Texas Watchdog

Authority 'not there' for city of Houston investigative arm, Inspector General Bob Doguim says as he quits job

Wed Feb 8 08:09:00 2012 CST

Inspectors general in other cities root out fraud, conflicts of interest; Houston's IG only has power to investigate complaints of vulgar language, unlawful tamale sales

While Philadelphia's inspector general was stamping out contracting schemes between vendors and city officials, Houston's counterpart spent the past year fielding complaints of poor work performance evaluations, harsh language and other petty grievances best suited for an HR department.

In Chicago, the office of the inspector general issues a quarterly report running dozens of pages describing the findings and results of its office. In Houston, the quarterly report amounts to simple tallies of cases closed. It took a public information request and a state Attorney General’s ruling to obtain all of the complaints fielded by its inspector general office. Even then the city attorney’s office violated the state’s open records law by failing to provide the records in a timely fashion.

And the office that was once said to be revamped via an executive order from Mayor Annise Parker has yet to issue a report on its findings over the past year.

The former FBI agent, Robert Doguim, hired to lead the office, stepped down. His last day was Friday. He lasted 14 months in the job and left on what he said were good terms. He also provided some candid advice to City Attorney David Feldman on how the office might operate in the future.

Bob Doguim

“I talked about the three cornerstones for a successful, true OIG operation,” Doguim said. “That is independence, proper authority and transparency. And I also believe that whoever serves next as the inspector general should have a fixed term.”

With his departure, Doguim said, the city is now in a position in which it can build a true OIG office like the ones in other cities the size of Houston. Or not.

"I said that when they are hiring the next inspector general, before they do, they should know what they want at the city," Doguim said. "Do they want to build the Federal Reserve, or do they want to put an addition on the house?"

The complaints received by the OIG office in the past year tell a story of an office with little legal heft, besieged by concerns that are mostly personal and often more concerned with perceptions rather than reality.

One employee filed a complaint stating that unauthorized vendors were selling tamales at the Houston Police Department.

Another claimed there was trouble in the city’s wastewater department: “...I have felt discriminated because I am Hispanic and I feel also retaliated and besides that I have been sick because of this situation, they do not treat me as a good hard worker. …”

Then there are also substantial complaints regarding misuse of funds and labor kickbacks that, if proven, would seem to lead to bigger cases or illicit activity.

One accusation, also from the wastewater department, alleges a supervisor misused funds and was given free work in exchange for directing contracts to certain vendors. The claim was backed up with 17 pages of emails.

There remains fallout from the Houston Fire Department fiasco from 2009. A May filing accuses a supervisor of downgrading an employee’s evaluation because of a “racially charged assessment."

The complaints came from across the spectrum of the city’s 21 departments and offices. Engine operators, inspectors of all kinds, city council members and even City Attorney Feldman were named in complaints.

That account alleged that Feldman, in a department meeting, entered wearing “a pair of brightly colored feathered earrings…

"The earrings strongly resembled the same type of earrings sometimes worn by Council woman Jolanda Jones. As Mr. Feldman entered conference room number 382, several employees laughed, however, the majority of the employees were not laughing. Mr. Feldman approached the podium and laughed himself! He then started to speak, but did not make sense in what he was saying. He stated (in a different tone than usual) 'I have had a hard life.' I had to walk several miles to get to school and Oh, did I mention I am a lawyer". 'I am a lawyer'. It then appeared that Mr. Feldman was clearly mocking Council woman Jolanda Jones in both her attire and demeanor.”

Doguim said he wanted to look into the allegation but was overruled by Mayor Parker, who sent it over to the Houston Police Department for investigate.

Feldman declined to speak with Texas Watchdog.

There are complaints of name calling, including numerous racial epithets, complaints against judges’ rulings, as well as complaints of inappropriate language, in one case citing the use of the words ‘damn’ and ‘hell.'

In another protest, a retired worked claims, “On July 29, 2011, Mr. Jackson came to my work station and called me ignorant. ... I have retired and no longer work for the city.”

Still another alleged that he was denied a promotion. One person filed a complaint against “someone in IT (information technology)” who had changed the passwords while that complainant was out of the office.

While Doguim professes admiration for Feldman, he said that in the end, “the authority is just not there.”

“I had always argued that the office should not be under the city attorney,” Doguim said. “Mr. Feldman never pushed back on anything I recommended, or tried to influence anything. But at this level, even the appearance of a lack of independence is a problem. It makes it look like someone is saying, ‘I have an OIG,’ but they don’t want all the things that come with it.”

Assistant City Attorney Lynette Fons will serve as interim IG until a replacement can be found. Fons is a former litigation attorney at Beirne, Maynard & Parsons.

Texas Watchdog will be releasing all of the 342 pages it obtained from the city in the coming weeks.

***
Contact Steve Miller at 832-303-9420 or stevemiller@texaswatchdog.org.

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Photo of Houston City Hall by flickr user J Jackson Photography, used via a Creative Commons license.

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Deja vu? Houston ISD procurement audit findings echo problems in grounds-keeping contract

Thu Jan 26 07:57:00 2012 CST

When the Houston school system awarded a grounds-keeping contract to the eighth-lowest bidder last year -- to a company that charged almost twice the low bid -- administrators stood by their decision, saying their contracting processes were fair, transparent and legal.

But a sweeping performance audit by a national education nonprofit group has found numerous problems in the school district's system of buying goods and services.

And that review raised some of the same questions about the Houston schools' procurement practices that Texas Watchdog asked last year about the district’s grounds-keeping contract with the locally based Southwest Wholesale Nursery.

The ways the Houston Independent School District does business “lead to a perception of manipulation of and distrust in the procurement process,” stated the audit by the Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools.

A Texas Watchdog investigation published in December of HISD’s business practices showed evidence of flawed bidding evaluations, improper influence by board members and suggestions of contract steering.

The council, which undertook the review at the request of HISD Superintendent Terry Grier, performed its examination of the Houston school system in October. Grier serves on the council’s executive committee.

HISD officials declined to answer questions this week whether about whether they still stood by their decision to award the grounds-keeping contract to Southwest.

A district spokesman this week declined to discuss the council’s audit or the similarities between its conclusions and Texas Watchdog’s questions about the grounds-keeping contract. Grier and HISD Chief Financial Officer Melinda Garrett did not respond to multiple e-mail requests for comment for this story.

PRICE NOT TERRIBLY IMPORTANT

Among the findings of the council’s review was that price often didn’t count enough in how the Houston school system buys materials and services.

That may sting for some -- the school system that faces a $44 million budget deficit this year, and last year it closed schools, laid off teachers and cut the amount of money given to each school per student. The district has an annual budget of $1.6 billion.

In many transactions, the price of the goods or services counted for just 50 percent of the overall decision of which companies HISD ultimately chose to award contracts, the council review stated. In some instances, price amounted to just 12.5 percent of the final score district evaluators gave.

