In January, Express-News Reporter Jason Buch profiled Edgar Valdez Villarreal, a U.S. citizen from Laredo who had risen through the ranks of a Mexican drug cartel. In high school, Valdez Villarreal was a jock who got the nickname “Barbie” for his light-colored eyes and hair. Years later in Mexico, he was poised to become a ruthless drug boss.
This week, Valdez Villarreal was arrested in Mexico and NPR featured an interesting interview with Jason yesterday about Villarreal. You can hear a Mexican ballad that extols the virtues of the drug lord, and how he’s such an intelligent businessman. Great stuff.
Karisa did. And what she found out was published on the front page of last Sunday’s San Antonio Express-News:
After the development firm NRP Group LLC lost its second bid for tax credits to finance an affordable-housing project on the city’s West Side, an influential ally intervened in the company’s cause.
State Rep. Jose Menendez took the lectern at the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs and urged board members to fund the San Juan Square II project, a 144-unit apartment complex that would replace blighted public housing. …
What Menendez did not tell the board at the meeting was that the development represented something else: a financial boon for the company he works for, Stewart Title, which had received $91,000 for issuing title insurance on the project’s first stage, and landed nearly all of NRP’s business on affordable-housing deals.
Payouts from the San Juan developments were among about $1.8 million paid to Stewart Title from NRP housing deals since 2003, records show.
Since joining the Legislature in 2000, Menendez has been one of the most outspoken supporters of NRP and other developers in the affordable-housing sector.
At the same time, the San Antonio Democrat has ascended the ranks of Stewart Title to become vice president for commercial development in the company’s national division.
Karisa said she spent six weeks working on the story about Menendez.
It was easy to confirm that he worked for Stewart Title. But his ties to the company raised a hard-to-answer question: How much money did Stewart Title make from the housing deals? That’s not something you can answer by Googling it.
Sometimes journalism is simply the act of quantifying something. You might know the broad outlines of a story very early in the reporting process, but you have to figure out how to fill in the gaps.
If you’ve ever bought a house, you know real-estate transactions churn out tons of paperwork. Normally most of those records are private. But because tax breaks were involved in the housing deals Karisa was looking at, the real estate records were considered public information, open to anyone who asked.
Karisa found the fees paid to Stewart Title by driving to Austin and reading the records for housing projects that receive tax breaks, which are filed at the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs in Austin. “I spent two days just going through boxes and boxes of documents,” Karisa said.
As she read through the files, Karisa typed key information such as the title fees into a simple Excel spreadsheet. After days of work, she was able to add up the fees for each housing project: A grand total of $1.8 million in title fees were paid to Stewart Title.
What did Mendendez have to say about that? Check out the whole story, it’s a great read.
The biggest single stimulus project scheduled to be built in Bexar County is a new highway interchange between traffic-clogged Loop 1604 and U.S. 281 on San Antonio’s far North Side. The project is estimated to cost $130 million, with $80 million coming from federal stimulus funds that must be spent by 2015.
But the site sits on the environmentally sensitive Edwards Aquifer recharge zone, the primary source of San Antonio’s drinking supply — and the source of San Antonio’s fiercest debates about pollution from urban sprawl tainting the aquifer.
In a way, it’s history repeating itself. The highway intersection was the site of one of the very first controversies involving the aquifer, when developers in the 1970s wanted to build a “super mall” near the location that sparked a petition and referendum by concerned residents who tried to halt the development.
Construction workers on the River Walk's Mission Reach
Our latest story about the stimulus is about how much federal money is flowing to Bexar County, what kind of projects are being funded, and what will the lasting impact be?
Stimulus money is fixing headstones at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery, building new playgrounds, painting buildings at Lackland AFB, paying for 50 new police officers and reshaping the San Antonio River.
It’s funding high-profile projects that will benefit future generations — and paying for obscure work that hardly will be noticed.
Sometimes, it feels like the biggest beneficiaries of the Recovery Act are companies that make the outlandishly sized checks for ribbon-cuttings, where politicians frequently take credit for stimulus projects.
But behind the photo ops are a large number of companies, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations that were awarded 775 grants and contracts in Bexar County worth more than $850 million, according to spending reports released last week by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. Another $60 million in stimulus money is being loaned to local businesses.
We’ve been spending a few months examining the local impact of the Recovery Act — past stories are here and here. I’ve also been bookmarking useful resources through Diigo — feel free to check out my real-time list of handy websites.
For the latest story, we mostly relied on data you can download directly from Recovery.gov, the website of the Recovery Board. The data doesn’t have a “county” category, but you can match the zip code of each award with the zip codes of your county. If you’re simply interested in seeing what kind of stimulus projects are being funded in your county or neighborhood, the Recovery Board offers an interactive map that lets you drill down to the street level. Each stimulus project shows up as a dot — click on it to learn more details.
Last week, Republican Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn released “Summertime Blues,” a report listing what they say are the top 100 wasteful stimulus projects across the United States.
