The Twinkie is dead, long live the Twinkie

Hostess, the Irving-based maker of "Twinkies," is going out of business, reported AP. See more background on the company's demise. Though I ate their products as a kid, today I can't think of a thing these folks make that I'd miss if their products were taken off the shelves. From what I read, it sounds like company management pretty much brought this on themselves. I'm sorry for the 18,500 workers nationwide who might lose their jobs, and I don't think anytime soon that the word "Twinkie" will exit the American lexicon. But wouldn't be sorry to see Twinkies and their ilk exit the American diet.

R.I.P. Darrell Royal 1924-2012

My father passed along this tribute. Though his three national championships came a decade prior, I'll always remember him paired with hometown hero Earl Campbell, as depicted here:

Last time I saw Earl, regrettably, he was nearly as decrepit as Coach Royal. Sad news.

Howdy, folks!

A depressing image for any Texan:

Via the Dallas Morning News

I won't mind seeing the old fellow get a modernizing makeover, but what a surreal event!

Badminton suspensions place wrongly blame players for incentives created by Olympic officials

There's a stench of hypocrisy surrounding the decision by the International Olympic Committee to suspend eight badminton players yesterday for tanking matches to manipulate who they would face in the seedings. (See Washington Post coverage.)

By contrast, the Japanexe soccer (football) team will rest four or five of their starting players in its game today against Honduras, I heard on NBC, because they're already won enough to be guaranteed a slot in the elimination rounds. NBC color announcer and former Olympian Cobi Jones predicted a Honduran upset as a result. Similarly, yesterday I watched an Australian boxer who had clearly dominated the first two rounds of a fight get on his bicycle and avoid significant punching exchanges with his opponent throughout Round Three.

How are these episodes any different from the athletes who tanked badminton matches? (And if you don't think badminton players are athletes, you haven't seen the game played at the highest levels.) IMO the blame lies not with the athletes, who're only responding to the incentives created by those who set up the event. If you want everyone to try hard every game, make them all elimination matches. But don't blame players for maximizing their chances to win a medal under the rules, which is all that happened here. Don't like it? Change the rules.

How long does it take to ...

This interesting list of options popped up on Google when I began a search query with "How long does it take to ...":

• boil an egg
• get to the moon
• get a passport
• digest food
• get pregnant
• get to mars
• walk a mile
• bake a potato
• hard boil an egg
• buy a house

As it happens, none of those items coincided with my own query, but I thought it was a particularly odd list. Not what I would have expected.

Watching TV, movies from across the Pacific

Kathy and I lately have been watching quite a bit of subtitled Asian TV and movies on Netflix and ran across - arguably, in my opinion - perhaps the greatest (if a quirky and unusual) love story I've ever seen portrayed on film: Castaway on the Moon, written and directed by Hey-Jun Lee. A genius plot, quite well done. Not just every scene but nearly every shot was masterful, emotionally compelling with high impact. It won awards in Asia but I hadn't heard of it: Top-notch stuff. I understand John Waters may be making an American version, but I couldn't recommend the Korean one more highly. Hard to say if the concept will translate.

We also tapped into a recent Korean TV series based on an old Asian cartoon hero called City Hunter, which told the story of an over-the-top revenge plot fulfilled (often against his will) by the son of a man murdered by his government on a secret spy mission against North Korea. The show was fun and compelling as a fan, with each episode ending on 24-style cliffhangers without quite the hokiness of some American thrillers. And the plot was different from most everything on American TV, exciting, provocative, and unexpected, if at moments a bit too sentimental for US tastes.

After watching City Hunter, the missus looked up other stuff done by the same lead actor, which led to a goofy but fun show called Boys over Flowers, which was apparently quite popular in Korea and throughout Asia in 2009. This show is mainly about the pretty boys and their clothes at an elite school where billionaires' kids call the shots and, with the exception of the female lead, the role of female characters is to drool and fawn over the four (admittedly spectacularly pretty) male leads while engaging in catty (sometimes violent) attacks on the heroine. Kathy calls the show "eye candy." So far (we're just a half-dozen or so episodes in), it's barely maintaining my interest, though as a teen love story it's pretty tame by western standards, and a little sappy. Still, the over-the-top class-war laden high-school drama and the always spectacular visuals (it's really made me want to visit Korea) are worth enduring the sappy teenage angst and constant glamor shots. For both City Hunter and Boys Over Flowers, I definitely wish the translations were better.