In the grounds-keeping contract, HISD hired Southwest and another company – even though Southwest ranked eighth-lowest among the companies that bid to do the work, records show.

The difference between the low bid and Southwest’s bid was about $205,000, an amount that would pay the annual salaries of about 4.5 teachers on the lowest rung of HISD's teacher pay scale.

Documents made public by the school system show that the price estimated by each bidder counted for just five maximum points out of a total 75 when a team of HISD employees ranked each of the bidders. That’s about 7 percent of the total score.

By comparison, each bidder could have received up to 20 points for “the quality of the vendors’ goods and services” or the extent to which the vendor “meets district needs.” Together, those two factors counted for up to half of each bidder’s possible score.

Despite the documents showing Southwest had submitted only the eighth-lowest bid among the nearly 20 bidders, each of the three HISD evaluators made Southwest their No. 2-ranked scorer in the criteria of “long-term cost to HISD.”

Eugenio Salazar, an HISD senior manager, gave Southwest and another firm a “2” score. He gave another eventual winning bidder, Houston Grotech Services, a “5” score, and did not score any of the other bidders in that category.

Larry Nabors, an HISD grounds manager, gave both Southwest and Houston Grotech “3” scores. He gave six other firms a “1” score, and left the other bidders blank in that category.

Brian Busby, another senior manager, gave Grotech a “4” and Southwest a “2.” He gave six other companies a “1” score, and left the other bidders blank in that category.

None of the documents released to Texas Watchdog by the school district give any explanation for how the three men arrived at those scores or any of the other scores they gave the bidders on that contract.

TRANSPARENCY ISSUE

That touches on another problem pointed out by the Council of the Great City Schools audit: Lack of transparency, which Michael Casserly, the council’s executive director, told Texas Watchdog was HISD’s most serious contracting problem.

“The majority of the district‘s purchasing,” the audit stated, “... is awarded based on a number of weighted factors that are not always transparent or consistently applied.”

For example, when HISD formally notifies the public that it’s accepting bids or proposals on a contract, the weighting of the various criteria “is not disclosed in most” cases, other than for construction contracts, the auditors wrote. The school district doesn’t assign the weights until later, and may not assign the weights until the district is actually picking which vendor to hire, the audit said.

“We should have a set method for procurement where we transparently specify the measurement criteria prior to the (request for proposals) being sent out,” said HISD Board President Mike Lunceford, who called the audit’s findings “major problem areas.”

“In that way,” Lunceford said, “everyone knows the rules before they play the game.”

Lunceford also told HISD administrators last year that he wanted them to tell the school board whenever they recommended HISD do business with a firm that was not the lowest bidder, and to offer an explanation of why.

In the grounds-keeping contract, HISD scored Southwest and its competitors on a total of eight criteria. The factors where Southwest and the other winning bidder, Houston Grotech, most greatly outdistanced the competition on the HISD scoring matrix were the vendor’s reputation, the quality of its goods and services and whether the company “meets district needs,” documents show.

“’The extent to which the goods/service(s) meet District's needs,’ refers to the extent that HISD is able to utilize the goods and/or services from the vendors that bid (on) the project,” HISD spokesman Jason Spencer said. “This measures how well the vendor’s offerings meet the needs of the district. It takes into account processes, ease of implementation, technology integration if applicable, etc.”

He pointed out that “meets district needs” is one of the criteria state law says school districts may use when picking vendors.

But national procurement experts told Texas Watchdog they had questions about that category’s use as one of the district’s procurement criteria.

“That’s a little broad, isn’t it?” asked Robert J. Nahabit, a national procurement expert and consultant based in Austin who gives seminars on proper purchasing procedures throughout the country.

When first told of the use of the “meets district needs” phrase in a phone interview, he began laughing. “My first impression? Who’s his brother-in-law?”

Bill Munch, director of purchasing for Mesa Public Schools in Arizona, agreed, in part, with Nahabit.

“It's too nebulous,” said Munch, who inspected the evaluation documents provided to Texas Watchdog by district CFO Garrett for the Southwest contract. “Best practice says criterion should be much more defined and specific.”

Barry S. Meltz, director of procurement for Florida’s Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s fourth-largest school district with about 345,000 students, said, “We on occasion will use the term ‘in the best interests of the District’ but normally not for bid evaluation purposes.”

Cindy Hallett, who served as procurement chief for Texas’ Eanes Independent School District from 2000-07, also reviewed HISD’s Southwest Nursery evaluation documents. Hallett currently serves as a Texas city purchasing manager.

“I would award to Houston Grotech Services,” Hallett said. “Their score is far above any of the competitors.”

A formal audit of the district's procurement practices is also being done by Houston-based accounting firm Null-Lairson. That review, being done at a maximum cost of $87,500, should be completed during the upcoming weeks, Lunceford and other district officials said.

***
Contact Mike Cronin at mike@texaswatchdog.org or 713-228-2850. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelccronin or @texaswatchdog.

Photo by flickr user sacks08, used under a Creative Commons license.

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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.

Lots of Einsteins or too low a bar? Houston ISD bursting at the seams with 'gifted' students, shelves plan to tighten standards

Thu Jan 19 08:24:00 2012 CST

Of all the challenges facing the Houston school system, here's one you probably haven’t heard about: It may have too many gifted kids.

About one student in every six in the Houston Independent School District has been identified as "gifted and talented" -- that's more than twice that of the Texas and national rates for gifted children, according to public records and a national expert.

Just what will be done about it, though, is unclear. HISD administrators in August had considered making it more difficult for students to qualify for the gifted program, but that plan was shot down after "feedback from principals" said it would be "a bad idea," district spokesman Jason Spencer said.

If the gifted criteria had become more stringent, he added, students already in the program “probably would (have been) grandfathered in.”

Peggy Sue Gay, 52, a mother of two sons educated in HISD's gifted program and a member of the district's Gifted and Talented Parent Advisory Committee, is one of many parents who complained that HISD “does not have a clear consistent path for" gifted and talented students.

“When I met with the administration in December, they admitted" they had not rectified the gifted and talented situation, "and said it needed to be addressed,” said Angela Standridge, 46, co-chairman of the committee. Her son, 14, is gifted and has an IQ between 165 and 168, depending on the test.

“I have not seen (a solution) in writing and action, but there does seem to be a dialogue. It would be most helpful if they filled the open position for a gifted and talented coordinator. It will not be on anyone else's front burner, no matter how many parents voice the concern.”

About 15.6 percent of HISD's student body has been identified as gifted and talented, according to e-mails written by HISD administrators in August and obtained by Texas Watchdog. The state rate is 7.2 percent, or closer to one child in every 14.

And even Texas’ percentage is a bit higher than the national average, which is between 6.5 percent and 7 percent, said Jim Borland, a professor who specializes in gifted and talented curricula at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York.

