Mose Buchele is the Austin-based broadcast reporter for StateImpact. He has been on staff at KUT 90.5 in Austin since 2009, covering local and state issues. Mose has also worked as a blogger on politics and an education reporter at his hometown paper in Western Massachusetts. He holds masters degrees in Latin American Studies and Journalism from UT Austin.
The toilet sink, imported from Japan, aims to educate people about conservation at Steve's Market and Deli.
Located just one county north of geographic center of Texas, Brownwood, population 20,000, might seem an unlikely place for high tech innovation. But about a year ago the town made headlines for proposing a cutting-edge solution to its water crisis: toilet to tap waste water treatment.
The future of that project remains unclear as the town explores other options (including simply digging new wells). But that hasn’t stopped some residents from taking matters into their own hands. On our recent reporting trip to to the oilfields of the Permian Basin, we ran into one of those people: Steve Harris, co-owner of Steve’s Market and Deli.
As a small businessman and self-described ‘activist’ Harris has turned his cafe into a sort of show-room for water conservation. The bathroom featured a toilet-sink commonly found in Tokyo. The cafe also captures rain water, and water from the AC system. It recycles trash in a town that has no city-wide recycling.
Workers check to make sure the food is not expired.
Sonia Perez is an employee of the West Texas Food Bank.
Campbell says the food bank distributes between four and five million pounds of food a year. tributes
The Permian Basin oil boom has brought jobs and wealth to West Texas, but it’s also brought something less expected: hunger. During a recent trip to Odessa, StateImpact Texas’s Mose Buchele sat down with Libby Campbell, director of the West Texas Food Bank, to learn how, as she puts it, “not all tides raise all ships.”
1) Increased Property Values. With people moving to the Permian Basin from all over the country, property values have skyrocketed. You often hear stories of rents doubling when the time comes for a tenant to re-sign a lease. That’s put a strain on budgets and led to more hunger in the region.
“Maybe their rent was six or eight hundred dollars three or four years ago, it’s currently twelve or fifteen hundred dollars,” says Campbell. “You’ve kind of already busted your budget before you even get to the point that you’re purchasing food.”
David Maidment says many rural parts of Texas lack proper floodplain maps.
Floods have devastated parts of Colorado and both the Gulf and Pacific Coasts of Mexico in the last week. While Texas had some rainfall during that time, it’s been years since the state has seen weather comparable to those disasters.
But that doesn’t mean that extreme stormy weather is gone for good.
“We know it’s coming, we just don’t know when,” Roy Sedwick, the Executive Director of the Texas Floodplain Management Association, told StateImpact Texas.
That’s the reason for mapping floodplains, so that when the rains do come, people will be ready.
“Think of a floodplain as a railroad track,” explained Sedwick. “Just like the track is put down to carry the train, a floodplain is put down by mother nature to carry the flood waters.”
“The only difference is we know the schedule of the train, we don’t know the schedule of the flood,” he added.
A third earthquake shook Timpson,Texas early this morning. It measured a 2.4 on the Richter Scale and comes on the heels of two stronger quakes that hit on Labor Day. At least one of those prompted reports of damage.
If you visit this site often, chances are you’ve read about Timpson. It’s an East Texas community home to just over 1,100 people that seems to get more than its fair share of earthquakes.
Up until the recent spate of quakes, Timpson had never felt an earthquake before, at least not since the USGS started keeping records. That might be related to something else that Timpson has in abundance: injection wells for storing waste water produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Science has proven the link between injection wells and seismic activity (which is the same thing as earthquakes). And researchers are studying that link in Timpson.
Click image to see the location of the two quakes that hit this Monday. They are represented by yellow dots. Find more info here: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/
If you visit this site often, chances are you’ve read about Timpson. It’s an East Texas community home to just over 1,100 people that seems to get more than its fair share of earthquakes.
Up until the recent spate of quakes, Timpson had never felt an earthquake before, at least not since the USGS started keeping records.
