Slashing funds for community-based mental health care will hurt taxpayers and degrade the quality of life for thousands of mentally ill Texans and their families, Harris County Jail officials told Texas budget writers today in written testimony for the Senate Finance Committee.
Houston
Posted in
Public Education
Athletics: Where Budget Balancers Fear to Tread?
With Texas public schools facing cuts of as much as $10 billion in state funding, predictions of the consequences have been dire: teacher layoffs, bigger class sizes, fewer instructional days. One topic conspicuously absent from the conversation: athletics.
Posted in
Economy
Artistic Development
Creative industries — from advertising to dance companies to book publishing — generate $4.5 billion per year in economic activity for Texas, according to a new report released by the Texas Cultural Trust in association with the Texas Commission on the Arts. The report features projects in communities like Amarillo, El Paso, Rockport, Texarkana and the tiny, north central Texas town of Clifton, population 3,795. “It’s more than fluff,” says Amy Barbee, the Trust’s executive director. “We want to tell the story that the arts truly are economic development.”
Posted in
Criminal Justice
Testing the Evidence
In police departments across Texas, tens of thousands of rape kits have been sitting on the shelves of property storage rooms for years — thanks to strained budgets, overworked crime labs and a law enforcement philosophy that such kits are primarily useful as evidence if a stranger committed the assault. Victims’ rights advocates and some lawmakers say they’ll work to pass legislation this year to take that evidence out of storage and create a DNA database that would help track rapists and perhaps even identify those who have been wrongly convicted. “I think we owe it to every person who has been raped,” says state Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth.
Posted in
Economy
In for the Long Haul?
A proposal by the Obama administration that would grant Mexican truckers greater access to Texas roadways would be a boon for business in the state, supporters say, since three of the top five ports for trade between the U.S. and Mexico are Laredo, El Paso and Houston. But unions contend the plan would cost American jobs. “This cheap-labor program comes at too high a risk and at too large a cost to middle-class American workers who work long, hard hours to help maintain a safe commerce system in our nation,” says a spokesman for the Texas AFL-CIO.
Posted in
Politics
Dick Trabulsi: The TT Interview
The president of Texans for Lawsuit Reform on why the group spends spend so much money on state elections, what it still wants from the Legislature, what he thinks the trial lawyers on the other side are after and what’s wrong with the Democrats these days.
Posted in
Politics
The Way Forward
Six weeks after the drubbing their party took at the hands of voters, surviving Texas House Democrats find themselves at a crossroads — on style and substance, politics and policy. With massive budget cuts looming, will they effectively sit out the session and force Republicans in the majority to have all the blood on their hands? Will they participate just enough to soften the blow in the areas they care about the most: education and health care? Can they hold together a solid 51-vote bloc on key legislation? Where exactly should they go from here? And who will lead them?
Posted in
Health care
A “B” for Effort
One in 10 Asian-Americans has hepatitis B, a rate that is 20 times higher than the rest of the population — and is surely pronounced in Houston, which has the fourth-largest Asian population of any U.S. metropolitan area. But state public health officials struggle to get funding for vaccinations and outreach.
Posted in
Demographics
TribWeek: In Case You Missed It
M. Smith and Butrymowicz of the Hechinger Institute on charter schools and public schools making nice in the Valley, Ramsey’s interview with House Speaker candidate Ken Paxton and column on the coming budget carnage, Hu on the Legislature’s disappearing white Democratic women, Grissom on the sheriff who busted Willie Nelson, Hamilton talks higher ed accountability with the chair of the Governor’s Business Council, Aguilar on the arrest of a cartel kingpin, Ramshaw on the explosive growth in the number of adult Texans with diabetes, Philpott on state incentive funding under fire and Galbraith on the greening of Houston: The best of our best from November 29 to December 3, 2010.
Posted in
Criminal Justice
A Man of Conviction?
Harris County District Judge Kevin Fine is set to hold a hearing Monday in the case of John Edward Green, who is charged with fatally shooting a Houston woman during a robbery in June 2008. Green’s attorneys and capital punishment opponents want Fine to find that prosecutors can’t seek the death penalty because the way we administer it in Texas is unconstitutional. “The current system is profoundly and fundamentally flawed from top to bottom,” says Andrea Keilen, executive director of the Texas Defender Service. Prosecutors counter that the ruling should be made by higher courts, not a trial judge.
