John Tedesco

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.

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.

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.

A few months ago reporter Karisa King got a tip that Michael Amezquita’s job was in danger. Amezquita is the chief appraiser for the Bexar County Appraisal District, the agency that appraises the value of all property in the county, which affects the tax bills of landowners.

Except not all landowners pay property taxes. Case in point: Some nonprofit housing developers get tax breaks under a program to provide affordable housing to the poor.

Amezquita claimed some developers weren’t fulfilling their end of the bargain. “They rent to poor people, but they’re not giving them a break in the rent,” Amezquita said. He revoked the tax exemption status for 42 housing developments, sparking an outcry from developers who claimed Amezquita was out of line. Some board members of the appraisal district sided with the developers.

Karisa’s first story about the conflict ran in April. It was a good primer on the controversy, but Karisa didn’t have much information about the housing developers benefiting from the tax exemptions.

“That begged the question, what’s going on with these housing groups?” Karisa told me when I asked her how she got involved in the story.

So for the next eight weeks, Karisa dived into the arcane world of government housing programs for the poor. The results of what she learned appeared on Sunday’s front page this week: A nonprofit organization called American Opportunity had applied for the most exemptions last year in Bexar County — 22 apartment complexes that could save $4.8 million in taxes in return for providing affordable rent for poor families.

But Karisa learned that Texas sets no caps on the amount of rent that can be charged. She learned American Opportunity, chaired by developer David Starr, was often charging families rents that were higher than they could afford:

To meet financing requirements for some properties, American Opportunity rents to many low-income families. But the state law that created the exemption imposed no rent limits, allowing the group to charge more than fair-market rent and caps used in other affordable housing programs.

Loopholes in state laws and a lack of oversight mean nonprofit groups can exploit the tax incentive without providing housing that is affordable for low-income people.

Struggling families paid as much as $1,040 a month in rent last year for a three-bedroom apartment. For some, making the rent means skimping on groceries, turning off the air conditioning and pinching other basic needs, the kind of hardship that affordable housing is supposed to relieve.

Meanwhile, American Opportunity paid $1.1 million to private companies run by Starr and his family in 2008.

“I learned a whole lot about the world of affordable housing,” Karisa said. “How important it is when lawmakers create these kinds of exemptions to tie it to some kind of test — something that allows you to test whether or not there’s a real public benefit that’s gained.”

For students, bloggers and journalists who look into a complicated topic like this, Karisa said the best thing to do is figure out what kind of documentation exists and then get your hands on it. In this case, Karisa wanted to find out if low-income tenants were truly paying affordable rents. She learned about public reports that showed many tenants were actually paying market-rate rents.

“I totally would not have had any story if there hadn’t been those records,” Karisa said. “It hinges on the documentation.”

One of the cool features of Bexar County’s digital archive is that you can do crazy keyword searches for people like “David Crockett” and other historic figures in San Antonio to discover deeds and other public records filed in their name. Some of these records document important events in the city’s history.

Out of curiosity, I ran a search for “Daughters of the Republic of Texas” and sorted the results by date to look for deeds filed in 1905, when the nonprofit group became the custodians of the Alamo.

I found this deed describing how the Daughters, with the financial help of Texas lawmakers and wealthy benefactor Clara Driscoll, had paid $75,000 to the merchants who owned the Long Barrack on the Alamo grounds. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $1.8 million in today’s dollars.

The deed says the Daughters were incorporated for “the patriotic purpose of acquiring historic ground and perpetuating the memory and spirit of the men and women who achieved and maintained the independence of Texas and cherishing and preserving the unity of Texas.” The deed describes how the Daughters released the property to the state of Texas. The state owns the Alamo; the Daughters take care of it.

If you’re a history buff, you could enjoy hours of nerdy fun finding these kinds of primary documents.

Notice how this record is just a piece of the story. Clara Driscoll helped save the Alamo’s Long Barrack by opening her pocketbook, so her name is in the deed. But there’s no mention of Adina De Zavala, who persuaded Driscoll to join the cause of preserving the Alamo, and later famously clashed with Driscoll about what to do with it.

For tips about looking up historical records on the county’s Web site, there’s a FAQ page that offers search tips, and I blogged here about some pointers.

Thanks for the great feedback about the history of my 85-year-old house. Brian Chasnoff told me he spent an hour looking up records for his own house. But Brian and another blog visitor who e-mailed me said they had trouble using Bexar County’s Web page set up by County Clerk Gerry Rickhoff to look up public records. Here are a few tips to get started.

When you visit the site, you have to register for free. Once that’s done you can log in and you’ll see this intro page:

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The old but well-constructed houses in my neighborhood near Woodlawn Lake have always interested me. The homes are all different — my house is stucco, while my neighbor’s house is brick. But they share stylistic touches, like the tiny octangular bathroom tiles, the smooth fireplaces, and the phone nooks built in the walls. There must have been a skilled builder who constructed a wide variety of homes in my neighborhood that all bore his subtle signature.

My cousin and his girlfriend were in town this weekend. (This is my cousin — John Gronbeck-Tedesco. The Tedesco clan calls him “Primo.”) While I schooled them in a game of Texas hold ‘em, we talked about the neighborhood, which was developed in the 1920s. I mentioned we can look up the historic deeds to the properties on the county’s Web site. Bexar County Clerk Gerry Rickhoff set up a free, searchable archive of digitized public records that go back to the 1800s.

This morning Primo and I hopped online and we found a pdf of the original deed to my house, written in 1925. The home was sold by Busby Building Corp. to G.A. Wiegand:

Someone named L.S. Busby owned Busby Building Corp., so he’s the guy who built my cool house. Or at least he bossed around the people who built it. We found other deeds with his name on other properties around here. Busby was most likely the person who put his personal touch on this unique neighborhood.

