So, this Chronicle article reports that former PGA Tour golfer and longtime Houstonian Doug Sanders is hosting another charity golf tournament, this time at the Palmer Course in The Woodlands on November 12th. The article notes that Sanders has signed up 16 foursomes for the event, but would like to have 20.
I wonder if Wayne Dolcefino has put a foursome together yet?
Houston Mayor Bill White is capriciously manipulating local governmental power to sidetrack development of a condominium project (nicknamed the “Ashby high-rise”) in a neighborhood where he raises a substantial political campaign funds. The incident has received some national attention through this Wall Street Journal ($) article, which somehow suggests that Houston’s phenomenal growth over the past 50 years has been in spite of — rather than because of — the city’s lack of zoning and liberal land use policies.
At any rate, it’s really a sad reflection of the state of political discourse in Houston that the Mayor has been given a pass on undermining a project for the benefit of his campaign war chest. The property was valued and sold to the present owners on the assumption that a large-scale redevelopment would be built there and the owners followed all the city’s rules and regulations in obtaining the necessary permits to proceed with construction. When a few wealthy neighbors of the development pulled Mayor White’s chain, he blithely ordered one of the city’s approvals to be revised to delay the development and now is attempting to ramrod two ordinances through city council to stop the project altogether.
In short, the developers invested a substantial amount of money in buying the property and followed the laws in preparing the large-scale redevelopment, dozens of which dot Houston’s landscape. Mayor White and his friends don’t like the development, so White is changing the laws. And this is political leadership?
At any rate, all of this reminded me of this excellent Virginia Postrel/Atlantic.com article that compares the radically different land use policies of Los Angeles, on one hand, and Dallas (which are quite similar to Houston’s), on the other. Suffice it to say that the likes of Mayor White favor the Los Angeles approach over that of Dallas and Houston. Think about that the next time you vote for mayor.
Update: The website for the group opposing the project is here. A copy of the proposed “emergency” ordinance is here.
Update 2: A recent West U Examiner article on the project is here.
Amazingly, the silly notion that it might be economically feasible to convert the Astrodome into a Gaylord Texan-type convention hotel has been making the local rounds for over three years now.
Maybe the combination of the Texans and the Rodeo coming out against the proposal will finally put the nonsense to rest. As the Chron article notes, even County Judge Ed Emmett is skeptical about the merits of the proposal:
County Judge Ed Emmett signaled in September that he isn’t convinced the project is viable. While attending the Texans’ home opener in September, he said the Astrodome struck him as an aging, rusted-out battleship that remains in a spruced-up port.
It occurs to me that the Astrodome hotel promoters decision to obtain a financing commitment for the project before getting the consent of the Reliant Park tenants to the project put a very large cart before the horse. Sort of like Oilers’ owner Bud Adams unveiling a model of a proposed new downtown football/basketball stadium back in the mid-1990’s without telling Rockets owner Les Alexander and Mayor Bob Lanier about it first. And we all know what happened after that imbroglio.
All of these machinations over what to do with the Dome would be relatively harmless except for the fact that the Dome continues to “eat” — that is, it costs Harris County a hefty sum (probably at least $3 million or so annually) just to mothball the Dome. Hopefully, the opposition of the main tenants at Reliant Park to the hotel redevelopment plan will finally lead to the Dome property being used for the best land use, which is probably parking. That’s not as sexy as a big hotel, but it provides something that is actually needed and will generate some revenue.
By the way, a good sign that a project is almost kaput is that its supporters become delusional. According to the Chron article, that’s already happening to certain promoters of the Astrodome hotel project:
Willie Loston, director of the Harris County Sports & Convention Corp., said the county attorney’s office is researching whether the county could approve the project over the objections of the Texans and the rodeo if the sports corporation determined the development would not hurt their operations.
Clear Thinkers favorite Tory Gattis does the calculations and concludes in this post that the Texas Triangle Megalopolis — the area between Houston on the southeast edge to Dallas-Ft Worth on the northern tip down through Austin and to San Antoinio on the southwest edge — is the 10th largest economic mega-region in the world (and fifth largest in the U.S.) with $700 billion in GDP (based on 2000 numbers).