I should also mention a Chinese movie, King of Masks, which featured the most brilliant performance by a child actress (Renying Zhou) I've ever witnessed: Like watching Jodi Foster's child performances, except arguably with even more nuance and emotional control. How this movie failed to compete for awards in the west is beyond me: It was brilliantly conceived, directed and acted. The ending was a tad sentimental, but for American audiences it would actually seem understated given the happy-ending goop sold to audiences here all the time.

We ran across King of Masks by identifying other movies including the actors from Farewell My Concubine, which received more favorable attention in the west than the other movies described here. Farewell My Concubine is a brilliant, epic film depicting the dark interior world of Chinese opera, particularly for children raised in that glorious but brutal tradition, not to mention the absolute awfulness of the Cultural Revolution and its treatment of artists. (The "concubine" in that movie plays a cross-dressing opera star in King of Masks.) Good stuff.

We've enjoyed two excellent Taiwanese movies during this stretch: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, and Eat Drink Man Woman. These are two very different movies but both focused on the personal lives of women in different eras. The former is set in the 19th century and tells the story of two women bound through decades of personal and political turmoil, while the latter depicts three sisters and their food-centered relationship with their father, an aging master chef. I enjoyed both of them tremendously.

Finally, we've watched two of three parts in the Japanese trilogy, The Human Condition (1959-'61), and are awaiting the third. Some critics have called The Human Condition the greatest movie ever made in any language; they're not far off, certainly for its era. The movie was perhaps the first time the Japanese people confronted in artistic form their nation's brutal totalitarian actions on mainland China during World War II and the implications for their society's ability to integrate into a modern world that respected instead of disregarded values of humanism. Netflix didn't have this one streaming but you can order each part separately through their mail service. So it takes a while to watch it but it's worth the wait.

I'm not sure how much of a market there is in the US for subtitled TV, but the quality of these offerings have been high. I've enjoyed our brief foray into Asian TV and cinema.

The Mystery of the Lost Library of Congress

This is simply bad-ass, and the Law Librarian blog is right that the story is ripe for inclusion in Nicholas Cage's National Treasure franchise: The Library of Congress' blog has a post on the mysterious disappearance of the contents of the first Library of Congress, most of which was supposedly evacuated prior to the British occupation of Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812. At the time, the Library of Congress was a collection of around 3,000 books but more importantly a collection of priceless historical papers dating to the founding of the republic. The official telling focuses on the books, which were replaced with Thomas Jefferson's private collection, according to the official Librarians of Congress blog:

Less than a month after the fire, Thomas Jefferson came forward and proposed that the United States purchase his collection of 6,487 books to replace the library that was lost. Congress eventually agreed to the purchase, although not without controversy; and in 1815 Jefferson’s library became the foundation of the modern collection of the Library of Congress.

The papers, though, were the bigger loss, and it appears they (and most of the books) were not burned in the fire in Washington but removed before the British invasion and stashed nine miles away, according to a later report to Congress. Here's how the Library of Congress blog retells the tale:

What is rarely remembered, however, is that in the immediate aftermath of the fire, there were conflicting reports about the extent of the damage that was inflicted on the original collection. Writing in 1905, Library of Congress historian William Dawson Johnston cited documents preserved in the Annals of Congress that indicate that much of the first library had in fact been preserved.

