The Chronicle’s Dan Feldstein continues his solid coverage of the Cleveland, Ohio corruption trial of Cleveland entreprenuer Nate Gray, who is the person from whom two former Houston officials — Lee Brown Administration chief of staff Oliver Spellman and building services director Monique McGilbra — testified that they took cash and gifts. A previous trial of Mr. Gray ended in a mistrial, and the retrial that resulted in the conviction began earlier this month. Earlier posts on the trial and the related investigation of Brown Adminsitration officials are here, here, here and here.
Mr. Feldstein sums up what the result of this trial means to the Houston part of the ongoing criminal investigation:

In Houston, the question is this: What did it mean when a federal prosecutor asked FBI agent R. Michael Massie on the witness stand whether the investigation was finished in Houston and Massie testified, “No”?
McGilbra admitted she took favors from five companies. Mayor Brown’s brother, Earl, was a “subconsultant” to Gray on Houston matters. Gray paid him to talk to Mayor Brown on behalf of his company, which was seeking a shuttle bus subcontract at Bush Intercontinental Airport.
Although he was not a registered lobbyist as would be required, Earl Brown said he did [talk to Mayor Brown]. Former Mayor Lee Brown has denied it.

McGilbra and Spellman are scheduled to be sentenced here in Houston on their plea deals on September 2nd.

Earlier posts (here and here) have addressed the chronically abysmal condition of Houston’s Harris County Jail. As noted in the posts, local politicians have an amazing propensity for blaming others rather than addressing the causes for an unpopular problem and resolving them in a responsible manner. Recently, the County Commissioners voted to throw some money at one of the symptoms of the jail’s problems (i.e., serious overcrowding), but there still appears to be no meaningful action being taken on addressing why the jail’s problems have continued to fester for decades.
Into that vacuum of action, Scott Henson over at Grits for Breakfast files this first in a series of posts that analyzes Harris County bail policies and their contribution to the jail’s overcrowding. As Scott notes:

According to a recent consultant’s report (download pdf), a major reason is clear: A shift in bail policy over the last decade to require cash bond in more cases instead of personal bond, or releasing defendants on their promise to later appear in court. Half of all inmates presently in the Harris County Jail are awaiting trial; a large proportion couldn’t make bail.
Though other factors are also at play, much of the Harris County Jail’s overincarceration crisis can be explained by this shift in policy. In other words, Harris County’s jail overcrowding crisis is a self-inflicted wound.

Read Scott’s entire piece, and his future posts on this issue will be noted. As noted in the previous posts, the horrid condition of the Harris County Jail is an embarrassing reflection of our community’s values. This is a problem for which all Houstonians should unite and demand resolution once and for all.

Following on this post from earlier this summer on former University of Houston chancellor, Barry Munitz, this NY Times article indicates that the heat is being turned up on current Getty Trust executive director.
Reporting on a LA Times article from this past week, the Times reports that the California attorney general has opened an investigation into the finances of the Getty Trust, particularly the financial records relating to Mr. Munitz’s eight-year tenure. The state is examining whether those expenditures had violated state laws governing its tax-exempt status, as well as a real estate deal between the Getty Trust and L.A. billionaire, Eli Broad, who happens to be one of Mr. Munitz’s buddies.
Mr. Munitz is one of the best-paid executives of a nonprofit institution in the nation, with salary, benefits and perks totaling over $1 million annually over the last several years. It appears that everything that Mr. Munitz received was approved by the Getty Board, so it appears that the primary purpose of the investigation is to embarrass Mr. Munitz and the Getty board. My sense is that neither Mr. Munitz nor the Getty board really cares.

This Church Report article — The 50 Most Influential Churches — examines the fifty largest churches in the United States based on a survey that was sent to 2,000 church leaders with the goal of ranking the nation’s fastest growing churches and churches with more than 2,000 weekend attendance.
Houston is well-represented on the list, with Lakewood Church ranking fifth (are there really four churches that are larger than one that holds its services in a renovated basketball arena?), Fellowship of The Woodlands at no. 17, Second Baptist Church at no. 33, and Windsor Village United Methodist at no. 43. The common thread through all of these mega-churches is that each of them is closely associated with a charismatic leader, and that is certainly true of the Houston contingent — Joel Osteen at Lakewood, Kerry Shook at Fellowship, Ed Young at Second Baptist, and Kirbyjon Caldwell at Windsor Village.

Continue reading →

Following on earlier posts on the same topic here and here, this article reports on an ominous development that flies under radar screen of most Texans and Americans — the increasing violence in the Mexican border towns along the Texas-Mexico border.
Tony Garza, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, ordered the closure of the U.S. Consulate in Nuevo Laredo for a week Friday night to assess the security situation just hours after rival drug cartels engaged in a gunfight with machine guns, grenades and rocket launchers in an upscale Nuevo Laredo neighborhood. The battle was fought Thursday night at a single-story house near a country club, which is about five blocks from the Nuevo Laredo’s main drag.
The Texas-Mexico border area of Texas — called the Rio Grande Valley or simply “the Valley” — has always been a fascinating and troubling part of Texan culture. The area is among the lowest in terms of per capita income in the United States, yet even the chronically depressed economy of the Texas side of the border is a fantasy of riches for many of those living in the poverty of the teeming Mexican border towns. The following is the way I characterized the area’s problems in this earlier post:

The region’s problems are complex and difficult, which makes the area prone to being ignored. The increased violence of late is the natural result of such neglect, and the usual response to such spikes in violence along the border — i.e., heightened law enforcement — is only a short term solution that often contributes to the animus that many of the Hispanic citizens of the area have toward the state. The area is desperate for leadership and a vision for solving its problems, yet those intractable problems tend to repel those in government who are in a position to do something about them. In short, the Valley needs statesmen, which are in short supply in the polarized American political landscape of the early 21st century.

With some politicians calling for the creation of state militia units to combat the increasing problems on the border, it’s high time for federal and state leaders to address the problems facing the Valley and devise short and long-term plans to address them. For if they do not, expect to see what happened in Nuevo Laredo on Thursday night to spill over to the Texas side of the border soon.

The comment that serves as the title of this post qualifies as genuinely good news these days at BP p.l.c. However, as noted in this post from just the other day, it is getting a bit difficult to keep up with BP’s various problems these days.
Another fire erupted at BP’s Texas City plant Thursday evening, just four months after the one in March this year that caused 15 deaths and dozens of injuries. No injuries were reported in Thursday’s fire that took place in BP’s Texas City 1,200-acre complex, but not close within the complex to the unit that exploded in March. BP released a statement saying that “there is no connection between the two incidents.”
Meanwhile, crude-oil futures settled up nearly a dollar to push prices above $60 a barrel for the first time in more than two weeks.