Timpson now has somewhat frequent earthquakes, but it also has a lot of something else: injection wells for storing waste water produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. By our last count, Shelby County where Timpson is located, is home to 27 active injection wells.
Science has proven the link between injection wells and seismic activity (which is the same thing as earthquakes). And researchers are studying that link in Timpson.
Cattle rustling, the age-old crime of stealing livestock, might seem like something for the history books. But, as our readers and listeners learned last month, Texas ranchers are seeing an increase in stolen cows, even as the number of cattle dwindles.
The report generated a lot of interest. It went viral online and was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered.
But, as is often the case, we still have more of the story to tell. This time in pictures.
Click the player above to view an audio slideshow of photos snapped on a recent reporting trip to Giddings, Texas and hear the NPR report. Peruse the text after the jump to learn more about black market bovines, and the people we met while reporting.
Larry Schatte manages an auction house in Giddings.
The Giddings Livestock Commission holds its auction every Monday. Hundreds of cows pass through, brought in by their rightful owners to be sold to the highest bidder. But, every now and then, auction manager Larry Larry Schatte says, a contraband cow finds its way into the mix.
“Probably about a year ago. This one guy, he’d usually bring in some cattle for his mom,” Schatte told StateImpact Texas on a recent auction day that the man would always bring in the same kind of cow, a specific type of cross breed.
“And this one particular time he came in with a couple of long horns, and I thought it was kind of an odd deal,” he said.
Pink flags mark the place where pine seedling will be planted in the remains of Bastrop State Park. Experts say fires like the one that ravaged the park in 2011 will become more common in the future.
This summer the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department celebrated its 50th anniversary. To mark the occasion TPWD Executive Director Carter Smith sat down with StateImpact Texas to talk about the history of the Department, and what climate change means for Parks’ future.
One interesting historical nugget?
Smith began the interview mentioning how how an illegal dove hunting trip by Lyndon Baines Johnson (and a run-in with a game warden) helped create the modern day TPWD.
MOSE BUCHELE: So LBJ figures into this somehow?
SMITH: Well, as the story goes, LBJ was dove hunting after legal shooting hours in hill country with several other well known hill country politicians and one of our game wardens, Grover Simpson, who was a legendary figure, came upon them shooting after sunset. And when he pulled into the pasture he saw three men around a truck and when he pulled up there were only two.
William Christian is a lawyer with Graves Dougherty Hearon Moody. Part of his practice involves representing landowners in condemnation cases.
Texas is a funny place when it comes to property rights.
State Supreme Court rulings have said pipeline companies are not doing enough to prove they can take private land. Meanwhile, an unprecedented boom in oil and gas drilling means those same companies are scrambling to put more pipeline in the ground. The result has been an explosion in litigation over how and when companies are able to take private land.
But while Texas may be ground zero in the struggle over eminent domain, industry representatives and legal experts are seeing more Texas-style battles in other parts of the country as drilling and pipeline building expand.
Jefferson County Court at Law Judge Tom Rugg listens to arguments in a property rights case.
This is part three of a three-part series devoted to looking at efforts to overhaul eminent domain in Texas and what may come next for landowners, pipeline companies, and the oil and gas industry. Read Part One here and Part Two here.
At the O’Keefe’s farm outside of Beaumont, Texas, Dick and his sister Margaret O’Keefe stood by their front door on a muggy day this summer and watch a truck pull up the long dirt road into their neighbor’s field.
The truck was headed to work on the Crosstex NGL pipeline. This is a project that had declared itself a “common carrier,” a pipeline with the right to claim private property.
But after the pipeline was in the ground, a Beaumont judge found otherwise.
“They just claim it, and it’s up to the individual landowners to challenge them,” Dick O’Keefe said. “That’s where I think the state could do a better job of policing what the pipeline companies are doing.”
For landowners like Dick O’Keefe, lawmakers’ failure to create a system in which pipeline companies prove their right to claim land is deeply frustrating. The pipeline industry was also upset by inaction at the legislature, but for different reasons. It wanted rules that freed it from the prospect of multiple landowner lawsuits.
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