The deed states that Wiegand paid Busby’s company $2,857.95 in cash up front. It looks like Wiegand also got a loan of $5,142.05 for the house. $142.05 went to the Uvalde Rock Asphalt Co. to pay for the construction of the street — West Summit. The remaining $5,000 of the loan was to be repaid at 8 percent interest.

So the price tag of the house and property came out to $8,142.05. That doesn’t sound like a lot. But when you adjust that amount for inflation, it’s nearly $100,000 in today’s dollars. This was a nice neighborhood — one of the first suburbs of San Antonio.

If you know San Antonio, then you know that historically, the city grew along racial lines. Most black residents lived on the East Side. Most Hispanic residents lived on the South and West side. And most White residents lived on the North side.

This pattern didn’t occur by accident, as the 1925 deed to my house shows:

There’s a deed restriction that says the homeowner is prohibited from selling or leasing the house to black people. The deed goes on to say that if this prohibition is violated, the owner can lose the house.

I was aware racial deed restrictions were the norm back then. It’s mind-blowing to read it in black-and-white in a deed tied to a property I own today.

Primo got his doctorate in American Studies and he told me about a 1948 Supreme Court case that ended deed restrictions based on race: Shelley v. Kraemer. The lawyer who won the case? Thurgood Marshall.

Reporter Karisa King wrote a story published Sunday that revealed state Rep. David Leibowitz, D-San Antonio, is accused of defaulting on $5.5 million in debt. Aside from being an interesting read (Leibowitz denies owing that much money), the story is a good example of the power of public documents. If you’re writing the same kind of story or blog post and need to check someone’s financial track record, a good place to start is your local courthouse. You can search online and even download scanned images of the actual documents, often for free.

For federal courts, which include bankruptcy cases, the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts set up Pacer, where you can search for free and, in many cases, download court records for a small fee.

In San Antonio, the Bexar County District Clerk offers a “litigant inquiry” on its Web page, where you can type in someone’s name and see if they have ever been sued. The county’s law firm sues people and companies that fail to pay property taxes. If you find any cases that look interesting on the Web site, you have to go to the courthouse to the clerk’s office on the second floor to read the actual case file. The clerk’s office has recently started digitally scanning filings, so hopefully those documents will be posted online like Pacer.

To find tax liens, judgments and other records filed at the courthouse, you can use an amazing, free site set up by County Clerk Gerry Rickhoff. After registering, you can search and download a wide variety of records. A search for “Leibowitz” on the site found numerous hits for the Texas lawmaker, including three federal tax liens here and here and here. The most recent one was filed in 2007.

When I first started out as a reporter in 1997, you had to trek down to the courthouse, figure out the county’s antiquated computer system, and ask someone to pull the physical records. Today, parts of the county’s computer system are still antiquated, but you can still find and download many types of records on the Internet in minutes. Pretty amazing.

(Photo credit: Zereshk)

Express-News Reporter Guillermo Contreras has been covering an unusual scandal at the Bexar County courthouse: Thousands of stolen airline tickets were sold at a discount to county employees — including judges and other public officials:

What happens in Las Vegas may stay in Vegas, but how you got there apparently doesn’t — at least not at the Bexar County Courthouse.

Between 2002 and 2005, courthouse regulars took trips to Sin City and to several other cities that Southwest Airlines flies.

As people around the courthouse heard how little was paid for airfare — $120 per roundtrip ticket — demand spread like wildfire, according to testimony in the federal trial dealing with 5,600 tickets stolen from Southwest by one of its former employees, Althea Jackson.

Soon, more people were going to a pair of courthouse sources for tickets: then-sheriff’s Deputy Mark Kedrowski, who ran a travel agency on the side, and the main ticket provider, Jackson’s husband, ex-Bailiff James Jackson.

One cool thing about Guillermo’s coverage is a database he obtained of the ticket sales, which the Express-News posted online. It gives you an idea of the sheer scale of this ticket-selling operation. You can also look up the public officials who bought tickets. For example, you can see that District Attorney Susan Reed went on three trips with a market value of about $570 apiece. The database shows the exact date of the trips and the destinations.

This is definitely one of the more unique databases I’ve ever seen.

Texas relies heavily on property taxes to raise revenue, and homeowners have a right to protest the appraised value of their land set by county officials. The lower the appraisal, the lower the tax bill.

Express-News Reporter Karisa King has been examining a county database that tracks protests filed by homeowners. She obtained the data through a request under the Texas Public Information Act.

Her first story showed how wealthy homeowners were more likely to protest their property appraisals. In today’s front-page story, she focused on how some homeowners take advantage of agricultural exemptions to drastically lower the value of their land. Karisa found an unusual example of such a case:

About 20 minutes north of downtown, a tall stone wall obscures the view of a 23,000-square-foot mansion that sits on about 30 acres of prime land.

Like many other owners of upscale homes in Bexar County, Robert and Sandora Kolitz, who built a multimillion-dollar luxury compound on Bitters Road, have fought to lower their property taxes. But they’ve had unusual success. This year, they slashed roughly $50,000 from their $236,000 tax bill. It’s a benefit they’re now entitled to receive every year.

The key to their savings: miniature donkeys.

The small herd of about 18 donkeys allows the Kolitzes to claim an agricultural valuation on most of their land, which drops the taxable value of the parcel from about $2.2 million to $2,350.

In other words, the agricultural designation means the home and land, which are listed as having a total market value of $10.6 million, are assessed at $8.4 million.

The property is one of the most costly and contentious homes in Bexar County.

The Express-News posted the Bexar County database of appraisal protests on its Web site. You can search the data yourself, and look up who exactly has protested their property appraisal, the value of their property, and how much their appraisal was lowered.

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmarkham)