Editorial Roundup: Texas
Austin American-Statesman. August 6, 2023.
Editorial: Canceling heat breaks for outdoor workers is cruel
Imagine pounding asphalt shingles onto a roof or digging trenches for new pipes in Texas with a scorching summer sun beating down on you all day. Now imagine doing that strenuous work without regular breaks for water and shade.
That’s the dangerous new reality facing outdoor laborers in Texas on Sept. 1 when a new state law takes effect, nullifying local ordinances requiring heat breaks for certain outdoor workers, including those on construction sites. The Texas Regulatory Consistency Act —derisively dubbed the death star law by critics—will also override local rules protecting tenants from eviction or guaranteeing other employment benefits, as well as a number of city ordinances related to finance, insurance and property codes. The cities of San Antonio and Houston have sued the state, arguing that the law is an unconstitutional intrusion on local rulemaking. Austin, a frequent target of the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature on local control issues, has not joined the lawsuit, deciding to let other cities take the lead.
Nullifying local protections for heat protection is dangerous
State Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Lubbock Republican who introduced the bill Abbott signed in June, says it will rein in a patchwork of local regulations that is difficult and expensive for companies operating in multiple cities to navigate. If that’s the case, the state could provide regulatory consistency and protect workers by mandating heat breaks for construction workers in all cities and counties. There would be no confusion then.
The new state law nullifies local laws in Austin and Dallas requiring 10-minute breaks for water and shade for construction workers. Canceling mandatory water breaks is an unwise and cruel decision that risks human lives and puts profits above safety of the workers who make the profits possible. If the state insists on preempting local ordinances protecting workers from heat-related dangers on the job, the federal government should step in.
We urge the Texas congressional delegation to support the Asuncíon Valdivia Heat Illness, Injury and Fatality Prevention Act, which would require the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration to adopt standards protecting workers in high heat with paid breaks in air-conditioned or shaded spaces, access to water and limitations on time exposed to heat. Toiling in extreme heat without breaks can lead to heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and heatstroke, and aggravate existing problems such as heart disease. As Texans know all too well, prolonged exposure to heat can also lead to death. Fifty-three Texans died of heat-related stress last year, by far the most in the nation.
In July, Texas set a new heat record with 10 straight days above 105 degrees. The month of July was the hottest on record, and the state’s climatologist predicts sweltering summers will become more brutal, with the number of 100-degree-plus days expected to double by 2036.
Supporters of the new state law, including construction industry groups that lobbied hard for its passage, say it doesn’t prevent employers from offering heat breaks—only that they can’t be mandated. They contend that companies that don’t allow for heat breaks won’t be able to recruit and retain employees in Texas’ competitive construction economy.
A safe workspace is a fundamental right
If a patchwork quilt of local laws is an obstacle for businesses, why not create and mandate statewide safety standards for breaks? A safe workplace is a fundamental human right, and the nullification of local ordinances designed to protect outdoor workers from heat-related illness and death in Texas is an egregious breach of this humanitarian principle. Even if it is not by design, repealing local laws mandating water breaks for outdoor workers is discriminatory because it weighs most heavily on minority construction workers. In Texas, Hispanics comprise 61% of the construction labor workforce, the highest percentage of any state in the nation. HB 2127 devalues the humanity of Hispanic workers and the immense contribution they make to Texas’ robust building industry.
Canceling mandatory water breaks in cities is drawing more negative attention to a state already under heavy criticism for its perceived cruelty, including allegedly denying water to distressed migrants trying to navigate the Rio Grande, and not providing air conditioning in state prisons where indoor temperatures routinely soar beyond 110 degrees in summer.
In July, President Biden directed the Department of Labor to increase heat-safety inspections in outdoor workplaces like construction sites and farms, and called out policies that deny workers breaks from the heat.
“I mean what are we doing here? What’s going on with some of this stuff,” Biden said.
Common sense compels us to wonder the same thing. It’s a question that state legislators and the governor would be wise to consider as they crow about Texas’ economic and population growth but deny safety protections to those who help make it a reality.
