John Tedesco

After Reporter Karisa King began writing about the complicated world of tax breaks for housing developers — and how those incentives are being abused — tipsters told her to check out state Rep. Jose Menendez.

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.

Some readers — and government officials — wonder why journalists are so nosy and make such a big deal about getting access to government records. Sure, transparency matters. But why make such a big fuss if an agency wants to withhold e-mails or something. Who cares?

Here are five shining examples of why this pesky-open government thing matters.

Last week, the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas held its annual conference in Austin and announced the winners of the Gavel Awards, which go to journalists who produced stories that shed light on the legal system. A common thread runs through all these stories: They relied extensively on public documents, and uncovered important, previously unknown problems and issues in the community.

So if you think public information isn’t really that big a deal, check out the winning stories:

Steve Thompson and Tanya Eiserer of The Dallas Morning News discovered the Dallas Police Department was under-counting serious crimes, creating the perception that the city was safer than it actually was. The reporters uncovered the story by examining piles of police reports.

Jeremy Roebuck and Jared Janes of the McAllen Monitor relied on public documents to tell the tale of how Hidalgo County was struggling to pay for millions of dollars in indigent defense costs. The reporters discovered the county’s system cost more per capita than any other urban county in Texas.

Leslie Wilber of the Victoria Advocate revealed how an innocent man was jailed for 62 days based on a questionable “scent identification lineup” overseen by a dog handler and his bloodhounds. The obscure law-enforcement technique answers to no laws or regulations and critics call it junk science. But the lineup is still admissible as evidence in court.

Cindy V. Culp of the Waco Tribune-Herald used court data to analyze the track record of a district attorney running for office. The news stories gave voters a clearer picture of a controversy surrounding how many criminal cases were dismissed.

David Schechter and Mark Smith of WFAA-TV uncovered how illegal immigrants who are accused of felonies in the United States — including murder — are routinely deported back to Mexico and set free.

Somebody explain to me again why public information doesn’t matter.

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 wait a second. How is this possible?

I thought reporters are socialists who believe in Big Government. That’s what the Rush Limbaughs of the world claim. U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas even said liberal bias in the media is the greatest threat to America.

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.

(Photo credit: Podknox on Flickr)

Red tape stalls stimulus project in San Antonio

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.

That’s what I did for the fire station grants. It allowed me to write the following graphs in my story about the fire stations:

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.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

My boss David Sheppard, projects editor at the Express-News, asked me to take a look at local stimulus projects in San Antonio to see where the money is going; to make sure that taxpayer dollars are spent appropriately; and to measure the economic impact locally.

Feel free to contact me if you know of any success stories or problems with projects in Bexar County that are funded by Recovery Act money.

If the stimulus program is an issue that interests you, here are links to resources on the Web that I’ve come across. I bookmarked these sites through Diigo and you can click here for more recent pages as I find them.
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Guess where we stayed last week. Here’s a hint:

This, my friends, is South Padre Island, where Jen surfed and baby Pete got to marvel at the ocean for the first time.

But when it was time to go and we tried to catch our Southwest Airlines flight out of Harlingen, a “mechanical issue” delayed our plane before it even arrived at the airport. Once it landed, all the passengers lined up to board. But then we were told the mechanical issue had to be fixed again. The hours dragged by as we entertained Pete and hoped he stayed in a good mood.

When you’re stuck at the airport, it’s a good idea to channel your inner Louis C.K. and remember that long-distance trips used to take weeks or months, not hours. At the same time, it does get annoying when you realize you could probably drive to your destination faster than the time you spent waiting at the airport. And you also wonder exactly how safe your plane is if it’s grounded for a nagging “mechanical issue.”

I asked one of the Southwest attendants what the nature of the mechanical issue was, and he told me it was a hydraulic leak. The mechanic on call was about 30 miles away in Brownsville, and he didn’t even arrive to start fixing the leak until 4:20 p.m., about two hours after our flight was supposed to depart. He drove up in an SUV, talked on his cell phone for about 10 minutes, and started taking apart the left engine:

The chances of getting hurt in a plane crash are very, very low. But if you’ve got nothing to do while a lone mechanic is trying to figure out what’s wrong with the plane that’s about to hurtle you and your family through the sky, there’s a way to pass the time and check the plane’s safety record.

Look for the “N” number near the tail. Here’s a photo of the number on our plane:

With that number, you can visit this website maintained by the National Transportation Safety Board and check a database of reports documenting aviation accidents and incidents. You can search by all kinds of parameters — including the N-number of a particular aircraft.

