Category Archives: News – Houston Local

And you thought Tropical Storm Allison was bad?

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Allison.jpgDuring a five day period from June 5th through the 9th in 2001, Tropical Storm Allison dumped a huge amount of rainfall on the Houston metropolitan area that caused widespread and tremendously damaging flooding. The Port of Houston recorded 37 inches of rainfall over that five day period. With damage estimates exceeding $5 billion, Allison remains the costliest weather event in Houston’s history.
However, as bad as Allison was, it’s hard to imagine that this Indian monsoon hit Bombay with 37 inches of rain in one day as “the rainfall descended in what looked like a solid wall of water.”

Apple stories

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apple-logo blue.jpgThe ever informative Dwight Silverman informs us that the new Apple Store is opening this weekend in The Woodlands. Given the spirit of the typical Mac user, Dwight points out that you may want to allow the initial stampede to recede before venturing over to do some serious shopping.
By the way, speaking of Apple, you can rest assured that Ken Leebow will not be one of the shoppers at an Apple Store anytime soon!

The changing Houston golf scene

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golfer2.jpgThis Sunday Chronicle article reviews the status of Houston’s municipal golf course system, which has run a deficit for the past five years, including a cool $620,000 for the most recent fiscal year. Although rounds are down at all muni courses other than the City’s crown jewel at Memorial Park, Brock Park was responsible for over 75% of the losses in the most recent fiscal year.
Frankly, the City of Houston needs to phase out of the golf business entirely. Although providing golf courses for citizens made sense a generation ago, the proliferation of a wide-variety of private daily fee courses in the Houston area have made most of the muni courses not only unattractive by comparison, but also unnecessary. Such a marketplace of private golf courses did not exist when the City of Houston developed its municipal golf system, but given the development of that private marketplace over the past 30 years, there is simply no longer any reason for the City of Houston to subsidize golf operations for a relatively small number of its citizens.
Here is a “thinking outside the box” suggestion for the Houston City Council on the golf course operation. Other than Memorial Park and Hermann Park golf courses, sell the remainder of the golf courses, including a sale or donation of the Gus Wortham Course to the University of Houston, which could then invest the funds necessary to renovate that tract into a potentially fine university course close to the University’s Central Campus. With a portion of the funds generated from the sale of the courses, the City could then fund an endowment to be administered by the Houston Golf Association to promote golf to underprivileged children and citizens of Houston.
The foregoing would be a “win-win” situation for the City of Houston and its citizens. Not only would the City shed the cost of its unprofitable golf operation and provide the city’s main public University with a convenient home for its storied golf program, the City would maintain two very good, profitable and well-located municipal golf courses, and provide its citizens who need it the recreational opportunity to enjoy the game of golf.

Chronicle follows up on Harris County Jail story

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jail2.jpgThe Chronicle’s Steve McVicker and Bill Murphy follow up their earlier story on the chronically abysmal condition of the Harris County Jail facilities with this story that reports that Harris County officials have ignored repeated warnings regarding the unsanitary and over-crowded condition of the jails.
To make matters even more egregious (if that were possible), a Sam Houston State University report warned Harris County officials almost two years ago of a looming explosion in the county jail population. Despite that report, the Harris County Criminal Justice Committee — which was created in 1995 in response to a jail-overcrowding lawsuit that resulted in the jail being under a federal judge’s oversight for 23 years — has not met to review the report or the conditions at the jail.
By strange coincidence, the Criminal Justice Committee is now scheduled to meet this Friday. I’m sure the previous Chronicle article has nothing to do with that.

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Watch out!

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metrocar4.jpgThe Chronicle’s Rad Sallee reports on one category in which Houston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority is surely leading among the country’s transit systems:

MetroRail logged its third collision in four days Friday, making 29 this year and 96 since fall 2003, when testing of the rail line began.
Before that, the last collision was July 5. The last string of three accidents in four days was March 13-16. Metro recorded three light rail collisions in two days Jan. 26-27 and five in eight days March 22-29, 2004.

Who boy, Kevin Whited and Anne Linehan at blogHouston.net are going to have fun with this one. BlogHouston.net’s Houston Transit category and Kevin’s PubliusTX.net Danger Train category are the two best sources for information on the seemingly unending foibles of Houston Metro.
By the way, is it just me or does Mr. Sallee’s analysis of MetroRail’s many crashes seems eerily similar to the way in which one would evaluate a Major League Baseball player’s career statistics?