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Dallas Morning News. August 2, 2023.
Editorial: Texas families and farmers are threatened by Washington gridlock
Farm bill can’t be a victim of congressional malfunction.
In the middle of a heat wave threatening crops in the Texas High Plains, farmers recently met with Sen. John Cornyn in Lubbock to seek additional assistance for the 2023 Farm Bill. Texas farmers are well aware of how extreme weather conditions affect their livelihoods. And planning how food is grown and what kind of food will make it to our kitchen tables in the years to come is essential for the well-being of our country.
The farm bill, a major legislative package that needs to be approved every five years, is set to expire Sept. 30. Debating, refining and passing this reauthorization is the sort of work a functional Congress should be able to do. But we know that isn’t how our government works anymore.
A big problem, but hardly the only one, is that a zealous caucus of Republicans, furious after cuts to a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program were taken out of the debt ceiling bill, see the farm bill as their next best chance to target basic food aid.
That rigid insistence, coupled with Congress’ usual failure to get much of anything done, saw legislators depart for their August recess without getting the bill passed. They will try again in September, with the clock ticking.
That puts a lot at risk. Crop insurance, to take just one example. Last year, farmers lost billions of dollars in the Texas drought. This year is shaping up to be just as bad.
“We know that Mother Nature can be fickle and that so many of these folks depend on that safety net,” Cornyn said, signaling support.
There are many other programs within the bill that are just as important. But the bulk of the Farm Bill is about feeding people through nutrition programs. According to the Congressional Budget Office, those will account for 80% of the upcoming bill’s more than $1 trillion cost over the next 10 years.
Republicans want to expand work requirements for SNAP benefits, previously known as food stamps. If approved, millions of current recipients would be ruled ineligible. The program can be improved, particularly as it relates to the products SNAP funds, with a greater focus on nutritious food. But sharply altering eligibility requirements threatens food availability for potentially millions.
A healthier Congress could debate these matters and actually improve the programs for the benefit of all Americans. Instead, the “kill the bill” crowd is pushing its leverage to the maximum while too little actual negotiation among serious lawmakers is taking place. Politico reports that neither the House nor the Senate has circulated a draft bill.
Democracy can’t work this way.
Farmers waiting for rain in the August drought may have better chances than the people do of getting a well-drafted, well-considered farm bill.
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Fort Worth Star-Telegram. August 4, 2023.
Editorial: Buyer beware: Texas should do more to protect ‘barndo’ customers, regulate builders
The old saying goes: If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is. In Texas, it needs an addendum: Don’t count on the state to help you get your money back.
A number of Texans who wanted to build “barndominiums” to grab a piece of country life at an affordable price have learned this painful lesson. Star-Telegram reporter Jess Hardin recently detailed heartbreaking losses suffered by some would-be barndo buyers who gave builders tens of thousands of dollars in cash, only to be left with an incomplete building, an empty slab or nothing at all.
Buyers often pay cash because banks won’t make loans to construct barndos. So, it’s a classic case of unscrupulous conduct slipping through the cracks of a low-regulation regime. The biggest chasm is the lack of licensing for general contractors, meaning that when a builder messes up or commits fraud, there’s no go-to agency for Texans to seek relief.
The problem is compounded by local prosecutors’ reluctance to pursue these cases as fraud, for understandable reasons: lack of resources, the difficulty of winning a conviction and the fact that business disputes are usually better handled in civil court. And there, even if an owner wins a judgment, they may not be able to find the builder to collect.
It could be mitigated some if the Texas attorney general’s office was functioning properly. The consumer fraud division could do a lot more to protect the state, if we had an attorney general who wasn’t busy saving his own political skin and who was willing to robustly investigate and prosecute bad actors.
Texas has long failed to regulate builders, who have cultivated power through campaign donations. But there’s also understandable reluctance, in a booming state with a deepening housing issue, to do much that would deter home construction.
