Harris County Judge Ed Emmett voiced concern Tuesday that a bill filed by a veteran state senator jeopardizes the county's plan to revitalize the Astrodome, adding that county representatives would continue to try to persuade legislators to support the $105 million project.
Emmett said state Sen. John Whitmire's bill, the Harris County Taxpayer Protection Act, was misleading and that Whitmire's statements that some Astrodome renovation funds could be spent on Minute Maid Park or the Toyota Center were "demonstrably incorrect."
"This bill is an example of state government making it more difficult for local government to do its job," Emmett said.
Whitmire's bill would require voter approval for a county plan to spend $105 million to raise the floor of the iconic, domed stadium and create 1,400 parking spaces and space for events or festivals.
Emmett, a Republican, said the county would delay a "comprehensive analysis of future operation and maintenance needs at NRG Park" until the bill's fate were decided. NRG Park includes the 52-year-old Astrodome, NRG Stadium, home of the Houston Texans and the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, and event venues NRG Arena and NRG Center.
At a press conference Tuesday in Austin, Whitmire and other state senators from the Houston area gathered to express their support of legislation that would effectively block - or at least delay - Emmett's plan.
District Attorney Kim Ogg and heads of local law enforcement announced Thursday that, starting March 1, all police agencies in Harris County will no longer arrest people caught with four ounces or less of marijuana, and the DA's office will no longer be prosecuting those cases.
The remarkable move, which Ogg had championed throughout her 2016 campaign, pushes the third largest county in the nation to the forefront of marijuana reform in places where it is still illegal. Harris County will join only the Brooklyn County District Attorney's Office in New York in choosing to divert misdemeanor marijuana defendants away from jail entirely, saving taxpayers millions of dollars and saving thousands of people the lifelong burden of a criminal record.
Instead of being arrested and hauled off to jail, low-level potheads and casual smokers will instead be asked to take a four-hour decision-making class, at a cost of $150 (exceptions will be made for indigent people). Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo and Mayor Sylvester Turner joined Ogg in developing the landmark policy. It replaces former district attorney Devon Anderson's First Chance Diversion Program, which only applied to first-time offenders caught with less than two ounces, which Ogg had criticized as being too narrow.
“At 107,000 cases over the last ten years, we have spent in excess of $250 million dollars collectively prosecuting a crime that has produced no tangible evidence of improved public safety,” Ogg said. “Additionally, the collateral damage to our workforce is immeasurable — because what we have done is we have disqualified, unnecessarily, thousands of people from greater job, housing and education opportunities by giving them a criminal record for what is in effect a minor law violation.”
In her first major action as Harris County's incoming district attorney, Kim Ogg announced Friday she had shown 40 prosecutors the door in a massive shake-up that eliminated a senior level of supervisors and career trial attorneys.
Ogg, who was elected in November as the county's chief prosecutor, notified 37 attorneys Friday that their services would not be needed when she takes office Jan. 1. Three others retired before Ogg's emails went out.
"Change is coming," she told reporters after news broke that more than 10 percent of the 329 lawyers in the DA's office would not be returning in the new year. "Like any good team that has suffered some under-performing seasons, we're changing management. My administration is heading in a new direction."
The terminations had been expected as Ogg - who ran on a campaign of reform - installs her own lieutenants and administrators with a new organizational structure.
. . . Under Anderson, the district attorney's office has a hierarchy that includes about six bureau chiefs, more than 20 division chiefs and dozens of trial and section chiefs who oversee staff lawyers.
Ogg got rid of a number of Anderson loyalists and some prosecutors tied to scandals that have erupted over Anderson's three-year tenure.
Ogg said the majority of her termination decisions fell on longtime employees who worked as supervisors. She declined to discuss specific employees but said her primary focus was to eliminate management positions created by her predecessor.
"It's a difficult process and one that is entirely necessary," she said. "Of the lawyers who were released or given the opportunity to resign, most are eligible to retire. Few of them handle cases on a day-to-day basis."
