Just a year of so ago, Houston-based El Paso Corp. looked as if it was a prime candidate to be the city’s next big corporate reorganization.
That’s not the case anymore. Earlier this week, El Paso announced that it had earned a $141 million profit in the second quarter on revenue of $1.21 billion. The natural gas pipeline company had a net loss of $246 million (38 cents a share) on $1.17 in revenues during the second quarter last year.
Good job, El Paso.
Following on posts here and here from last year regarding the City of Houston’s ill-advised investment in several downtown hotel properties, this Matt Stiles/Chronicle article reports that the City had decided to “restructure” (translated: Can you please pay us something?) $15 million in second lien loans on the Magnolia and the Crown Plaza hotels in downtown Houston rather than attempting to foreclose on the properties and deal with the messy business of attempting to eke out a profit from the two highly-leveraged properties in an overbuilt downtown hotel market.
As noted in this previous post, the Magnolia and Crowne Plaza are poster projects for why local governments should rarely get involved in financing projects that private financing sources will not support. In reality, the City is nothing more than a preferred equity investor in these highly-leveraged properties and, thus, its entire $15 million investment is at serious risk of being lost. That type of loss is not going to break the City of Houston finances, but the quality of the City’s investment decision should give one pause when considering the amount of money the City is throwing around in regard to these equally dubious investments.
According to this Chronicle article, State Representative Harold Dutton chose the keynote address at the summer commencement ceremonies of Texas Southern University to declare who is truly responsible for the recent scandal involving former TSU president, Priscilla Slade:
Along with the usual advice and good wishes for graduates, State Rep. Harold Dutton delivered some pointed criticism of Texas Southern University’s Board of Regents during his keynote address at the school’s summer commencement ceremony Saturday.
“You (regents) are directly responsible for the unsuccessful management and government of TSU,” Dutton said in his speech, with the regents arrayed on the platform behind him.
In an interview later, Dutton, D-Houston, said he was referring to the “dark clouds” looming over TSU because of the regents’ handling of the investigation, dismissal and subsequent indictment of former university president Priscilla Slade and their current dispute with the school’s radio station. [. . .]
Dutton, an alumnus of the university, said that although the controversy centered on Slade, he felt that the regents were just as much to blame because it is the board’s responsibility to oversee TSU’s fiscal management. He said the regents acted so poorly he considered them “co-conspirators.”
“I don’t think you just look to Priscilla Slade for the reason why, I think you have to look at all the board members,” he said. “She may be in the spotlight, but I don’t think she’s the only one responsible for the mess we’re in.”
H’mm, let’s see here. The TSU regents hire Slade, who by all accounts did a good job as TSU president, except for that little problem with managing her expense accounts, which is hardly something that regents of a university should be using their time to oversee. Yes, TSU has chronic financial and related management problems, but this and this has a lot more to do with those problems than the efforts of regents who donate their time to deal with the mess.
In short, Representative Duncan, you and the parochial nature of Texas education politics are much more responsible for TSU’s problems than the TSU regents or even Ms. Slade.
Anne Linehan and Kevin Whited, and Tory Gattis continue to do a good job of covering Houston Metro Rail’s ever-present expansion plans, which seem to be impervious to whether the expansion is actually needed. Previous posts on the boondoggle of rail systems in cities such as Houston are here.
Although not as slick as a trendy Metro economic report analyzing the projected benefits of an expansion of the light rail system in Houston, this Bill Schadewald/Houston Business Journal ($) op-ed describes his rather compelling analysis of Metro Rail’s ridership on one portion of the existing rail line:
As Yogi Berra once observed, sometimes you can see a lot just by looking. Neighborhoods can change character in a just a year.
Today I’m revisiting the outer Texas Medical Center area with a stroll down Fannin past Reliant Stadium along the light rail line.
It’s half-past five on a Tuesday afternoon. The walk from South Braeswood to the end of the line is about a mile, give or take. . . .
A Metro train passes, whistle wailing. The trains regularly come and go in opposite directions every few minutes.
I’m focused on heart rate and rock, not paying much attention to the rhythm of the rails. Then I happen to look over. Staring back is a single solitary face on an entire train.
The cell phone says a quarter to six. Just one rider? During rush hour? It doesn’t make sense.