Regulating general contractors would be a big step, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly. A full-blown licensing requirement might be too much at once. Perhaps lawmakers can do more to encourage builders to carry adequate insurance and bonds against faulty work. Doing more to educate consumers and help them find resources to protect themselves would be a good start, too.
One element that makes the barndominium buyers’ misfortune even more important is that these are just the kind of creative housing solutions that should be encouraged to sustain growth. Not everyone would want to live in a steel structure, but not everyone can afford a full-blown country ranch house, either. With trustworthy actors, ideas such as barndominiums can help fill the gaps.
For now, though, the best advice is: buyer beware. Anytime one pays cash for a project, rather than a bank loan, it’s on the consumer to ensure adequate protections. Be extra vigilant about vetting a contractor. Check references, and if possible, not just the ones the contractor supplies. Get specific details on what will be delivered when, and try not to pay in advance for too much work.
And of course, get the particulars of the deal in writing, and demand that modifications, delays or mishaps be reflected in writing, too.
No one wants to blame the victim of an unscrupulous business person who took advantage. It’s especially sad to see someone who thought they could attain an otherwise unavailable dream home defrauded through no fault of their own. Texas should do more to protect them.
In the meantime, though, we’ll have to do it ourselves.
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Houston Chronicle. August 6, 2023.
Editorial: Is Travis Scott a proud Houston son or profiteer? Astroworld showed us.
Drive through any neighborhood in south Houston on a summer evening and you’re likely to feel the thrum of woozy bass lines vibrating from car stereos. Out of an open window, you’ll hear the sluggish moan of a pitched-down voice rapping in slow motion, a hallmark of “chopped and screwed” hip-hop, a mainstay on the city’s unofficial soundtrack.
As with any transcendent art form, this sound is no longer Houston’s alone. The novelty sub-genre pioneered by DJ Screw while messing with turntables in his apartment, has, over 20 years, been borrowed, bent, broken and even shamelessly stolen by artists across the globe.
Cultural appropriation, homage, or both? It’s a classic question in art, one Travis Scott should be feeling keenly right now.
The Houston rapper’s music, at times, borrows from the native sonic dialect, mimicking the chopped and screwed style as a wink to his local roots growing up in Missouri City. He liberally references Houston iconography on his albums, mixtapes and merchandise, from Astroworld to Frenchy’s Chicken to the Toyota Center. In return, he’s given back to the city through charitable contributions and toy drives. His Cactus Jack Foundation helped build a new basketball court at Sunnyside Park, a community garden at an elementary school, and an art and design center for middle and high school students on the East End. His status as a cultural ambassador was cemented by Mayor Sylvester Turner, who presented Scott with a key to the city in 2019 for “keeping Houston on the map.”
Then, two years ago, Scott’s most significant cultural contribution to Houston — the Astroworld music festival — ended in tragedy.
What was meant to be a tribute to the iconic amusement park Scott frequented as a child descended into a horror show: 10 concertgoers, including a 9-year-old boy, died when a massive crowd surge caused them to black out and suffocate while the star rocked the stage.
What is Scott’s stature among the rich lineage of Houston artists now? Astroworld has yet to return. Civil suits brought by thousands of festival attendees against Scott and concert organizer Live Nation are still pending, and Scott has barely shown his face in Houston since. While he escaped criminal charges for his role in the Astroworld deaths after a grand jury declined to indict him in June, he has yet to achieve public absolution —no matter what his lawyer says.
A 1,200-page Houston Police Department report released on July 28 revealed that Scott may have, in fact, been aware of how unsafe the crowd was while performing, yet did little to stop it, and apparently stood to lose millions of dollars if he did.
HPD investigators interviewed witnesses who directly contradict Scott’s claim in his own police interview that he didn’t know about any of the crowd deaths until after the show. Steve Hupkowizc, a monitor engineer at the festival, told investigators that Scott was informed the concert had taken a deadly turn well before the show’s climax, in which the rapper Drake was brought on stage. Hupkowizc said one of the vocal technicians told Scott: “We need to hurry up and get to the Drake part of the show … three people have died,” a stunning failure to recognize that inviting one of the biggest stars in the world would further amp up an already perilous crowd environment. There was also the financial incentive at play: HPD investigators detailed a contract between Scott and Apple that would have paid him $4.5 million so long as he finished his set.