I criticized Craig Biggio for the way in which he ended his playing career with the Stros, but I have never questioned that he and Jeff Bagwell are the best players ever to have played for the Stros.
Bidg is also a wonderful ambassador for Houston, his adopted hometown. Over the weekend, Chevrolet named Bidg the 2007 recipient of the prestigious Roberto Clemente Award for his tireless work on behalf of the Sunshine Kids.
It is a well-deserved honor for a very special Houstonian. Congratulations on a job well done.
In the ongoing saga of Galveston-based U.S. District Judge Sam Kent (previous posts here), the Executive Session of Judges of the Southern District of Texas issued a couple of administrative orders (here and here) transferring the duty station of Judge Kent from Galveston to Houston and delegating the handling of the Galveston docket to other U.S. District Judges of the Southern District. A related Chronicle article is here.
The order transferring Judge Kent’s duty station to Houston does not say when, if ever, Kent would be reassigned to Galveston. David Bradley, chief deputy clerk for the Southern District, told the Chronicle that Judge Kent will remain in Houston until a new order is issued to return him to Galveston. One of the above orders does put Judge Kent back into the case assignment rotation as he will receive 20% of the civil cases filed in the Houston Division. However, Judge Kent will not be assigned any criminal cases through Dec. 31, probably because he remains on leave until January, 8, 2008.
Folks are finding it pretty easy these days to pile on Galveston U.S. District Judge Sam Kent over the recent reprimand that he received from the Judicial Council of the Fifth Circuit (previous posts here). As regular readers of this blog know, I’m wary of the mobs and simple morality plays that tend to form around such matters, so I was pleased to learn that Bill Dyer had decided to pass along some thoughts on Judge Kent’s case.
I perceive to have been a serious campaign of distortion in other publicity about Judge Kent by people who do, or at least should, know better. They say Congress ought to commence an impeachment investigation ó but they’re not telling you something very important that you ought to know in forming your own opinion on that subject.
Check out the entire insightful post.
In several of my weekly local football reports over the past two seasons, I have been regularly touting the feats of Houston Cougar running back, Anthony Alridge. Alridge is the most exciting UH running back since the consensus All-American Chuck Weatherspoon back in the Run ‘N Shoot days of the early 1990’s.
Alridge is listed as 5’9″ tall and 175 lbs, but my bet is that he is closer to 5’7″ and 160 lbs wringing wet. After toiling in relative obscurity as a slot receiver for his first couple of years at Houston, Cougars head coach Art Briles began to use Alridge as a RB midway through last season and the results have been astonishing. Combining blinding sprinter’s speed, incredible shiftiness and surprising power for a player his size, Alridge quickly became one of the nation’s top running backs. During the Cougars 2006 championship season, Alridge rushed for 959 rushing yards on only 95 attempts, resulting in an NCAA Division 1-A leading rushing average of 10.1 yards per attempt.
Alridge has picked up this season where he left off last season. As noted here yesterday, he was extraordinary in Houston’s win over Rice last Saturday, scoring 4 touchdowns while rushing for 205 yards on 24 carries, including 111 yards and 2 TD’s in the 4th quarter alone. ESPN ranked Alridge’s incredible 50-yard TD run that put away Saturday’s game as No. 4 on its top-10 Plays of last Saturdey. Here is the Barry Sanders-type run:
Even after that performance, the video below reflects that the effervescent Alridge still had enough energy after the game to do a pretty darn good job of directing the Spirit of Houston Marching Band, much to the delight of the band members:
The criminal trial of former Texas Southern University president Priscilla Slade (previous posts here) ended in a mistrial Friday afternoon after four days of jury deliberations could not break a deadlocked jury that was essentially evenly split. The trial had lasted a little over a month and a half.
The mistrial was a remarkable achievement for Slade defense attorneys Mike DeGeurin and Paul Nugent, who probably concluded that a hung jury was their best shot at avoiding a conviction of their client after they decided not to allow Ms. Slade to testify in her own defense.