Several posts from last year (here, here and here) addressed one of the constants of my 27-year legal career in Houston — the chronically abysmal condition of the Harris County Jail. With this article, the Chronicle’s Steve McViker continues the Chronicle’s series on the problem that no Harri County official seems to want to solve. Despite showing a “good faith effort” to correct problems at the jail, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards has concluded that the jail will remain decertified for the third straight year.
During an inspection of the jail earlier this month, commission officials found that “although there were over 700 available beds, there were 548 inmates without bunks,” which followed a 2005 commission report in which it noted that just under 1,300 inmates were sleeping on the floor. Meanwhile, Harris County officials continue to dawdle over increasing staffing at the jail and even are dragging their feet in regard to the Chronicle’s open records requests regarding jail matters.
Last year, Scott Henson over at Grits for Breakfast wrote a fine series of posts that addressed the reasons for the problems at the Harris County Jail and what needed to be done to correct those problems. As has been the case for decades in Houston, Harris County officials continue to do the minimum necessary to avoid a state-mandated closing of the jail while avoiding the difficult work of actually addressing the causes of the jail’s problems by implementing necessary changes in the jail’s administration and the local criminal justice system.
A community’s soul is often reflected by how the community deals with constituencies who are unpopular and have no political power. In the case of Houston and the people most impacted by the Harris County Jail, that reflection is ugly and — as shown by this community’s remarkable response to the Gulf Coast evacuees last year after Hurricane Katrina — not an accurate indication of our community’s conscience. It is well-past time that Harris County officials prepare and implement a plan to resolve the local jail’s chronic problems once and for all, and here’s hoping that the Chronicle and the TCJS stay on their tails until they do. Houston deserves better.
In a story that appears to be flying underneath the radar of the local media, Houston-based sports player agent and lawyer Carl Poston has been suspended from representing NFL players for two years by the NFL Players Association because of alleged “bad faith efforts to delay, frustrate and undermine” an arbitration hearing about Poston’s role in a contract dispute between NFL linebacker LaVar Arrington and the Washington Redskins. The NFLPA licenses agents of NFL players as a right granted under its collective bargaining agreement with NFL owners.
The NFLPA’s disciplinary committee previously suspended Poston for two years due to his actions in connection with the December 2003 contract extension signed by Arrington with the Redskins. Inasmuch as the most recent action is a separate two-year suspension, Poston could now be barred from representing NFL players for up to four years.
Since the mid-1990’s or so, Poston and his Michigan-based brother Kevin have made a splash for themselves for their “take no prisoners” approach to representing high-profile professional athletes, such as former NBA star Penny Hardaway, NFL All-Pro tackle Orlando Pace of the St. Louis Rams, Kellen Winslow Jr. of the Cleveland Browns, Charles Woodson of the Oakland Raiders, and Charles Rogers of the Detroit Lions. The Postons were somewhat unique in that they tended to represent linemen, defensive backs, and other NFL players who traditionally have earned far less than the marquee players at the skill positions.
But controversy has increasingly dogged the Postons recently, as many management-types within the NFL considered them to be unrealistic and needlessly adversarial in contract negotiations. Last year, Pace fired the Postons as his agents after they failed to secure a long-term contract for him with the Rams, and then quickly obtained a lucrative contract with the Rams after retaining another agent to represent him.
The Arrington case is particularly troubling for the Postons because the main issue is whether the team negotiated one contract and then — unbeknownst to Carl Poston — slipped Arrington another to sign, minus a $6.5 million bonus. That a lawyer didn’t bother to read the contract of his client before having the client sign it is not a particularly effective basis for the client’s claim.
Yes, lunch in LA can be so interesting.
You remember Barry Munitz, don’t you? Former UH wunderkind president, Maxxam executive, California state university administrator and besieged Getty Museum director, the talented Mr. Munitz certainly knows how to get around the key social circles in SoCal. Previous posts on Munitz are here.
And remember California attorney general Bill Lochyer? He is that gem of statesmanship who told an interviewer in 2001 during the aftermath of the California power crisis that “I would love to personally escort [the late former Enron chairman and CEO Ken] Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, ‘Hi, my name is Spike, honey.'” Of course, left unsaid by Lockyer was that Lay and Enron had little to do with that crisis, which was caused primarily by California state politicians (including then state senator Lockyer) who botched deregulation of electric utilities by freezing retail power rates while utilities bought juice from a newly-created wholesale market at prices that had no caps. Lockyer is the sort of politician who prefers to rely on myths and appeal to resentment rather than confront the truth.