“Houston’s percentage of gifted and talented students is very high,” Borland said. “I haven’t come across an urban school district with such a large scale of gifted and talented students – or anything close to this.

"It makes you ask why so many kids need a form of special ed. What’s wrong with the general education system? That’s sort of the implicit message – that about one in seven students need something outside the regular curriculum.”

Each Texas school district is required to use at least three criteria for entrance into gifted ed programs -- but the districts are allowed to pick what those criteria will be.

HISD officials use a matrix which includes these factors:

Student scores on achievement tests in subjects such as reading, math and science and on a nonverbal-ability test;

Grades on the student’s report card;

Teacher recommendations; and

Obstacle points, which are “awarded to those from low-income families, English language learners, historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, and/or special education,” Spencer said.

The proposal that HISD administrators discussed in their August would have raised the score students needed to earn to gain admission to the gifted and talented program by five points, to 67 from 62.

Even if the five-point increase occurred however, the percentage of HISD gifted and talented students might drop only to 13.4 percent of the student population, according to the e-mails – still much higher than the Texas and national averages. Spencer said the five-point increase would reduce the percentage to 12.5 percent.

But Spencer said that “the fact that HISD has identified a higher percentage of students as (gifted and talented) than the average Texas school district is not indicative of a problem in and of itself.”

Yet Tracy Weinberg, associate director of the Texas Association for Gifted and Talented in Austin, disagreed.

“When you over-identify gifted and talented students, you’re slowing the pace of classroom instruction and not creating a challenge for students who are truly gifted,” Weinberg said. “They don’t get the depth of content and complexity because there’s too many bases to be covered in the class.”

And it could even hurt students who normally would not qualify as gifted and talented, said Columbia’s Borland.

“The whole goal of a gifted and talented program is to identify kids who need that type of instruction and group them homogenously with kids of comparable ability,” Borland said. “The larger you make that group, the more heterogeneous you make it. If kids are misplaced, it’s not good for anybody. It could be less effective because of the unwieldy range of abilities in the gifted program.”

But parents of HISD gifted students say any plan that would cut kids out of the gifted program could hurt the pupils who remain in it, robbing them of valuable dollars precisely at a time when the district faces cuts across the board due to a looming $44 million budget deficit.

“I’d hate to see the district take dollars away from the high-performing kids,” said Judy Long, 64, a parent who has raised four HISD graduates. “We wouldn’t do this to athletes, but we’ll do it to our most gifted kids, like the best violinist. It’s crazy.”

Texas funds programs for 5 percent of students whom individual school districts identify as gifted and talented, said Long, who also serves on the district’s gifted committee. The HISD board of trustees created that committee and appointed about 18 members last year.

“The remainder of (the funding comes) from the HISD budget for kids identified over the 5 percent,” Long said.

Parents have clamored for improvements to the Houston schools' gifted and talented curriculum since administrators eliminated the top program for the district’s best and brightest in 2006.

Long said she believes HISD officials eliminated the "Tier 1" gifted and talented selection process and program five years ago to allow more minority students to access to top-notch academic and arts learning opportunities.

Though a noble cause, Long said that hurts those students who are truly a cut above the rest.

“Now that great violinist goes into a pool with lower (collective) talent,” Long said. “If we do something for the least-able students, we need to do something for those working at or above grade level.”

But she emphasized that the answer is not to take away minority students' access to gifted and talented opportunities or lower the percentage of pupils identified as gifted and talented. That would only eliminate necessary funding to students with high ability.

Instead, Long and other parents said HISD administrators should restore the Tier 1 program, which would create a curriculum for those who really stand apart from the rest of the pupil population.

But even under the current gifted program, Hispanic, African-American and low-income students are under-represented, Spencer said.

For instance, Asian students are six times more likely to qualify as gifted and talented in HISD as African-American students, Spencer said. Overall, 42 percent of all Asian students in HISD have been identified as gifted and talented, along with 40 percent of all white students.

But just 7 percent of the district's African-American students have been designated as gifted and talented.

Those numbers aren't at all in line with the overall demographics of HISD's student body, which is nearly two-thirds Hispanic and about one-quarter African-American.

The state's plan for gifted ed says a school district's gifted and talented population should be reflective of its total population, Spencer said.

HISD officials have addressed this issue in recent years by implementing universal gifted and talented testing for all kindergartners and fifth graders, Spencer said. And in high school, HISD officials provide rosters of gifted students' names to ensure identification is carried over from middle school, he said.

Organizing students according to their actual abilities is the most effective manner to teach kids, said Patrick Suppes, an emeritus professor at Stanford University who founded that school’s Education Program for Gifted Youth.

“It’s a mistake to get caught up in a single definition" of gifted and talented, Suppes said. “It’s a good idea to stratify.”

Spencer acknowledged that the district "has more work to do when it comes to properly identifying" gifted kids, and said an ad hoc committee comprising HISD principals recommended examining the current matrix to determine whether it needs refining.

If district administrators decide it does, any changes would be made in time for the 2013-14 academic year, he said.

***
Contact Mike Cronin at mike@texaswatchdog.org or 713-228-2850. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelccronin or @texaswatchdog.

Photo by flickr user sethstoll, used under a Creative Commons license.

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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.

Austin bag ban pushed with faulty numbers; author of cited report says it did not address plastic bags, ‘a minute portion of the waste stream’

Wed Jan 11 17:26:00 2012 CST

City of Austin officials wildly inflated the volume of plastic bags in Austin’s litter stream and the cost to dispose of them, based on a misreading of a key report cited by the officials, one of the authors of the report told Texas Watchdog this afternoon.

It was unclear how the error, an extrapolation more than three-and-a-half times larger than it should have been, will affect a proposed ordinance that would make offering disposable shopping bags of plastic or paper a misdemeanor in Austin beginning in January of 2013.

The city’s Solid Waste Advisory Commission is expected to consider the ordinance at 6:30 p.m. tonight in Austin’s City Hall. Should an ordinance be approved, the City Council is expected to vote on it sometime in March.

As of 4 p.m. Bob Gedert, director of Austin Resource Recovery, was unable to respond to Texas Watchdog’s questions about the calculation he used in the report upon which the disposable bag ban is based. He was, however, expected to address them at the commission meeting, his spokeswoman, Lauren Hammond, said.

The reason Gedert could not make an estimate of plastic bag volume or cost in Austin based on the report he cited was the figure for plastic bag volume in the U.S. was not in the report, Steven Stein, an environmental scientist and co-author of the 2009 study of litter in the U.S., told Texas Watchdog.

The Keep America Beautiful litter study listed the top 10 sources of visible litter on American roadways. Cigarette butts were responsible for 36.3 percent of the litter. Plastic bags, at .6 percent did not make the top 10 list or the study, Stein said.

“We had, like, 60 categories, and we weren’t going to include them all,” Stein said. “Because plastic bags made up such a minute portion of the waste stream we didn’t include it.”

In his report to the City Council in January of 2011, Gedert cites Stein’s study and uses a 2.2 percent figure, which corresponds to a type of litter Stein called Other Plastic Film. This category refers to agricultural plastic like the sheeting wrapped around big round bales of hay.

“That’s the only place I can think of where he might have gotten the 2.2 percent,” Stein said.

On Tuesday, Stein sent an e-mail letter to Gedert pointing out the error.

“You have overstated the amount and cost impact of plastic bags by about 366 percent,“ Stein wrote. “Additionally, since retail plastic bags only constitute a portion of the study’s plastic bag category (dry cleaner bags and trash bags are also in this category), even 0.6 percent for retail plastic bags is an overstatement.”

“Specifically, page three of your memo indicates that plastic bags constitute 2.2 percent of litter. The 2009 National Litter Study found that plastic bags of all types comprise only 0.6 percent of litter. Percentages for categories that constituted minute portions of roadside litter, such as plastic bags, were not addressed in the 2009 National Litter Study.”

“Thus, the wrong data point was used in this memo’s analysis. The mix-up may stem from Figure 3-3 (Top 10 Aggregate Litter Items, All U.S. Roadways) on page 3-3 of the KAB 2009 National Litter Study. That table lists “Other Plastic Film” as 2.2% of all litter. Note that this category specifically excluded plastic bags.”

Stein said he has so far not heard from Gedert, before or after his letter.

“Regardless of this position you take on this issue, what is of consequence is that you dig deep enough to make sure you have the correct data to base your assumptions on,” Stein said. “I think it was an honest mistake that I would have been happy to point out to him. But I think the public in Austin ought to know about it.”

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

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Photo of plastic bags by flickr user taberandrew, used via a Creative Commons license.

The New Year’s Nine: The top nine places in Texas where state troopers are issuing tickets

Fri Dec 30 13:09:00 2011 CST

Over the holiday season, travel increases. And so do the number of police on the roads. So to help you make travel choices this year, Texas Watchdog decided to take a look at the state’s highways to see where drivers were getting the most tickets.

The data, a database of all tickets issued last year by the Texas Department of Public Safety, was procured for us by our news partner Brian Collister of WOAI-TV San Antonio and analyzed by Texas Watchdog’s Jennifer Peebles.

Because this list only includes TDPS ticket data, the vast majority of these tickets will have been written by Texas state troopers on the state’s major highways. This list does not include, for example, tickets issued by local police or county sheriff's officers.

See the interactive map pinpointing each of the ticket hotspots by clicking here or go to the map at the bottom of this story.

Now, the New Year’s Nine:

1. The Valley. Hottest spot: A spot outside Edinburg centered around Mila Doce in the Valley. We found 13,739 tickets were issued in 2010 within 10 miles of Mila Doce. This is near the Mexico border and includes US highway 83.

2. The Houston area. Hottest spot: North West Harris County. We found 7,950 tickets within 10 miles of Klein. That includes parts of state highway 249 and I-45.

3. The Dallas area. Hottest spot: An area centered around Plano that includes southwest Collin County, including small parts of northeast Dallas County and southeast Denton County. We found 6,897 tickets had been written within 10 miles of Plano. That includes sections of US highway 75, state highway 190 and I-635.

4. The Austin area. Hottest spot: A swath of central Travis and central Williamson counties centered around Round Rock. We found 7,868 ticket had been written within 10 miles or Round Rock. That includes a section of I-35 and state highways 45 and 130.

5. The Longview area. Hottest spot: A section that includes a large chunk of Gregg County, the northwest corner of Rusk County and a small eastern part of Smith County. We found 6,128 tickets had been written within 10 miles of Rolling Meadows. This is an area where many state and US highways come together (US highway 259 and state highway 149, for example). This also includes a section of I-20.

6. The Beaumont area. Hottest spot: We found 4,612 tickets written within 10 miles of Vidor. This includes a large section of the I-10 corridor east of Beaumont.

7. The Corpus Christi area. Hottest spot: Much of western San Patricio County, centered around Edroy. We found 2,670 tickets written within 10 miles of Edroy. This area includes a stretch of I-37.

8. The San Antonio area. Hottest spot: Around Lytle, southwest of San Antonio. This is the area where Bexar, Medina and Atascoca counties all touch. We found 4,139 tickets written within 10 miles of Lytle. I-35 runs right through this section.

9. The Midland area. We found 3,943 tickets written within 10 miles of a spot roughly halfway between Midland and Odessa. This includes a stretch of I-20 and state highway 191.

View The top nine Texas hot spots where tickets are issued on highways in a larger map

***
Contact Trent Seibert at trent@texaswatchdog.org or 832-316-4994 or on Twitter at @trentseibert or @texaswatchdog.

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Photo of Texas state trooper by flickr user rschroed, used via a Creative Commons license.

Texas Watchdog examines how politics and cronyism seep into big-dollar Houston schools contracts

Tue Dec 20 07:43:00 2011 CST

Today, Texas Watchdog takes its most comprehensive look yet at the influence that Houston Independent School District trustees wield over the school district's business practices.

Why is this a problem?

HISD has repeatedly done business worth millions of dollars with buddies and associates of district trustees, and it’s a problem that HISD’s own leaders have acknowledged but been unable to nip in the bud over the last few years.

This raises serious questions of cronyism and contract steering.

Meanwhile, scores of Houston teachers were laid off and four schools were closed this year. Some HISD leaders have talked about a property tax increase and a request to the voters for more spending authority next year.

Our series of stories publishing today includes these:

Rash of improper influence over high-dollar contracts at Houston ISD -- while teachers are cut and schools are closed

Houston school trustees have been accused in at least seven cases in the last two years of using their influence to affect what companies the school district does business with, public records show.

In all but one of those cases, trustees are accused of using their influence to give school district work to favored vendors -- even if those vendors weren't the best-suited or the lowest bidders for the job.

Read the full story here.

Former Houston ISD procurement chief reveals problems in the agency, talks about his dismissal

The former head of HISD's procurement department discusses the problems in HISD and why he feels he was unfairly fired last summer.

Read the full story here.

Houston school district launches two audits, but questions abound on whether either will solve HISD’s problems

The Houston school board launched two external audits of the district’s procurement practices during the last three months to address questions about possible favoritism and trustee influence in the awarding of contracts. But some question whether the two audits will help.

Read the full story here.

***
Contact Trent Seibert at trent@texaswatchdog.org or 832-316-4994 or on Twitter at @trentseibert or @texaswatchdog.

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Photo of HISD trustee board meeting by Flickr user mikemcguff, used under the Creative Commons license.

