Operation Homefront “restructured”

By Enrique Lopetegui
elopetegui@sacurrent.com

(Update on 2/1/10: Jim Knotts clarifies status of communication department, newly created position, and reveals his salary)

On January 20, the national office of the San Antonio-based military charity Operation Homefront eliminated nine positions, four of them locally, even as donations have greatly increased since at least 2006.

“We actually didn’t do any layoffs, we did a restructuring,” Amy Palmer, Operation Homefront’s chief operational officer, told the QueQue. “We’re trying to reduce our ongoing operational expenses, and we restructured the national staff.”

Operation Homefront, founded in 2003, provides “emergency and morale assistance for our troops, the families they leave behind and for wounded warriors when they return home,” according to its website. It has more than two dozen independent chapters around the country which operate under the national charter. One third of the national staff of 27 is based in San Antonio, one-third in Washington, D.C., and the rest are virtual employees scattered around the country. Ashley Matta, administrative assistant for the Texas chapter, also based in San Antonio, confirmed that the job losses didn’t affect the chapter’s staff.

Two of the eliminated positions were already vacant, so the decision affected seven positions in human resources, marketing, administration, and Operation Homefront Village, the OH apartment complex that since March 2008 serves as short-term transitional housing for wounded vets. But there is also a new San Antonio office assistant position created that is currently open.

"We are in the process of developing the job description and advertisement," said Jim Knotts, who took over as CEO in November 2009.  "We eliminated a marketing specialist and an administrative assistant positions.  We are taking the most important responsibilities of those two positions to create the new office assistant position. So, in effect, the position was created when we announced the restructuring on January 20. With one new position created, we have 28 positions on the national staff after the restructuring: Twelve are in San Antonio, six are in D.C., and the other 10 are virtual across the country."

Any more "restructuring" in the near future?

“We hope not,” said Palmer. “We have to monitor our fundraising progress and continue to reassess our financial position. But we do not intend at this time to make additional restructuring decisions. A lot of organizations have gone through changes in the last couple of years, with the economy the way it is. We’re no exception, but we’re looking at ways to get more money to the families that we’re trying to serve. Our services weren’t cut. This is not unique to military charities, and it’s not unique to operation homefront.”

Knotts told the QueQue that those whose positions were eliminated should be able to receive unemployment benefits.

“We pay into the state for unemployment insurance, like every employer,” said Knotts from Ecuador, where he has just adopted a son. “It was explained to us that, yes, they’ll be able to apply for unemployment insurance.”

Palmer said that for the last year several employees have been reassigned to different areas within the charity. But, for the outsider, the loss of positions came as a surprise: According to the organization’s last three 990s, OH received donations of $3.5 million in 2006, $12.7 million in 2007, and $16.4 million in 2008. And as late as December 1, 2009, Operation Homefront earned its third consecutive four-star rating from Charity Navigator “for its ability to efficiently manage and grow its finances.”

“Only 13 percent of the charities we rate have received at least three consecutive four-star evaluations,” wrote Charity Navigator’s president and CEO Ken Berge, in the December letter addressed to Palmer, “indicating that Operation Homefront executes its mission in a fiscally responsible way, and outperforms most other charities in America.”

But some comments written on Operation Homefront’s Charity Navigator’s page accuse OH of “dismantling” its communications department, and of having “internal issues,” illustrated by the fact that here have been three presidents in the last few years.

"Operation Homefront has had three CEO's in three years," Knotts wrote the QueQue. "However, the organization has also grown each of those years in terms of needs met for our military families and total revenue, which is a testament to the depth and professionalism of the staff."

On the issue of the communications department, Knotts sent us two emails.

"Earlier in 2009, we rearranged some reporting structures within the national office, changes that had nothing to do with this restructuring,” said Knotts in the first email. “As a result, our online communications team moved from communications to operations. So before the restructuring we had two positions in communications. Both are currently vacant, and we plan to fill both."

An hour after this posting, Knotts sent another email for clarification:

"We did have a VP of Online Communications take a job outside of Operation Homefront in November," Knotts wrote. "At that time, we chose not to refill that position. That was the same time we changed the reporting structure so that the online communications group began reporting to Operations instead of Communications. Since it was unrelated to the restructuring, I had overlooked the change, but your specific questions about eliminated positions in Communications reminded me."

Although the personell info in the Operation Homefront Charity Navigator page is outdated, Knotts said he makes $175,000 a year, "which will be public record when we file our 2009 taxes." His predecessor, Mark Smith, made $125,648 a year.

No matter what changes Operation Homefront goes through, Palmer says the four-star status is not in jeopardy.

“We didn’t make any changes to our program,” Palmer said. “The support and emergency assistance we provide to the families hasn’t changed and will continue exactly as it is.

“Our donations have been pretty strong for 2010. Of course, it all comes down to cash. Our employees get paid with cash, and of course we have a lot of non-cash services donated, but it all comes down to cash. So we have a very aggressive fundraising plan and we expect to do very well this year financially. The pace will slow, because we’re a young organization growing very quickly. The leaps won’t be as aggressive, but we do expect to continue having a trend of positive earnings.”

DOD cutting ‘non-combat’ greenhouse gases, leans on Valero for the dirty stuff

Greg Harman
gharman@sacurrent.com

The sophisticated hacking of a major UK climate research center two weeks before the would-a-been-historic international gathering on climate change in Copenhagen last December “bore all the hallmarks of a co-ordinated intelligence operation,” according to Sir David King, former science advisor to past British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

King told the Guardian, “it was an extraordinarily sophisticated operation. There are several bodies of people who could do this sort of work. These are national intelligence agencies and it seems to me that it was the work of such a group of people.”

Such a group, he added, could be marshaled only by a foreign government or, perhaps, the well-funded “anti-climate change lobbyists” in the U.S.

The hacking preceded the United Nation’s global conference on climate change, where representatives from around the world were hoping to cobble together a successor to the Kyoto Protocol with a binding reductions agreement intent on stabilizing the planet’s climate.

The hacking — and subsequent mass misinterpretation and mischaracterization by U.S. media outlets like FOX — played a central role in squirreling the deal.

Obama, widely criticized for turning Copenhagen into a photo-op to announce agreements that hadn’t actually been reached, came back to Washington with an edict for the federal government: reduce global-warming gases by 28 percent by 2020. In response, the U.S. Department of Defense committed to doing one better, or four better, with plans to cut by 34 percent by 2020.

However, these are “non-combat” emissions we’re cutting. The ill-defined War on Terror continues to rack up monster carbon costs.

One of the top beneficiaries of the DOD’s fossil fuel purchases is San Antonio-based Valero — ranked fourth among the agency’s fuel contractors with Fiscal ’08 earnings of $1.04 billion. The hometown crew  just edged out The Bahrain Petroleum Company ($1.02 bil) and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company ($918 mil) for the honor, according to the Defense Energy Support Center.

Seems a plausible alternative explanation for the company’s pump-based anti-climate legislation ad campaign … but is it enough to motivate top officers to fund a band of federally trained cyber-warfare renegades to remotely storm the East Anglia Climate Research Unit? Utter conspiratorial nonsense, I’m sure.

However, the profits do make American Apparel’s $14-million arrangement for battle uniforms, coats, and trousers for the U.S. Air Force (being stitched together in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas) sound like small (American-grown, organic) potatoes.

Still, there are plenty of other San Anto outfits earning less than a bil per-annum. Recently announced new or renewed contracts fueling the all-points conflict with ground stations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, include:

* LaBatt Food Service and Sterling Foods are keeping those Meals Ready To Eat as real as possible with continued $9-mil and $38-mil contracts, respectfully, for “full line food distribution” and bakery goods.

* Valero Marketing & Supply Co. earned another bump of federal largesse with $118 million for “aviation turbine fuel” out of the Corpus refinery.

* Connecticut-based Pratt & Whitney Military Engines bagged another $6-million contract for continued “maintenance, logistics and engineering supplies and services” performed in San Antonio for F-16A and F-16B engine parts.

* Decypher Technologies, Ltd, P3S Corp., and SpecPro Technical Services, each took a $93-mil contract for hyper-technical gobbledygook, ie. “administrative and functional support, medical and biomedical research assistance, clinical and clinical hyperbaric medicine services, environmental bio-terrorism support, technology evaluation and research studies support services to Brooks City-Base and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base units.”

* Three percent of an $8-mil Lockheed Martin project expected to showcase the possibilities that dedicated space for conducting “cyber security experiments” is also coming to San Antonio.


Remember, war is today’s growth industry. It’s the one front Obama’s new fiscal conservatism won’t touch — unless its something-less-than-surgical drone strikes we're talking about.

Court watch: Supremes (lite) to decide if children can prostitute

Greg Harman
gharman@sacurrent.com

Sixteen-year-old Angela was said to be a “case study” in the difficulty domestic human trafficking victims represent to law enforcement.

Though first forced into prostitution at age 11, it would be several years before local police would discover her. But instead of being rescued as a child victim, she was placed into the juvenile system in 2008 on a theft charge after a man accused her of stealing his wallet and pants. Only after first prosecuting her as a criminal — due in part, they said, to her uncooperativeness — did law enforcement recognize her as a child victim. Some months later her full story came out.