Lockyer’s office launched an investigation of then Getty Museum chief Munitz in mid-2005 after the LA Times reported that Munitz had made grants to friends, demanded a raise amid cost-cutting, traveled lavishly, expense and used staff to perform personal errands, all at the expense of the non-profit Getty (subsequent post here). Munitz resigned as the Getty Museum CEO this past February, agreeing to forgo more than $2 million under his contract with the Getty and to reimburse the non-profit $250,000 to resolve “continuing disputes.”
However, it’s now almost August and still nothing has been heard from Lockyer’s investigation of Munitz. So, the LA Times started nosing around and asking questions and, earlier this week, Lockyer responded to the Times by admitting that he and Munitz had met in mid-January for lunch (at LA’s Rocket Pizza, which has very good crust), smack dab in the middle of Lockyer’s investigation of Munitz and a month before Munitz bailed out from the Getty.
Lockyer, who is now running for California state treasurer (can’t this guy get a real job?), is in full retreat over the disclosure. He actually told the Times that the get-together did not violate his unwritten policy of not meeting alone with targets of an investigation because the probe was not discussed.
“This was, in my mind, lunch with a personal friend that I’ve known for a long time and it didn’t have anything to do with the case,” he said. . . “I was being a good listener, kind of consoling him as he leaves a job that he loves,” said Lockyer, characterizing the discussion, which eventually shifted to books and movies, as “therapy with a friend.”
I bet the pizza was good, too.
Texas has its share of insect problems.
First, it was the invasion of the killer bees.
Then, it was the onslaught of those nasty fire ants.
Now, it’s the invasion of the Libytheana bachmanii larvata.
Or, as they put it in South Texas, “Looks like you ran into some snouts.”
It took awhile, but the Texas criminal justice finally got it right yesterday in the sad case of Andrea Yates, thanks to an honest and dispassionate jury.
Of course, as noted here earlier, this is a prosecution that never should have been tried once, much less twice. Yates and her attorneys were always willing to cut a deal in which the obviously insane Yates would spend the rest of her life in a tightly-controlled state mental hospital, yet the Harris County District Attorneys office stubbornly refused to provide any meaningful prosecutorial discretion in the case. The result has been a four year saga in which untold millions of dollars of has been spent so that the prosecutors could prove what? That this obviously insane woman just was lucid enough when she killed her children that she should spend the rest of her life in a maximum-security prison rather than a state mental institution?
Yates initially will be sent to a maximum-security hospital, probably North Texas State Hospital in Vernon, and then if doctors determine she is not a danger to herself or others, she later will probably be moved to a medium-security state mental health facility, such as the Rusk State Hospital where she lived for several months pending her retrial. Oh yeah, where she lived before prosecutors insisted that she be detained in the Harris County Jail during her retrial.
Although the Yates defense was successful this time around, there is no real victory here. Yates will spend the rest of her life in a heavily-guarded mental institution and any time she regains even a little bit of lucidity, she will descend back into a deep depression with psychotic features and schizophrenia when she realizes what she did to the children that no one involved in the case disputed that she adored.
One aspect of the case that I’ve not seen reported much in the media is that this trial only involved the deaths of three of the five children that Yates killed, so the Harris County District Attorneys office clearly hedged its bets that it could lose this case when it elected not to prosecute the deaths of the other two Yates children. Thus, it’s possible that the DA’s office could mount another murder case against Yates, although even their bad judgment in pursuing the first case against Yates through two trials does not seem to make that a likely scenario.
The bottom line on this case is that good people afflicted with terrible mental illness are capable of committing horrendous acts during a period of harrowing madness. That’s the reason why insanity is a defense to a murder charge under our criminal justice system, and there is simply no reason to have that defense at all if the state insists upon using its overwhelming prosecutorial power to place obviously insane people such as Andrea Yates in prison — rather than a more humane mental health facility — for the rest of their lives.
