the amount of lettuce they were putting in the chef’s salad recipe. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but they were shorting the lettuce by 1/2 cup and then doctoring their records to say they’d put in the full 1 and 3/4 cups, which is the federal nutrition standard. The Star-Telegram explained it all in a story back in October — the story’s not on the newspaper’s site any more, but you can read Google’s cached version here.
Corruption. Wasteful spending. Gitmo. Lettuce. Softball. No matter what issue is important to you, public records and open government laws benefit you.
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Remember that big fuss about that unusual church group that went by the name FLDS, where folks were alleged to be practicing polygamy and kids were getting abused, and the state went in and took like 400 kids away? Well, the state Child Protective Services agency has done an investigation into it.
But when The Houston Chronicle asked for it, CPS said no. And the reason the agency is citing isn’t even a valid exemption under the Texas Public Information Act – it’s because they just want to release them later on.
From reporter Terri Langford’s story:
On Wednesday, agency spokesman Patrick Crimmins confirmed that the abuse investigation is finished but said the findings would not be released because CPS officials want to release them later in an upcoming report. The agency hasn’t set a date for that release, Crimmins said …
The Chronicle’s request does not seek the names of the children, only the sex and the age of each child and whether the agency found a “reason to believe” abuse occurred or that investigators were “unable to determine” any abuse or neglect happened.
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From the Star-Telegram:
A former Farmers Branch City Council member is suing her city for not complying with the state’s freedom of information law.
Carol Dingman filed suit in a state civil court in Dallas on Wednesday, demanding the city produce legal bills that the state Attorney General ordered must be turned over. Instead of producing the documents, as the attorney general ordered, the city sued the attorney general, according to Dingman’s lawsuit.
Dingman wants to find out how much the city has spent defending attempts to ban illegal immigrants from renting apartments in the city.
See also: Dallas Morning News.
Taxpayers can expect a $313 billion bill to keep the roads up for the next two decades, the Houston Chronicle reports.
The estimate comes as legislators consider tightening control over the Department of Transportation, the paper writes.
“The release of the preliminary findings comes as lawmakers are conducting their periodic “sunset” review of the Texas Department of Transportation amid questions about its financial accountability and in the wake of controversy over its handling of planned public-private partnerships on toll roads and the Trans-Texas Corridor transportation network.”
Off the Kuff provides more background information here.
Two of three state Department of Public Safety officers who made more than $100,000 last year through big overtime checks are on the governor’s security detail, and a third spent six months as a counselor at the DPS Training Academy, an agency spokeswoman said.
If you saw our story from yesterday about state workers who made six figures, you saw that we mentioned three DPS officers who showed up in our database of state workers making $100K or more. The Department of Public Safety has answered some questions we posed about the three officers.
Two of them were Lt. Warren Wallace and Sgt. Oscar Javier Guzman, whose overtime pay for the year came to $33,297 and $31,575, respectively. “Lt. Wallace and Sgt. Guzman work for the (Governor’s Protective Detail), so their schedules are impacted by the Governor’s schedule,” DPS spokeswoman Lisa Block wrote me in an e-mail.
The third officer was Sgt. Robert Byrd, who made $30,254 in OT. He’s a Highway Patrol officer in Canyon. From Block:
“From March 18 to September 14, 2007, Sgt. Byrd worked as a DPS Training Academy counselor, which is a position that requires troopers to spend six months away from their regular duty stations and homes, living at the Training Academy in Austin. During this time, their normal work day begins before sunrise and ends after sunset, due to a packed training schedule for the trooper trainees. Their schedule includes classroom instruction, physical education and counseling, which can extend into the night-time hours. In Sgt. Byrd’s case, he also had the added travel time from Canyon to Austin and back at various times throughout his six-month training class. Sgt Byrd also participated in the Selective Traffic Enforcement Program (STEP) at his regular duty station in Canyon, while he was not a counselor at the Academy, which is funded through the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDot). TxDot receives STEP funding from the federal government. Highway Patrol uses the funding to provide increased traffic enforcement during specific times and targeting specific traffic enforcement, such as driving while intoxicated. STEP funding provides money to Highway Patrol troopers who work overtime hours during STEP time periods.”
I had also asked what DPS is doing to mitigate employee overtime, given the worsening national economy and governments trying to tighten their belts.
“Unfortunately, during times of economic recession, crime does not stop and may increase,” Block wrote me. “Each DPS trooper is responsible for traffic enforcement on 115 miles of Texas roadways, in addition to other duties. Overtime pay for DPS employees is reviewed, and unnecessary overtime is not allowed.”
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Texans want to be No. 1. They want to be bigger, better, faster, at the very top of every list.
Well, Texas, here’s a ranking where you’re almost at the very top. In fact, you’re No. 3 in the entire nation.
It’s the number of public officials convicted of criminal charges between 1998 and 2007. The New York Times has the entire nation ranked in a nifty graphic.
Yes, Texas, you rank right below Florida and New York in terms of sheer numbers — 565 to Florida’s 824 and New York’s 704.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking — But Texas is a big state! Twenty-four million people live here! THAT’S why we have so many corrupt officials — because we have more people!
You’ve got a point. Looking at the numbers on a per-capita basis, convictions per million residents per year, The Times ranked Texas at No. 32, right below Maryland and right above Arizona and Rhode Island.
Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, join our group on MySpace, follow us on Twitter, fan us on Digg, join our network on de.licio.us, and put our RSS feed in your newsreader. We’re also on NewsVine, tumblr, FriendFeed and YouTube.