Whether that incentive factored into Scott’s thinking might never be known, but a statement from his attorney Kent Schaffer did little to assuage the perception that Scott is more concerned with his bottom line than being accountable for his actions. Schaffer accused HPD of attempting to discredit Scott and hurt his record sales by timing the release of the report to coincide with the release of “Utopia.” Schaffer noted that Scott “actively stopped the show” at different points during his set, but stayed on stage throughout. In fact, Scott’s version of a welfare check was asking the crowd if they were good by instructing them to put their middle fingers to the sky. Afterwards, Scott told police he was “dialed in” to his performance, and that the crowd seemed mellow.
These disparate accounts are further muddied by Scott’s music. Those looking for signs of personal or artistic growth on his new album, “Utopia,” will be disappointed.He’s always been more vibe curator than wordsmith, orchestrating baroque, bouncy productions laced with debaucherous and, at times, banal lyrics. His primary artistic function is churning out hits with ear-wormy hooks, and getting people to “rage” — shorthand for some concertgoers’ primal desire to cause destruction while thrashing about in a crowd of thousands.
“Utopia,” his first album in five years, is a messy, brooding body of work projecting an indulgent, robotic emptiness that feels out of touch with reality. Here his superficial lyrics, with hollow boasts about his wealth, fame and sexual exploits, seem to foil any attempt at introspection. The closest thing to a sign of genuine remorse about the Astroworld devastation on the 73-minute long project is on the second verse of the fourth track, “My Eyes.”
Amid droning synths and pattering drums, he raps: “I replay them nights, and right by my side, all I see is a sea of people that ride wit’ me / If they just knew what Scotty would do to jump off the stage and save him a child / The things I created became the most weighted, I gotta find balance and keep me inspired.”
That flicker of vulnerability might be compelling if seconds later he didn’t revert to his materialistic comfort zone: big houses, fast cars and shiny watches.
There is certainly plenty of blame to go around for the Astroworld failures. Neither city nor Harris County officials have passed new standards or regulations to prevent any of the myriad factors that contributed to the 10 deaths from happening again. A task force organized by Gov. Greg Abbott let Live Nation off the hook and basically admonished concert attendees themselves for lacking “collective accountability” for keeping each other safe.
Nobody was expecting a new album or single from Scott to heal the grief of 10 families who lost loved ones at Astroworld. And the time for heroism was long gone. But we thought he’d spend a few verses remembering victims, reflecting, maybe wrestling with the responsibility of his enormous platform, perhaps pushing for change.
When a similar crowd stampede during the band Pearl Jam’s set at a 2000 Danish music festival left nine people dead, the band members didn’t run from their own culpability. They became vocal about making festivals safer and met personally with the victims’ surviving family members. On the 20th anniversary of the disaster, the band issued a heartfelt statement honoring the victims.
That admirable response is probably an outlier, and it’s true that people are still buying Scott’s music regardless.
By some projections, he will score another No. 1 album, with the equivalent of 400,000 album sales when factoring in streaming numbers. Fellow Houston icons such as Beyonce are still collaborating with him. He still benefits from his connection to Houston. But does Houston?
Some of us once viewed Scott’s appropriation of city symbols as a point of pride. Now, one of them, Astroworld, has been forever redefined — memories of carefree thrill-seeking tinged with horror, and dread, and for some families, grief.
We don’t begrudge Scott his success. He’s moving on. That’s what profiteers do. It’s just that, at one point, we thought he was more than that.
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San Antonio Express-News. August 4, 2023.
Editorial: 500,000 Texans and counting have lost Medicaid coverage
Five hundred thousand people.
That’s more than six times the capacity of AT&T Stadium, where the Dallas Cowboys play.
It’s far greater than the population of Corpus Christi.