The late Dr. Ross M. Lence of the University of Houston was a founding member of board of directors of the Abbeville Institute in Atlanta, which is an association of scholars devoted to the critical study of philosophical nature of the Southern tradition in the United States. Upon his death last week, the Abbeville Institute issued the following endearing tribute to Dr. Lence, which — as is always the case in discussing the indomitable Good Doctor — provides several amusing anecdotes, including this classic:
Once at a seminar with other academics, Ross was challenged by an especially obnoxious participant who, rather than confront his arguments, hoped to end the argument by saying that Ross had not read Locke carefully. Ross calmly replied (he was always calm) with that wry smile of his that if the gentlemen would tell us the paragraph number of the Second Treatise that interested him, he would quote it from memory and then attend to what the gentleman thought he had failed to understand in it.
The entire Abbeville Institute tribute is below.
Dear Colleagues, Students, and Friends,
It is with sadness that I inform you that Professor Ross M. Lence died on July 11th, 2006. Ross was a founder of the Abbeville Institute and a member of its Board of Directors. Much of what we stand for was exemplified by his teaching and character.
Ross studied at the University of Chicago, Georgetown University, and the British Museum before completing his Ph.D. at Indiana University under Professor Charles Hyneman. He greatly admired Hyneman who became his mentor and friend. Ross often quoted him and had a portrait of him prominently displayed in his office at the University of Houston over a table set with bottles of whiskey and sherry for the refreshment of his visitors.
Ross tells the story of how, as a raw graduate student, he first met Hyneman. Ross appeared in his office, confronting the abrupt question, what do you want? Ross replied, to study American political science. Hyneman asked, have you seen it? Ross answered, seen what? America, Hyneman replied. If you want to see it, meet me tomorrow morning. They spent the next few summers traveling around America observing its life in small and large towns, villages, and out of the way farming communities.
This story expresses a truth Ross learned from Hyneman and which he embodied in his own work; that theorizing about political things must be rooted in a connoisseur’s understanding of practice. Unhappily this essentially Aristotelian wisdom is missing from much of American political science which has not freed itself from an ideological style of theorizing.
Ross also thought one had to have a detailed knowledge of classical political texts. He could quote Locke’s Second Treatise and The Federalist from memory. Once at a seminar with other academics, Ross was challenged by an especially obnoxious participant who, rather than confront his arguments, hoped to end the argument by saying that Ross had not read Locke carefully. Ross calmly replied (he was always calm) with that wry smile of his that if the gentlemen would tell us the paragraph number of the Second Treatise that interested him, he would quote it from memory and then attend to what the gentleman thought he had failed to understand in it.
His knowledge of political theory and of political things was broad and deep. But he wore his learning lightly. It never intruded pedantically in conversation. It was there as a cultural inheritance which he had worked hard to make his own and from which flowed his disarming Socratic questions; his refusal to accept facile answers even when they favored his own position; his insistence on clarity; and all of this carried on with a wit that was both piercing and lovable.
These qualities made him a great teacher. It is no exaggeration to say that he must be included in a handful of the greatest teachers in the America of our time. He joined the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston in 1971. Over the years he won many teaching awards within and outside the University.
In the late 1990’s hundreds of students established an endowment for a chair in his honor. In 2001 Ross was appointed to the Ross M. Lence Distinguished University Teaching Chair. For over twenty years he regularly taught at the Women’s Institute of Houston. Ross was one of the earliest, and a frequent participant in Liberty Fund Colloquia, a private foundation devoted to exploring the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
He was devoted to “Liberty,” the ideal of an older federative America which today has largely been replaced with talk of “democracy,” and “freedom” both of which typically reduce to “equality.” By liberty he meant the right of individuals and communities of human scale to govern themselves. He lectured at the first Abbeville Institute summer school, 2003, which was recorded on video. So we are fortunate to have a film of his lectures.
Ross was a leading scholar on the philosophy of John C. Calhoun whom he saw as embodying much of what he loved in the ideal of liberty. He edited the Liberty Fund collection of Calhoun’s writings Union and Liberty in 1992. He never published much. Learning for him was inseparable from character, and was a way of life best communicated through face to face knowledge. He not only gave of his time freely to students, he in time acquired an informal reputation at Houston as one to whom students could turn for counsel.
His last year was an ordeal of serious illness and suffering, made more bearable by the great numbers of current and former students and friends who gave their love, respect, and gratitude, and assistance. Few people will leave the world more loved than Ross. And so the Abbeville Institute salutes for the last time our never to be forgotten friend, mentor, and colleague with the words he always used in parting:
Gaudeamus!