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In Chicago, the office of the inspector general issues a quarterly report running dozens of pages describing the findings and results of its office. In Houston, the quarterly report amounts to simple tallies of cases closed. It took a public information request and a state Attorney General’s ruling to obtain all of the complaints fielded by its inspector general office. Even then the city attorney’s office violated the state’s open records law by failing to provide the records in a timely fashion.
And the office that was once said to be revamped via an executive order from Mayor Annise Parker has yet to issue a report on its findings over the past year.
The former FBI agent, Robert Doguim, hired to lead the office, stepped down. His last day was Friday. He lasted 14 months in the job and left on what he said were good terms. He also provided some candid advice to City Attorney David Feldman on how the office might operate in the future.
Be sure to read the entire Texas Watchdog piece.
We don't have a big problem with Mayor Parker moving the Office of Inspector General under the Mayor's Office in an effort to raise its prominence and authority, but as with many mayoral initiatives, the follow-through seemed lacking, and the Texas Watchdog story strongly implies that Dogium is departing because of lack of authority to do the job as he thinks it should be done.
Unfortunately, that's not entirely surprising. Houston pols (and Texas pols generally, for that matter) like some oversight on ethics and transparency, but not too much oversight -- hence the toothless nature of so many of these entities and their lack of independence (ultimately, Dogium is right that the office probably needs to be more autonomous, certainly not under the authority of the city attorney, who is usually a political ally of the mayor).
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 02/09/12 07:57 AM | Comments (0)
Salaries soar at Harris County Housing Authority - Mike Morris, Houston Chronicle (11/20/2011)
Harris County Housing Authority leaders have received steep salary increases and staggering bonuses in recent years, nearly tripling some executives' pay since 2004.
As CEO, Guy Rankin's salary has gone from $99,507 when he took over in July 2004 to $263,965 three years ago. That included a $60,000 bonus, dubbed "equalization pay" in authority records. This year, while not scheduled to receive a bonus, he stands to make $242,008.
The authority's second-in-command, David Gunter, was making $74,256 as a senior accountant when Rankin became CEO. He since has been promoted three times, to chief administrative officer, and will receive $220,001 this year. That includes a $55,000 bonus. His pay exceeds that of all housing authority CEOs in Texas, as well as those of some of the nation's largest housing authorities.
[snip]
The agency is funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and collects fees from housing it develops with private builders. It receives no local tax dollars.
Rankin and authority board members defended the agency's pay scale. They pointed to two salary surveys, including one last year, that used "extensive private sector data" to show authority employees were paid 8 percent to 40 percent below "market rates." The 2010 survey also polled other housing authorities to create a pay scale "slightly above the median of the relevant labor market."
The project, called Patriots by the Lake, was envisioned as a $400 million "living monument to America's veterans" on the shore of Lake Houston. It was to include hundreds of homes, armed-forces memorials, restaurants, shops, a marina, a hotel and a town hall containing a replica of the Oval Office.
Critics accuse authority CEO Guy Rankin and the agency's board of commissioners of pouring money into the project after it was clear it would not be built. County officials say the largely market-rate development went against the authority's mission of providing affordable housing, and question some of the project spending, such as $18,000 on letters said to be penned by Abraham Lincoln, bought from a shop in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
Rankin and board chairman Casey Wallace say the idea was an inspired concept that was derailed by many factors....
Is anybody home at the county housing authority? - Lisa Falkenberg, Houston Chronicle (02/03/2012)
The resort-style development that Harris County Judge Ed Emmett has likened to the Taj Mahal was to include armed forces memorials, shops, a hotel, a marina and single-family homes ranging from $175,000 to $700,000, a project that would seem to stray far from the agency's supposed mission to provide quality "affordable" housing in the region.
If Patriots were a private-sector deal, the folks responsible would have been out of a job a long time ago.
Housing authority's snoop had eye on others - Lisa Falkenberg, Houston Chronicle (02/07/2012)
In early December, a mysterious open records request from a private investigation firm called Pathway Forensics arrived at county offices asking for emails, phone records and credit card statements for Emmett and several staffers. Specifically, the request sought correspondence related to communication with the Houston Chronicle and city of Houston elected officials.
Emmett says he wasn't sure who or what was behind the request until he saw a courier note listing the origin of a follow-up request: the housing authority. And then it made sense.
"It wasn't the brightest move they ever made," Emmett told me last week. "I just thought it was absurd for the housing authority to be trying to file an open records (request) on me and my office. Obviously, they were trying to find out who was giving me information. The whole thing has been sordid."