The Annals of Congress for September 22, 1814, for example, contains a letter written by the staff members of the Library who were assigned the task of removing the collection to safety in the days before the invasion of Washington: S. Burch (who was furloughed from his post in the militia on August 22 – two days before the fire – so that he might resume his duties at the Library) and the Under-Librarian of Congress, J.T. Frost (who was too old for militia duty). These were the only staff members involved in the evacuation of the Library. The letter was their report to the Librarian of Congress, Patrick Magruder, about the events at the Library leading up to the fire. They write:

“[On Monday, August 22] We immediately went to packing up, and Mr. Burch went out in search of wagons or other carriages, for the transportation of the books and papers; every wagon, and almost every cart, belonging to the city, had been previously impressed into the service of the United States, for the transportation of the baggage of the army; the few he was able to find were loaded with the private effects of individuals, who were moving without the city; those he attempted to hire, but not succeeding, he claimed a right to impress them; but, having no legal authority, or military force to aid him, he, of course, did not succeed. He sent off three messengers into the country, one of whom obtained from Mr. John Wilson, whose residence is six miles from the city, the use of a cart and four oxen; it did not arrive at the office, until after dark on Monday night, when it was immediately laden with the most valuable records and papers, which were taken, on the same night, nine miles, to a safe and secret place in the country. We continued to remove as many of the most valuable books and papers, having removed the manuscript records, as we were able to do with our one cart, until the morning of the day of the battle of Bladensburg, after which we were unable to take away anything further.”

Thus far: two oxcarts were taken away to safety – one full of records and papers, and another containing books and papers. The records and papers appear (in another passage) to have been destroyed in a later fire, one that took place in the safe house; but as for the printed books, Burch and Frost state later in the letter, “a number of the printed books were consumed [in the Capitol fire], but they were all duplicates of those which have been preserved.”  In other words, the better part of the Library had been removed to safety before the fire, including the most valuable books. Frost mentions the successful rescue of the print book collection again in another letter on December 17, 1814, which he wrote in response to public statements made by the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress. The Committee had claimed that the collection was completely destroyed because no preparatory measures had  been taken to expedite its removal. Frost writes, “The several loads [of books] that were saved, were taken from the shelves on which they were placed and deposited in the carts by which they were taken away; they have suffered no injury…”

That account, however, was denied in whole by Brigadier General Duncan McArthur as well as an official "statement of the committee on the Library headed by Joseph Pearson." Could the denials have been a coverup, and if so what might be a possible motive? Could the two men charged with moving the materials decided to act opportunistically? Might there have been a political backstory? (The Law Librarian blog mischeviously suggests as a possible movie-motive that "Jefferson is cash poor and sells his books to Congress because he needs money.") Regrettably, since even the account of the spiriting away of the records says the papers were destroyed in a separate fire at the safe house, one doubts some National-Treasure style adventure might one day lead to their discovery, anymore than I suspect some 21st century Indiana Jones will discover the lost library of Alexandria. But that was all definitely history I didn't know.

Gila National Forest burning

One of my favorite camping spots in New Mexico, the Gila National Forest, is presently burning out of control, though thankfully prevailing winds have kept the flames away from populated areas so far. The biggest of the fires has burned more than 170,000 acres and is New Mexico's largest wildfire ever. (After last summer's fires in Central Texas, it's easy to empathize.) From the Gila Forest's Flickr stream:

Backyard Naturalist Report, May 12

Any Backyard Naturalist worth their salt must frequently collect samples for further study. These are samples collected recently of several varieties of flowers found in Grandma's backyard garden, along with the collector:

Here's a dragonfly perched over a small pond in the front yard:

And examples of some of the flora:

Yes, that is a television turned into a planter. These are in a windowbox:

And finally, the tomato crop is beginning to come in:

This concludes your Backyard Naturalist report for the day.

'Let Yankees adopt such low callings': Reflections on the making of a southern lawyer

Tracy Crawford presents award to my Dad (right)

I appreciated all the kind words readers had to say about my father, Tom Henson, who was honored Friday in Tyler with the "Justinian Award" by the Smith County Bar Foundation, so I thought I'd point those interested to a blog post from my brother - a minister in Shreveport - giving a brief account of the event.  I should add that, though I've always been proud of my father, the hagiography offered up by his law partner and (for me) life-long family friend Tracy Crawford during the introduction left me downright tearful and beaming with pride. (I said to my Dad afterward that normally people don't say things like that about you until they're throwing dirt on you!) Your correspondent was blessed to be raised by good Christian parents of high character and it was wonderful to see my Dad justly honored for his life's work.

