If you’re voting today, Josh Baugh explains what Proposition 1 is really about:

In spring 2008, local lobbyist David Earl began touting a plan that he said would simultaneously curtail encroachment on Camp Bullis and relieve gridlock on the far North Side.

Estimated to cost as much as $190 million, the project called for the purchase of buffer zones along the southern edge of Camp Bullis and construction of a major thoroughfare, known as the “East-West Parkway,” connecting Interstate 10 to U.S. 281. But by that fall, the plan seemed to have died because of Earl’s proposal to finance it: the creation of a tax increment reinvestment zone, or TIRZ, which uses increased property tax revenue in the area to fund the construction of infrastructure.

It turned out that the plan’s biggest obstacle was the Texas Constitution, which says TIRZs are for blighted areas. City and county officials said at the time that the proposal didn’t pass constitutional muster because property near Bullis is anything but blighted.

A constitution amendment on the Nov. 3 ballot would tear down that obstacle — and it’s largely Earl’s handiwork.

Related: How developers skirt city codes

Read the fully story here.

(Photo credit: Army Environmental Update)

The post The real story behind Proposition 1 appeared first on John Tedesco.

A team of journalists working for Hearst-owned newspapers and television stations across the country have spent months investigating the little-known but deadly problem of medical errors in the United States. The stories reveal that more people die every year from medical mistakes than car accidents.

At the San Antonio Express-News, Database Editor Kelly Guckian analyzed medical data and Projects Writer Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje wrote this story:

Elbert Eugene “Gene” Riggs Jr. went into Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio for a stomachache.

He ended up dying there — after a feeding tube was inserted into his right lung.

Editor-At-Large Phil Bronstein explains how the project was done:

The idea for the story first came in an informal discussion among reporters and editors from several papers; we were looking at topics to investigate that would have a significant impact on people’s lives. We decided that focusing on the plague of fatal but preventable hospital errors would be a public service.

Our team, which during the course of the project involved over 35 people – and an entire class of graduate journalism students at Columbia University, read thousands of pages of documents, disciplinary files, lawsuits, governmental, medical and other public and private reports.

Related: Four women are in prison for a bizarre case of child abuse. Did they do it?

I like how this kind of enterprise journalism relies on reams of public records to shed light on a tragic problem many people don’t know much about. Hearst also set up a Web site for the stories that includes links to Facebook and Twitter accounts, which is a nice way to open up a dialogue with readers.

The post Dead by mistake: Hearst investigation probes medical errors appeared first on John Tedesco.

An article about false claims of military service is today’s most viewed, e-mailed, and commented-upon story on the San Antonio Express-News’ Web site. But it’s a story that very easily could have gone untold. There were no press conferences announcing it. There were no photo ops for television crews to get their images and soundbites.

Thanks to MacCormack, readers of Sunday’s newspaper now know that Culp isn’t the Army Ranger he claimed to be. Contrary to what he told others, he wasn’t wounded in combat and wasn’t awarded the Purple Heart.

MacCormack does a nice job explaining how common it is for people to embellish or lie about their military service:

Embellishing military records has a long and rich history in the United States, dating at least to the Revolutionary War when a German soldier of fortune gained George Washington’s confidence with false credentials.

Claiming to be having been a key military aide to the King of Prussia but alas, having no papers to prove it, Baron Von Steuben proved to be the exceptional imposter, providing valuable service in training the rag-tag revolutionary army.

But more than two centuries passed before it became a crime to lie about military honors and achievements.

Since passage of the Stolen Valor Act, in 2005, such deceptions are punishable by up to a year in prison, and dozens of fake vets have since been prosecuted. Others have gone to prison for receiving financial and medical benefits based on false claims.

A force behind the new law was B.G. Burkett, an Army veteran of Vietnam who spent more than two decades exposing legions of fake heroes and co-authored the book “Stolen Valor” that documented the phenomenon.

“It wasn’t just post-Vietnam. It’s every single conflict that’s ever occurred. It happened after the Civil War and it’s happening right now in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said of false claims by soldiers.

“The No. 1 reason people do this is low self-esteem. The second you say you are a heroic warrior, people treat you differently,” he said.

MacCormack’s story comes on the heals of a revealing investigation by the Chicago Tribune that found hundreds of people have made bogus claims of receiving medals of valor.

Related: How to contact an investigative reporter in Texas

Most readers thought this was a valuable article. The question is, how can newspapers continue to tell these kinds of stories when newsrooms are shrinking and we’re losing experienced reporters? MacCormack is a veteran reporter and it wasn’t very hard for him to disprove Culp’s war stories. MacCormack is the journalist, after all, who solved the murder mystery of the infamous atheist Madalyn Murray O’hair.

How can the next generation of John MacCormacks keep telling these watchdog stories?

The post Invalid valor: Veteran Brian Culp lied about his military service appeared first on John Tedesco.