Pension reformers warn of looming breaking point, cite governments' 'actuarial bullshit'

Thu Dec 8 06:03:00 2011 CST

You might call it the Big Little Bang.

On Nov. 17, the assembly for the smallest state in the Union voted by a landslide to take some pension benefits away from all of its public employees and 21,000 retirees.

Rhode Island assemblymen, one after another, spoke with remorse that evening about what they were about to do. And with good reason. Most of this assembly was seated with the support of the Democratic and union machines that vehemently opposed the pension cuts.

Fifty-seven of the 72 members of the House and 35 of 37 in the Senate voted for a bill that would pull Rhode Island’s public pensions back from the precipice and reduce its unfunded liability by $3 billion.

For pension reformers in Texas and across the country, Rhode Island was just a matter of time and a bellwether. In a report issued late last week, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation of Houston warned of underfunding of the nation’s public pensions by $1.26 trillion and the “catastrophic” municipal bankruptcies, pension debasement and wholesale public service cuts that were sure to follow if something wasn’t done.

Bill King, a Houston lawyer and columnist, helped Houston businessmen found Texans For Public Pension Reform with the intention of making pension reform an issue for the 2013 Legislature.

“I think the state needs to get the hell out of this (pension) business completely,” King told the Austin American-Statesman in August. Although he has pulled back a bit on that statement, King says that unless the state commits itself to paying fully each year for the pension promises it makes he can see a time in the next decade when half of a Texas homeowner’s property taxes would be needed to pay pension contributions.

Bill King

“We’ve created a system where politicians have made promises with the expectation that they will be paid for by our kids and our grandkids,” King says. “The public is not yet connecting the dots that the money isn’t going to be there for the pensions or their services will be sacrificed to pay for them.”

King admits it has been tougher to get the attention of the people who matter in Austin because public pensions on the whole are better off in Texas.

By paying off less than the total paid out to fund members and any interest owed on what is unpaid - sort of like maintaining a balance on a credit card - governments create unfunded liabilities that can grow exponentially.

Earlier in the year, the Pew Center on the States, a public policy project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, issued a report that said the amount the nation’s public pension funds had gone unfunded from 2008 to 2009 had jumped by 26 percent.

State pension plans alone were responsible for $660 billion of the $1.26 trillion of underfunding, the study said.

While the recommended rule of thumb used by the Government Accountability Office and actuarial experts suggests pensions be at least 80 percent funded in any given year, 31 states failed in 2009 to meet the standard, the study said.

At the very bottom Illinois, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky and New Hampshire were all below 60 percent.

Rhode Island was just 59 percent funded, but not until August, when one of its cities, Central Falls, declared bankruptcy and cut its pension benefits by nearly half, did both political parties get behind state Treasurer Gina M. Raimondo’s Rhode Island Retirement and Security Act of 2011.

The bill limited cost of living adjustments, expanded the retirement age to 67 and moved public employees into a pension plan funded in part by the employee in a state matching 401(k). Such a hybrid is one of the recommendations made for Texas in the Arnold Foundation study.

Neither Josh McGee, author of the foundation study, nor King is suggesting things are as dire as they were in Rhode Island. Texas is comfortably above the 80 percent funding threshold, as are other populous states like Florida and Pennsylvania. New York, along with Wisconsin, were the only fully funded state pensions in 2009, according to the Pew study.

California, however, is a cautionary example of becoming too comfortable funding your pensions at only 80 percent of their full worth. Faced with hundreds of billions in unfunded state and local pension liabilities -- Pew says the unfunded liability for the state alone in 2009 was more than $93 billion -- Gov. Jerry Brown in late October proposed a cost-sharing 401(k) hybrid, retroactive pension increases and a 67-year-old retirement age similar to Rhode Island’s.

The populist governor, stung by the angry reaction, had stood firm on a bill that has yet to be considered by the California Legislature. "I try to protect working people whenever I can but I'm also responsible to the taxpayer and making sure we have a solvent state government," Brown said in a Los Angeles Times story at the time.

McGee says California and Rhode Island got into their fixes in the same way Texas and all the other states went from pension surpluses in boom economy of the 1990s to billions in liabilities today.

Josh McGee

“You have elected officials making financial commitments to be paid long after they’re gone,” McGee says. “Then, given government’s task to balance the budget, there is an incentive to underfund in the present when there are unpredictable costs in the future.”

Politicians in Texas were encouraged to think that way after nearly a decade of bumper investment crops brought in by pension and retirement fund managers. What should have been a buffer to protect the funds against a downturn became a substantial benefit increase bestowed upon state pensioners by the Legislature in 2001.

“I think it’s human nature when things are going well not to see those surpluses as a cushion for the bad times, but extra money,” Ruth Ryerson, executive director of the Fort Worth Employees Retirement Fund. “You could reduce contributions and increase benefits at the same time.”

Almost immediately after the Legislature’s gift came the first of three severe economic nosedives, the last not yet in full recovery. In 2009, the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, by far the state’s largest pension fund with more than 834,000 members, saw its valuation drop from $110 billion to $69 billion, executive director Brian Guthrie says.

Brian Guthrie

The fund swung back up to $90 billion later that year because fund officials didn’t panic. Others did.

“I’ve heard horror stories about getting out of the stock market and missing the best third quarter in stock market history,” Guthrie said. “I came out of it with a greater appreciation for patience and a need for a long-term model.”

The problem is keeping critics from projecting the short term onto the long term with patience and appreciation. Guthrie says the Teacher Retirement System is fit and hale, with assets to allow it to keep making pension payments more than 60 years into the future.

The fund is also unfunded by nearly $23 billion, almost five times the $4.8 billion unfunded liability of the second biggest pension program, the Employees Retirement System of Texas and its more than 142,000 active members, according to state Pension Review Board figures for September of 2011.

The 10 plans with the largest active membership in the state have a combined unfunded liability of $36 billion. Of the 96 pension plans in the Review Board report, 63 or nearly two-thirds have funding ratios below the 80 percent actuarial threshold.

So far there has been no Central Falls in Texas, but King, who is careful not to cry doomsday, is concerned at the lack of urgency among fund managers to get back to full funding.

King says the public is also being misled by a device designed to smooth out fund forecasting that assumes funds will earn at least 8 percent a year, which he calls “complete actuarial bullshit.”

The Arnold Foundation study says the investment return nationally has been just under 4 percent.

“Those plans that assume 8 percent growth are assuming a boom economy forever, and that’s just not realistic,” King says. “There is a danger in this thinking, and you get further and further behind.”

There is some truth to King’s contention, Guthrie says. In the long term, funding at 80 percent isn’t actuarially sound, he said. And recent investment returns have been tepid.

The teacher’s retirement fund’s annual return on investment over the past five years is about 5 percent, 8.3 percent over the last 10 years and 9 percent over the last 25 years.