The Harris County Housing Authority’s board of commissioners will discuss the possible end of embattled CEO Guy Rankin’s tenure with the agency tonight.
We are sometimes critical of the Houston Chronicle for too frequently serving as a cheerleader for favored causes and institutions instead of acting as an advocate for taxpayers and citizens when it comes to scrutinizing and holding accountable local government and governmental agencies. So kudos are due to Mike Morris and Lisa Falkenberg for the digging they have done over the last 2-3 months into the goings on at the Harris County Housing Authority. Between salary shenanigans, project shenanigans, and apparently even snooping on Harris County's most popular political figure (Judge Ed Emmett), the agency seems to have been acting badly.
And that's probably just the tip of the iceberg. If this all goes down by the usual standards of The Houston Way, a nervous Board will force out some executives, and will hope that's that, the newspaper can claim a rare scalp, and nobody will be looking much deeper (well, at least until the FBI shows up years later -- see various figures connected directly and indirectly to the Lee Brown Administration for an example of how this sort of thing has played out in the past).
Here's hoping that many more public information requests have been filed, and that this is just the start of getting a closer look at just what has been going on at this quasi-governmental agency -- and why the agency's Board seemed to be asleep at the wheel while it was going on.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 02/07/12 08:54 PM | Comments (3)
Houston is poised to enact a new revenue stream which will regulate automotive repair shops:
The Houston City Council is scheduled to consider a proposed ordinance to regulate the automotive repair and collision industry at an upcoming city council meeting. The Automotive Service Association (ASA) contacted the mayor and council members asking that they address a number of concerns with the proposed ordinance.
Although the proposed ordinance has gone through multiple revisions, ASA is concerned that there are still significant issues with the ordinance.
No! Significant issues with a Houston ordinance? Unheard of!
A December op-ed by the past president of the Houston Automotive Service Association has more specifics, and includes this gem:
The ordinance includes pages and pages that regulate how records will be kept, how repair shops may gain approvals from customers and establishes fines for sometimes honest mistakes that must be paid to the city.
Wouldn't want that fine to go to the customer who was actually involved in the transaction, now would we?
PREVIOUSLY: Is this necessary? - Camposcommunications's Blog.
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 02/04/12 06:26 AM | Comments (3)
DA Pat Lykos launched examination of grand jury after ABC13 report - Ted Oberg, KTRK-13 News
This all started the day after we broke the news a grand jury was investigating DA Pat Lykos' office. According to people involved in the search, Lykos wanted details on the grand jurors because she thought they had become hostile to her. She wanted her chief investigator to find evidence of their political bias and plug the leaks to the news media -- especially Eyewitness News.
[snip]
Using the confidential list of grand jurors' names, the DA's chief investigator looked at Facebook, Google, the state bar and then accessed a county paid for, password-protected database called Accurint -- which gave him a list of grand jurors' addresses, jobs, relatives, bankruptcies, all sorts of information and connections.
"It's more than just collecting information on people," said KTRK Legal Analyst Joel Androphy.
Our legal analyst says using those confidential names for a political purpose could now pose problems.
But it doesn't really matter if DA Lykos insists we all call what happened a "cursory review," "internet search," or even a lullaby! The facts, at least as reported by Oberg, suggest that DA Lykos deployed resources of the District Attorney's Office (taxpayer resources) to snoop on perceived political opponents. Quite a Nixonian lullaby, hmm?
In my view, that's an abuse of power. It's not clear that it rises to the level of an illegal abuse of power, although the DA's political opponents will probably make that case (yes, she has political opponents, in her own party and outside her party -- that's sometimes how elected offices work). But it certainly doesn't reflect well on the DA.
BLOGVERSATION: From Frying Pan to Fire? - Defending People, A Petty DA - Camposcommunications’s Blog.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 02/02/12 09:41 PM | Comments (0)
Only after we told [DA Pat] Lykos what we learned today, she told us she didn't order an investigation, but did order in her words "a cursory internet search... to learn if there was a political motivation behind the attacks" on her office.
No matter what she calls it, here's what we know about what was ordered.
According to sources, on Saturday, October 22, 2011 the DA's chief investigator was called while off duty. He was told by the DA's first assistant, Jim Leitner, to collect information on members of the grand jury themselves -- specifically the foreperson, Trisha Pollard, and another member who shared a last name, but no relation with DWI defense attorney Mark Theissen.
[snip]
A week later, on Saturday, October 29, sources confirmed the chief investigator was called again and told to expand the scope of his examination to include the special prosecutors, the judge in the case Susan Brown, and her husband, and a potential Lykos political opponent Mike Anderson and his wife.
Sources tell us the investigator was told the orders were coming from the boss -- meaning Lykos....
So, after all that posturing in front of media yesterday about being the victim of political shenanigans, it turns out that Lykos was actively engaged in word-parsing games in an effort to obfuscate the fact that she herself had deployed DA resources in what appear to be politically motivated shenanigans. Surely there are better (even ethical!) uses of DA investigative resources than engaging in not-investigations of people the temperamental DA thinks are out to "get" her politically!
NOTHING about this affair reflects well on the Harris County District Attorney's Office led by Pat Lykos. Not one thing.
BLOGVERSATION: Investigating the Investigation Investigating the Other Investigation - Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 02/01/12 09:32 PM | Comments (0)
Why Does the Sheriff's Department Want to Censor Our Law Firm Website? - Steph Stradley Blog
Ultimately, I am certain that running one of the busiest jails in the country isn't easy. And at least, [Alan] Bernstein agrees with our law firm site that Harris County Jail is not a fun experience that leaves some people feeling fatigued and humiliated. But doesn't the Sheriff's Department have better things to spend their money on than scouring the web to find unhappy words about them and send long, whiney letters? And what's with a former journalist using his position to try to censor other people's points of view?
Be sure to read the whole thing.
This isn't the first time Bernstein's heavy-handed approach has been questioned. The bullying tactics aren't that surprising given the source, but they don't make the department look all that great.
BLOGVERSATION: Sadistic Harris County Jailers. And the Streisand Effect - Defending People.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 02/01/12 09:03 PM | Comments (12)
An attentive reader called our attention to the page above from Friday's Houston Chronicle (sometimes, there really is no substitute for the print edition).
On the right side of the page, we have a story about a disgraced HFD captain who was investigated after engaging in online chatting with an underage girl and was found to be in possession of child porn:
Houston police confiscated Fiszer's laptop and media storage devices that held pornographic images and a video of children, investigators said. Officials said they found at least 450 images of child pornography.
On the left side of the page, we have a photo of disgraced METRO CEO George Greanias posing for some METRO promotion or another. Unlike the HFD captain, Greanias has friends at the highest levels of city government, the most important being Mayor Annise Parker. Unlike the HFD captain, Greanias didn't have to deal with HPD searching his computer after he was caught visiting apparent gay child porn sites using METRO resources. Rather, the disgraced CEO's insistence that no laws were broken interestingly resulted in... no police investigation at all!
It helps to have friends in high places.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 01/31/12 09:30 PM | Comments (2)
Are Houston’s TV forecasters climate change skeptics? - Eric Berger, SciGuy/Chron.com
This weekend the Chronicle ran a story I wrote on the Forecast the Facts campaign, a controversial initiative which essentially seeks to out TV meteorologists who hold contrarian views on climate change science.
Contrarian, eh?
Well, at least the Chronicle's in-house global warmist is no longer pretending to be merely an objective reporter without an opinion on the matter.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 01/30/12 09:03 PM | Comments (3)
Last week Bill White pictured Rick Perry . . . - Unca Darrell
[Former Mayor Bill] White ... proposes "three simple actions" by which [Gov. Rick] Perry could restore his credibility with Texans. You can read them for yourself, but the three simple actions boil down to one simple principle: Be more like me, the good brother, and less like your perfectly awful self.
Think Bill White is still just a little bitter over those stupid voters re-electing that stupid Aggie when they could have chosen a smart, successful Democratic mayor instead?
Again, click over to read the whole righteous takedown.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 01/24/12 09:57 PM | Comments (5)
An Example Of What’s Wrong With Journalism These Days - Lawrence Person's Battleswarm Blog
This Houston Chronicle piece by Joe Holley is an example of why so many people are dissatisfied with the job the legacy media is doing of reporting events.
No argument from us. Be sure to click over and read the whole thing, and check out the BattleSwarm Blog regularly. It's one of the good ones.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 01/24/12 09:33 PM | Comments (0)
In other words, one of the branches of Harris County government we count on to keep an eye on OTHER public officials isn't really all that interested in doing so. That would be handy to keep in mind around election time.A letter to a federal judge from Harris County’s legal counsel supporting ousted Harris County Commissioner Jerry Eversole was “inappropriate” and demands a revisiting of the county’s ethics policy, Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said in an interview.
The letter from First Assistant Harris County Attorney Terry O’Rourke to U.S. District Judge David Hittner asked for leniency – a sentence of probation in a case where the penalty allows up to five years in prison - for Eversole, who was indicted in 2010 for accepting bribes to steer millions of dollars in contracts to a developer, Michael Surface.