The Robertsons of Houston

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crobertson.jpgThe late Corbin Robertson, Sr. was a bright business mind when he came to Texas as a young man from Minnesota in the 1940’s. After marrying Wilhelmina Cullen — the daughter of famous Houston wildcatter Hugh Roy Cullen — Mr. Robertson ultimately became the brains behind the investment of the Cullen Family oil and gas fortune, a role that Richard Rainwater successfully emulated decades later for Ft. Worth’s Bass Family. Houston benefitted greatly from Mr. Robertson’s business acumen as both the Cullen and Robertson families became among Houston’s greatest philanthropists, contributing huge amounts to institutions such as the University of Houston and the Texas Medical Center.

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The abysmal condition of the Harris County Jail

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jail.jpgOver my 26 year legal career, a local issue that has been continually discussed among Houston attorneys is the horrid condition of the Harris County Jail.
This is not an easy issue. The constituency most interested in the issue — prisoners — is neither attractive nor important to politicians. Similarly, the issue brings into sharp focus a public policy conflict that governments have ducked for decades — i.e., the tendency of politicians to indulge the public demand for tougher sentencing for political purposes while attempting to avoid responsibility for most government’s booming deficits and debt. Stated simply, politicians are not particularly interested in dealing with the fact that governments either have to accept that tougher sentencing means more prisoners and more money spent on building prisons or — if government is not willing to spend the money — fewer and shorter prison terms for offenders.
With that backdrop, it’s not particularly surprising that, after noting that almost 1,300 inmates are sleeping on mattresses on the floor of the Harris County Jail while large sections of the jail are unused because of a guard shortage, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards has decertified the Harris County Jail for the second year in a row. This Steve McVicker/Bill Murphy Chronicle article reports on the Commission findings.

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Is Emily heading for Brownsville?

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Emily.gifIt’s looking increasingly as if Hurricane Emily — currently a powerful category 4 hurricane — is headed toward Brownsville and the Texas Rio Grande Valley, probably by Tuesday of next week. Current projections have Emily weakening while it goes over the Yucatan Peninsula this weekend, but strengthening to a category 3 storm once it travels back over the warm Gulf waters.
After having virtually no rainfall for a 45 day period prior to July 1, the Houston area has received as much as 10 inches of rainfall over the past two weeks.

It’s been a tough year for BP

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thunderhorse.jpgFirst, British Petroleum had to deal with the explosion at its Texas City plant earlier this year.
Then, yesterday, BP discovered that Hurricane Dennis had damaged its huge Thunder Horse Drilling Platform in the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend, as the picture on the left of the badly listing platform reflects. BP’s press release on the damage is here.
Hat tip to Clear Thinkers reader Charles Satterwhite for the amazing picture of the listing Thurder Horse.
Update: Kathy Herrmann is analyzing the technical and financial implications of the damage to Thunder Horse over at Big Cat Chronicles.

The first Vioxx trial

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vioxxB.jpgJury selection begins today in Angleton, Texas in the first personal injury/wrongful death trial against Merck & Co. for alleged non-disclosure of the risks of taking the pain relieving drug Vioxx. Angleton is a small town in a plaintiff-friendly county about an hour south of downtown Houston. Talented Houston-based personal injury trial lawyer Mark Lanier has been receiving quite a bit of free publicity about the upcoming trial (here is the NY Times article and an earlier WSJ ($) article is here), and here are several previous posts on Merck and Vioxx.
Mr. Lanier’s effectiveness as a trial lawyer is in no small part attributable to the fact that he is a devout Christian who regularly teaches a Bible Study class at his church in Houston. Such familiarity with the Bible typically resonates with jurors in small Texas towns, who often rationalize tenuous liability and damage issues through Biblical associations.
Curiously, as Professor Ribstein has pointed out, Mr. Lanier’s case against Merck is based largely on the very un-Biblical concept of resentment and not the truth. Merck pulled Vioxx from the market in October, 2004 after a study showed that it increased the risk of heart attack or stoke, but not necessarily the risk of death. That move prompted Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Eric Topol to go postal over Merck’s handling of the drug, contending that Vioxx resulted in 15 cases of heart attack or stroke per 1,000 patients.

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