The 30-year return rate for the Employees Retirement System has been 8.5 percent, executive director Ann Bishop says.

“While the stock market has been rocky in recent years, experience has shown that well diversified investments can provide a stable return over the long run,” she says.

Texas pension funds are further stabilized by the state Constitution, which says the state may contribute no less than 6 percent and no more than 10 percent to pensions funds in any given year, according to Keith Brainard, research director for the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, based in Georgetown, TX.

This past Legislature approved a 6 percent contribution for the 2012 fiscal year and 6.4 percent for 2013.

And while the Legislature went in for a benefits boost a decade ago, it did not nor did it ever include cost-of-living increases what would have tied future taxpayers to an inflating pension balloon, Brainard says.

King doesn’t believe pension funds will get back to soundness on their own. As a platform, Texans for Public Pension Reform is calling for legislative help to make the pensions more transparent and to require uniform actuarial practices so the public can see exactly how the funds are performing.

The pension reformers also want to Legislature to make it law to commit taxpayers to no more pension costs than can be paid for in any given year. Unfunded promises, he says, aren’t good business.

The Arnold Foundation is going further, pressing for the state to turn over its pension responsibilities to public employees and retirees in the form of a 401(k), or at least to consider a combination with the current pension format, McGee says.

Guthrie says the Legislature has asked pension officials to study a plan to pay as you go. Transparency and uniform accounting are worthy goals, he says.

The heads of the state’s biggest pension programs, however, do not support chopping up a pension system they think works well for Texas and dumping the investment risks onto individuals.

It remains for the economy to either blunt or sharpen the arguments for reform before the 2013 session. Vicki Truitt, chairman of the House Pensions, Investments and Financial Services Committee, said she hadn’t heard that anyone was proposing a full pension funding plan.

Truitt says she hasn’t sensed intense pressure for wholesale reform of any kind. By the same token, while she thinks a majority of public employees like their pensions the way they are, they aren’t opposed to changes that keep their funds sound.

“My position is to keep an open mind,” Truitt says, “gather comprehensive, factual information, and allow that factual information to drive sound public policy.”

Two-thirds of controversial Montrose Management District board have ties to Houston Mayor Annise Parker

Tue Nov 29 07:13:00 2011 CST

The cadre of business owners itching to dissolve the Montrose Management District are fighting more than a legislatively-created taxing entity.

They’re fighting city hall.

The Montrose Management District is led by a board of 15 appointees, two-thirds of whom have financial or domestic ties to Houston Mayor Annise Parker, records show. Together with employees of the district they've given her nearly $50,000 in political donations since 2007.

Eight of them have donated at one time to the political endeavors of the mayor, and one, Kathy Hubbard, is Parker’s domestic partner. Another board member shares an address with a donor of the same last name.

In addition, David Hawes, who heads Hawes Hill Calderon, the management firm handling the district, has contributed $9,500 to Parker since 2007, when the mayor was running for city controller. And the lawyer for the district, Clark Lord, is also a Parker donor.

“When you vote someone into political office, the power isn’t just in the money they earn,” said Andrew Leva, who is part of an effort to repeal the district calling itself Stop the District. “They get to exert influence. No one who is opposed to this tax will ever be elected to that board.”

Asked for comment, Parker issued an e-mailed statement: “I have been active in the Montrose business community dating back to before I was an elected official. In addition, these are my neighbors with whom I have had relationships for decades. It is not surprising they would be on my donor list. However, I have nothing to do with their appointment to this organization as all board members were appointed by the state.”

The board in turn elects subsequent directors as terms expire. The mayor and the city council have the power to approve new members, although they have not exercised it in recent years, according to City Council minutes.

Still, the donations point to a board that has great fealty to the mayor.

Montrose district-Parker ties

Annise Parker

Here are the players and their donations to Parker totaling $47,150.

David Hawes, executive director of MMD and a partner in Hawes Hill Calderon, which receives $6,000 a month for managing the district – $9,500

Board Position 1: Claude Wynn, Chairman – none

Position 2: Allen Ueckert – $500

Position 3: Randy Mitchmore, Vice Chairman – $350

Position 4: Cassie Stinson, Secretary – $5,250

Position 5: Michael Carter – $14,750

Position 6: Marchris Robinson – $4,500

Position 7: Dennis Murland – none

Position 8: Robert Jara – none

Position 9: Kathy Hubbard, Treasurer – partner of mayor, business Hubbard Financial Services paid by Annise Parker's campaign

Position 10: Michael Grover – $2,900

Position 11: Tom Fricke – none

Position 12: Brad Nagar, shared address with Joseph Nagar, who has donated $5,750

Position 13: Tammy Manning – $1,250

Position 14: David Robinson – none

Position 15: Randall Ellis – $150

Clark Lord, attorney at Vinson & Elkins, counsel for the district – $1,250

Alberto Cardenas, lobbyist for Montrose Management District – $1,000

NOTE: Texas Watchdog arrived at the totals based on an analysis of campaign finance records available here. The linked documents are examples of the donations and may not equal the total.

The Montrose Management District was hatched via 2009 legislation carried by City Council member-elect Ellen Cohen, a state legislator at the time. Cohen did not return a call.

Her bill allowed the creation of a West Montrose Management District, which quickly merged with the established East Montrose Management District, as had been planned for years.

Records show that a group calling itself Montrose Management District paid two lobbyists from Vinson & Elkins, which also handles legal matters for the district, to work for it last session. The two were paid under $10,000, one of the broad ranges used in reporting lobbying activity.

Hubbard was a main figure in the original district, nominating Nagar and Ellis in 2006, and motioning to put Grover on the board.

Under the bill creating the West Montrose district in 2009, 10 board members were named, unlike the 2005 legislation creating its east-side counterpart. Eight of the 10 are now on the consolidated management district board.

The 2009 bill also provided a method for directors to avoid abstaining from voting on issues that might favorably affect their own interests.

Under the provisions of the bill, a director files an affidavit acknowledging the conflict of interest. The member may then participate in the vote provided “the majority of directors have a similar interest in the same entity” and “all other similar businesses ... in the district will receive a similar pecuniary benefit.”

After meeting jointly for over a year, the districts merged by approval of the two separate boards in February, becoming the Montrose Management District. The vote was unanimous, and there were no public comments.

Lord, the lawyer with Vinson & Elkins, was there to ensure the consolidation went in accordance with the law. Five directors were announced at that meeting, but between then and the March meeting, the number of directors grew to its present 15.

Hawes, the director, said that the board appointments have always been made legislatively, and changes to the board are subject to approval by the mayor and city council. He added that Parker has never made an appointment but that former Mayor Bill White had rejected some appointments.

Hawes was not aware of the favor of the sitting board toward Parker.

"I can tell you that I'm not surprised that a large portion are Annise Parker supporters because a good portion of my board is gay and they're from Montrose, and she happens to be from Montrose," he said.