County officials said last summer that ‘Angela,’ diagnosed with hepatitis and HIV, was finally in a “safe place” getting counseling and medical attention.

Some would like to see child victims jump straight to the help line, and a decision pending with the Texas Supreme Court could move things strongly in that direction, according to Dottie Laster, a New Braunfels-based advocate fighting against human trafficking and the sexual exploitation of children.

The case involves a girl identified as B.W., taken from her mother at age 11 and placed with Child Protective Services. After running away from CPS, she was picked up by Houston Police Department officers two years later after they observed her trying to sell herself on the street. She was booked on charges of prostitution. Later, after her age of 13 became known, she was placed in the juvenile system and charged with delinquency for committing prostitution instead of returning her to CPS.

Attorney Ann Johnson (left) argued that the child should have never been put on the “prosecutorial train.” That state law holds that children under the age of 14 cannot consent to sex. Period.

“Despite their discovery that one of the passengers on that train was a 13-year-old, mentally deficient child with undeniable evidence of sexual exploitation no one to this day has pulled the emergency stop cord to say, ‘Wait. We’re supposed to be handling this issue differently’” Johnson said.

When Harris County Assistant DA Dan McCrory (right, below) stumbled in his defense of the prosecution of B.W., Justice Harriet O’Neill asked, “Why in the world would a prosecutor want to put her through the criminal, sort-of quasi-criminal system?”

“We already know what happened to this juvenile when she was in the custody of CPS,  she was on the street being a prostitute,” McCrory responded.

You can tune watch the point-counterpoint yourself.

Interestingly, Johnson further alleged the police didn’t make any attempt to track down and interview the 32-year-old man B.W. identified as her “boyfriend” — a violation of B.W.'s due process under the U.S. Constitution, she said.

Laster disputes Harris County’s assertion that it is necessary to place children like B.W. in the juvenile justice system was for their own protection.

“You can protect a child when they’re in danger without charging them with a crime,” Laster said, adding that the outcome in the case could transform how state law enforcement responds to child victims.

“I believe if they rule to protect the victim that it could greatly change the way juveniles are protected in Texas; if they rule to punish the victim, it could set us back years and cause harm to many more juveniles, or minors, children. However you want to say it, I still look at them as children.”

And if Texas judges find their way to the federal mindset, they will discover that “any child in commercial sex is considered a victim of trafficking,” Laster said.

Of course, this is Texas. Worse. This is Houston, Texas, we're talking about.

The city was pegged last year as the national hub in child trafficking. Judging from the position of the DA's office, reform there — despite the training that Laster, now working with MillionKids.org and running her own consulting group, has given many of its law-enforcement officers — may come most grudgingly.

Prepondering the evidence: Judge rules in CPS-NRG nuke nonsense

Greg Harman
gharman@sacurrent.com

The conference call held this morning could by no stretch of the most twisted Manga creator’s imagination be considered alt-weekly friendly. Some of us were deep beneath a pile of second-hand blankets and renegade felines — not hip for hangovers, but weird enough to imagine we were in chrysalis —when NRG Energy’s 8:00 am (Eastern) phoner came and went.

Fortunately, the various newes and muses were harder to contain than a barrel of nuclear monkeys.

As I suspected, NRG CEO David Crane’s “forward-looking” statements made by dawn’s early light were quickly eclipsed by San Anto’s master of the 408th District Court, the merrily rhyming Judge Larry Noll.

In Solomoniacal wisdom, Noll ruled that SA-owned CPS Energy can split with partner NRG without losing those millions of freshly scrubbed Benjamins. Or not all of them, anyway. (If you need the backstory on CPS and all its hurt feelings, eject now!)

To date, CPS has spent about $350 million on the planned expansion of the South Texas Project nuclear project. Noll said that while the contract between the two does not define what should happen if the parties split, CPS should be compensated if it drops out. “The Supplemental Contract does not equate cessation of participation in the project as an event of default,” he wrote.

However, channeling his inner Johnnie Cochran, Noll added a “Word of Caution” to the City — that CPS would have to keep paying into the project if it wanted to remain a 50-percent partner. “If you want to be in the Play, you have to pay or you can’t stay,” he wrote. “You will eventually lose your equity share.”

So negotiations must resume as to what CPS should receive for backing out at the last minute (in this case, the “last minute” being defined as the minute after City Hall and area ratepayers first learned that CPS promises all last summer related to the ultimate cost of the project may have been “rounded down” by $4 billion.)

Still, Crane’s call-in was useful. We received multiple emails from those whose yogic powers and/or sedatives were more powerful and/or less obliterating than our own.

One interesting slide being tentatively titled by some, “Fuck All This”...



So, like (paraphrasing here):

Scenario A: Fuck with us and we’re out;

Scenario B: See Scenario A.

[Of course, President Obama, eager to reboot his relationship with a non-majority Senate by reining in spending wants to loose gazillions of dollars in new nuke loan guarantees. As a fiscal conservative move, that's for doctoral-candidate news analysts to make sense of, knowing  the GAO estimates that about half of those loans will never be paid back.]

Meanwhile, back at the headquarters of Karen Seal, attorney for the tossed together Ratepayers Sumthin-Sumthin for Destroying All Vestiges of Corruption That Remain Coalition, the mood was moderate to light.

“I think we all felt that a lot of information wasn’t getting out,” said Seal. “Every time NRG would try to bring something in, CPS would object and the judge would dismiss it.”

By being joined to the suit, Seal sits on a wealth of information about CPS’s practices pre-Reformation. “It shows that CPS was very, very deceitful to the people of San Antonio. They need, from the bottom up, to get rid of these people. To me, they’re criminal and under normal circumstances they would have been gone.”

Wading out of her secret dirty document stream, Seal advocates the creation of an oversight committee that would be able to sit in on all CPS and CPS Board of Trustee meetings and report back to the City Council. “This is nonsense,” Seal said.

We’re not calling CPS’s huffy interim GM Jelynne LeBlanc Burley, because, you know, she denied us an interview last round anyway, and, you know, it is 5 pm on a Friday. And, besides, nonsense is something we at the Current are intimately acquainted with.

What do you think the alt-weekly writing life is all about? Hounding power suits? I don’t think so.

TCEQ, ‘lapdog of industry,’ says ‘no need for alarm’ over toxics

Greg Harman
gharman@sacurrent.com

I’m not sure why the protesting rockers up in Cowtown honed in on trees like they did. I mean, I like to hug a tree as much as the next brainwashed lover of all things verdant and life-sustaining (you rascals!), but in the miasma of potential problems that natural gas drilling in North Texas could create — drinking water spoilage, toxic air emissions, earthquakes, and the possibility of increased cancer rates — I would have chosen a different tune to spoof than Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.”

Officials with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality — currently defending themselves against charges of operating under regulatory cover as a “lapdog for polluters” — “rushed” to Fort Worth this summer to investigate growing public fears of toxic air emissions from an explosion of gas-well drilling that began several years back.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram writer Mike Lee reported that one in five sites explored by the TCEQ were found to be emitting high levels of cancer-causing benzene.



No fines are expected to be issued related to the pollution. In fact, TCEQ employees went into damage control on behalf of industry. The head of toxicology, told the Los Angeles Times, “there is no cause for [watch the qualifier!] widespread alarm.”

It was suggested that bad publicity was punishment enough.



So, as San Antonio considers the natural-gas-plus-alternatives energy path forward, and I catch up on developments up north, I’m not getting where “Tree Fellin’” comes into the picture. Oh, make no mistake, I celebrate rabble-rousers in all their denimy shapes, but maybe “Don’t Come Around Here No More” would of sent a stronger message.

Or, in the interests of keeping things local to the Fort, throw some Toadies up in that motherfracker (h/t mr. maas) with a reworked “I Come From the Water.”


It could go something like …

I come for the water / 
I woke with the earthquake zones
 / I left my TV home / I got my friends to save / 
I sucked that benzene in
 / And rolled upon the sand / 
And burned beneath the flares / 
Is this human?
 / I come for the water



You know, if’n you should rock some new protest vids in the future.

Go Charlie go

By Enrique Lopetegui
elopetegui@sacurrent.com

Congressman Charlie González wasn’t there, but 38 local MoveOn supporters were. On January 26, the activists gathered outside of the Federal Building downtown (where González keeps an office), to thank the Congressman for supporting the public health-care option and to pressure him into not giving an inch, especially after the Democrats’ embarrassing loss in Massachusetts.

The House could vote for the Senate Bill as it stands, with no changes, but (according to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) there are not enough votes yet. The Senate is going to have to change its bill to make it more palatable to the House, and then the House would vote on it and, proponents hope, the bill would pass.

“The Senate bill does not include a public option, and we would like to see one,” said MoveOn’s Angie Drake. “Republicans say that [Democrats] lost the Massachusetts election because we’re going ‘too fast too soon,’ but it is precisely the opposite: People who supported Obama with $5 and $10 donations are the ones who didn’t go to the polls because they’re so frustrated we’re not doing it fast enough. Democrats need to start passing a progressive agenda, so that we’re willing to show up at the polls again in November.”