There’s an interesting pattern buried in the 583 footnotes at the end of the report: More than 200 citations rely on stories published by news organizations. Many of the examples of questionable spending were first made public in news articles — including one by yours truly.
But if they’re right, why are journalists spending so much time uncovering examples of wasteful government spending, publicizing the details, and holding officials accountable?
Think about it. You can pick up a newspaper anywhere in the country and chances are, there’s a story about some taxpayer-financed boondoggle. And if you’re not reading it in a newspaper, you’re probably watching the story on TV, or reading it online in one of the countless investigative Internet sites that are sprouting up.
The journalists I work with are obsessed with this watchdog thing, and it gets annoying after awhile. They totally forget how we’re supposed to be liberal radicals. A reporter might be talking to me about the nuances of the Texas Public Information Act, and I’ll be like, “Dude, I’m just here for the free Che Guevara T-shirt.”
Memo to my bosses: I have yet to get my T-shirt, please get on that.
Some people might say the critics who get worked up about liberal media bias conveniently ignore all the investigative stories that poke a gaping hole in their claims.
I, for one, would never say that. It’s so much more fun to be part of a vast liberal media conspiracy.
A week ago, Jenny LaCoste-Caputo wrote a front-page story about Holy Cross High School, and how it withheld diplomas from students who owed thousands of dollars in tuition.
This week, Jenny is on her way to a new job in a new city. She’s leaving behind the news business and all its uncertainty.
“It was getting scary,” Jenny said, referring to round-after-round of lay offs in the turbulent media industry. “We got two little kids.”
When a journalist leaves journalism, it’s easy for the bean counters to figure out how much money is saved in pay and benefits. But it’s difficult to calculate the lost impact of all the great stories that will probably go untold by a single talented reporter.
Jenny covered the education beat. She first learned of the problems at Holy Cross in May through a tip. She began talking to “as many people as possible” to vet the complaints about Holy Cross, and she went back and interviewed families to make sure they didn’t change their stories. The didn’t. “It’s not like we took things at face value,” Jenny said.
Here’s the top of the long article Jenny wrote after weeks of work:
For Sylvia Flores, a private school voucher seemed like a winning lottery ticket.
Flores lives in Edgewood Independent School District but desperately wanted a Catholic education for her son, Luis Flores.
It was a dream that was out of reach until she heard about a voucher program funded by San Antonio businessman James Leininger, who spent 10 years and $50 million of his fortune bankrolling a political idea that never caught hold in Texas.
When the voucher program ended after her son’s sophomore year at Holy Cross of San Antonio, Flores was left with a gut-wrenching reality: She couldn’t afford the school Luis loved. But she said that when she opted for public school, Holy Cross’ principal urged her to stay, offering tuition assistance and opportunities to work off the $5,100 in annual tuition.
Ultimately, staying cost Luis his diploma and left Flores with a bill of nearly $10,000 she didn’t expect.
Four families whose children were scheduled to graduate from Holy Cross this year told the San Antonio Express-News that the school’s administration encouraged them and others to remain at the school despite mounting bills, promising help with tuition. But in the second half of the students’ senior year, school officials told the families they would have to pay their tuition bill in full if they wanted their children to graduate. The bills ranged from $6,300 to nearly $14,000.
A teaser for the story was posted online and it generated more than 100 comments before the full article was even published. One thing Jenny learned is that several of the students were athletes, and Holy Cross didn’t raise concerns about their tuition until the sports seasons were over.
“In almost every case, that was what happened,” Jenny said.
Caputo
Express-News Editor Bob Rivard mentioned the Holy Cross story in a newsroom meeting Thursday, where we all said farewell to Jenny and three other journalists who are moving on to other jobs or going back to school.
Reporter Elizabeth Allen also left the paper, and the conversation at the meeting turned to the memorable reporters like Elizabeth who came to the Express-News after covering news in the Rio Grande Valley. Maro Robbins, Jeanne Russell, Bonnie Pfister … they all wrote outstanding stories. And they’ve all left the news business. It’s sobering to think of all the great stories that are going untold in San Antonio. Not to sound like Donald Rumsfeld, but we don’t even know what we don’t know we’re missing.
Bob said as much during the meeting. While some news executives claim we can do less with more, Bob said he didn’t buy that.
“Make no mistake,” Bob told the departing journalists last week, “by losing you, we are diminished.”
In the age of Facebook and Twitter, you could argue that even though we’re losing some talented voices in the media, in the long run it’s OK because the Internet allows all of us to tell stories. But that argument doesn’t take into account the quality of the stories. Jenny’s article was rich with telling details, which she dug up during weeks of work. That kind of time is a luxury for most bloggers. And that kind of depth is a far cry from a rant on Facebook.
Jenny’s husband, Anton, had covered the environmental beat at the Express-News, and led our coverage of the controversy surrounding the proposed expansion of the nuclear power plant in Bay City, Texas. Anton got a job in Austin and left journalism — and Jenny’s doing the same, working for the Texas Association of School Administrators.
“I’m glad I’m going out on a high note with a story that made some impact,” Jenny said.
