Todd: Oh shit, he won!
Mortland: Yeah, I'm gonna have to get a "Hug a Tree" bumpersticker.
Todd: I can't believe both of them won! How many did he win by?
Mortland: About 1,200 votes.
Todd: Now I guess 1,200 votes are gonna be a mandate.
Mortland: Well, at least we got two good people on the ACC board!
(Guaranteed: All dialogue reported verbatim.) -- C.W.
On Monday, Freeport spokesman Garland Robinette told the Dow Jones Asian Equities Report that Pressman "didn't say anything like that, I can guarantee it." The news service went on to quote Robinette as saying, "We certainly don't have any plans of a countersuit."
Beanal's suit, which seeks $6 billion in damages, alleges that Freeport has participated in "cultural genocide" and "eco-terrorism." -- R.B.
Proponents of the law would like to see the fund carried over to the next election year, to offer an enticing attraction for candidates to abide by the limits. But Garza's expense list may prevent that. He says the City Clerk's office and the Legal Department needed 590 staff hours and $20,152 to administer the ordinance. The other $2,000 came from a new computer purchased by the City Clerk's office, to help with the electronic filing of contributions and expenditure reports.
But Jim Marston of the Environmental Defense Fund, who chaired a task force that originated the ordinance, calls the administrative costs "blatantly misleading." That's because the bulk of the costs would have been incurred even without the ordinance. For example, the 195 hours put in by the clerk's office covered the costs of filing contribution and expenditure reports, a task the clerk's office does for every election. And no outside legal attorneys were hired to research or interpret the ordinance; the Legal Department's costs were in-house and already budgeted. Moreover, staff hours are never tallied for compensation. Indeed, Legal and the clerk's office didn't keep time sheets to show when they worked on the ordinance; the 590 hours is merely an estimate based on recollection. The only certifiable new cost of the ordinance is the $2,000 computer. And City Clerk Elden Aldridge acknowledges that even that will be used for much more than administering the Fair Campaign Finance Law.
Garza denies that the numbers are cooked up, but Councilmembers Gus Garcia, Jackie Goodman, Shea, and Max Nofziger still aren't ready to use the fund to pay for all the administrative costs. At the May 30 council meeting, they voted to send the ordinance and the $22,152 question to the Ethics Review Commission for further study. The commission is expected to look at the ordinance in July. -- A.M.
House the Homeless, Inc. has sued the Air Force for failing to make the homes and other buildings and about 1,000 acres of land at Bergstrom Air Force Base available to Austin's homeless in accord with the 1988 McKinney Act, signed by Ronald Reagan. U.S. District Judge James Nowlin ruled in the USAF's (and city's) favor several months ago, but on Thursday, attorney Cecilia Wood was set to present oral arguments to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, seeking an injunction to stop removal and demolition of all buildings at Bergstrom.
Since 1991, the city and the Air Force have held that, since Bergstrom was built on property leased to the military by the city, Austin holds title to the property and the McKinney Act does not apply. Ever since, however, House the Homeless has questioned whether the improvements to this property -- that is, the base itself, along with smaller parcels added to the base over time -- are not really federal property subject to McKinney. On that score, "the Fifth Circuit thinks there's something to what we said," says House the Homeless leader Richard Troxell. "It would seem at least some of the feds think they made a mistake." A decision that further delayed or derailed the new airport would be... well, let's not think about it.
Troxell insists that House the Homeless has "never wanted to do anything but resolve this with the least amount of fray, certainly not interfere with the progress of the airport. But as a taxpayer, I'm very upset; we've been forced to take everyone to court on this issue, even though we warned them years ago there was a cloud on the title." Troxell refuses to speculate on the possibility of a settlement, except to note that "the homeless problem faces all the government and its citizenry. We would hope that this is an issue that they would want to deal with." -- M.C-M.
As Shell prospered, however, Nigeria went from one of the most prosperous countries in Africa, to one of the poorest and most corrupt. Local resistance to the abject poverty to which most families have been driven in the southern area of Ogoniland -- where Shell's 111 oil spills between 1985-94 have fouled local crops, rivers, and drinking water -- culminated last year in the death of tribal organizer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others, who were arrested by the government on trumped-up charges and executed. The execution, and the subsequent terrorizing of local natives in Ogoniland and elsewhere, outraged international human rights and environmental groups, who have called for boycotts of Shell products.
But apparently it's all a non-issue for The Nature Conservancy of Texas, which just accepted a $500,000 gift from the Shell Oil Foundation here in the U.S. to support the Shell Coastal Conservation Research Program at the Mad Island March Preserve on West Matagorda Bay. Conservancy spokesperson Karen Cornelius says she is not aware that Shell Oil is a subsidiary of Royal Dutch/Shell and is unfamiliar with events in Nigeria related to the petroleum company. "It doesn't have anything to do with us," she says. "World affairs, I can't control -- the problems in Texas are all I'm concerned about."
Cornelius explained that companies like Shell, and even chemical companies like DuPont, involve themselves with the Conservancy because "they have a serious commitment to change their methods to be more environmentally friendly." Asked why an ideological group like the Conservancy would ignore Shell's actions overseas, unlike many other U.S. environmental groups like the Sierra Club, Cornelius replied, "As I said, we don't make judgements about the geopolitical situation in other countries."
Check, please. -- L.C.B.