BTW, a line from my father's acceptance speech recorded in John's post will give you a flavor of both my Dad's humor and a taste of the cultural background that led your correspondent to choose the perhaps unlikely nom de plume, "Grits for Breakfast." At one point my Dad rattled off a series of quotes about the law from a variety of learned figures from Einstein to Clarence Darrow to St. Thomas Aquinas, but he finished off the litany with a line from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind: "The south produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors and lawyers and poets, but certainly no engineers and mechanics. Let Yankees adopt such low callings!"

Tracy Crawford mentioned, as my brother recorded, that my great grandfather, Archibald "Arch" Sneed, my grandmother's father, was a huge formative influence for my Dad, and he could have added for me as well. (My brother was a little too young to remember him very much.) He died when I was six and was the first person I loved to pass away, which itself was a formative experience. But this family patriarch's life and legacy was as emblematic of Texas for me as Longhorns or spring bluebonnets.

Sneed's family came to Texas after Sherman's soldiers destroyed their family farm in eastern Mississippi near the end of the Civil War. According to family lore, the women and children hid in a root cellar, terrified, silent and cowering while union troops burned out their farm. They listened to the soldiers pillaging their home while their animals screamed and died in a burning barn just a few feet away from them. Afterward, they abandoned the smoldering rubble to head westward to Texas, part of a mass migration of ex-Confederates that rapidly populated much of the state.

Via the XIT Museum

Arch Sneed was born a Texan and grew up in Lampassass. As Tracy mentioned, he was inspired to see the cattle drives plowing northward toward the markets in Kansas and Chicago. As a young man  he moved north hoping to work as a cowboy on the famed XIT Ranch, which covered large chunks of ten Texas counties in the northwestern section of the Panhandle. He was turned down when he first applied, though. They only wanted men age 21 and over who could vote in order to maximize their power in local elections. If you're unaware of the XIT it's an interesting tidbit of Texas history that was incredibly important to that region of the state. A Chicago-based syndicate, if I recall, had traded the state for the massive expanse of property along the New Mexico border - three million acres famously surrounded by six thousand miles of fence - in exchange for construction of the Texas capitol. The granite building - the one still in use today - had to be built to spec: Slightly taller than the capitol in Washington D.C. and facing south, with its back to the Yankee oppressors.

Anyway, before my great-grandfather was old enough to land his dream job at the XIT, Teddy Roosevelt came through town recruiting men to join his Rough Riders, who would eventually join him in his famed ride up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War. He was traveling through cowboy country recruiting men as he headed southward where they would train in San Antonio before heading to Cuba. Young Arch met the future president, was sorely impressed with him, and desperately wanted to join the Rough Riders, he recounted to me more than once many decades later. But because he was 17, the Army required his mother's permission and she said "no." Her reason: He would be required to wear a blue (read: Yankee) uniform. The wounds were still too fresh. So that was that. He would remain a cowboy instead of becoming a soldier, signing on at the XIT the moment they would have him. If Arch Sneed could be said to have had any life regrets, the missed opportunity to ride with Teddy Roosevelt would certainly be it.

TR recruited Panhandle cowboys

When the XIT Ranch folded before WWI, my great-grandfather became a railroad engineer and worked 30 years based out of Dalhart piloting trains across America for the now-defunct Rock Island Line, retiring with a traditional company watch when he was done that's one of my father's prized possessions. Less discussed in family lore was his participation in massive railworker strike in 1946 busted by Harry Truman. He was a Freemason of some fairly high degree. On a darker note, he very briefly joined the Ku Klux Klan, say my older relatives, leaving once he "found out what they were about." I hope that's true. His favorite book was Ivanhoe, which he read more than a dozen times. (When books were more scarce, you read the same ones over and over.) He could recite poetry nearly endlessly on command, much of it memorized from a set of small blue books anthologizing "classic" poetry he'd purchased somewhere on his railroad travels. (My father later taught me to recite verse as a child from those very same texts.) He raised two daughters, including my grandmother, and sent both of them to college at Texas Tech.