The mistrial increases the likelihood that the venue of the retrial will be changed from Harris County. The defense will hoping for a venue change to a location such as Austin or the Rio Grande Valley, but definitely not New Braunfels or San Angelo. Prosecutors and defense counsel are scheduled to appear before District Judge Brock Thomas on Friday to determine details of the retrial.
Meanwhile, the chronic problem of what to do about TSU continues unaddressed. So it goes.
Anyone who has spent any time in rural Texas understands the havoc that the burgeoning feral hog population (previous posts here) has caused in almost every area of Texas. Chronicle outdoors columnist Shannon Tompkins has been studying the problem for quite some time and, in this article from this past weekend, he puts the hog problem in perspective:
Texas is awash in a rising tide of feral hogs. And Texans appear as impotent as King Canute in stopping that tide from climbing up the beach. [. . .]
Texas has about half as many feral hogs as it does white-tailed deer ó perhaps 2 million hogs and about 4 million deer. [But] almost all the growth in the hog population has occurred over the past 20 years. Once limited to a few thousand pigs in small pockets of East and South Texas, feral hogs infest all but a half-dozen or so of Texas’ 254 counties.
This is an incredible rate of expansion. And with it has come millions of dollars of damage to agriculture, land, water and native wildlife.
What’s behind the expansion?
We Texans did this to ourselves. People hauled live-trapped feral hogs all over the state and released them, thinking they would create good hunting opportunities.
Those infections spread.
Also, changing land-use practices ó everything from what grows on land, who owns it, average size of tracts, who has access to that land and what they do there ó gave feral hogs the conditions they needed to become established and thrive.
Will feral hogs become more populous in Texas than whitetails?
Could happen. Texas’ deer population is stable, and deer live on just about every acre that can support them; the herd isn’t going to grow.
But the feral hog population continues mushrooming as the animals pioneer into new corners and herds expand to fill the newly infested habitat.
Feral hogs can outcompete and outreproduce deer.
Hogs are omnivores. Deer are browsers. Deer depend on a small suite of plants for food. Hogs can live on almost anything, and in places that will not support deer.
A doe deer doesn’t breed until she’s a year old, then produces one fawn most years and twins in really good years. On average, half those fawns survive to their first birthday.
A sow feral hog can breed for the first time when she’s 8 months old or so, and throw litters of four to eight piglets twice a year, and almost all survive.
Do the math.
It appears impossible to eradicate feral hogs once they have become established at the level we have them in Texas.
Yes, extreme methods ó intense trapping, aerial gunning ó can clear an area of feral hogs. But it’s expensive, time-consuming and only a temporary solution. If intense control is not maintained ó constant trapping, brutally efficient gunning over a large area ó new hogs migrate to fill the vacuum.
Look; Texas has the most liberal hog-killing regulations in the nation. Feral hogs can be killed by any method other than poisoning. They can be shot from the air or ground. They can be trapped. They can be run down by packs of hounds. Day and night. No limits.
No one has a dependable estimate of how many feral hogs are killed in Texas each year. But it has to be in the neighborhood of a quarter-million or more. Heck, the state’s two commercial processing plants that butcher feral hogs for the retail market are annually handling an estimated 100,000 wild swine. Maybe twice that many are taken by recreational hunters and trappers.
Still, the pig population climbs.
Feral hogs are the four-legged equivalent of fire ants, tallow trees, salt cedar, water hyacinth and all the other non-native, invasive species that are damaging Texas’ biota. Their only positive qualities are that they provide hunting opportunity, and they are great on the table.
I kill feral hogs whenever I can, even though I understand that assassinating one every now and again from a deer stand or even trapping a dozen or two a year from the deer lease has the same impact as trying to dip out the ocean using a coffee cup.
It’s not particularly satisfying work. But I like to think the deer and the quail, squirrel and turkey and every other native creature in the woods appreciates the effort.
Feral hogs have even been seen roaming in parts of Houston’s Memorial Park near Buffalo Bayou. And markets are developing for feral hog meat. But the population continues to grow steadily. Any ideas?