You never know what you’re going to find when you do these searches. Nearly 10 years ago, an engine on a Continental Airlines jet carrying six Corpus Christi officials malfunctioned and the flight had to make an emergency landing. No one was hurt. I checked the N-number and found the same plane had a similar problem nearly a year earlier. Here’s the top of the Dec. 8, 2000 story I wrote:

A Continental Airlines jet that made an emergency landing after an engine failed Wednesday experienced a similar incident last year in Florida, government records show. No one was injured at the Corpus Christi International Airport when a Boeing MD-80 carrying 65 passengers – including six city officials – made an abrupt emergency landing shortly after one of its engines lost power.

City Council members described hearing loud popping noises from the right side of the aircraft. Jim Nelson, chief of public safety at the airport, said the plane was able to land with its remaining engine.

“We could tell something was wrong,” City Council member Melody Cooper said. “It was really scary. All they told us was they couldn’t fire (the engine) up to full power. I guess we didn’t know enough to scream.”

On March 16, 1999, the same passenger jet had taken off from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida when a “loud bang” was heard during the first few minutes of flight.

The plane’s left engine failed, according to a Federal Aviation Administration incident report, and the pilot circled back for an emergency landing. None of the five crew members and 141 passengers was injured. …

The accident database is an amazing resource. You can search the narrative field of all the incident reports. So you could search for the words “bird” or “birds” if you’re curious how often they cause problems for aircraft. That became an important issue after a flock of birds struck a US Airways flight and forced it to land in the Hudson River.

The N-number can tell you the model of a plane, who owns it, and its age — our plane, not surprisingly, was a Boeing 737, the workhorse of Southwest Airlines. You can also look up Service Difficulty Reports, which document what are usually minor problems. Landings.com also offers access to the same government databases.

In our case, about the craziest thing I could find for our plane was a service difficulty report in 1998 that said the plane had to make an unscheduled landing because of a leaky window. In the accident database, there was no mention of our 737′s N-number, which made me feel better when we finally boarded the flight and made our way home.

Check out this open-records story by Josh Baugh: A Bexar County official wants to sue the attorney general in an effort to withhold e-mails from the San Antonio Express-News — because the official believes the newspaper is biased:

Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson refuses to comply with a Texas attorney general’s ruling that ordered him to release e-mails in his private accounts that contain public information. This week he instructed the Bexar County district attorney’s office to sue the AG.

The San Antonio Express-News submitted an open-records request under the Texas Public Information Act on Feb. 17, seeking all e-mails between Adkisson and grass-roots toll opponent Terri Hall regarding business of Bexar County and the Metropolitan Planning Organization, of which Adkisson is chairman.

The request sought e-mail correspondence from Adkisson’s county-provided e-mail address as well as from two private accounts he maintains. The newspaper is seeking the e-mails because they would offer insight into Adkisson’s management style at the MPO.

The story raises two issues that ought to trouble open-records advocates:

One is that public officials are keenly aware that their government e-mails are public documents, and they are turning to private e-mail accounts to conduct government business.

The other is Adkisson’s explanation for seeking to withhold his e-mails from the newspaper: He believes the Express-News is biased and has a pro-toll road agenda.

Even if Adkisson’s claim were true, the point is irrelevant when it comes to public information. In Texas, a government record is either public, or it isn’t. In order for an agency to withhold a record, it must cite a legal exemption. For example, a section of the Texas Public Information Act says investigative files of law enforcement agencies don’t have to be made public.

The motives of the person requesting the information has no bearing on whether a document is public. In fact, under the law, officials aren’t even supposed to ask why someone wants the information. Otherwise, government officials could withhold everything from the public simply by saying they don’t trust the people asking for the information. Or they could play favorites and give information to preferred journalists and bloggers.

So now the county is going to spend taxpayer money on a legal effort to withhold information from taxpayers. Maybe Josh can find out how much money the county will spend on the case — assuming no one questions his motives for asking.

Constitution of the Mexican Mafia in Texas

Express-News Reporter Guillermo Contreras is covering a federal trial involving the Mexican Mafia, and he wrote about a fascinating court exhibit: The constitution of the Mexican Mafia in Texas.

This document was posted on mySA.com today, and it’s all about setting a strong social structure for the gang:

A democratic vote is needed to approve new members of the Mexican Mafia. The new members must undergo a probationary period of 120 days, and they must be recommended by a sponsoring gang member. The constitution also states: “We all have the right to express opinions, ideals, contradict and criticize constructively.”

“Each member of the Mexikanemi must make the effort to conquer his disabilities; be they pleasure or materials.”

Each member must show respect to each other. “Playing and kidding around among Worthwhiles shall be permitted up to a certain point. Heavy ‘teasing’ of whore, faggot, brown-noser, etc. …. are totally prohibited.”

“Cash bets amongst Worthwhiles with a value of over one pint of ice cream shall be prohibited.”

There are few words that actually describe the criminal activities of the Mexican Mafia. Here they are:

“We shall deal in drugs, contract killings, prostitution, large scale robbery, gambling, weapons, and in everything imaginable.”