Activist Vivian Weinstein urged González to ratify his early support for the public option, and praised him for his performance at a town hall meeting at the Edgewood Independent School District’s Theatre of Performing Arts in August 2009.

“Nobody shouted him down,” Weinstein said about that town hall meeting, alluding to the dozens of conservative opponents to health-care reform that were skillfully handled by González. “Charlie has stood up all the way through this fight, and we need him to go and talk to other Congressmen who are unsure or backing away.”

But Jennifer Noyes stole the show.
 


According to the statement she read, she was diagnosed with type-one diabetes at age 10; developed severe allergies, asthma, and anemia at 11; at 16, thyroid disease (undiagnosed until age 25) and Crohn’s Disease; and osteoporosis at 22. She managed to earn a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Trinity, but says she can’t find work because no one will insure her.

“In 2007, for example, I grossed about $25,000,” she read, but she “spent $11,670 out of my own pocket [her emphasis] on medical care, and that was with a quote ‘good’ major medical plan.” She says she didn’t become homeless because she lived with her grandmother.

“I was recently offered a job that paid $16 an hour, but I had to turn it down because the health insurance was so bad that even had I spent every dime of that $16 on health care, I still would have been on the hole at the end of the year,” she read. “So now I am looking for minimum-wage jobs that offer good health insurance, just to keep myself alive. I’m sick and tired of hearing that only lazy, uneducated people get screwed by the current system. I have a master’s degree, and have worked hard my whole life. I don’t want a free handout, but I do want some fairness and some justice. I’m OK with being screwed by fate and having these illnesses. I’m not OK with the fact that I cannot go back to school because student insurance plans are so bad. I’m not OK with the fact that in a country where people say you can do anything, I cannot own my own business because there is not a single health insurance company in this country that will insure me …”

Stephanie S. Smith, special projects manager for González, came down to greet the crowd and invited small groups of them upstairs to sign the guest book and do a mini-tour of the Congressman’s office. There is a pair of boxing gloves on his desk, perhaps symbolizing his commitment to fight for real health-care reform.



“San Antonians know that health-care reform is too important to throw away,” the Congressman said in the statement sent to the QueBlog after the demonstration. “I have heard their concerns loud and clear, which is why I have worked tirelessly with many of my colleagues on possible solutions while others have simply opposed those efforts without offering any viable alternatives. San Antonians said [yesterday] that enough is enough, and I stand with them.  American families deserve better."

Questions remain after Bexar County Jail detox death

Greg Harman
gharman@sacurrent.com

On January 4, Ricardo Guzman got a haircut. The 43-year-old San Antonio resident wanted to look good when he turned himself in at court the next day for outstanding drug-possession charges. Guzman had no way of knowing that trusting himself to Bexar County could play a part in his death three days later.

“He turned himself in on Tuesday and Thursday is when the police came to my mother-in-law’s house and announced he had passed away,” said Kathy Ruiz, Guzman’s sister-in-law. “They wouldn’t give her any information as far as to what happened. The only thing they said was they found him on the floor and that he had passed. They wouldn’t let her go identify him. They said he had already been identified.”

Guzman died at 5:46 pm on January 7 while being held in a detox cell at Bexar County Jail two days after his conviction on possession of a controlled substance. According to jail officials, a unit officer was distributing dinner trays when he found Guzman, who was detoxing off heroin, unresponsive on the cell floor.

Sheriff’s deputies would still not let Guzman’s mother, Lupe Guzman, see her son when she signed for his body at the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office the next day. “She thought maybe there was a possibility it was a mistake. They said no, he’d already been identified by fingerprints and photos.”

Guzman was buried on Monday, January 11, with the family still not understanding why or how he died. “He went in fine one day and then he was dead the next. Obviously something happened and we just need answers, you know? What happened to him?” asked Ruiz.

David Fathi, U.S. program director for Human Rights Watch, said jails across the country had been found liable in similar deaths. “It’s a critical 24 or 48 hours immediately after a person is taken into a jail, and jails have to be aware of that and prepared to deal with this kind of urgent medical need. If the jail has reason to know if a certain arrestee is at risk of drug detox then they have an even stronger duty to take stronger action.”

A spokesperson for the Bexar County Jail said that while a cause of death has not been established, Guzman's death is not being investigated as a possible suicide. A toxicology report is pending at the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Last year, suicide deaths at Bexar County were triple the national average.

Detainees at the jail receive comprehensive medical screenings to help determine drug dependence, mental impairment, and suicide risk. However, it is the actions that follow those screenings that matter, said Fathi.

“You can have the world’s best screening program on paper, but it’s only as good as the people who implement it. Obviously, if it’s not being reliably done, or the screening’s being done but then nothing happens as a consequence, then you’re going to get bad outcomes.”

BOOK REVIEW: Heart of Dryness shows culture of water waste behind persecution of First Peoples

Greg Harman
gharman@sacurrent.com

In the history of the conservation movement, notions of wilderness have rarely included people. Homo sapiens were universally tagged as the hapless despoilers of the land. Nearly 30 years ago, writer Gary Paul Nabhan exposed a notable exception to this ingrained prejudice by examining two desert oases — A’al Waitpia, located inside Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona, and Ki:towak, across the Mexican border.

De-peopled of Tohono O'odham subsistence farmers by the U.S. Parks Service in 1957, A’al Waitpia had since chocked on sediment, Nabhan wrote in in The Desert Smells Like Rain. It had regressed to a quiet pond visited by few animals or people. Across the border, at Ki:towak, fruit trees bloomed and insects rushed about thanks to the irrigation that made use of still-flowing springs. Native greens and healing herbs grew, and biological surveys showed human partnership with the land resulted in double the variety of bird species present.

On a larger scale, the Parks system had long past driven out Lakota, Crow, Blackfeet, and Miwok from enormous parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite to preserve this “virgin” country. So it was with “First World” historical precedence and the tacit approval of the global conservation movement that the government of President Festus Mogae began to drive the Bushmen of Botswana’s Kalahari Reserve off their land while exploiting global affection for the “animal-rights darling and antitrade emblem,” the African elephant, writes James Workman in Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought.

In this well researched and carefully footnoted offering, Workman not only exposes the suffering the practice brought to First Peoples fighting for liberty in the Kalahari, but argues that our increasingly thirsty world desperately needs the knowledge of those we persecute in the name of saving the Earth.

Workman’s’ 247-page narrative tracks the unraveling of what had been one of the most successful democracies in Africa as former President Mogae presses for the total removal of the few remaining bands of subsistence hunter-gatherers attempting — during what turn out to be the planet’s hottest years on record — to hold onto their traditional ways.

Though many human rights organizations mobilized against Mogae’s effort to drive Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, Workman suggests it was winked at by American and European wildlife biologists. After all, in protecting the over-sized elephant’s wide-ranging habitat entire ecosystems hosting untold numbers of other plant and animal species are preserved, as well. For Botswana, there was nothing quite like Loxodonto Africana for the balance sheet: with tourism-related revenues climbing in pace with the growth of the elephant population. “The trouble with indigenous people, it seemed,” Workman writes, “was that they generated insufficient cash flow, especially foreign exchange from ecotourists.”

But it wasn’t only elephants and tourist dollars motivating Mogae’s government to shut down the sole federal water pump inside the CKGR and sustain a low-intensity war upon the Bushmen. The world’s largest diamond company, De Beers, also reportedly had its eye on the Kalahari for new mining sites. In a nation and region where native peoples were frequently relocated to make way for development projects, the case against the Bushmen was exacerbated by the inherited racism of the dominant Tswana, many of whom ridiculed the Bushmen a “serf” class or as embarrassing “Stone Age” creatures. “If the Bushmen want to survive, they must change,” Mogae had said in 1996, “otherwise, like the dodo they will perish.”

Workman uses the story of resistance to tell a broader story about the gathering global water crisis that is already recasting international — and, perhaps more importantly, intra-national — relationships around the planet. Ultimately, Workman’s tale is a rallying cry. It is a call to trade in our leaky, centralized water systems, massive pumping of irreplaceable fossil water, and food production systems soaking up seven of every 10 gallons of water worldwide (as much of the world slips into a state of permanent drought), with a decentralized model based upon key Bushmen principles.

He turns the tables on centuries of hydrological thought to ask, “What Would the Bushmen Do?” The answer — to Workman’s mind — doesn’t flow from a UN resolution establishing an inherent human right to water. Neither does it come through privatization. Instead it sits somewhere like a submerged Kalahari sip well, beckoning us to part the sands, fashion our reeds, and reevaluate the value of life itself.

Centro Partnership: Trickle Down(town) Economics

By Enrique Lopetegui
elopetegui@sacurrent.com

Update on 1/25/10: Pat DiGiovanni on potential City parking job losses.

In a unanimous vote Thursday, the City Council approved a resolution of support greenlighting the incorporation of Centro Partnership, a public-private non-profit umbrella corporation that would oversee the Downtown Alliance (advocacy and marketing), Centro San Antonio (operations and maintenance) and the Community Development Corporation (real-estate acquisition) in order to turn San Antonio’s downtown area into, according to the June 2009 proposal, “a new model other cities may seek to copy for years to come,”

Despite a few reservations on the part of some council-members (District 10 councilman John G. Clamp drilled deputy city manager Pat DiGiovanni on funding, and District 9 councilwoman Elisa Chan wants more City involvement in the Centro’s bylaws and governance), the Centro’s proponents were able to convince the Council that this was a good idea that, in the words of DiGiovanni, will correct the fact that the downtown area “has no key person or entity to go to.”

