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#texasobserver

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texasobserver.org/whos-paying-

Calling all #texans #texan #texas to read this 1998 article from @TexasObserver #TexasObserver about school #vouchers. If we have any hope of stopping this monstrosity, we've gotta understand its roots. Consider this 1998 article a prophetic post-mortem of how school vouchers finally got through the Lege #txlege. Then subscribe to The Texas Observer and start organizing outside of the two-party right-wing duopoly. (#txpol)

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>Bullock wouldn’t discuss his recent resignation from the voucher PAC Putting Children First. But his aide, Tony Proffitt—who has worked for Bullock since long before he moved from the comptroller’s to the lieutenant governor’s office—said the Lieutenant Governor still supports a “very limited voucher program,” and that he left Putting Children First because, as was first reported by the Dallas Morning News, “it was engaging in partisan activity.” The specific partisan activity was a January 19 letter from Putting Children First Chairman Jimmy Mansour to Betsy DeVoss, the founder of the Amway company [2025 Editor’s Note: Betsy DeVos married the son of the founder of Amway]. The letter refers to last session’s “tremendous momentum for our forces, as evidenced by Lt. Governor Bob Bullock joining our effort.” And it mentions plans “to gain two additional seats in the senate, where we currently hold a slim majority.”

Lolwut? "I left the PAC because it was doing PAC things." Were PACs, in the 1990s, genuinely considered to be "non-partisan" entities engaged in "non-partisan" activities? Or is that just Bullock grasping for straws?

(Reading ahead: grasping for straws)

Also, I guess Betsy DeVoss has been entangled in Christian Right politics for a while.

>“They assured him it wouldn’t be partisan,” Proffitt said. “Bullock still believes that a child who has been refused admission to another public school, after leaving a low-performing public school, should be allowed to attend a private school—as long as it doesn’t have a religious program.”

Why do I get the feeling that reading this 1998 article is gonna have me pining for the right-wing of the 1990s? (Yes, I know Bullock was a Democrat; No, Democrats are not, and never have been, left-wing).

>And in all likelihood, he has known and knows about Putting Children First, which until last year operated as a thoroughly partisan political action committee called “The A+ PAC for Parental School Choice.”

The rhetoric is the same, even 30+ years ago.

>Although A+ focused on the House and Board of Education, it also worked to ensure that the Senate over which Bullock presided would have a Republican majority, giving at least $20,000 to the unsuccessful candidacy of Bob Reese and at least $5,000 to Senator Steve Ogden, who trounced a woefully underfunded Democratic opponent.

Those numbers are fucking quaint.

>(Besides directly electing Republican candidates in the past two sessions, the PACs’ targeting of vulnerable incumbent Democrats has driven the cost of campaigns so high that the limited funding resources of Texas Democrats are constantly exhausted.)
>
>...
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>It is in general elections that PACs make a big splash, and in the last election A+ PAC (Mansour, Leininger, Walton, and several big, out-of-state funders) made sure that conservative Republican candidates were awash in money. So Putting Children First has been bi-partisan thus far. But the last time these funders got together as the A+ PAC, the contributions were indeed “imbalanced.” The A+. PAC provided a total of $8,500 to Democratic House candidates. To Republicans, it contributed $587,445. As with the Putting Children First money, almost all the A+ Democratic money went to minority, inner-city Democrats, who now find themselves in the seemingly awkward position of accepting contributions from corporate and Christian right funders whose explicit and much-announced goals include making the Democrats a minority party, and reducing funding for public education. In this battle, “vouchers” are simply a means to an end—and that end is defined by Republican funders.

*Dingalingaling!* (that's a bell) Democrats underfund Texas (even when they ruled it, apparently). Also, water is wet. If you think the Democrats have learned in the intervening 30 years, they haven't.

>I asked Glen Lewis, an African-American Democrat from Fort Worth, if he had any misgivings about such funding, considering that most of the $685,000 Leininger spent on lobbying and campaigns last session was used against Democrats and Democratic Party interests. “I didn’t go to them,” Lewis said, “they came to me because I was interested in the issue.” Lewis, one of three Democrats who remain on Putting Children First’s Legislative Advisory Council, said he favors vouchers because of the extremely poor performance of the inner city public schools that his constituents are forced into. (The other Democrats still with Putting Children First are Ron Wilson, of Houston, and Laredo Representative Henry Cuellar, who sent Mansour a letter complaining about the letter that provoked Bullock’s resignation.) I asked Lewis if he had any objection to accepting campaign contributions from a group whose huge investment in elections is moving the state’s political center farther and farther to the right. “Texas politics?” Lewis said. “How could it get any farther right than it already is?” (For the answer to that question, Representative Lewis will only have to watch the next two election cycles.)

Yowza. I find it fitting that #FortWorth #Dallas #dfw creeps up here. In Fort Worth, *nobody* wants to send their kids to public school. Everybody fights over slots in private schools. One would have thought that democrats would look at the rightward slide they were in and come to the conclusion that, perhaps, veering leftward might have been the harder, but more foundationally sound, choice to make.

Also, not surprised to see that Cuellar was a shithead even back in the 1990s.

>He said he will take advantage of whatever resources are available to pass voucher legislation that will allow students to transfer from low-performing public schools to high-performing public schools. “I have a different agenda. The Republicans are in this for the privatization and the free market aspect. I want to improve the public schools,” Garcia said. “I support increasing teacher salaries and decreasing class size to eighteen.” But until schools, and in particular inner-city schools, are improved, Garcia said, he will work to pass a voucher bill that will require school districts with high academic performance to accept students from schools with low academic performance.

This is the *escape* mindset. It is a corrosive poison that has embodied the body politic of Texas for decades. We will not *escape* these problems. We must *meet* them, head on.

>“I have seven students in my district who want to transfer to suburban schools that refuse to admit them,” Garcia said. “They think if they accept these seven students, they’ll have a whole wave of transfers and their standards will fall.”

The classism and racism of suburbia strikes again. May we all read The Color of Law, please.

>Garcia’s pragmatic argument may seem to make principled liberal opposition to vouchers seem somewhat precious. But in historical perspective, the battle over school vouchers is not finally about vouchers at all; it’s about real racial integration in Texas (and U.S.) public schools.

Yep.

>Short term, these guys will use inner-city children as a first step, and even spring for a few tickets for poor minority kids to attend rich majority schools. In the long term, as Republican Representative Rick Williamson said after the House came as close as ever to passing a voucher program in the 1997 session, losing only on a tie vote (67-67): “We’re going after the whole system.”

And that is exactly what was done.

Subscribe to the Texas Observer, y'all.

The Texas Observer · Archives: Who's Paying for Public School Vouchers? (1998)"Somebody had to eat the first oyster." With that salty metaphor, Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock makes the argument that elected officials shouldn't be afraid to try new ideas—in this case, vouchers that would shift taxpayers' moneys from public to private schools.
Replied in thread

@remixtures

>Various AI-powered software programs were purchased under the governor’s border disaster declaration or in response to Abbott’s executive orders to prevent mass attacks, agency records show.

The defense sector is all a big grift.

>Several AI companies, including those that sell tech to DPS, have registered lobbyists in Texas this session, according to state records, including Clearview AI, Flock Safety, and LEO Technologies, which sells the Verus surveillance software. One company also has connections to state law enforcement in Texas: Skylor Hearn, a former DPS deputy director, was a registered lobbyist for Clearview AI in 2020 and 2021 and joined the company as its government affairs director in 2022. During his tenure at the firm, he testified in other states against banning or limiting police use of facial recognition tech. This session, Clearview AI has three registered lobbyists in Texas.

The revolving door keeps revolving.

>The Republican lawmaker cautioned that, while he would not necessarily call the agency’s capabilities a “dragnet,” he had concerns about protecting Texans’ privacy: “It does come into question whether we are creating a wide area of study of people who have not committed a crime and trying to use that for law enforcement purposes.”

"That's not bullshit. It's repurposed bovine waste."