Through all of that, though, he continued to self-identify as a cowboy. It was who Arch Sneed was at his core. Dalhart continues to hold an annual XIT Rodeo along with the world's largest outdoor barbecue. But the annual event in August used to be the XIT Rodeo and Reunion, where, before they all passed, former XIT cowboys would be feted and honored, even driven down the street in a full-blown parade with floats and marching bands. By the time I attended, as we did nearly annually as a kid, the increasingly few elderly former XIT cowboys would ride along in horse drawn carriages, followed by one horse with a poignantly empty saddle to honor the cowboys no longer with them. The XIT Ranch was celebrated in Dalhart when I was a kid more vigorously than the Fourth of July!

Tracy Crawford couldn't be more right that to understand Tom Henson one must understand Arch Sneed. It's probably true for me as well. The man's life helped define our family's values and priorities long after he was dead and buried, and my own identity as a Texan is certainly rooted in his legacy. My father's parents lived just a few blocks away from his maternal grandparents during his childhood and he spent nearly as much time at their place as at his own home. His father was Dallam County Judge and a rather stern man, while Arch Sneed, his grandfather, was a jovial, joking character with a wry sense of humor who liberally handed out nicknames and was full of stories from his cowboy and railroad days, always sprinkled with healthy dose of almost classic Texan exaggeration and bombast, but also the down-to-earth self-deprecation of a man who'd helped transform the Old West into the modern era, along with many others like him, not through oil money or hustling real estate but by the sweat of his brow working other men's cattle and land.

As my father likes to point out, Arch Sneed's life coincided with a wave of technological and social change that's nearly impossible to fathom. As a boy he established his life's ambition watching Texas cattle drives marching northward and before he died he watched on television as a man walked on the moon. What a mind blowing transformation he witnessed! He would have been proud of last week's homage to my father, and I was pleased his memory was recognized on Friday along with my Dad.

Backyard Naturalist Report (for a 5-Year Old)

The missus is taking the granddaughter to school today and the young'un asked for an update on the flora and fauna watched most closely by the child in our seemingly ever-interesting (when you're 5) backyard.

First, and most importantly, I can report that there are no fewer than nine spiders - big and small but all the same species - who have created huge webs across 2/3 of the pond:

I was also instructed to check on the plant hanging from her treehouse and am pleased to report that it's covered in bright purple flowers:

Finally, the squash plant she planted in a cup in her pre-K class, which was replanted into a pot on our deck, is now about eight feet long, has grown off a metal table that it will soon completely consume, and this morning sported two, bright orange five-pointed flowers, with two more about to open. Here's an example:

That concludes your Backyard Naturalist Report for May 3.

The sucker at the table

Two timeless thinkers taught me the importance of picking one's battles in political and other competitive settings: Sun Tzu and Amarillo Slim, the latter of whom passed away this week at the age of 83, and whose book on poker I read as teen. Many in politics mistake proximity to power for influence, coveting a "place at the table" even when the game is rigged. Slim's relevant advice: "Look around the table. If you don't see a sucker, get up, because you're the sucker." Ain't it the truth?

Is graffiti art, free speech, vandalism, or all of the above?

In Cario, Egypt, the military has blocked off Tahrir Square with huge concrete blocks and graffiti artists responded by painting replicas of the street scenes blocked from view by the barricades:

Exceptionally cool, from conception to execution. See here for more pics. You tell me: Is this graffiti art, free speech, or vandalism?