Hawes added that because board members serve rotating terms, several positions are due to be vacated soon, and there is talk of getting "some new blood in there."

As things stand today, though, some district members feel left out.

“This is the antithesis of democracy,” said David Johnson, another business owner seeking to dissolve the Montrose Management District. “They are ruthless and have no pride. This is tax money.”

The folks at Stop the District have made plenty of noise about their effort in recent weeks, gathering the signatures of business owners and presenting them to the head of the district. The law requires a petition signed by the owners of at least 75 percent of the assessed property.

The district board has decided to fight the opposition, despite the fact that a significant portion of business owners wants out from under the district tax of 12.5 cents per $100 valuation.

After presenting a petition they say had been signed by 78 percent of the commercial property owners, the group was told that it would have to do better. The district says the 75 percent threshold applies to all property owners, including the residential properties not subject to the tax.

Too much influence over principal hires? Or too little? Houston schools officials struggle to find consistency in trustee involvement

Mon Nov 28 09:43:00 2011 CST

Despite a policy that explicitly states that Houston school-board members are not to be involved in the hiring of any personnel, the reality under Superintendent Terry Grier has been quite different.

In fact, Houston Independent School District officials have offered some trustees outsize influence over the process of hiring principals, while rejecting other board members’ inquiries about who’s being considered to run the schools.

“There is a conflict regarding how the administration works with the different trustees,” Trustee Juliet Stipeche said. “Each community deserves equal treatment and fair, regular guidelines for the selection of their leaders. The community typically knows best.”

Board member influence ranges from zero input to participation by invitation, according to e-mail records obtained by Texas Watchdog and interviews with board members.

Board President Paula Harris has bragged in e-mails about hiring and firing principals. Trustee Manuel Rodriguez said he has been asked by administrators to sit on selection committees. And Trustee Anna Eastman said officials have asked her to review principal candidates.

But Stipeche said district officials prohibited her from providing any input in selecting a principal for a middle school in her district during the summer and held no community meetings before hiring a principal at another school. Yet other trustees said such meetings are typical in their districts.

In a July 6 e-mail to Stipeche, Middle Schools Chief Dallas Dance said that HISD staff do not reveal the names of principal candidates to trustees because “personnel decisions are left to the Superintendent.”

District spokesman Patrick Trahan affirmed that stance in a statement e-mailed to Texas Watchdog: “It is the policy of the Houston Independent School District that trustees are not involved in the hiring process for any personnel.”

Dance said Grier instructed staff in May and June 2010 to standardize the process of principal hires.

“The superintendent was very clear,” Dance said. “We were not to put any board member or district employee in the middle of the process -- particularly if it would look like someone was favoring one candidate over another.”

But that directive has not been applied uniformly.

"I was called by a (school improvement officer) and invited to screen principal candidates," Eastman said, referring to a district official who oversees many schools. “I declined. I believe board members screening principal finalists is crossing the line, and if I'm involved, I lose my ability to hold the administration accountable."

Eastman declined to name the school in question. She was elected to the school board in 2009 and has served her entire tenure during the Grier administration. HISD trustees hired Grier in September 2009. He succeeded Abelardo Saavedra.

Manuel Rodriguez

Similarly, Rodriguez said he has been asked to serve on selection committees.

“But I don’t think it’s a board member’s place to have that much influence,” he said. “It might feel like I’m adding pressure.”

Once a selection committee identifies a list of finalists, however, then Rodriguez said it’s a trustee’s responsibility to offer his or her thoughts.

“Just to see if there might be anything negative there for the community,” Rodriguez said. “As long as you’re looking at the macro situation rather than the micro. And you have to be aware of the situation at that specific school.”

‘No community involvement’ in principal selection at one school

Juliet Stipeche

When Stipeche asked to see a list of finalists for principal of McReynolds Middle School this summer, she was rebuffed.

“Dallas Dance would not even let me know who was being considered for McReynolds because he said this was inappropriate,” Stipeche said.

Stipeche sees other inconsistencies.

“On one occasion, they asked me to create a community committee to help select a principal,” Stipeche said of Stephen F. Austin High School. “This community committee was given the opportunity to question the final candidate and offer input. When I asked for the same process at another school (Eastwood Academy High School) right down the street, the administration said, no.”

And at Gregory Lincoln Education Center, “there was NO community involvement and a principal was appointed WITHOUT any meetings or input, which happened EARLY in my tenure,” Stipeche said via e-mail (emphasis hers). She has been on the board about a year. “I was so unfamiliar with everything that I didn’t fight it, and I regret this to this day. The Freedman’s Town community was so mad that it was not involved and rightfully so.”

Trustee Harvin Moore said such meetings have occurred in his district.

“Twice in my experience -- at River Oaks Elementary School -- parents wanted me to attend the kickoff meeting to make sure their voices were heard,” Moore said. “They wanted to be sure there wouldn’t be some decision made by the administration without regard to what they need.”

Policy aimed at blocking board interference

Board policy states that trustees “shall not engage in activities that interfere with the administrative responsibilities of the Superintendent and staff,” nor with “recommendations regarding selection and promotion of District personnel, other than the Superintendent and the Chief Audit Executive.”

“Since I can't fire a principal I send your emails to those that hire and fire him," Harris replied in an April 22 e-mail to a person with questions about Sterling High School matters.

Paula Harris

But Harris herself has been inconsistent in applying that policy.

She had stronger language in a May 27, 2010, message to then-Yates Principal Ronald L. Mumphery. She scolded him for criticizing the Houston school superintendent and board members and told him that she had helped “the community get rid of the previous leader and put you in his place."

“How soon we forget!” she added. Harris copied the message to Grier.

The e-mails obtained by Texas Watchdog under the Texas Public Information Act show Harris frequently receives messages about HISD personnel decisions. Harris did not respond to a phone call or an e-mail requesting comment for this story.

Audra Aubrey, a fourth-grade teacher at M.E. Foster Elementary School, asked Harris in an e-mail to be considered for an assistant principal position within HISD.

“I am contacting you desiring an opportunity to serve our students and the community in a larger capacity as an Assistant Principal,” Aubrey wrote Harris on May 16. Aubrey outlined her qualifications and concluded the letter with, “Educationally yours, Audra Aubrey.”

Texas Watchdog has no other correspondence relating to Aubrey’s e-mail that demonstrates what Harris did with Aubrey’s request. Aubrey remains a teacher at Foster.

Harris received an e-mail from Beverly Dancer on July 6, subject line: “AP position at Yates H.S.” Dancer at the time was assistant principal at Attucks Middle School and was applying to become an assistant principal at Jack Yates High School. Dancer sent an e-mail to HISD officials on June 9 to apply for the position.

Dancer did not get the job. Her last day at HISD was June 30, said Ann Best, the district’s chief human resources officer.