“The Centro will have a tremendous impact on surrounding areas,” DiGiovanni said, in what the QueBlog calls the “trickle Downtown effect”: Pour money into Downtown, and everybody else will shine.

“Downtown is a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces, but we’re missing some pieces,” said David Freehan, president of Civitas Consultants LLC, who was contracted by the city in January 2009 to expand on recommendations made by the International Downtown Association Advisory Panel, which met in San Antonio in May 2008. “We need a system that will find these pieces.”

The planned Centro Partnership is a 501(c)(6) non-profit corporation that would manage, market, and maintain downtown’s public spaces and economic development. It would be headed by a CEO, but its ultimate authority will rest in a board of directors, with the public sector represented by the Mayor, City Manager, Bexar County judge and a representative selected by the City Council.

Among other organizations, the Centro is endorsed by the Frost Bank, the Greater Chamber of Commerce, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the HemisFair Park Area Redevelopment Corporation and the Tourism Council.

However, at Thursday’s Council meeting, GOP tie-wearing local conservative –– and perennial presence at the Council chamber –– Jack M. Finger expressed his skepticism.

“Good day, sirs… It’s a good day to be an American,” he said, “especially if you’re a Republican, he-he…” The council sat stone-faced, and Finger proceeded to show them handwritten signs reading HemisFair ’68, Urban Renewal ’70, Target ’90, and CRAG (Community Reinvestment Action Group), all, in his opinion, high-profile initiatives of the past that didn’t do jack for San Antonio.

“We’ve been through this before, and nothing was accomplished,” he told the Council. “Now we’re going down the same road.”

Although it is not clear what impact the Centro will have on small business owners, its immediate impact might soon be felt by the city’s parking-lot attendants. Under the new plan, all municipal parking systems will be under the Centro’s control, and there are no guarantees that the current lot attendants will keep their jobs.

“Nothing has happened [yet], and we will continue to communicate with [the Council],” said DiGiovanni, after District 7 councilman Justin Rodríguez asked him about a memo the councilman received talking about a “possible reorganization” of the parking system.

“I hope we don’t lose any employees, and whatever shrinkage [there is] comes from elsewhere in the system,” said District 3 councilwoman Jennifer V. Ramos.

“Details to come, Councilwoman,” replied DiGiovanni.

During lunch recess, the QueBlog decided to visit a nearby city parking lot, where a man and two young women employees were talking. After introducing ourselves, upon the sole mention of “Centro Partnership” they looked at each other, smiled, and the women took off in different directions.

“They’re scared shitless,” said the man, who wanted to remain anonymous (we’ll call him “Deep Lot”). “Wouldn’t you be if you didn’t know how much longer you’re going to work? But come with me, I want to show you something. Let me take you on a merry path.”

He pulled out a couple of printouts from his pocket, the first one being an agenda for an October 9, 2009, Centro presentation by Freehan before the HemisFair Park Area Redevelopment Corporation at the Hilton Pavilion, which he attended.

“[The City] is trying to take over the parking division to raise money to do other things, like acquiring land, which otherwise it would be much harder for them to do,” Deep Lot said. “As one of the Council members said before, it is a complex mess of many layers, and the more layers you put in, the harder it is for anyone to track down what they do.”

He was probably referring to Chan. According to an Express-News report from September 25, 2009, at that point she thought that, “rather than streamlining the city's downtown plan, [it] would merely add another layer of bureaucracy and introduce more organizational confusion.” She now supports the project.

“The reason why [Chan] went along with it was because the [Centro’s] bylaws were amended,” Jeff Bazan, director of communications for Chan, told the QueBlog. “Part of those amendments included adding the chairman of the Economic [and Community] Development Committee and all four of the members of the ECDC on the board of the Centro.”

Deep Lot said the parking-lot attendants are well aware that their jobs may be at risk, but few want to talk about it.

“You know… If you look for another job, nobody wants the City to speak badly about you,” he said. “They say they’ll find us jobs in another City position, but nobody is guaranteeing anything. We’re expendable, because our [parking division] is the ugly step-child of the city.”

Then he said, “Let me guess: The [City Council] vote [approving the Centro] was unanimous, wasn't it?” It was, we tell him. “Of course! It'd be political suicide if they don't vote the same thing. Look who’s on the board [Mayor Castro and City Manager Sheryl Sculley, among others]!”

On January 20 (a day before the council meeting), Director of Downtown Operations Paula X. Stallcup sent an intradepartmental correspondence to the parking division employees, with a copy to DiGiovanni. That’s the memo Rodríguez talked about at Thursday’s Council meeting.

“Open communication with our staff is a top priority, and this letter serves to communicate with you directly about potential changes in our department,” the memo reads. “As you know, the City of San Antonio has been working with a consultant to create the Centro Partnership, a new organization charged with leading redevelopment efforts of downtown. On January 21, 2010, the City Council will be considering a resolution to support the concept of the Centro Partnership. Because the parking system is an integral part of downtown, it has been recommended that the city considers transitioning the parking system to this new organization. The city will be studying and evaluating this potential transition in order to determine how we will move forward. Please remember that the city has always made an effort to continue employment of affected individuals. The council’s consideration on January 21 is a resolution supporting the concept of Centro Partnership. Through additional studies we will be able to determine how the parking system will be affected. We appreciate your continued hard work to create a positive experience for our downtown patrons. We will keep you informed as further decisions are made.”

“What does this sound like to you?” Deep Lot asks. “A warning,” I say. “No, they’re making it sound like they’re helping us, but really, she works for the City and she was representing the City in that [Oct. 9] meeting. So they make it sound like they’re trying to help us, but… If they want to fire us because we’re not doing our jobs well, that’s fine. But don’t fire me just because that’s how they do it in the big cities.”

As I leave, the woman who “escaped” from the QueBlog earlier collects for my parking ticket and says, “Hmmm… You’re still here?”

I pay, and ask her, in passing, “You’re not too much into the Centro Partnership idea, are you?”

“No,” she says, “but what can you do? Whatever they decide, they decide, and we have to go along with it.”

Councilmen Rodríguez and Clamp, neither of whom knew anything about potential job losses until Wednesday (Rodríguez) and Thursday (Clamp), offer a tiny ray of hope.

“I wouldn’t necessarily call it a deal breaker,” Rodríguez told the QueBlog Friday, “but we directed staff to bring that back to us for further discussion. The two main issues are governance, whether authority is taken away from City Council, and the well-being of the employees. There’s a commitment, at least in theory, that the City never had to layoff employees. So we’ll continue to talk about that.”

“I’m concerned that the [parking] workers are going to be displaced,” Clamp told the QueBlog Friday. “I didn’t even think about the workers until yesterday, because I just assumed that they were going to go over to the new partnership. But we only voted for a resolution to incorporate the partnership. They have no funding yet. They’re just a paper entity and we still have several concerns. Do I buy into the notion that the City will offer [City parking lot attendants] other jobs within the city? Yes. I’m just not so sure as to whether the jobs will be good or bad.”

Or whether there will be enough of them, but deputy city manager DiGiovanni stands by the city's track record.

"First of all, no one’s losing their jobs," Di Giovanni told the QueBlog on January 25. "The City’s pledge in the past has been that, if we do these kinds of transitions, nobody loses their jobs. I would suspect this will be the case in the future. There’s no danger, if you will, of anyone losing their jobs. We had a no-layoffs policy for ages here.

"What I’m talking about is absorbing them into the rest of the organization, and giving them jobs that are comparable to what they’re being paid right now. We’re not talking about them going with the [new] parking system. They will have an option like that available to them, just like we did with the golf employees, but no one took us up on that offer. When they were offered the opportunity to go with a new golf organization, they refused to go and the City found them all jobs within the city organization, so no one lost their jobs, and no one lost pay. That’s exactly the scenario that we will be looking for with the parking system."

OK, so they may not lose their job, but they may lose that particular job, right?

"Yes," DiGiovanni said. "But we’re getting the car way before the horse here."

Cooper Center bringing green tech, training to West Side

Greg Harman
gharman@sacurrent.com

When former Mayor Phil Hardberger and his eco-logical aide-de-camp Larry Zinn cranked out Mission Verde, an economics-based sustainability plan for Alamo City, back in the waning days of Hizzoner’s Era, they put quiet hopes in the city’s abandoned school houses.

With numerous schools closed across the city, and more expected to be added to the list of shuttered district properties this year, the pair saw opportunity for the vision of decentralized power.

Through the school houses, the city would be able to connect with homeowners at a neighborhood level and demonstrate alternative building models, train weatherizers and solar installers, partially power neighborhood homes with photovoltaic installations on the schools' roofs, and even help spur the local-foods movement by planting the empty fields.