Some of the highest-ranking prosecutors to go include First Assistant Belinda Hill, Chief of Staff Kathy Braddock and top lieutenants Maria McAnulty, Karen Morris, Roe Wilson, Dick Bax and Jane Waters, all of whom were bureau chiefs. Craig Goodhart and Terrance Windham, who also were bureau chiefs, recently retired.
Other well-known prosecutors who were asked to leave the office include three division chiefs: Julian Ramirez over civil rights; Bill Moore over major frauds; and Lance Long over the major narcotics cases. Also notified that they will be leaving are Alison Baimbridge, who prosecuted high-profile DWI cases and other vehicular homicides; Alan Curry, an appellate chief who successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court; and Inger Chandler, who headed the conviction review section.
Democratic challenger Ed Gonzalez defeated incumbent Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman by nearly 64,000 votes Tuesday. Hickman conceded to Gonzalez shortly after 10 p.m., with roughly 81 percent of the votes counted.
Since Hickman's appointment by the Harris County Commissioners Court in May 2015, his administration had been plagued by continuing problems at the Harris County Jail — poor conditions that Hickman blamed largely on his predecessor, Adrian Garcia. (Garcia stepped down to run for mayor).
In a September interview with Houston Public Media, Gonzalez, a former Houston Police Department homicide detective and three-time city councilman, called Hickman's administration "stagnant" and "almost going backwards."
Gonzalez told the radio station “There’s three things that we’re addressing in law enforcement that do not have a law enforcement response, and that’s mental illness, poverty, and addiction. We’ve got to find community-based solutions to that."
Hickman's campaign had centered largely on the fact that Gonzalez was no longer a licensed peace officer, while stressing the incumbent's law enforcement bona fides. This earned him endorsements by the Houston Police Officers Union, the Harris County Deputies Organization and the Mexican-American Sheriffs Organization. (Perhaps even more importantly, he had the blessing of Gallery Furniture founder Jim "Mattress Mac" McIngvale).
But Gonzalez was endorsed by the Houston Chronicle, saying that the former homicide detective and three-term city councilman "built a record as a policymaker dedicated to diverting people from our jail — one of the major challenges facing the sheriff's office."
In accordance with the Texas Local Government Code (LGC) §111.063, the County Auditor has prepared a “Final Statement of Estimated Available Resources” to be used in developing the Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 Appropriations Budget for Harris County and the Harris County Flood Control District. The estimate of available resources is comprised of available beginning cash and cash equivalents, plus estimated revenues and transfers‐in for the upcoming fiscal year. The available beginning cash balances for FY 2015 have been adjusted by a projection of the County’s accounts receivable and liability account balances at January 28, 2014. The “Final Statement of Estimated Available Resources” includes all information as required by Chapter 111 of the Local Government Code:
Outstanding obligations of the County.
Cash on hand to the credit of each fund.
Funds received from all sources during the preceding fiscal year.
Funds and revenues estimated to be received from all sources during the preceding fiscal year.
Funds and revenues estimated to be received during the ensuing fiscal year.
A statement of all accounts and contracts on which sums are due to or owed by the County as of the last day of the preceding fiscal year, except for taxes or court costs.
With Harris County's Precinct 4 Constable's Office mired in scandal over the improper destruction of 21,000 pieces of evidence, serious evidence cataloging and control problems also have been uncovered in the constables' offices in Precincts 3,6 and 7, according to interviews and audits obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
While there is no proof yet that evidence has been unlawfully destroyed in those other three offices, 2,000 items were initially reported missing in Precinct 3; guns, jewelry, electronics and cash were misplaced in Precinct 6; and Precinct 7's evidence room has been described as "a shambles."
In Precinct 4, where the evidence destruction scandal is still unfolding, prosecutors so far have dismissed 100 criminal cases and are still determining how many convictions could be affected by years of careless work blamed on a corporal fired for illegally disposing of drugs, guns and evidence. The episode remains the subject of a criminal probe.
Only time will tell whether chaotic evidence handling practices reported in Precincts 3,6 and 7 will result in case dismissals, appeals or further investigations.
Harris County auditors in May 2015 uncovered evidence problems - never made public - in a review of the overstuffed property room inside the Precinct 6 Constable's Office in the East End. There, auditors reported finding 28 percent of the evidence missing along with $54,000 in cash in a review of a sample of 799 items, the audit shows. Their visit to the office came only months after the previous constable, Victor Treviño, resigned after pleading guilty to misappropriating money from a charity he ran out of his office.
The demands on election administrators have been growing in recent years.
Federal laws passed in the wake of the Florida recounts in the 2000 presidential election imposed new requirements on everything from voting equipment to provisional ballots to voter databases.
States have added to the complexity, too. Some have imposed voter ID laws that require election officials to apply a new layer of scrutiny on would-be voters. Others have added to administrative duties by expanding early voting, increasing access to absentee ballots and starting Election Day registration.
Meanwhile, social media and the 24-hour news cycle can easily turn a local bureaucratic snafu into a national news story -- like when voters in the Phoenix area had to wait hours to cast votes in this year's presidential primary.
Sharing expertise in the field has been difficult, but Doug Chapin, the director of the University of Minnesota's election administration program, hopes they can fix that.
"Because elections are so localized in this country, people tend to become experts on how things work in their own jurisdiction," he said. "This program allows them to put it in a larger national and thematic context. It's the first step in creating what I like to think of as a profession of election administration."
Because the program is online, it allows elections officials from across the country to connect with one another. The diversity of their experiences is important, said Gelms, because states handle various issues differently. And even in the same state, populous areas face a whole unique set of problems from spread-out rural areas.
An introductory class covers broad themes, including what Chapin characterizes as the three central tensions in election administration: central control vs. local control; access to the ballot vs. integrity; and fairness vs. finality. Other courses explore law, design, communication and even transportation -- and how they affect election administration.
Property values rose more than 10 percent across Dallas County this year, the highest jump in at least two decades.
The increases mean steeper tax bills for many property owners and unexpected jackpots for local governments, prompting debate among officials over whether to keep the cash or cut tax rates.
"Our middle class didn't get raises like this, and they can't afford these increases,"
Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said Tuesday. "We can always find a way to spend a windfall, but it's best in this economy for us to give people back their money."
Jenkins cited a Dallas Morning News analysis that found the rising preliminary property values increased disproportionately for middle-class homeowners. It's unclear whether that disparity remained after property owners' protests ended and many won reductions. The official numbers were released this week, though some properties remain in dispute.
The potential tax windfall far exceeds the budget predictions of many government entities, such as the county, the city of Dallas and Parkland Memorial Hospital. Dallas Independent School District, meanwhile, anticipated a greater increase.
"It's the largest increase we've seen since I have records," said Ryan Brown, the county budget director. The records date to 1989. The closest the county has come was in 2008, when values rose 9.8 percent before plunging during the recession.
This year, the average home valued at $149,000 would cost nearly $400 in county taxes alone -- an increase of $37 from last year.
Government bodies across the county will set tax rates in September.
Lawsuits over commercial property appraisals are on the rise in Texas, and taxpayers are footing an ever-bigger legal bill.
In Austin, 413 lawsuits are pending against the Travis Central Appraisal District. Property owners are contesting $11.3 billion in values.
Of the nearly 4,000 cases tried in the past 12 years, commercial property owners won an overall 7.5 percent reduction in tax exposure.
In San Antonio, companies sued Bexar County over $19.4 billion in appraisal disputes last year, more than double the amount litigated in 2012. Thus far, lawsuits shaved the valuations to $17.5 billion.
The rising tide of lawsuits comes as large commercial entities contest double-digit increases in property values that produce correspondingly bigger tax bills.
On the sidelines of the dismissed criminal case against former Gov. Rick Perry stands the Travis County district attorney’s Public Integrity Unit, which has lost staff and struggled to remain afloat after a political firestorm over the past three years stripped it of much of its budget. The unit, its officials say, has had to start turning away cases and no longer has the resources to provide counties with the investigative support it once did.
“We are a shell of our former selves,” said Gregg Cox, the Travis County prosecutor who oversees the Public Integrity Unit. “We might be able to prosecute certain cases more effectively. We probably have more experience and a better track record of handling those cases, but we are still having to tell those agencies, ‘Sorry, take it to county X, we just can’t do it.’”
The Public Integrity Unit’s troubles began during the 2013 legislative session, when Perry threatened to veto its funding in an attempt to force District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg from office after her arrest and conviction for driving while intoxicated. When Lehmberg declined, Perry cut all of the division’s $7.5 million from the state budget, trimming the staff from 35 to 17 employees.
Perry was indicted a year later, and the Public Integrity Unit remained front and center in a clash between lawmakers, some of whom saw its duties as essential and others who believed its prosecutions were partisan and politically motivated.
The division, created by the district attorney’s office in 1978, mostly handles fraud against state programs, insurance fraud and tax fraud. But it has grabbed the most headlines for its investigations into the ethics abuses of officials at the highest levels of government, less than 5 percent of its caseload.
The state budget didn’t restore any of the vetoed money the unit lost for 2016-17, and the 2016 county budget allocated $363,000 of about $1.4 million requested to keep the unit intact, forcing officials to cut an additional seven jobs for the fiscal year beginning Oct 1.
Cox said that to deal with the losses, officials have had to dissolve and reorganize the unit, which now falls under the Travis County Special Prosecution Division. The latest cuts include two investigators and a forensic accountant. The Public Integrity Unit has to share the three remaining investigators and support staff with the white-collar crime unit, which handles financial crimes with losses of at least $50,000.
Cox, director of the special prosecution division, said the Public Integrity Unit has been further hurt by at least four prosecutors and investigators who have left voluntarily amid the funding battles. With no receptionists or support staff, the office on the second floor of the Granger Building in downtown Austin now seems abandoned.
The unit could once provide forensic financial analysis and contract expertise to counties that didn’t have such resources, its officials said, and it could consolidate cases from multiple jurisdictions, making it easier to prosecute agents and corporations stealing from the state. It can now only take those cases that have been almost fully investigated by local law enforcement agencies, the FBI or the Texas Rangers.
Evidence of its financial struggles surfaced last month when Travis County prosecutors said they were no longer leading a criminal investigation into the Austin tech firm 21CT and its controversial technology deal with the state that spurred sweeping contracting reforms. “It gives me heartburn to think we could not prosecute that case,” said Susan Oswalt, chief of the Public Integrity Unit.
In April, it rejected a request from the Department of Public Safety to reopen an investigation into controversial border security contracts, telling DPS Director Steve McCraw the unit doesn’t have “sufficient staff or resources to accommodate your request at this time.”
Criminal-justice related political races are odd birds because the issues do not fall along obviously partisan lines, even if candidates are elected on those terms. Thus, Grits doesn't follow these elections through a partisan lens, particularly, but rather based on which candidate is best for promoting criminal-justice reform. Every cycle there seem to be a few local races which have statewide implications, so it's worth mentioning a few of them ahead of the March 1 primary.
The Sheriff's race in Fort Bend County features a reformer incumbent, Troy Nells, vs. a revanchist candidate backed by disgruntled ex-deputies complaining they lack free speech on the job. (Think: How much free speech do you get to exercise at your job when you disagree with your boss?) One of the challenger's big issues is to repeal an officer-safety based policy that reduced deputies' opportunities to initiate high-speed chases. Fort Bend County is growing fast and in many ways this is less a Tea Party vs. the Establishment race than a generational dispute between a young suburban professional class and old-school sheriff's deputies who liked the autonomy they enjoyed back when Fort Bend was more of a rural outpost. A Nells victory would signal that county voters have matured enough to accept the responsibilities of what increasingly has become a large suburban county.
The success of federal deportation policy in Texas and nationwide depends for the most part on a heads up from county sheriffs. They run the jails where people are taken when arrested and where the culling of criminal immigrants begins.
Being at the bottom of the enforcement pyramid places tremendous pressure on them — political, legal and otherwise — sheriffs say, and with federal policy increasingly targeting serious, repeat criminal offenders, their role in the process has grown.
“When some of these sheriffs talk about bringing in an undocumented, it may be one a month,” said Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez. “With us, it’s several a day.”
The legal tool federal authorities use to take custody of immigrants they want is the detainer. Around in some form or fashion since the 1950s, detainers are notices sent to jails asking them to hold on to an immigrant once local authorities are done with them so federal agents can come by and get them.
In its latest incarnation, the detainer is reserved for the most serious convicted immigrant criminals. This new, narrower restriction, imposed in November 2014, has caused the number of detainers to drop. As of October 2015, the latest monthly figure available, 7,117 detainers were issued. That's down from an all-time monthly high of 27,755 in August 2011, according to voluminous Freedom of Information Act requests made by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Texas is central to the federal agency’s deportation efforts. Nationwide, only eight jails received more than 1,000 detainer requests in the last year, according to clearinghouse data. Four were in Texas — Harris, Travis, Dallas and Hidalgo counties.
About two dozen states including Texas, use a local coroner system under which someone is elected or appointed to verify that a deceased individual is, well, dead.
In Texas, the coroner's role falls to the 817 elected justices of the peace, The JPs marry couples, handle small claims disputes and come when called, usually by law enforcement, to verify death when someone doesn't die in a hospital or when a doctor cannot — or will not — sign a death certificate.
"I'm the coroner, and everything," explained David Beebe, one of the two justices of the peace in Presidio County who were called on Saturday to come to Cibolo Creek Ranch, 28 miles southwest of Marfa, after Scalia, a guest of the resort's owner, was discovered dead in his room.
But both Beebe and Presidio County's other JP, Juanita Bishop, were too far away, so the Presidio County Sheriff's Office contacted the county's chief executive, or county judge, Guevara.
What happened next speaks to the remoteness of Texas geography and the nation's haphazard system of managing death.
Thea Whalen, an attorney who trains JPs at the Texas Justice Training Center in Austin, said the state's size and population distribution is something many fail to grasp.
Facts of the case
The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (Brady Bill) required "local chief law enforcement officers" (CLEOs) to perform background-checks on prospective handgun purchasers, until such time as the Attorney General establishes a federal system for this purpose. County sheriffs Jay Printz and Richard Mack, separately challenged the constitutionality of this interim provision of the Brady Bill on behalf of CLEOs in Montana and Arizona respectively. In both cases District Courts found the background-checks unconstitutional, but ruled that since this requirement was severable from the rest of the Brady Bill a voluntary background-check system could remain. On appeal from the Ninth Circuit's ruling that the interim background-check provisions were constitutional, the Supreme Court granted certiorari and consolidated the two cases deciding this one along with Mack v. United States.
Question
Using the Necessary and Proper Clause of Article I as justification, can Congress temporarily require state CLEOs to regulate handgun purchases by performing those duties called for by the Brady Bill's handgun applicant background-checks?
Conclusion
No. The Court constructed its opinion on the old principle that state legislatures are not subject to federal direction. The Court explained that while Congress may require the federal government to regulate commerce directly, in this case by performing background-checks on applicants for handgun ownership, the Necessary and Proper Clause does not empower it to compel state CLEOs to fulfill its federal tasks for it - even temporarily. The Court added that the Brady Bill could not require CLEOs to perform the related tasks of disposing of handgun-application forms or notifying certain applicants of the reasons for their refusal in writing, since the Brady Bill reserved such duties only for those CLEO's who voluntarily accepted them.