The Houston school board approved extending Superintendent Terry Grier’s contract during last night’s regular monthly meeting by a five-vote majority – the slimmest possible margin to pass the motion.

Hoping to keep a captive public guessing, Austin waste officials still aren’t quite sure what kind of ban on plastic bags they want, but they are sure it is time to vote on it.

The City Council has scheduled yet another public hearing prior to taking a vote March 1, according to a story by the Austin American-Statesman.

Bob Gedert, director of Austin Resource Recovery, now thinks March of 2013 is the perfect time to prevent shoppers from taking home their groceries in inexpensive, disposable plastic bags.

He thinks. Maybe. He’s pretty sure.

Less than a year ago, Gedert thought Austin ought to ease into a ban, maybe in 2016. Then he thought 2014 might be better.

But there has been so much to think about since Gedert and the city started to get serious about the locust-like plague of plastic grocery bags swirling, tumbling, clotting and generally blighting Austin.

There was the matter of criminalizing the bags, making it a Class C misdemeanor to continue to bag groceries and other goods in them. And deciding that it really didn’t make any difference whether the actual estimated cost to clean up plastic bags was as much as $600,000 less than thought because of Gedert’s miscalculation.

Gedert had once considered charging a fee for the bags, providing a small discomfort on the way to the greater irritant. He had trouble deciding if the city should charge by the bag or the transaction.

No matter. We’ll skip the interim fee period altogether and go right to the plastic bag ban, Gedert told the council. But what, several council members asked, are we to do about paper bags, the exclusion of which prompted lawsuits in California.

Mayor Lee Leffingwell, a plastic bag banner from way back, says he isn’t sure about banning paper because they can be recycled easily and cheaply, two words rarely used during this entire plastic bag debate.

Gedert wonders why paper bags should be banned when the council sought exemptions for paper and plastic for bagging meat and produce. Can’t the cost of cleaning up bags for bulk goods and those big, billowy dry cleaning bags be over-estimated, too, without resorting to an exemption?

And in whose pocket is a council eager to grant exemptions for booze, wine and beer bags, bags for carry-out food and those windsock-like newspaper sleeves?

The list of cities around the country passing bag bans is growing and so, too, are the lawsuits contending the bans are overreaching and selectively punitive.

So very many questions, so little time and so confusing for Austin. Gedert thinks he has that worked out, too. Whatever the city comes up with by March 1 will be fully explained in a two-year, $2 million education program, Gedert says.

For taxpayers, paid by taxpayers.

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Contact Mark Lisheron at 512-299-2318 or mark@texaswatchdog.org or on Twitter at @marktxwatchdog.

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Photo of groceries by flickr user Librarian By Day, used via a Creative Commons license.

Further establishing that there are no unaccountable federal programs only bad people, authorities have charged a Houston clinic administrator with $116 million in Medicare fraud.

Mohammed Khan’s alleged con was to pay elderly and disabled care operators to recruit residents for the mental health clinics he oversaw through Riverside General Hospital, a story today by the Houston Chronicle says.

With an added entrepreneurial flourish, Khan lured recruits into therapy giving away coupons for merchandise at several “country stores” at Riverside Hospital and handing out cigarettes and food, the indictment says.  

Khan and several unnamed co-conspirators submitted $116 million in claims to Medicare for treatment that wasn’t medically necessary and sometimes not provided at all, the indictment says.

For this federal authorities charged Khan with seven counts of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and health care kickback conspiracy.

Khan’s arrest is the latest in a federal crackdown on Medicare and Medicaid fraud called for nearly two years ago by President Obama.

Restrictions on Medicare claims data were eased as a tool for pursuing fraud late last year after an investigation by the Wall Street Journal led to arrests in Dallas and Houston almost a year ago in the broadest Medicare fraud roundup in U.S. history.

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Contact Mark Lisheron at 512-299-2318 or mark@texaswatchdog.org or on Twitter at @marktxwatchdog.

Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and Scribd, and fan us on YouTube. Join our network on de.licio.us, and put our RSS feeds in your newsreader. We're also on MySpace, Digg, FriendFeed, and tumblr.

Photo of ‘Carla’s Surgery’ by flickr user ReSurge International, used via a Creative Commons license.

Some of our readers may have seen the story we published this morning that reported that the Houston school board was about to break the state's open meetings law by voting on extending Superintendent Terry Grier's contract this afternoon.

It’s not as cut-and-dried as that.

The open government lawyer we quoted in that story, Austin attorney Joel White, this morning reviewed the wording of the agenda for this afternoon's board meeting and said the agenda “is not as clear as it should be, but reasonable people could disagree on whether it violates the letter or spirit of the” open meetings act.

The meeting agenda item says the school board would "consider" Grier's contract in closed session, and then consider closed-session topics in open session.

Texas Watchdog apologizes and regrets the error. We've taken the original story off-line to try to prevent any additional confusion.

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Contact Jennifer Peebles at Jennifer@texaswatchdog.org or 281-656-1681.

Photo of 'wrong way' by flickr user Bob.Formal, used under a Creative Commons license.

The cost of October’s performance audit by a national education nonprofit of the Houston school system’s way of buying goods and services is about $16,000, district officials say.

Austin, where money is no object except for grocery shoppers and taxpayers, is offering weekend rides on its MetroRail train for just $2.2 million a year, according to a story today by the Austin American-Statesman.

The Food Safety News was denied records by the state of Texas to find out exactly which restaurant was linked to a national salmonella outbreak last fall, but other states complied, pointing to Taco Bell as the culprit.

Like this story? Then steal it. This report by Texas Watchdog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. That means bloggers, citizen-journalists, and journalists may republish the story on their sites with attribution and a link to Texas Watchdog. If you do re-use the story, e-mail news@texaswatchdog.org.

Dallas’ finest have been knocked offline by that most sinister of all criminals. No, not a crazed violent felon or a serial predator.

Rep. Kay Granger’s tireless work in Washington has delivered nearly 52 million dollars to downtown Fort Worth redevelopment. Taxpayers can rest easy knowing she has put that money in the hands of her son, JD.

We relayed to you yesterday the stellar reporting of the El Paso Times on political donations from a felon to some high-ranking state figures.