Hardberger coaxed $1 million in federal energy efficiency grant money through the Council to fund a green tech demonstration center. But in the minds of leading CPS Energy executives, Board members, and some on Council, such efforts would always play second-string to the planned expansion of the South Texas Project nuclear complex.

What a difference a year makes.

Next week, the same day CPS Energy (with the nuke project all but dead for San Antonio) finally heads to court to face off with nuke-expansion partner NRG Energy in a $32-billion lawsuit, a new mayor will take up the Verde charge.

On Monday, Mayor Julián Castro is expected to dedicate a green-tech demonstration and training center on the city’s West Side at the former Cooper Middle School, 1700 Tampico Street. Thus will begin the multi-party project involving a long string of clean thinkers from the City, UTSA, Alamo College, SAISD, Texas A&M, Texas Engineering Experiment Station, and local utilities SAWS and CPS.

A centerprice of the Cooper Center will be Texas A&M’s School of Architecture’s award-winning groHome: a zero-energy, solar-powered modular house now installed at Cooper (above left, SACurrent). Built by pioneering students at A&M, displayed at the National Mall for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon competition in 2007, and reassembled for display at the George Bush Presidential Library, the groHome — rechristened SuCasa, Sustainability Urban Center for the Advancement of San Antonio — will serve as more than inspiration.

“You can then use it in multiple ways to explore other technologies and teach,” said Jorge Vanegas, dean of the A&M’s College of Architecture. “Part of what we’re trying to do is [see] how can you actually bring to the application-level sustainability, not in terms of just green and theory and good wishes, but how can we use it as a transformational opportunity for communities to take care of themselves.”

With just days away to dedication, further details were hard to come by Thursday. Calls to Alamo College’s point man on the project were passed along to the Mayor’s office, where calls were not immediately returned. But one thing is certain — this is where Verde has to go.

Community green-power centers like the Cooper Center, when hitched to a soon-to-be established city program expected to allow all income levels to receive loans for solar power and energy efficiency upgrades — loans which can in turn be paid off through the energy savings realized by the homeowner — have the potential to forever change the way San Antonio is powered.

Good to see the better aspects of the waning Hardberger days begin to wax with Castro.

Dr. Berggren in Haiti: Safe, heartbroken, and hopeful

Dr. Ruth Berggren, head of the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, has been back in Haiti since Monday providing medical care in rural areas. After an inquiry from the QueBlog, Berggren sent us the following email:

"We are fine but heartbroken about all the amputations that are being performed on children. The aftershock of [Wednesday] was not felt in terms of shaking earth, but shook a lot of souls as our patients learned of the event. They began to pray very fervently and earnestly for their people and for their country. This afternoon we received yet more patients, including a three-year-old all alone who had a head injury. We quickly realized he needed neurosurgery and by some miracle a helicopter not only showed up, but allowed us to put him on the chopper with one of our pediatricians. We see miracles like this every day which gives us hope in the midst of so much tragedy. Thanks for your concerns and your prayers."

And thank you, reader, for helping Haiti.

Wind-powered nuclear warhead facility in our future? Hunters seem to think so

Greg Harman
gharman@sacurrent.com

Wind power isn’t dead. Not by a long shot. Despite the cancellation of what was being billed as the next world’s largest wind-power complex by former corporate raider, woulda-been West Texas water mogul, and relenting wind-power booster T. Boone Pickens, things are just starting to get interesting for lovers of overgrown pinwheels. Especially in West Texas.

Last week, engineering minds at Texas Tech University and the Pantex nuclear weapons plant outside Amarillo agreed to work together to study the possibility of powering the subterranean warhead care and refurbishment center with pollution-free, bat-exploding wind power towers.

So speaketh the Associated Press:

Wind power is contentious in some quarters for its debated impact on migratory birds, especially endangered, migratory birds like the whooping crane. It’s not crazy popular with the bat people either. (That popping sound? Them’s be bat lungs exploding.)

Still, in the hustle to eliminate carbon from the planetary diet, clean-energy concerns typically come out on top of whooper fears and nocturnal skeeter eaters.

Following the Tech-Pantex meetup, a couple hunters started staking out the lands around Pantex. I imagine them deeply shaken by fears of 200-foot blenders churling up cherished game birds and hot to stuff their own bags with feathers before the turbines got a chance to churn. The sight of the pair inspired a facility lockdown at 8 am last Friday.

Said Reuters:



I don’t know about you, but a wind-powered nuclear weapons complex isn’t where my mind lurches when I hear the words “clean-energy revolution.” In the style of San Antonio businesses proudly displaying their Windtricity badges, or our U.S. Marines’ bible-literate rifle scopes, I imagine future intercontinental delivery systems of mass death marked: “This missile courtesy of the U.S. military-industrial complex and pollution-free wind energy. Enjoy the blast.”

Still, the point, if I can suss some wind from this rapid deflation, seems to be that whether Pickens chooses to be King of the Breezes or just a bit player, the tech is still moving strong. So, energy and biz writers, should cool it with the eulogizing.

Instead, check out the recent study by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which reports that half of the U.S. (and a big chunk of Canada) known as the Eastern Interconnection could meet 20 percent of its power needs by 2024.

Handing mic over to NREL Project Manager David Corbus …

Haiti: An SA Aftershock

By Enrique Lopetegui
elopetegui@sacurrent.com

 

For Dr. Ruth Berggren and medical student Beth Melia, returning from Haiti on Sunday, two days before the January 12 earthquake, offers no consolation.

“I felt a multitude of emotions when I found out about the earthquake,” Melia told the QueBlog, “but I’d say my very first concern was about the people we worked with and who were still in Port-au-Prince.”

For Melia, a second-year medical student, it was her second trip to Haiti. She was part of a group led by Berggren, director of the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. The delegation, consisting of 10 medical students and four doctors, is part of the center’s "Project Haiti," which twice a year sends medical students and doctors to conduct mobile health clinics in rural areas of Haiti. This time, the group stayed in the island country from January 3 through the 10th.


 
“Since we came back, it’s been email after email trying to find out who had heard from which person and if we could account for every person we worked with,” said Melia. “Fortunately, we were able to account for most people.”

One of those people was a Haitian-American translator named Emanuelle Charlier, a Wellesley College student Dr. Berggren had hired as a Creole translator and who missed a charter plane back to the States in mysterious circumstances. After days of great anxiety, Emmanuelle was found safe in the Dominican Republic waiting to return to the U.S. But the fate of others is unknown.


 
“There’s actually students from [Florida’s] Lynn University where half of them are missing,” said Berggren. “Six students showed up at the [U.S.] embassy [in Haiti], eight are missing and there is a search organization that is now looking for them. My thoughts and feelings are with all those people who have missing loved ones. This is a time of great anguish.”

Besides being the head of a department that “helps heighten students' sensitivity to the patient's experience and preserve their innate empathy,” according to its website, the Haiti tragedy affects Berggren in a deeply personal way: She lived there from ages four through 14.

“Haiti is a country that nurtured me during my childhood, and it was very good to me,” she said. “I have great love for the country and the people of Haiti. They’re my brothers and sisters, they’re my family.”

Berggren stressed the immediate need for medical volunteers and said in “three or four weeks' time” people skilled in engineering, water technology, and construction will be needed as well.

“But now we need medical people, and Remote Area Medical and Partners in Health could both be possible portals for people, and they have set up systems where you can send email inquiries,” she said, adding that it is better to send emails instead of trying to reach them by phone. “It’s not a good time to make any phone calls to these organizations because they’re completely swamped. Even when I have inside info and I know who I am calling, I have to be on hold for a long, long, time.”

One of those potential volunteers is Wayne Herrell, who Berggren calls “my closest tie to Haitian community [in SA].”

Herrell served in the Peace Corps in Haiti from 2000 to 2002 as an agricultural volunteer. He met his wife (and mother of their two Haitian-born daughters) on the first year and now they both run a plant nursery in San Antonio.

His wife Henriette, who became an American citizen but holds dual citizenship, spoke to her side of the family away from the capital and everybody is fine, but several relatives in Port-au-Prince are unaccounted for.

“We know for sure we’ve lost three cousins and an uncle,” said Herrell, “and we haven’t been able to contact a number of people in Port-au-Prince: A sister, a brother, nieces and nephews that we don’t know their whereabouts at the present time.”

Herrell says he’s ready to go back to Haiti both to help and to try to locate his wife’s relatives.

“My wife is tough,” Herrell said. “From the two of us, I’m having a tougher time emotionally, and I’m trying to get in touch with people who’d need somebody to go. I understand the people, the language, I know my way around Port-au-Prince really well. I’m trying to get an organization that needs someone like me to go help. I’m ready to go today if somebody calls me.”


 
Henriette Beauvil, his wife, would surely appreciate that.

“I’m really worried about my family, I don’t know what happened to them,” said a tearful Henriette at the nursery she runs with her husband. “I’d love for him to go and see whether my sister is OK or not. But I’m trying to be strong.”

Berggren told the QueBlog she was leaving for Atlanta on the night of January 15, arriving in Santo Domingo on the 16, and from there she will drive across the border into Haiti to work in Jimani with Remote Area Medical.