>Meanwhile, Senator Parker’s bill, SB 1964, would require Texas agencies to more thoroughly report on how they use AI and what risks of “unlawful harm” these systems have. Under the bill, state agencies would be required to create impact assessments of any AI-powered tools they deploy—though the reports would be considered confidential and exempt from the Texas Public Information Act.

Intelligence for me but not for thee.

>“People want to make sure that the government isn’t just surveilling people who aren’t doing anything wrong just because they can. ..."

Completely missing the point. The government *defines* what "doing anything wrong" *is*. "Only going after bad guys" is tautological nonsense in this context.

>Shah, the attorney from Just Futures Law, said the dangers of surveillance technologies are easily overlooked because they are not viewed as inherently or imminently violent.
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>“It’s just that it’s creating the infrastructure in which you can be harmed,” Shah said. Plus, she added, many surveillance tools were originally designed for warfare, or by former military intelligence personnel, and should be viewed through that lens and not as the “soft side” of policing, which is how some AI companies market the tools.
>
>“These are wartime technologies that are now in the hands of local cops,” she said. “We should be really worried.”

At least one person quoted in the article understands the problem. Talk about burying the lede, @TexasObserver :P

texasobserver.org/staying-aflo

>“We need to have a culture of efficiency in our state,” Walker said. There are plenty of ideas for conservation and reuse of water in the State Water Plan that need funding, she said, especially in smaller rural communities that don’t have as much technical expertise as larger cities and their utilities. “There’s a lot of good things we can be spending money on.”
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>While both the proposed legislation and the current state water plan acknowledge that Texas also needs to conserve water and fix existing water systems, so far leaders seem more focused on grander plans to build new infrastructure.

Until Texas bans lawn watering state-wide, we ain't fuckin' serious about the water crisis.

>These days, SAWS [San Antonio Water System]—which serves 2 million people in Bexar, Medina, and Atascosa counties—has nine different sources of water. The utility can now draw from four additional underground aquifers, its own recycled wastewater, and three reservoirs, including Medina Lake. But because of drought, San Antonio hasn’t used Medina Lake for years.
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>SAWS has invested instead in its “advanced storage and recovery” system as a better insurance policy. The utility doesn’t always use its full annual water rights from the Edwards Aquifer, especially during rainy times. So SAWS has turned to injecting extra Edwards water into a different rock formation directly below the H2Oaks Center, the Carrizo Aquifer, to use later during dry summers and droughts. Utility staff refer fondly to this reserve as “the bubble.”
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>All this water used in homes, businesses, and public buildings throughout San Antonio eventually flows from drains and toilets downhill to the city’s lowest elevation point, where SAWS has built its wastewater recycling plant. Here, trash—mostly “flushable” wipes that in reality are not at all flushable—gets screened out of the water, and the plant’s workers diligently cultivate microbes that eat the city’s biological waste.
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>At the end of this lengthy process, the treated water flows into the Medina River, just above where the Medina itself flows into the larger San Antonio River. The water entering the river looks clean, like a small waterfall more than anything. Trees surround the wastewater plant’s outfall, the air smells fresh, and birds fly by.
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>“You should take us for granted,” said SAWS CEO Robert Puente, who previously served in the Texas Legislature and chaired the House Natural Resources Committee, in an interview with the Observer. The utility has plenty of water for at least the next decade, and longer if San Antonio’s recent population growth levels out, he said.

Excellent! So we already have a model for what every other city needs to be doing.

#water #hydrology #texas #drought #Municipal #utilities #SanAntonio #TexasObserver @TexasObserver

The Texas Observer · The Medina And San Antonio Rivers Are Drying UpLessons for the future of Texas water

texasobserver.org/brazos-river

>What’s more, Dow-Freeport is operating with a wastewater permit that expired in 2019 but has been “administratively continued” by TCEQ, according to an agency spokesperson. That means Dow is allowed to follow outdated rules while a TCEQ review of the facility’s new draft permit drags on.
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>“It is concerning that this is coming up on five years, which is, frankly, the length of time a new permit would have been,” said Josh Kratka, a senior staff attorney at the National Environmental Law Center. While Kratka doesn’t know what’s transpiring between Dow and TCEQ specifically, he explained that many companies try to convince regulators that they can’t reasonably comply with pollution limits in order to delay enforcement. “Rather than really crack down, enforcing a solution quickly, the regulators just give them more time,” he said.