[snip]
“In my professional review of the Murworth properties … I found that the county procedures had been followed and that there was no evidence of undue or improper outside influence on the decision makers," O'Rourke wrote, contradicting the federal indictment.
“As a civil litigator with only the burden of preponderance of the evidence, I would not, and did not, recommend the filing charges of either bribery or unlawful gift to a public servant to the appropriate officials. Based on this, I recommend that you grant probation in the case.”
This was a nice catch by Texas Watchdog yesterday morning. The Chronicle ran a similar story in today's edition.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 01/24/12 07:42 AM | Comments (0)
Swamplot notes that construction of a bikeway north of downtown continues, and there'll be a "highlight" for hikers and bikers once it opens:
One highlight of the journey: a close-up view of the 17.3 acres of swampland Hakeem Olajuwon flipped to Metro back in 2005 for a cool $15 million.
He made a $13 million profit. Quite a fine example of Frank "Procurement Disaster" Wilson's outstanding leadership, wouldn't you agree?
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 01/23/12 06:50 PM | Comments (3)
City of Houston Negotiates End to Red Light Camera Vendor Lawsuit - Office of Mayor Annise Parker
The City of Houston has reached a $4.78 million settlement of the lawsuit filed by American Traffic Solutions (ATS). The agreement brings to an end the legal fight that began when Houston City Council approved ending Houston’s red light camera program. The funds to pay the settlement will come from previously collected fines that are in escrow and the approximately $25 million the City is still owed in outstanding red light camera fines issued when the program was still operational.
[snip]
Under the terms of the agreement, ATS will be paid $2.3 million up front. This represents the amount ATS would have received had the red light cameras remained on from the date they were initially turned off following the voter initiative in November 2010 to December of 2011. ATS will also receive another $2.4 million over the next three years. This additional amount is meant to address the amounts ATS could have received under its contract with the City, based on collection of delinquent red light camera fines.
In exchange for the payments, ATS has agreed to end its legal fight with the City and remove all of its cameras from Houston intersections within 60 days of approval of the settlement by Houston City Council.
Red-light camera settlement going to City Council - Chris Moran, Houston Chronicle
What's missing from this story?It will cost the city of Houston at least $4.8 million to get out of its contract for red-light cameras, according to a lawsuit settlement headed to the City Council on Wednesday.
American Traffic Solutions has agreed to take down the cameras within 60 days in exchange for $2.3 million upfront and a cut of future collections of delinquent fines from red-light runners.
[snip]
If collections don't cover the obligation, the city will pay $2.4 million in installments over the next three years.
[snip]
Beyond that, a future ATS payday depends on the city's success in collecting from the 240,000 delinquent red-light runners. If the city were to collect all $25 million in outstanding fines — highly unlikely since some of them are already 5 years old — ATS's payout could reach $12.3 million.
Any reference to the fact that Bill White's gambit to remove an opt-out provision from the contract with ATS and "outsmart" the state legislature is now going to cost the City of Houston millions.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 01/22/12 09:54 PM | Comments (2)
To celebrate this lovely 70+ degree January weather, we've decided to have an impromptu BH meetup.
We'll be getting together at the West Alabama Ice House tomorrow (Saturday, January 21, 2pm-??) to hoist a few brews, maybe have a gyro or taco, and chat about stuff. Please feel free to drop by if you're out and about.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 01/20/12 08:06 AM | Comments (1)
Woman gets pinned under METRORail in downtown Houston, hospitalized - Jessica Willey, KTRK-13 News
Quote of the year so far from METRO's very expensive TV mouthpiece: "She wasn't that far under there."According to METRO, the woman was walking on the tracks near Polk toward the train. The driver sounded the horn, but she never moved. She was struck and pulled under. The train came to an abrupt stop.
"Everybody was just shocked, they were taken aback. Everybody was on their phones, everybody was trying to see what had happened. We couldn't get a good angle but all the police and the ambulance showed up and it was chaos," Dupre said.
The woman ended up under the cab and not the wheels. And on this scene Houston firefighters didn't use hoses, but rather airbags for the rescue.
"To help lift the train just a couple of inches, she wasn't that far under there. It required a couple of inches of life to get her up from under the train," METRO Spokesman Jerome Gray said.
That's reassuring.
Meanwhile, METRO continues to build additional, expensive at-grade tram lines down busy streets. Because we wouldn't want this sort of Friday the 13th fun restricted to just one short stretch in Houston!
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 01/14/12 08:45 AM | Comments (0)
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