“Text messaging was working, even when you couldn’t receive a phone call,” said Berggren. “I imagine the reason people lose contact is because batteries die and there’s no way to recharge. That’s something I learned and have to put on my list right now: Lots of extra batteries.”

Whenever the time comes for new medical students to go to Haiti, they will be able to put basic Creole skills to use, thanks to Berenice Nadal, a 22-year-old Haitian-American who will teach them the language.


“In my direct family they’re all safe, but some extended family and friends have lost their lives,” said Nadal, who was born in Haiti but left with the family at age 13 when her father obtained political asylum in the U.S. On Monday, January 18, she will have her first meeting with medical students to decide the details of the classes.

“In a place like San Antonio, people don’t even know where Haiti is,” Nadal said. “When I tell them I’m from Haiti, they say, ‘Oh, Katy, Texas?’ It’s pretty bad. So anything we can do to spread the word and help people get informed, it’s always a good thing.”

For a country that was in dire straits to begin with, the earthquake only made matters much worse.

“This is a country with most of the people live on less than $2 a day, about $400 a year,” said Melia. “Portable water and food are already scarce, and it’ll be more scarce now. For those who don’t have money it’ll be difficult to be treated or to maintain a healthy status.”

But, will the money and goods reach the intended destination and in a timely fashion? The corruption in and out of Haiti is another problem earthquake victims and potential donors have to deal with.

“A lot of people got a website saying, ‘I’m helping,’ but they [aren’t],” said Beauvil. “So be careful where you donate.”

“You need to be looking at who’s recommending the donations,” said Berggren, who personally recommends Partners in Health, a Boston-based organization that has been in Haiti for 25 years and was co-founded by her former classmate, Dr. Paul E. Farmer. “I have complete confidence in them, and I personally made a donation there already with my credit card” said Berggren.

Also bonafide are Remote Area Medical, her own center (where the tax-deductible donations are sent to a special account that is only used for Haiti), and Project Medishare.

“These organizations have the man power and the connections in Haiti to effectively and efficiently mount a relief effort in that country,” said Melia.

Even though early reports of looting of destroyed homes and even a UN food warehouse in Port-au-Prince, as well as increasing volatile tempers among the locals, suggest that a considerable portion of donated money and goods will end up in the wrong hands, if people don’t donate then there is absolutely no hope that help will get to the right people.

"So donate ’till it hurts, because Haitians are hurting,” Berggren said. “I really feel that it is urgent for all of us to mobilize and help as soon and as much as we can.”

Haiti: How we can help.

The following is a partial list of local and national organizations, including Obama's White House, doing their part in trying to alleviate Haitians from the devastating effects of Tuesday's earthquake. In order to make an informed donation, we suggest you visit Charity Navigator and Charity Watch.

The Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics (write 'Haiti' on the check's memo line)

Partners in Health
P.O. Box 845578
Boston, MA 02284-5578
617-432-5256

Project Medishare

Remote Area Medical
Remote Area Medical Foundation
1834 Beech Street
Knoxville, TN 37920
1-877-5RAMUSA
865-579-1530

The White House

Clinton Bush Haiti Fund

Red Cross (1-800-REDCROSS or Spanish 1-800-257-7575)

Doctors Without Borders

Oxfam America

Yéle Haiti

New Probation chief ditches snoopy Cline, bones up on lawsuits

Greg Harman
gharman@sacurrent.com

For some employees within Bexar County Adult Probation, the New Year couldn’t come fast enough. As January approached, Former Probation Chief Bill Fitzgerald, ridiculed by more uncouth elements of the San Antonio media family (read: us) as a paranoid, out-of-touch, union-busting, foot fetishist, overflowing with blind faith in poorly performing piss sniffers (read: Treatment Associates), was ambling toward resignation and a string of court appearances. After shameful, closed-door votes violating the spirit of state Open Meetings law, local judges at last agreed to rotate 16-year felony case manager Jarvis Anderson into Fitzgerald’s seat.

And so with the Arctic chill that swept San Anto last week, Anderson blew in. Day three on the job brought the expulsion of his predecessor’s (mostly) loyal companion and legal adviser Kathy Cline, who had been likewise mistreated by pro-legalization forces in the city (read: us) as a vindictive, paranoid, union-buster with a penchant for late-night email snooping (on her boss and any suspected union members, according to the former IT director).

Jehovah may have rested on the seventh day, but Anderson is far from ready to kick back and sedately survey his creation. For starters, he’s got lots of re-creating to do. But tomorrow, his seventh in the swivel seat, he’ll be receiving the “blow-by-blow” briefing from Texas Attorney General suits on the slurry of lawsuits naming Fitzgerald and Cline and Adult Probation. “We have to come to some kind of resolution quick, where we can still function as a department,” he said.

As new hopes spring with these titular changes, local labor attorney David Van Os says he is close to submitting a settlement offer on one of his suits against Fitzgerald, one that would see Sheri Simonelli, head of the Central Texas Association of Public Employees, reinstated in her former position as a case worker at the department.

Simonelli was fired after publicly blowing the whistle on Treatment Associates. Though he didn’t name Simonelli specifically, Anderson said he hopes employees that left under Fitzgerald will consider returning to work. Simonelli, president of the CTAPE, says Fitzgerald’s retirement has been good to the union, with membership shooting up between 15 and 20 percent over the past week.

But one of Anderson's biggest tangles will be Treatment Associates. Drug-testing TA has had a rough time expanding from drug counseling to fluid dynamics. Strike One immediately followed Bexar County’s contract with the company as a rash of false positives swept the department, results that, according to at least one lawsuit, sent innocents into the cooler and caused some local judges to swear off their readings entirely.

Strike Two came when a TV crew caught TA employees dumping client records into public dumpsters. Finally, came allegations of employees charging probationers for guaranteed clean results, prompting a District Attorney investigation.

But Anderson’s first priority will be bringing the computer network into the 21st Century. Already representatives of Bexar County Juvenile Probation, Bexar County Information Systems, SAPD, and the DA’s office have expressed interest in linking up, something that would vastly improve the ability of his case managers to do their jobs, Anderson said.

“The system is long overdue, especially for a department this large,” he said. “Right now we have a system that’s kind of old, if you are not a part of that system … you can’t share it, you can’t send it, you can’t receive it. … That’s my number one priority.”

You know, it feels an awful lot like reform just having the boss calls you back for a chat. It's been more than a year that the righteously muck-rackin' Current has been begrudged (read: ignored) by the Fitz/Cline combo pack. It'd be impossible not to grant Anderson a full pack of gold stars.

Suddenly, Simonelli has lost her nemesi. That's alright, she says, from here on she expects the union won't be tied up fighting management and can switch to advocating for better state funding. That may be something the whole department can get behind.

Disgraced Bartley cashed out of CPS with pension, insurance

Greg Harman
gharman@sacurrent.com

Though humiliated and driven from his position as Interim General Manager at City-owned CPS Energy for failing to divulge a multi-billion gap between CPS nuclear-expansion cost estimates and its partner Toshiba, Steve Bartley isn’t suffering.

Under terms of his negotiated settlement agreement, Bartley was “given” nearly two years of service time with the utility so he could qualify to receive a pension from CPS under terms of an Early Pension program that allows employees 55 or older with 10 years of benefits service to retire with a pension. Bartley joined CPS in September, 2000, and resigned under fire on November 29, 2009.

While, former Vice President of Nuclear Development Bob Temple is seeking to block the release of the terms of his severance package with an appeal to the Texas Attorney General's Office, Bartley’s settlement was released today to the Current through a Texas Public Information Act request.

In addition to receiving a company pension, Bartley will receive 15 months of base pay and 1.78 years of health care coverage for himself and his wife with the option of continuing health coverage through the City Public Service Group Health Plan into the future.

In fact, Bartley even got the money (“up to $5,000”) to hire an attorney to review the terms of the severance agreement with CPS.

For his part, Bartley agreed never to sue CPS, share CPS secrets “including any and all concepts, advertising information, techniques, processes, designs, trade secrets, business methods, cost data, computer programs, software, scientific or technical know-how, financial, marketing, manufacturing processes, research developments, business activities and operations, inventions, customer or client lists, industrial practices, financial statements and /or other business information, or any information CPS Energy specifically refers to as confidential information or labels as confidential information,” or ever utter any “derogatory comment” against the utility.

In another interesting clause, Bartley pledges to aid CPS in its existing and potential future legal troubles while CPS agrees to pay for Bartley's legal defense in any matters that pop up related to his time at the utility.

Of course, he’ll still be under oath, right?

In 2008, Bartley earned $313,232 in base pay and $101,918 in incentive payments. It was unclear at press time what percentage of his pay he’d receive via the pension.

Ratepayer Protection Coalition intervenes in CPS-NRG lawsuit as utilities play nice

Greg Harman
gharman@sacurrent.com

CPS Energy lied to and manipulated the public and City Council in its rush to consolidate support for the expansion of the South Texas Project nuclear complex outside Bay City. That’s not only the running public narrative these days, but the substance of a fresh legal complaint piled onto the multi-billion CPS-NRG spat this morning by a freshly minted non-profit.