This article was written in 2023. So far as I can tell, the permit in question, WQ0000007000, was originally granted in 1978. Its latest "approval date" is from 2016, and its latest "expiration date" is... STILL 2019. And yet the permit is still "active" rather than expired.

You can check at: www6.tceq.texas.gov/wqpaq/inde

Put in "WQ0000007000" for the State Permit No., click Add, then click Search.

(Sidenote: still using ColdFusion? In 2025? Damn).

Ouch.

#TexasObserver @TexasObserver #BrazosRiver #Brazos #Brazoria #Texas #TCEQ #FreePort #CleanWaterAct #CleanWater

The Texas Observer · Breaking the BrazosPollution and development are straining the mighty river that Spanish explorers once called "the Arms of God."

texasobserver.org/rio-grande-w

>In McAllen, about 60 percent of municipal water use goes to water lawns, according to Jim Darling, a former McAllen mayor and head of the Region M Water Planning Group.
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>...
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>This efficient drip irrigation method is used on about 20 percent of local citrus orchards, he said. The other 80 percent flood entire fields, using twice as much water. Historically, the water savings of drip irrigation haven’t mattered much to farmers, who pay only $10 per acre-foot (about 326,000 gallons).

Absolute insanity.

#TexasObserver @TexasObserver

The Texas Observer · Drifting Toward Disaster: the (Second) Rio GrandeWith the river on the brink, authorities are “praying for a hurricane” as reservoirs dwindle and populations boom.

Y’all, here’s a shocker! #ICE has known #Nazis on staff. For example, James “Jim” Joseph Rodden, a 44-year-old who works as an assistant chief counsel for ICE in the Dallas area. Rodden represents the agency in immigration court hearings where judges decide whether an individual is removed from the country.

Here’s some choice words of ICE attorney Rodden; Quote: It is our holy duty to guard against the foreign hordes. Nobody is proposing feeding migrants into tree shredders,” the account posted in March 2024. “Yet. Give it a few more weeks at this level of invasion, and that will be the moderate position.”

There’s more, and it’s worse. Support free press, consider subbing to the #TexasObserver, they do good work. Also, fuck ICE.

texasobserver.org/ice-prosecut

The Texas Observer · ICE Prosecutor in Dallas Runs White Supremacist X AccountThe Observer has identified the operator of “GlomarResponder,” an overtly racist social media account, as ICE Assistant Chief Counsel James Rodden, based on an overwhelming number of biographical details matched through publicly available documents, other social media activity, and courtroom observation.
Continued thread

Texas has a dire shortage of social workers. @TexasObserver explores how the state is shooting itself in the foot by imposing a lifetime ban on candidates who’ve been convicted of certain crimes such as assault. The law came into place in 2019 and does not allow for rehabilitation or glowing recommendations — it’s one strike, and you’re out. James Knight and Daryl James spoke to Katherin Youniacutt, a grandmother and recovering alcoholic with more than 10 years of sobriety who is still being punished for a mistake she made in 2007.

texasobserver.org/social-worke

The Texas Observer · This Aspiring Social Worker Should Not Be BlacklistedImposing permanent punishments for old mistakes backfires by reducing the talent pool to address Texas’ social worker shortage.

The Texas Observer is back in business! I'm ecstatic! We the people turned this around with our donations and loud yelling, and now they can go back to making Republicans miserable with the truth.
I donated in honor of Molly Ivins, who worked at the Observer for a few crucial years and kept them in her heart forever.
Here's the story:
#TexasObserver #Journalism #TexasPolitics
texasobserver.org/the-texas-ob

The Texas Observer · The Texas Observer Lives!After a terrifying near-death experience, we live to muckrake another day.