Governing v. administering

Trustees vote to approve filling vacant positions, not the specific individuals, said Trustee Mike Lunceford. Board members do vote on the individuals filling certain high-ranking posts such as the superintendent.

Beyond that, however, HISD board members hold a variety of opinions on how and when they should be involved in principal selections.

Eastman said she felt comfortable participating in the search process only when parents and other interested parties are outlining what they’re looking for, “before the candidates are chosen.”

Mike Lunceford

Lunceford agreed.

“My main concern is making sure that the administration includes teachers, parents and community members in developing the principal profile,” Lunceford said, referring to the document used to describe the type of administrator people hope to hire to fill the vacancy.

Lunceford cited the board policy on employment practices, which says, “The Board delegates to the Superintendent final authority to hire contractual and noncontractual personnel.”

He also referred to the board policy on personnel positions, which contains “a detailed selection process for principals. In neither of these policies do the words ‘consult the Board Member before a decision is made’ occur.”

Stipeche said that she has been asking HISD to create a clearer, more practical policy.

Dance acknowledged that now would be a good time to review HISD policy and ensure consistency in the principal hiring practices across elementary, middle and high schools.

“It might be a good idea to operationalize this, to put it in writing,” Dance said.

School boards throughout the country handle the principal hiring process differently, so “there’s no right way or wrong way,” said Gene Maeroff, the school board president of Edison Township public schools in New Jersey.

In some districts, trustees participate in a “meet-and-greet” introduction before the whole board, prior to the superintendent making the final recommendations, said Maeroff, who is the author of School Boards in America: A Flawed Exercise in Democracy and founder of the Hechinger Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York.

“It is a good idea to keep board members informed about the process,” Maeroff said. “That way the superintendent increases the chances his or selection will be approved.”

But Maeroff was adamant about trustees separating themselves from recommending who principals should be. That’s the superintendent’s job.

“There’s a difference between governing and administering,” he said. “That’s why a board exists and why a board hires a superintendent who then hires a staff.”

***
Contact Mike Cronin at mike@texaswatchdog.org or 713-228-2850. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelccronin or @texaswatchdog.

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Big-gun lawyers handle Texas Windstorm Insurance Association's transparency questions; two firms raked in $545K in the past year

Thu Nov 17 07:13:00 2011 CST

The Texas Windstorm Insurance Association has shelled out more than half-a-million dollars to two law firms in the past year to handle a swarm of public records requests and its own questions on holding open meetings, records show.

Racking up $545,500 in legal fees, lawyers researched decades-old open meetings legal decisions and fashioned arguments to withhold information, according to billing records and checks released by the association. One lawyer/lobbyist, responsible for monitoring a massive TWIA reform bill moving through the Legislature, charged $2,700 for a single day’s work in June.

TWIA used the services of Vinson & Elkins attorney Susan Banowsky, who bills TWIA at $545-an-hour and offers expertise in navigating open records requests, paying her firm more than $415,000 from November 2010 through October.

The agency also paid a $400-an-hour Austin lobbyist and lawyer, Burnie Burner of Mitchell Williams, to research open meetings law and meet with lawmakers on TWIA’s behalf as they pondered new laws to rein in the troubled agency. Burner’s firm billed the agency $130,500 from the time of his hiring in April through July.

"There doesn’t seem to be any end in sight,” state Rep. Larry Taylor, a frequent critic of the agency, said in a statement regarding the legal bills. “I don’t know how we can be prepared for the next natural disaster if we can’t fix this financial one. I intend to get to the bottom of why TWIA policyholders are bearing this significant burden.”

Taylor, R-Friendswood, was one of several lawmakers who led the TWIA reform movement last session. The law they passed was aimed at keeping cases out of court and avoiding bills like the $39 million in fees TWIA said it spent defending itself in Hurricane Ike cases. The fees included $5.2 million on the cases that were eventually settled in an $189 million mass settlement.

TWIA was taken over by the state in February after it was deemed "hazardous to the public.” It remains the target of an investigation by the Travis County District Attorney's office.

Texas Watchdog sought the agency’s comment on the legal fees. TWIA General Manager John Polak, Board Chairman Mike Gerik and Banowsky did not return calls.

Susan Banowsky

Banowsky’s billable duties include responding to information requests from the public. She is responsible for determining which records may be public, contesting the release of others through letters to the AG’s office, and discussing issues regarding open records with TWIA officials. Her tasks at one point also included reviewing an article written by Texas Watchdog.

See all of Banowsky’s bills here.

Banowsky’s $545-per-hour rate is more than twice the going rate of $244 per hour for lawyers who like her have 18 years of experience, according to a report by the State Bar of Texas for 2009. Banowsky was formerly with the open records legal team at the state Attorney General’s office.

Included in Banowsky’s bills to TWIA was almost $5,000 in copying, courier and other charges. Her office routinely paid $40 to Pro Courier to deliver papers to the AG’s office five miles away and $27 to ferry mail to TWIA headquarters, six miles away. In March, it paid $71.81 to courier a document to the Travis County District Clerk, less than a three-mile walk away, or five miles by car. It also charged $10 to copy a single data CD.

For Burner, the work entailed conferences with representatives from legislative offices, including that of state Rep. John Smithee, R-Amarillo, who authored the reform bill, House Bill 3.

Burnie Burner

See all of Burner’s invoices here.

When Burner began working for TWIA in April, the agency was being pressured to be more open and had at times shown a creative disregard for sunshine laws: using code language in a public meeting to obscure the substance of the discussion, initially refusing to provide the call-in number to a board meeting conducted by teleconference, and slow-walking on release of records showing the agency’s finalists for general manager.

Burner dealt with the particulars of the open meetings law and other transparency issues.

On April 17, Burner reviewed a 1983 state Attorney General's opinion on attorney-client privilege with regard to open meetings stating that “a governmental body may meet with its attorney in executive session only with respect to pending or contemplated litigation or settlement offers, or to seek or receive the attorney's advice with regard to legal matters.”

He also looked at an opinion from 2000 that prohibited a public body from discussing the nonlegal specifics of a contract in closed session.

Burner was also paid that day to look at the 2003 Weatherford v. City of San Marcos case, which examined whether city officials had followed the law when they went into closed session, they said, to seek their attorney's advice on potential litigation.

On June 15, when Burner billed for 6.8 hours a charge of $2,720, the work included “monitoring” House Bill 3 and e-mailing with Polak, TWIA in-house counsel David Weber, TWIA public relations person Meg Meo, Elizabeth Fuller, financial counsel from the Texas Department of Insurance, and lower-rung lawyers who also do work for TWIA.

***

Contact Steve Miller at 832-303-9420 or stevemiller@texaswatchdog.org.

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Photo of money by flickr user Images_of_Money, used via a Creative Commons license.