Callipygian: A lonely but useful word

Photo via Robert L. Peters

How many words can you think of that have no synonyms, where there is literally no other, single word to describe a concept? I learned a new one this morning: "Callipygian," which means "having well-shaped buttocks," according to Dictionary.com. The Thesaurus entry on the word, by contrast, yields no results. A related form of the word, as evidenced in the accompanying photo, is "callipygous."

There are perhaps slang synonyms - "bootylicious," comes to mind - though a web search came up with surprisingly few others. But "callipygian," with its etymological referent to Aphrodite, lacks the same misogynist air while capturing the same concept.

Excellent word.

Facing middle age, or, procrastination on a rainy December day

On a rainy December day I enjoyed thinking back to our trip to Galveston this summer.

Not to mention our trip right after session to Mexico City:

 

 Not so nice here at the moment. We need the rain, but the gray weather's a bummer.

Austin Water’s bond rating may look better if Water Treatment Plant 4 delayed

In the wake of a breathtakingly high estimate from city staff on the cost to shut down construction of Water Treatment Plant 4 (WTP4), the temptation for city council to just build the project out as planned may be overwhelming. Some have even claimed that the city’s bond rating might go down if the project isn’t completed immediately.  But city staff estimates throughout this process have been notoriously unreliable and always directed towards getting a “yes” vote to build out the plant.

A more realistic review of the utility’s finances reveals a strong argument for delaying WTP4  as perhaps the only fiscally prudent decision. Weather patterns and individual conservation have combined to reduce water use so much that the plant simply can’t be paid for without massive, politically unsustainable rate hikes that punish the poor and those who conserve most.

But first, a little context. Austin Water’s bond rating (AA-) is already lower than the city’s general revenue bonds because their income flow long-term appears not to match their increased spending and debt load. Truth be told, I suspect any ratings agency that looked too closely at the Austin Water Utility’s future water sales projections in their bond prospectus might consider downgrading the debt further if the plant goes forward.

The entirely predictable effects of a half-billion in new debt are starting to kick in: Before the City Council’s vote last year to begin construction of WTP4, the water utility told the council and the public that water rates for the average residential customer would go up 34 percent over six years if the project went through. The SOS Alliance hired me to separately analyze rate projections and in a report (pdf) titled “The Perfect Storm,” I projected rates would rise 74% over six years (including last year’s rate hike).

After construction of  WTP4 was underway, the city quietly admitted that predictions of much-higher residential rates were accurate, and then some. In the current proposed budget, not only will the city raise residential rates by 66% in the next five years, city staff wants to tack on immediately an Orwellian-named $6 per meter monthly “sustainability fee.”

 I say “Orwellian” because the fee really pays for an unsustainable business model that depends on the city selling far more water over the next decade than appears remotely likely. The “sustainability” fee is both front-loaded and heavily regressive; including it results in immediate rate hikes of 26% for the "average" residential customer and 66% for those using the least amount of water, according to city estimates.  Residents using the most water would see only a 7% increase. That’s a dramatic shift from the focus in recent years on “conservation pricing,“ which raised prices most on the most profligate water users.

Which brings us to the issue of the credibility of city estimates. If I could tell last year that rates must rise that much to pay for all this debt (as could, by the way, any kid with an A or B in 9^th grade algebra), why couldn’t Austin Water? City staff projections have erred consistently and dramatically throughout the long debate over WTP4, but were always biased in one direction: favoring the plant’s immediate construction. So I don’t know what the cost of mothballing WTP4 would be, but the $138 million figure seems incredible and unlikely considering city estimates that just 15% of the work is done.

The far bigger problem is that the city has told bondholders that their water sales – especially peak use in the hottest days, which is all even proponents say the plant is needed for – are on a steadily rising trend that will generate enough revenue to pay for the bonds. In reality, though, conservation measures have reduced per-capita consumption. So, for example, even on the hottest day this summer Austin’s peak use hasn’t topped 221 million gallons (Aug. 28), while in its bond prospectus, the city estimated to purchasers of its debt that peak use would reach 254 mgd in 2011, a number we’ve virtually no chance of hitting.