I was on vacation last week and didn’t have a chance to post my latest story about the federal stimulus program and how it’s playing out in Bexar County. San Antonio’s weatherization program is behind schedule, and officials blamed the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs. Tracy Idell Hamilton wrote a follow up story last week and officials assured her they were ironing out their differences.
We’ve been looking at various stimulus projects locally. If you have any success stories or concerns about specific programs, feel free to contact me. You can also check out useful links about the Recovery Act through a real-time list I published on my Diigo account.
What is it about hurricanes that prompt TV reporters to broadcast live in the wind and rain? It’s like there’s an unwritten rule that they have to make a spectacle of themselves. Wouldn’t it be nice if reporters didn’t become the center of the story, and simply show us what was going on when Hurricane Alex made landfall?
I’m a big fan of these kinds of online videos, where the reporter is unobtrusively giving viewers a sense of place. For some stories, like a hurricane making landfall, the news article and the news video can compliment each other nicely.
We’ve been checking how stimulus funds are being spent in Bexar County, and one of the interesting things we’ve learned is how money for some projects still hasn’t been spent, more than a year after the Recovery Act became law.
Last month I met Peter Zanoni, assistant city manager for the city of San Antonio who’s in charge of the city’s stimulus projects. He and his staff said the stimulus is great for San Antonio but they were also open about some of the difficulties they faced. At one point, Zanoni showed me a chart detailing how the city had been awarded $118 million in stimulus money. But as of April, the city had only spent about a tenth of that — $12 million.
“So you’re probably saying, ‘Jeez, what are you guys doing? That’s pretty weak,’” Zanoni quipped.
The problem is that officials want to spend the money quickly, but they also want to make sure it’s spent appropriately. There’s a ton of federal oversight — audits, reviews, paperwork — that the city must deal with.
I ended up focusing on an example of a project that was mired in red tape. The city had plans for two fire stations that were “shovel ready” and had received $7.3 million in stimulus grants. The money came from FEMA — the Federal Emergency Management Agency. I got a tip that the project was taking forever and the contractor on the job, Bartlett Cocke, even had to lay off a few employees.
Not quite what the stimulus program was supposed to be accomplishing.
The tip turned out to be true — I interviewed Kirk Kistner at Bartlett Cocke who confirmed it. I also asked for any e-mails from the city that discussed the delays with the fire stations and other stimulus projects. It’s important in these kinds of stories to track down pertinent documents. Tad Wille, budget program analysis manager for the city who somehow keeps track of all the paperwork tied to stimulus projects, was very helpful in compiling a pile of e-mails discussing the delays.
In one message, a deputy fire chief updated his bosses about the federal regulations that were slowing down the project: “FEMA stated to me that ‘shovel ready’ was not a term in their lexicon,” the chief wrote. The e-mails helped lay out the timeline of events and revealed concerns expressed privately by city officials.
One thing I wanted to know is whether other fire departments were experiencing similar delays with these fire station grants. Federal data allowed us to answer that question.
Recipients of stimulus dollars file spending reports, and that data is posted online at Recovery.gov, the official website of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. In the data, each type of grant is identified by a specific code. So you can filter the data by that code to find who has received similar grants.
According to the most recent spending reports posted online by the Recovery Board, 118 fire departments in the United States had been awarded nearly $200 million in grant money to build new stations. But four of five recipients reported the projects have yet to start, and few jobs have been created.
The reasons for the delays aren’t always FEMA’s fault. In the town of Edgewater, Fla., the station still is being designed, so a detailed environmental assessment required by FEMA didn’t interfere with construction, Fire Captain Jill Danigel said.
“That process did take us many, many months,” Danigel said. “If we were shovel ready, that would have held us up.”
In Valley Hill, N.C., Fire Chief Tim Garren said he’s in the “same boat” as the San Antonio Fire Department.
“We’re as shovel ready as can be,” said Garren, whose department received a $640,000 grant in September 2009 to build a new station. Garren still is waiting for the environmental assessment at the site to be approved.
“I don’t want to fuss because it’s going to be free money, and it’s greatly needed,” Garren said. “But it’s still frustrating.”
We plan to run more stories about local stimulus projects and their impact in Bexar County. I’ve been bookmarking interesting websites about the stimulus and sharing them online through Diigo, feel free to check them out and offer recommendations or tips.
Hand it to Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson — his feud with the Texas Attorney General and the San Antonio Express-News is, at the very least, exposing a flaw in the state’s open-records law.
Adkisson doesn’t want to release private e-mails in which he discussed public business. The attorney general’s office told him he has to release the e-mails. However, there’s an important caveat: Adkisson is the one who’s responsible for identifying the e-mails that pertain to the public’s business.
Adkisson. The guy who doesn’t want to give up any e-mails. He’s the one who’s supposed to go through his Hotmail account or whatever and turn over copies of e-mails that can be deleted with a mouse click.
In related news, a public interest group, the Corrupt Regime of Associated Politicians (C.R.A.P.) announced today that they’ll be conducting all business on Yahoo! e-mail accounts.
Last week, Republican Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn released “
