EDITED BY ROBERT BRYCE
Missing the Target: She’s only been in office five months, and she’s
already
been targeted as a Christian-hating liberal by ultra-conservative
groups.
Freshman Rep. Dawnna Dukes (D-Austin), representing
District 50
on the east side of town, was the subject of a recent mail-out sent by
the
American Family Association of Texas (AFAT). “You’ve been targeted by an Anti-Christian lawmaker,” reads the
envelope.
“Will you help me stop her campaign of bigotry?” pleads AFAT Executive
Director
Wyatt Roberts, who claims Dukes publicly stated that groups
identified
with the “religious right,” like AFAT, were “the same people that cast
a vote
for Adolf Hitler in the ’30s and ’40s.” Roberts exhorted AFAT members
to fill
out and return the enclosed “Petition to Stop Anti-Religious
Bigotry.”
Being labeled “anti-Christian” and a “bigot” rather annoys the
32-year-old
Dukes, a self-described “good Catholic girl” and successor to
Wilhelmina
Delco, who held the seat for 20 years before retiring last year.
“My comments were directed toward supremacists,” Dukes says, adding
that the
AFAT mail-out manipulated her statements out of context. She says that
Roberts
harangued her and her staff until she received him in her office and
warned him
to stop the harassment. Roberts’ version of their meeting, according to
his
missive, is that Dukes “has stubbornly refused to retract her
statement.” She
admits she did tell Roberts that until his group denounced the Ku Klux
Klan and
marched on Martin Luther King Day, she’d continue to regard them as
supremacists.
Has the squabble cast a pall on her first term in office? “Not at
all,” Dukes
replies. “If you’re effective, you’ll please some people and anger some
others.”
Dukes currently serves on two House committees, the Environmental
Regulation
and State, Federal & International Relations committees. Most of
the
legislation she has filed relates to environmental and urban affairs.
She looks
forward to the debate over HB 2994, which she authored. The bill would
add a
one-dollar fee per semester per student at the University of Texas, and
use the
money to install a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr., on the Forty
Acres. She
expects the bill to reach the House floor over the next few days.
Another Dukes
bill, HB 3133, would allow Travis County to establish an airport
authority, if
the voters want one. The board would not be a taxing entity, and the
members
could be appointed or elected.
Dukes would be the first to agree that she’s likely to follow the
footsteps of
her mentor, Delco. “We are alike in many ways,” she says. But following
her
steps doesn’t necessarily mean grinding a hole in them, and Dukes says
that
even when she might differ with her predecessor, Delco isn’t the type
to
criticize her.
And, say, was that really Dawnna Dukes sharing a giggle on the House
floor a
few weeks ago with ultra-conservative Rep. Warren Chisum,
D-Pampa, the
head of the Conservative Caucus? Well, he is her committee chairman,
after all.
But still! Warren Chisum?! “What people need to realize is that you
have no
permanent friends or enemies,” says Dukes, “just permanent issues.”– Roseana Auten
THE TEXAS CAPITOL – HOME OF THE $79,000 PARKING SPACE: As visitors
enjoyed the
festivities connected to the restoration of the Texas Capitol last
week, one
area wasn’t on the tour: the new $54 million, 250,000 square foot,
685-space
parking garage dug 65 feet into the ground under the vast new Capitol
Extension.
Yes, the new restoration of the Capitol is nice. But how much did
those
parking spaces cost? According to Dealy Herndon of the State
Preservation Board, the subterranean parking spaces cost taxpayers
nearly
$79,000 each. But Herndon quickly adds that the spaces aren’t just for
dignitaries. She says the garage functions “as basically an office
garage for
the Capitol.” Every office gets at least a few spaces and assigns them
at will,
she says. “The House, the Senate, and the Governor’s office get
preference, but
each legislative office gets X number of spaces.”
Herndon says the state looked into and rejected other options,
including
leasing an already existing parking garage which, at four blocks, was
determined to be too far from the Capitol. As for building a new
garage,
Herndon says such a project was deemed too expensive, although she says
no one
“costed out” the idea to see what the actual price tag would be.
A quick call to the City of Austin allows a comparison. In 1992, the
city
bought a 1,000-space parking garage for the new Convention Center for
$6.2
million. That amounts to about $6,200 per parking space. $79,000 here,
$79,000
there… pretty soon you’re talking real money. – Andrea
Barnett
ONE PERSON’S TOILET: SB 1017 is the latest Austin-bashing bill that
everyone
loves to hate – even the daily paper railed in a recent editorial
against this
measure, which could keep Austin from enforcing any water quality
regulations
in its extra-territorial jurisdiction (ETJ). Add in two more bills like
SB 298
and SB 650, both authored by Sen. Bill Ratliff (R-Mt. Pleasant),
and you
have a recipe for lousy water quality from Muleshoe to Brownsville.
State law currently sets the standard for any “unclassified” streams
–
waterways where the existing water quality is unknown – at 5.0
milligrams per
liter of dissolved oxygen (mg/L). Cities that use this “unclassified”
water are
expected to treat their effluent until it reaches that standard before
they
send it on downstream. And under state law, if a city can prove that
the water
quality is naturally lower than 5.0 mg/L, they can get a variance to
downgrade
from the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (TNRCC).
Ratliff’s SB 298 would lower that standard to 3.0 mg/L, supposedly
because it
is nearly impossible to get a TNRCC downgrade. One of Ratliff’s aides,
who
asked not to be named, claims that no one has gotten such a downgrade
in the
last three years. But in fact, according to the TNRCC, the agency has
28
downgrades pending, and expects to grant all of them, probably by this
summer.
Dwayne “Sparky” Anderson, state program director with Texas
Clean Water
Action, says that not only will SB 298 force people downstream to pay
for
cleaning up their neighbors’ waste, but it could cost Texas the
opportunity to
compete for federal loan money to build sewage treatment plants. And
it’s not
just naked vegetarians and wild-eyed environmentalists who are opposing
the
bill. “We’re against the bill,” says Jim Sagnes of the Texas
Shrimp
Association. He says the lower dissolved oxygen parameters could hurt
shrimp,
which need unpolluted fresh water inputs. Sagnes says that if the
current
standard is lowered, “we’re going to run into problems.”
Ratliff’s other water quality bill, SB 650, will ensure that Texas’
water
quality standards for stormwater discharges are no more stringent that
those
set by the federal government. Meanwhile, Ratliff’s fellow Republicans
in
Congress are doing their best to eviscerate the Clean Water Act and
Safe
Drinking Water Act, both of which are up for reauthorization this
year.
SB 298 and 1017 have both passed the Senate. SB 650 has been
approved by the
Senate Natural Resources Committee and is waiting for a vote by the
full
Senate.
– Andrea Barnett
READIN’ AND WRITIN’: The House Public Education Subcommittee approved
on
Wednesday, April 26, its version of the overhauled state education
code. The
bill is expected to go to the full House for a vote by the end of this
week.
This article appears in May 5 • 1995 and May 5 • 1995 (Cover).