Indeed, somewhat confusingly, in that same prospectus, sworn truthful as of November 1, 2010, the city told bondholders that FY 2010’s “projected” peak day was 249 mgd. In fact, the fiscal year had already ended by that time and the peak day (of a quite rainy year) was just 193 mgd (Aug. 29). Similar, the actual total annual water pumpage in FY 2010 was 21.6% below what was told to those purchasing the city’s debt.  Especially considering about 8% of that was leakage that never actually reached the customers (or their meters), the city is simply not selling the quantities of water bondholders were told would be necessary to pay off the debt. Notably, the bond prospectus estimates fail entirely to take into account the effects of higher rates and recently adopted conservation goals to reduce per capita consumption to 140 gallons per capita per day by 2020.

The confluence of all these factors leaves the utility one, predictable option and we’re now seeing it: Raise rates even higher, and preferably (from the standpoint of selling the most water) in a way that deemphasizes conservation and encourages more water sales. That’s not in the city’s long-term best interest. Given low levels in the Highland Lakes it may not even be physically possible to sell as much water as the city has projected in representations to bondholders. This plant won’t produce more water, it only treats water we already have. Conservation remains our most effective approach to drought conditions, and should be reinforced, not undermined, by pricing decisions.

Even if it cost millions to mothball WTP4, launching such a high-dollar project without sufficient demand to justify the expense was just a bad management decision. If they chose to pause construction because the plant’s not needed, the City of Austin would be no more likely punished by the bond raters than was the Intel Corporation after they stopped construction of a large new building mid-stream just two blocks from Austin’s city hall. The company did so because their changing economic situation couldn’t support it and they were flexible enough to recognize it and make a decision in their long-term fiscal best interest.

The question is whether a majority on the Austin City Council will do the same, injecting some fiscal sanity into management of the water utility? Or will Austin just raise rates ad infinitum to secure promised revenues to bondholders from increased water sales that it’s obvious won’t be forthcoming? Will the city council protect ratepayers before this self-inflicted debt bubble bursts or just soak them afterward and pretend they had no choice? When you find yourself trapped in a hole, the saying goes, the first thing to do is stop digging.

The author is a consultant for the Save Our Springs Alliance hired to analyze Austin Water Utility finances and their effects on residential water rates, though this article was not pre-vetted by SOS or any other group.

Trannsforming Tragedy

I wanted to share with readers a remarkable story that provides a happy coda to a dark, sad episode in Grits' personal family history: Readers may recall that two years ago (on Tuesday, to be exact) my 12-year old niece, Maggie Lee Henson, died after a tragic church bus accident and three anguished weeks lingering in an intensive care unit in Mississippi. Rather than rush to the state capitol to push for a new criminal statute named after their daughter, my brother and his wife instead designated Maggie's birthday, October 29, "Maggie Lee for Good" day, challenging those who knew and loved her and others whose lives she touched to perform one good deed on that day in her memory. Thousands responded, from small gestures to grand ones. In the Shreveport Times this week, her mother Jinny, shared stories of how the Maggie-Lee-for-Good movement became an unexpected blessing for their family during from the first 24 months after Maggie's death. On her blog this morning, Jinny (who is a Christian comedian by trade) linked to the Shreveport Times story and added these sobering thoughts:

While I would give anything to have her back, and hear that that feeling subsides little as the years go by, I know that we will always be a table with three legs.  As time goes by, you learn to put the heavy stuff on one corner and just where to place the chairs in case things topple, but these gymnastics only serve to remind you of what you lost.

Then again, at least I have a three-legged table while some people have no table at all. I am vastly aware of what I have left. August 2nd marks the one year anniversary of 6 Shreveport teenagers drowned while swimming, one mother losing three children on the same day. That is a pain I cannot fathom.

As we begin our third year of life without Maggie Lee, I have to be thankful for God’s sustaining grace, a loving family and the most unshakable friends in the world.

