Your afternoon reading.
July 2010
Posted in
Energy
TribBlog: PACE Slows
A national program to encourage energy-efficiency and solar in homes is generating interest in Texas cities — even as it has encountered setbacks in Washington.
Posted inState Government
The Brief: July 19, 2010
It seems that business and politics may not mix well for gubernatorial candidate Bill White.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
Hide in Plain Sight
A few elected officials and municipalities in Texas are asking a federal judge to throw out the state’s open meetings law, which they claim is an infringement on free speech. Ben Philpott of KUT News and the Tribune reports.
Posted in
Energy
The Off Switch
Rather than building new power plants just to meet peak electricity demand on hot summer afternoons, why not just persuade people and companies to use less electricity? “Demand response” is quickly taking hold in Texas.
Posted in
State Government
Follow the Money
The mid-year campaign finance reports reveal which races have the attention of the political players. They’re a down-in-the-weeds look at where the fights will be this fall.
Posted in
Demographics
The University of Someplace Else
Fewer students from Mexico have enrolled at border schools like the University of Texas at El Paso, UT-Pan American, and Texas A&M International since 2006, while their ranks have grown at schools farther from the Rio Grande, like UT-Austin and Texas A&M. Can the drop be attributed to the drug war, or is the growing violence simply compounding the decades-old problem of border “brain drain”?
Posted inState Government
They Want Their GOTV
The push to get out the vote is underway. Democrats in Austin scattered about town Saturday morning to reach out to registered voters and sign up new ones for the November election — a strategy they banked on in 2008. But as Erika Aguilar of KUT News reports, they’ve got competition.
Posted inState Government
A Size Thing
The last Democrat who outraised Rick Perry in a governor’s race Tony Sanchez was writing his own checks. But without lifting his own pen, Democrat Bill White raised more money than the Republican incumbent and had $3.1 million more in the bank than the governor at mid-year, according to their campaign finance reports.
Posted in
Demographics
TribWeek: In Case You Missed It
Grissom’s three-part series (here, here and here) on prosperity and peril along the U.S.-Mexico border, Hu on the Division of Workers’ Compensation audit report, Stiles puts more than 3,000 personal disclosure forms filed by politicians, candidates and state officials online, M. Smith on attempts to curb the practice of barratry (better known as ambulance chasing), Ramsey interviews the chair of the Texas Libertarian Party, Hamilton on attempts to improve the success rates of community colleges, Galbraith on whether electric deregulation has helped or hurt Texans, Aguilar talks to a chronicler of the bloody narco-wars and Ramshaw on doctors who most often prescribe antipsychotic drugs to the state’s neediest patients: The best of our best from July 12 to 16, 2010.