It’s roughly the number of people who have lost Medicaid coverage in Texas since April, largely for procedural reasons. For each person now lacking health insurance, a potential crisis looms.
How did we get here?
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, federal regulations prevented states from removing people from Medicaid. But after three years, those federal pandemic protections came to a halt in April. States have, in turn, had to determine Medicaid eligibility. Since then Texas has removed around 500,000 people from Medicaid.
As Eleanor Klibanoff recently reported for the Texas Tribune, an initial review found about 95,000 people no longer meet the eligibility requirements for Medicaid, but another 400,000 were removed due to state bureaucratic loopholes, or “procedural reasons,” such as not responding to letters or emails from the state.
In other words, people were removed from Medicaid without the state determining eligibility. That is disturbing, especially since Texas could use third-party data, known as an ex parte process, to determine eligibility.
In a statement about this crisis, the policy nonprofit Texans Care for Children said, “Unfortunately, the Texas data show only 1% of renewals were completed through this process. By contrast, the majority of states are able to use the ex parte process to renew at least 25% of their renewals, and a quarter of states conduct over 50% of renewals through the ex parte process.”
Legislation was introduced in the Texas House this past session to streamline the ex parte process, but, unsurprisingly, it went nowhere in the Texas Senate.
The crisis has set off alarms.
Signing off as “Concerned Texans and Dedicated Employees,” staff from the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, or HHSC, the state agency that manages Medicaid for Texans, recently penned a letter claiming approximately 80,000 eligible people “lost coverage erroneously.”
Nearly half of all children in Texas younger than 19 are covered by Medicaid or CHIP, according to the nonprofit Every Texan.
The potential for coverage loss among children — let alone disabled people, and pregnant and postpartum women — due to bureaucratic red tape is untenable, tragic and an embarrassment. The reality is that when health care needs are ignored, problems fester and costs multiply. Just visit an ER.
“We’re deeply concerned that Texas kids who are still eligible for health insurance — either through Medicaid or another program — are losing their health coverage for bureaucratic reasons and are going to get turned away the next time they walk into a doctor’s appointment,” said Diana Forester, director of Health Policy at Texans Care for Children.
These numbers will worsen. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission will review eligibility for about 5.9 million Medicaid recipients. Rather than plow ahead, Texas should pause the Medicaid disenrollments and then reevaluate the 400,000 people who may have lost coverage for bureaucratic reasons.
Tiffany Young, HHSC spokesperson, told us the agency added staff and increased pay to bolster recruitment and retention efforts to reach clients regarding their renewal process.
But the onslaught of procedural denials signals a problem in the review process or workforce, or both. The agency clearly lacks support since state legislators only provided $111 million of the $143 million it requested to manage Medicaid renewals.
The decrease in health-related spending will take an economic toll. According to a Perryman Group analysis, the 500,000 Texans (and counting) who lost Medicaid coverage through July 28 will cost our state an estimated $13.6 billion in annual gross product and more than 121,200 jobs.
Texas has long had the dubious distinction of leading the nation in the percentage and number of people who are uninsured, but things were improving due to pandemic-era policies. A Georgetown University Center for Children and Families analysis in December found Texas had the worst uninsured rate in the U.S. for children in 2021, but the number of uninsured kids dropped — from 995,000 in 2019 to 930,000 in 2021 — thanks to Medicaid policies during the pandemic.
Now, Texas is once again falling behind.
Texas is one of 10 states to refuse to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though expansion has broad support among Texans and would bring in billions of federal dollars.
The disenrollment crisis again shows Texas has other intentions.
While there are federal requirements to conduct renewal determinations for all Medicaid recipients over a 12-month period, it’s imperative that HHSC’s process is fair. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra has sent a letter to governors encouraging them to be strategic in retaining people on Medicaid.
Health care is a human right, and our state and country’s exorbitant health care costs can have calamitous effects. Texas should pause Medicaid disenrollments and take steps to ensure renewals for those who are eligible. It is the least the state could do.
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