Cracked ground in far West Texas. Some parts of the state never fully recovered from the drought of 2011.
Only a quarter inch of rain will have fallen on average in Texas through the entire month of November, according to estimates provided to StateImpact Texas by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
That would make it about the 3rd or 4th driest November since record keeping started in 1895. If you look at the last two months together, estimates say it’s been the driest October and November since the drought of record in the 1950s.
“The worst one year drought in Texas on record began in October 2010 and lasted about a year,” NOAA meteorologist Victor Murphy tells StateImpact Texas.
“We saw some brief improvement in late 2011, early 2012, and now boom! We’re right back in a pretty dry pattern again,” Murphy added. “So, arguably, you could make the case that perhaps we’re in the third year of drought here in Texas. Especially certain parts of the state, we obviously are.”
Strutting its Stuff. The Lesser Prairie Chicken was proposed for listing as "threatened" today by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Today the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced the start of a process that could lead to the listing of the Lesser Prairie Chicken as a ‘threatened species’ under the Endangered Species Act.
The bird lives in the grasslands of the Texas panhandle, as well as in Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, and Colorado. The proposal to list it as “threatened” rather than “endangered” allows Fish and Wildlife more flexibility in crafting conservation measures for the animal.
Under the listing, “we can tailor ‘take’ prohibitions under section 4d of the Act,” Leslie Gray, Texas Public Affairs Specialist with the Service, told StateImpact Texas.
A “take” is an action that harms, harasses or kills the animal. Continue Reading →
Under Texas' Sunset Review, state agencies sometimes face a choice: reform or be eliminated.
The Sunset Advisory Commission, a state agency dedicated to reviewing how the rest of the state agencies are working and spending money, just released this thing called “The Sunset Report”. Well, they actually released several reports. The reviews look closely at some state agencies, deciding whether or not the institutions should be put on the chopping block.
As we reported earlier this week, the Texas Railroad Commission recently received a Sunset review. Proposed changes include a name change, as well as campaign finance restrictions for commissioners. Before the Sunset legislation is called to a vote next year, we thought we’d take a moment to break down exactly who the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission is and how these Sunset Reports came to be.
What is the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission?
The Sunset Advisory Commission began in 1977 as a way to look closely at the effectiveness of Texas state agencies and determine their utility and worth. The Commission is made of 5 Texas House Members, 5 Senators, and 2 members of the public, appointed by the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House of Representatives. The Commission’s main function is to propose Sunset review recommendations to the Texas Legislature as a Sunset Bill.
At a speech before the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce today, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst said lawmakers should look into using $1 billion from the state’s Rainy Day Fund to finance water projects this upcoming legislative session. You can watch his remarks above, the funding for water projects starts at the 22 minute mark.
The Rainy Day Fund is a pot of money (currently sitting at about $8 Billion) collected primarily from oil and gas development taxes. It is designed to be very difficult for lawmakers to get their hands on, and is set aside by state law for use only in circumstances like an extreme budget shortfall, or to respond to a natural disaster.
Texas’ current political leadership was reluctant to tap into the fund even at the height of the recent nationwide recession.
It took the driest one-year period in Texas history to convince some in power that it’s time to tap the fund. Today, Dewhurst suggested that Texas’ looming water crisis meets the benchmark to open up the fund. He joins other voices at the state capitol who see funding for water projects as an crucial issue for Texas, but who are unable or unwilling to raise taxes or create other forms of revenue to do it.
An LCRA Tanker truck pumps water into the Spicewood Beach water system. A second truck was destroyed in an accident in October.
We recently brought you an update from Spicewood Beach, the first town in Texas to run out of water in the great Texas drought.
As we reported, things have not gotten much better there, and in some ways they’ve gotten worse. People are moving out, property values have plummeted, and residents face the prospect of nearby lake levels (and, by extension, their water table) dropping even lower, if water is released from the Highland Lakes to rice farmers downstream in January.
You can now add to that list of concerns the loss of one of the trucks that was hauling water into town.
A Texas scientist dubiously claims she's sequenced Bigfoot's DNA. So is it legal to kill him/it now?
Update, 2/14/13: The second week of February, Ketchum released her paper claiming to have sequenced Sasquatch DNA. It was published in a ‘scientific journal’ created only a week earlier. You can read more over at the Houston Chronicle.