I was already thinking about Maggie and my brother's family a lot these last few weeks, so I wanted to both share the Shreveport Times story with y'all and publicly express my admiration for Jinny, John, and their son Jack. They each have weathered this terrible storm with remarkable courage and dignity, transforming grief into literally a constructive force. I couldn't be more proud of them for it.

Austin water rate hikes foreseeable, foreseen

Here's a letter I sent to local Austin city beat reporters about rising water bills, decrying the city's efforts to downplay and/or mislead the public about massive rate hikes required to pay for Water Treatment Plant 4:

Perchance you received, as I did, an email from the SOS Alliance mentioning Bill Spelman's calculations of future Austin water rate hikes. It read, in relevant part:

Last summer the Austin Water Utility projected a five-year total increase in residential water rates of 30 percent.   ... Recently the Water Utility released its initial budget figures.  Councilmember Bill Spelman has analyzed the data - and calculated a projected 5-year water rate increase for residential customers of 66%.  Go to http://www.billspelman.org/2011/05/spelman-analyzes-projected-5-year-water-bill-increases/ and click on the "spreadsheets here" link and look at the "monthly bill" chart.

That is an eye-popping sixty-six percent rate increase - and more than double the Water Utility's projection from just last year.  And it follows seven years of annual rate increases.  (If you just count last year's increase, the six year increase thru 2016 is projected at 74 percent.)

In that context, please recall that last year's SOS Alliance report on this very topic (attached, titled "The Perfect Storm") predicted - wait for it - a 74% residential water rate increase over six years from publicly available data !  I remind you of this to ensure that, if and when you report on the subject, you make it clear to your readers and/or viewers that these rate hikes were not a surprise. Don't, in your coverage, allow the Mayor, Greg Meszaros, Daryl Slusher, etc., to greet Spelman's calculations in your stories with quotes saying "We couldn't have known." They could, and they did. But they wanted to keep this fact out of the public debate until WTP4 bonds were issued, construction began and it was too late to do anything about it.

Spelman's calculations differ from mine mainly in that they cover the years 2011-2016, whereas my report estimated them for 2010 - 2015, and he's including sewer rates whereas I focused solely on water. (City staff shifted some of the increases from water to sewer in response to criticisms in the report.) But both analyses document the same, inexorable trend - water bills headed upward on a dramatically steeper curve than city staff and WTP4 backers were last year willing to admit, with most of the increase (far more than the city lets on) attributable to WTP4.

The calculations are not rocket science. Staff knew exactly what it would take to repay the city's huge new debt burden. The bond prospectus for new Water Treatment Plant 4 debt simply lied about growth in water use to make the numbers work, but in real-world budgeting such phony, politicized projections carry no weight. The future rate hikes Spelman and I documented were an inevitable and foreseeable outcome at the time they took that vote.

Though I'm no longer employed by SOS, having been retained only for that one research project, this still offends me. I've been around this town a long time and I don't mind losing a fair fight. But I certainly do mind losing because public officials don't tell the truth, or worse, as in this case, actively attempt to discredit truth-tellers.

This episode also speaks to the fact that Austinites were poorly served by local media in this affair. Anyone who investigated city claims about water rates last year would have easily documented these misrepresentations, as did my report, from available public records. But local media just took pols' word on rate hikes and adopted a "quote both sides" approach that equated falsehoods with facts. City staff based their public calculations on higher use levels even as the city was adopting per capita conservation goals that would on their face leave AWU short of revenue needed to pay for WTP4 debt (and demonstrate that we don't even need the thing). The situation would have been obvious if any reporter had independently examined the subject instead of simply quoting officials without verifying what they said.

That failure, of course, is now water under the bridge (or from the perspective of ratepayers, over the dam). But with a regressive new fee proposed which would assign the cost of AWU's misrepresentations disproportionately to the poor, you now have a chance to really dig into this and not just accept whatever falsehood is handed you in some official's formal statement. Rapidly increasing water rates and the new, regressive fee are a real burden on the public, and an honest discussion of that burden should have been part of the WTP4 debate. It's not too late. Good reporting on this issue still matters...a lot. Perhaps we'll eventually see some.