CPS can’t represent the City of San Antonio, argues the Ratepayer Protection Coalition, a collection of familiar faces from the vindicated critics' pool. Not only has CPS “conducted a campaign of misinformation, disinformation, and deception designed to convince the San Antonio community about the merits of pursuing nuclear power” but threatened the City Council “that a decision not to pursue the nuclear project would lead to the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the project to date by CPS Energy.”

In short, CPS has “dirty hands” and can’t represent the City of San Antonio in court, according to RPC's complaint filed this morning in the 37th District Court, joining the CPS-NRG lawsuit as an intervener.

“We have standing,” said Karen Seal, a local Sierra Club member and one of the architects of the pleading, said today. “They have to do something to take us out.”

Representatives of CPS and its partners in the planned expansion of STP — NRG, NINA, and Toshiba — were scheduled to gather this morning at the Westin Riverwalk Hotel by invitation of San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, who hoped to broker a peace deal and keep CPS's lawsuit from reaching trial later this month.

CPS is suing NRG, alleging the utility has manipulated CPS’s position in an attempt to gain control of the project by, in part, feeding sensitive information to the media. Interestingly, when CPS Board member Steve Hennigan first made the allegation, Express-News Editor Bob Rivard ridiculed it as a “conspiracy theory.” Now the theory has become the substance of a $32-billion lawsuit between feuding partners. (For more backstory, see “Operation: CPS”)

From the RPC press release:

The RPC has standing in the lawsuit, according to its complaint, because its members are taxpayers and “public funds are to be expended and have been expended on illegal activity.”

According to its court filing, the RPC’s mission is “to use educational and legal means to protect ratepayers residing in and outside of San Antonio from high utility bills, financial waste, fraud, misrepresentation and illegal expenditures; to protect San Antonio taxpayers from high utility bills, financial waste, fraud, misrepresentation and illegal expenditures; and to protect San Antonio voters by ensuring that the process for developing a San Antonio comprehensive energy plan is free from the taint of fraud and misrepresentation.”


(ADDED 1:07 pm) Meanwhile, talks break down at Mayor's peace summit. Heads of NINA and NRG don't show and CPS interim GM complains: "CPS Energy is ready to honor Mayor Castro’s request and seek a sensible solution out of court,however it appears David Crane of NRG Energy and Steve Winn of NINA aren’t interested or else they would have attended today’s meeting. Instead, they’ve sent their lawyers who thus far have been very uncooperative.  Ignoring Mayor Castro’s invitation indicates Mr. Crane and Mr. Winn are not at all serious about a negotiated settlement.”


    

A decision, PERFavor

By Enrique Lopetegui
elopetegui@sacurrent.com

Update on 1/11/10: Includes quotes from Michael Helle, president of the San Antonio Police Officers Association)

According to city officials, the police union’s unwillingness to give an inch on its health-care benefits – as most of the rest of the U.S. population has done – has brought the collective-bargaining contract talks between the City and the San Antonio Police Officers Association to a “temporary standstill” with no immediate end in sight.

“There’s no deadline,” attorney Lowell F. Denton, the city’s chief negotiator, told the QueBlog on the phone Thursday. “I really thought that at some point in the fall we were going to wrap it up, but it didn’t happen. Negotiations came to a [temporary] standstill over the issue of the health-care portion of this contract.”

Although Denton said it would take him “about 45 minutes” to explain the complex positions of each side on the issue, and that he preferred to do it in writing before press time (which he didn’t), he did say that SAPOA’s position is the exact flipside of what regular Americans go through daily.

“People lose their health care either because they change jobs, or they come up with a condition and their carriers won’t renew their policies,” Denton said. “On the other hand, police officers have a very good plan, they don’t want it to be reduced, and they don’t want to pay more money for it. That’s what we’ve been arguing about for the last two or three months. That’s what kept us from going anywhere and the negotiations are stalled. Everybody else in society is experiencing that their costs are going up, the deductibles are going up, the list of drugs are being reduced, but [policemen] don’t want to have changes that take away from anything that they’ve enjoyed for a long time.”

“One of our primary objectives is to address both the short-term and long-term costs of health care,” assistant city manager Erik Walsh told the QueBlog on Friday. “But in both police and fire contracts there were significant changes in their health benefits plan, so it’s a continuation of that. And, from the city’s perspective, the four [Police Executive Research Forum] recommendations that we brought forth to the table were pretty straightforward. If you ask the police association you might get a different answer, but I don’t think it was complicated.”

Shortly before press time on Monday, SAPOA president Michael Helle told the QueBlog that the city's insistence on making changes to the officers' health-care is unnecessary.

"For the last two years, our health-care has seen less than one percent growth, and there is no reason to change our plan," Helle said. "Considering national health-care trends, our growth is well below average."

As far as the city's demand being a "continuation" of changes made in the 2005 police and fire contracts, Helle said that, "precisely, those plan modifications are one of the major contributing factors why our health-care is flatlined. Why change it again?"

Even if the city had a case on the health-care issue, Helle sees no reason to delay the agreement because the existing contract (which expired on October 2009 but has a 10-year evergreen clause) has mechanisms that allow the city to renegotiate with the police association.

"It's certainly not the position of our organization that, if the city is in financial crisis, we're going to take that arm and twist it even further behind their backs," Helle said. "No, we're in this together."

The last of the meetings (which began in January 2009) took place in late September. Since then, both parties agreed to have discussions with their respective health-benefits consultants, but no new collective-bargaining sessions have taken place, and none are scheduled.

In addition to the health issue, Denton said “four or five” PERF recommendations were being discussed in the contract talks, “all of which were proposals by the City, and all have not currently been accepted by the association.” These included increasing the number of civilians in the Chief’s Advisory Action Board (made up of police officers and community members, the board reviews and makes recommendations on internal investigations), and the removal of the so-called veto provision by SAPOA.

“The City Council should select the civilian members of the Board without the involvement of the Police Officers Association,” reads page six of the PERF report. “Allowing a police labor group to effectively ‘veto’ potential board members is unusual and is detrimental to community trust in the process.”

Helle denies the claim that SAPOA refused to follow the PERF recommendations.

"I can't [be] 100 percent [sure], but pretty much we found middle ground to acommodate what the city was looking for on the PERF recommendations," Helle said.

Local civil- and human-rights activists are more concerned with those PERF recommendations than with the health-care negotiating. Out of the 36 PERF recommendations that the SAPD refused to follow (of a total of 141), three are particularly troublesome for the activists: the fact that the SAPD does not give citizens who file complaints copies of the reports, the use of tasers, and the fine print that indicates to complainants that perjury is a third-degree felony.

“The argument [SAPOA] gives us [to deny copies of the reports] are absurd,” said former councilman Mario Salas, who represented the San Antonio Coalition for Human and Civil Rights on the task force formed to negotiate the implementation of Internal Affairs-related PERF recommendations with the police union. “They tell us that they’re trying to protect the confidentiality of the police officer, and that’s not absurd. What is absurd is that when I suggested that the officer’s name be hidden so that the person making the complaint would still get a copy, they refused.”

The PERF recommendations don’t mention anything about giving report copies to complainants, but do suggest that, in these cases, “The procedure should include required notification of outcomes to the complainant.”

Just as important for the coalition is the issue of the “fine print” that warns complainants that lying is a third degree felony.

“Obviously, it’s been put in there to discourage people from filing complaints,” Salas said. “People are going to lie no matter what. But you can discourage people from telling the truth. It’s an old trick.”

Based on a standard November 2006 report named “Conducted Energy Devices: Development of Standards for Consistency and Guidance,” which was compared to current SAPD practices, the PERF report recommended “Establishing parameters on the number of CED [taser] activations permitted; Placing restrictions on CED use against visibly frail people; Requiring medical evaluation for all those subjected to CED use; Providing guidance regarding the duration of CED activation; Placing restrictions on multiple officers activating a CED on a person simultaneously; and, Establishing a requirement that a supervisor should respond to the scene of each CED activation.”

“That’s another one that came up,” said Salas. “ACLU was more into that than me, because they have statistics and stuff. I’m opposed to tasers, they should not be used, or they should be used only in very, very special circumstances. Anybody who is taking any type of medication is subject to death if they are tasered.” ACLU attorney Ed Piña couldn’t be reached for comment.

Among the 105 PERF recommendations Police Chief McManus agreed to follow are no more tasering of bicyclists, working in a required pause between taser jolts, and having Internal Investigations respond to all officer-involved shootings.

Finally, Salas is particularly upset at what he says is an SAPD practice of “throwing someone’s background check in their faces” whenever someone with a checkered past files a complaint against an officer.

“They’ll tell the person making the complaint, ‘You’ve been to prison, young man,” Salas said, “and you’re making an accusation against an SA police officer? How dare you!’ My position is nobody’s record should be checked when filing a complaint, and it ought to not even be mentioned. The fact that somebody has a record doesn’t mean they’re not telling the truth. That’s something you use to discredit someone in a court of law. It should not be used in a complaint process.”

Salas said he will soon meet for the first time with Mayor Castro, the son of a long-time acquaintance.

“I’ve known his mother for 35 years,” said Salas. “I saw her at the cleaners the other day, and I supported Julián for his campaign. He’s a pretty good guy, but this is a tough issue because the union doesn’t want to come clean with the public.”