You may have read some dubious new claims by a Texas “scientist” that Bigfoot is real. Nacogdoches veterinarian Melba Ketchum (who claims to also be a a scientist in “Forensics and Hominid Research” on her Twitter profile) announced this week that her company, DNA Diagnostics, has successfully sequenced the DNA of not just one, but several Bigfoots. (Or is that Bigfeet?)
Using DNA apparently found from hair, blood and tissue samples, Ketchum says she’s sequenced Bigfoot. Those samples may have come from cryptid enthusiast Robin Lynne, who claims to have several Sasquatch roaming the land around her Michigan property. She says … wait for it … she’s enticed them there with blueberry bagels.
The news is even being covered by major outlets like CNN, FOX and TIME. (For a robust, skeptical take on the new claims, check out Eric Berger’s solid debunking in the Houston Chronicle.)
But if Bigfoot were indeed real, and you were out hunting in Texas, it may surprise you to know that you have some options once you encounter him/her/it.
Edith Williams lives with her dog in an apartment in Round Rock. She says she depends on low income assistance from the System Benefit Fund to make ends meet.
“Fiscal transparency” and “cost cutting” are just a few of the buzzwords to watch for as state lawmakers gather in Austin next January for the 83rd Texas legislature.  But with all that talk, you might be surprised to learn that there’s a pile of nearly one billion dollars that’s been growing in a state fund for years. And it’s not being used for its intended purpose.
Meet the System Benefit Fund, a pot of 850 million dollars overseen by the Public Utility Commission of Texas. You might already be acquainted with the fund. After all, if you’ve ever paid a bill to a private electric company in Texas, you’ve paid fees into it.
Now meet Miss Edith Williams.
Williams is a 69 year old retired housekeeper. She and her dog live in an apartment in Round Rock, Texas. And she’s one of the hundreds of thousands of people who receive money from the System Benefit Fund to help pay her utility bill. In fact, the day I visited her, she said that I may have found her sitting in the dark if it weren’t for the fund. Continue Reading →
The spill was the largest environmental disaster in history, killing eleven and spewing 206 million gallons of oil into the Gulf.
“EPA is taking this action due to BP’s lack of business integrity as demonstrated by the company’s conduct with regard to the Deepwater Horizon blowout, explosion, oil spill, and response, as reflected by the filing of a criminal information,” the EPA says in a statement. The agency says they’re doing this in an effort to conduct business “only with responsible individuals or companies” and the suspension is “standard practice.”
While the suspension only applies to new contracts, it could do some financial damage. This morning, the federal government is holding an sale of more than 20 million acres of offshore oil and gas leases in the Western Gulf of Mexico. Update: BP will not be awarded any leases from today’s auction until the suspension is resolved, the Bureau of Oceanic Energy Management, which is running the sale, confirms to StateImpact Texas. The Bureau says that “unless and until” the suspension is resolved, no leases from today’s sale will go to BP.
The electricity industry and its regulators in Texas have consistently touted the state’s competitive retail market as good for consumers. But price data indicate many of those customers are failing to take advantage of the lowest rates.
Courtesy Texas PUC
Donna Nelson chairs the PUC
In speeches and at public hearings, Donna Nelson, chairman of the Public Utility Commission (PUC), has contended that the areas of Texas where electricity is sold by a variety of retailers — as opposed to just one utility company as in San Antonio and Austin — is a system that benefits consumers.
“I think what the rates now show us … is that competitive markets work,” Nelson said at a commission meeting earlier this year.
Similarly, in 2011, Nelson told the Gulf Coast Power Association, an industry group, that while critics may “look for any way to describe Texas’s restructured market as a failure,” Texas retail electric providers had rates well below the national average according to an example she cited. Continue Reading →
Kate Stein's home in Steiner Ranch was destroyed by fire in 2011.
A report released by the Travis County Fire Marshall last week confirmed what many had already suspected: the Steiner Ranch Fire that destroyed 23 homes during last year’s infamous Labor Day wildfires was started by power lines.
County investigators believe the fire was likely started when high winds caused Austin Energy electrical lines to slap together, throwing molten metal on the dry grass below.
Travis County Fire Marshal Hershel Lee told KUT News that his office had been holding off on releasing the report until other private investigations were completed. But Lee says now he’s not sure when those investigations will be finished. So the Fire Marshall’s office decided to release the report a couple days before Thanksgiving.
“We are hoping that by releasing the information we have that people will have some bit of closure about the cause of the fire,” said Lee.
The fact that this fire, and the two other major fires that weekend, are all linked to power lines could force a re-evaluation of power line upkeep and safety, said Travis County fire Marshall Hershel Lee.
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