When the QueBlog asked him about former Mayor Phil Hardberger, Salas sighed and recalled a 2008 meeting at Mount Zion First Baptist Church in which Hardberger, according to him, declared that he was in favor of citizens getting a copy of the complaint that they filed against the SAPD.

“He said that publicly, but he didn’t do anything that I know about it,” said Salas. “Maybe he did, but he didn’t communicate it to us. The Mayor came, [City Manager Sheryl L.] Sculley came, [SAPD Chief William] McManus came, members of the PERF committee were there, and they all agreed with everything that PERF had decided. Well, McManus didn’t agree with everything, of course. But Hardberger did, and I never saw him say or do anything else. He spoke nicely and, like a good politician, disappeared.”

Hardberger didn’t return a call from the QueBlog Thursday.

Despite his original skepticism about the PERF report, Salas admits that the results could’ve been a lot worse.

“I was extremely skeptical, but afterwards I thought they did a decent job,” he said. “In retrospect, I would have to say that part of the reason for doing a decent job is that many of these police officers in the PERF committees were police chiefs, and chiefs generally don’t belong to a union, they’re management. Oftentimes police chiefs tend to be a lot more fair than people who belong to the union.”

Still, only the City can pressure SAPOA into implementing the recommendations –– it won’t come voluntarily from the union.

“The city must find a way to put [the recommendations] in the contract and fight very aggressively for transparency at Internal Affairs. There’s like … a cult of secrecy around that place.”

The question is, will they? Why would Castro, who was endorsed by SAPOA on January 23, 2008, risk pissing off the powerful cop union by pressuring them to implement reforms they’ve already expressed a disagreement with?

“Endorsements don’t come easily,” said Helle, with then-candidate Castro at his side on the steps of City Hall. “We need to be aggressive to fight crime, and Julián will provide the forward thinking that we need, which will enable officers to do their jobs better.”

He then passed the mic to Castro, who pledged to turn San Antonio into “the safest big city in America.”

“We will make sure we give our officers the resources and equipment they need to fight crime,” said Castro, without specifying whether the “resources and equipment” included tasering or denying report copies to those who accuse police officers of excessive force.

In a statement sent Friday to the QueBlog, Mayor Castro said he is all for the PERF recommendations, “especially those that call for greater civilian participation on the citizens disciplinary review board.”
 
“I've made my perspective clear,” Castro added. “We are all in agreement – myself, the city manager and the City Council – that the review board needs greater citizen representation.”

Denton, the city’s chief negotiator, can’t understand those who doubt Castro’s commitment to the citizens.

“I don’t think [doubters] know what they’re talking about,” Denton said. “The city is absolutely committed to implementing those changes and reforms, and Mayor Castro is personally committed to implementing those reforms.

“I may be wrong about this,” continued Denton, “but I think if you ask the [police] union president, he’ll tell you that the proposed changes that came out of that PERF report, for the most part, would’ve been included in our new agreement if we could get past these other issues. He might not say that, but I think he would.”

He did. On Monday, January 11, Heller confirmed that the health-care issue is the only stumbling block threatening the negotiations but that the stubborn party is the city, not SAPOA.

"We've been leading the charge the whole way to make it happen," Helle told the QueBlog, "and basically [City Manager] Sheryl [Sculley] is coming up with a smoke screen regarding health-care, which has stalled everything."

To show SAPOA's good will, Helle said the police association has agreed, "for the first time ever," to have a zero percent salary increase for the first year in the new contract, to increase civilians (and even allow them to bring an observer if they want to) to the Chief’s Advisory Action Board, and to create a "dual role employee" that would dramatically improve response time for the department.

"I hear a lot of complaints from people waiting for hours on end for the police to show up, and that is embarrassing as hell," Helle said, explaining that the SAPD a "power shift" that would reduce waiting time and allow officers to both respond to calls and collect evidence.

"[In the past] we hired civilians, trained them [in evidence collecting], and they ended up quitting our department to work for another department that pays them 25 or 30 percent more," Helle said. "If your house is a total wreck after being burglarized, sometimes it takes up to six or eight hours for the police to show up to collect evidence because there's no one available. We want our officers to be able to do it all, and we all agreed to do it, but we can't do anything about it until we finalize the contract. And it's all because of the health-care issue."

“I think ultimately we’ll be able to achieve an agreement with [SAPOA],” assistant city manager Walsh said. “I know that for the [City] Manager and the Council it is a priority to get these issues resolved to the benefit not only of the citizens, but the employees themselves. We’ll get it done.”

"It's not that Sculley doesn't respect us or anything," Helle said. "I just disagree with her position. We hope to finally agree on everything. It's probably too late for January, but probably we'll start back up again on February. Our argument is: Quit trying to make a fire where there is none: There is nothing wrong with our [health] plan. Let's get our deal done."

Urgent: Special Community College Board Meeting

ACCD Special Board Meeting

Date: Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Time: 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Location: 201 W. Sheridan, San Antonio, TX 78204-1429.
 
Robert J. Pohl

      An important public meeting will occur on 12 January. Alamo Community College District (ACCD) is hosting a special meeting to address the issue of single accreditation. Single accreditation would require aligning ACCD colleges so that the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools can accredit the district as a whole -- instead of leaving the colleges independently accredited. Some professors have alleged that single accreditation has been Chancellor Bruce Leslie's surreptitious plan since his arrival at ACCD in 2006. The consequences of single accreditation are multiple and have the potential to affect all 1.6 million Bexar County residents (read the summary of the Accreditation Review Committee Report below). ACCD is only giving the public one chance to come speak or learn about single accreditation. Several forums were held last semester for faculty and students to learn and speak about single accreditation, however.   

The Accreditation Review Committee Report was released to the public on 16 December. The facts gathered for this report indicate that single accreditation would be harmful, not helpful. After five months of research, the 21-member committee released the report with these important findings:  

•          If all of the colleges were accredited as one, St. Philip's College would most likely lose its status as a historically black college. Without this status, St. Philip's would most likely lose more than $7 million each year. The other colleges would probably lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants each year as well. St. Philip's alone would lose about $70 million over 10 years.

•        If the district were singly accredited, about $235,000 would be saved annually. The savings would come from not having to pay the costs associated with getting Northeast Lakeview College accredited and not having to set up and maintain separate financial audits for each college. 

•        The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) accredits ACCD. The report states that the process of singly accrediting the district would take about five years. If the district became singly accredited, NLC would probably have to wait an additional five years to receive accreditation -- making NLC wait 10 years for accreditation.

•       The report also reveals that during a 10-year span, the costs of single accreditation would be $1.83 million; the costs of keeping the colleges independently accredited for 10 years would be $4.18 million.

•        Saving $2.3 million during a 10-year span with single accreditation would mostly likely lead to the loss of about $70 million for St. Philip's College during the same period, as well as the loss of millions for several more ACCD colleges during a 10-year span because several colleges would likely lose their federal designations as  Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Without the HSI designation, several ACCD colleges would be ineligible for hundreds of thousands in federal grants each year. The Department of Education determines whether or not an institution qualifies for a Historically Black Colleges & Universities or HSI designation.   

To learn more, go to theranger.org. Or, pick up The Current on 13 January.

Another consequence of single accreditation is that it requires the standardization of curriculum among all colleges; the board of trustees and the chancellor have already begun this process. Most professors oppose standardizing curriculum because they say that standardizing curriculum fails to meet the needs of students who come from discrete communities. For example, Professor Christy Woodward Kaupert of SAC's political science department said that a disproportionate number of students who attend St. Philip's College come from Title 1 Schools, schools that have the highest concentrations of students who come from impoverished families. Kaupert said that the prerequisite standards, for example, at St. Philip's College are not suitable for San Antonio College and vice versa because the needs of discrete communities of students vary.

 Knowledge of this general opposition to standardizing curriculum comes from letters that the faculty senates at Northwest Vista and San Antonio College sent to Chancellor Leslie, interviews with faculty senate members, and the resolutions that were read on the night that over 90 percent of professors who participated presented their votes of no confidence to Chancellor Leslie. 

 On 15 September, over 90 percent of professors who participated presented their votes of no confidence to Chancellor Bruce Leslie. Average participation among the four colleges that participated in the vote was about 80 percent (Faculty at Northeast Lakeview College did not participate because NLC is not yet accredited). Standardizing curriculum was just one of many reasons for the votes of no confidence. To learn more, go to therange.org. 

              Since the inceptions of St. Philip's, San Antonio, Northwest Vista and Palo Alto College, each college has been independently accredited.

           

 

'A tank of regular and a pipe of premium, please'

San Antonio Lightning readers probably recognize the signature punny headline up there, which arrived in my inbox this a.m. R.G. Griffing and his crew have a new post up about a local Valero store that's selling pipes -- "near the 'munchie aisles.'"

According to the story, San Antonio-based Fortune 500 company Valero asked the store, which the Lightning says is independently owned but branded Valero, to remove the paraphernalia in December after the Lightning brought it to the company's attention.

Griffing's a libertarian at heart (also an animal lover), so I'm a little surprised to find him on this side of the drug war. But it's good news for local head shops, which don't need the competition from convenience chains.