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 beef checkoff vote is about more than just a one dollar tax.
Forget the governor’s race. All across Texas people are voting over beef.
Friday is the final day for ranchers and others who deal in cattle to vote on implementing a Texas beef checkoff, a tax charged each time a cow is sold. There’s already a national beef checkoff that levies a one dollar assessment on the seller per cow.
The vote today is on a proposal to create a Texas checkoff, also for a dollar. If the proposal passes, most ranchers in the state will pay a two-dollar tax for each head of cattle they sell.
The government doesn’t collect this tax. The money goes to the Cattlemen’s Beef Board which then gives some of it to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. That industry group uses it to fund beef-related research and to promote beef. The same group also lobbies Washington on behalf of the beef industry. Supporters of the checkoff argue that the tax has raised the price of beef over the years by creating demand.
“Every time the price of beef goes up, it helps me,” says Texas Rancher Curtis Younts Jr., who supports the checkoff.
But the Texas vote has become about more than a one-dollar tax. Many are viewing it as a referendum on the way beef is taxed and promoted in Texas and the US.
The growing presence of methane in the water wells of a suburban Dallas community cannot be linked to nearby drilling activity even though methane levels have risen in several wells in the area since drilling began, according to a report released by the state’s oil and gas regulator. But other scientists who study the issue are not so sure there is no link to drilling.
The report released last week by the Railroad Commission of Texas says it found no evidence that elevated levels of methane in the water or the Parker county housing development ‘Silverado on the Brazos’ is caused by gas drilling operations. The report also says further investigation into a potential link “is not planned at this time.”
“I was surprised that the commission isn’t planning to do some more testing,” Rob Jackson, professor of Earth Sciences at Stanford University who is also studying the issue, says. “Their own data found that five of eight water wells had increasing methane concentration through time. That alone seems like enough reason to follow up.”
Jackson is planning to publish his own findings on the region’s water. Another study by former EPA scientist Geoffrey Thyne indicates the methane is linked to drilling, though Range Resources, the drilling company that owns nearby drilling wells has dismissed the scientists findings, and says the methane is naturally occurring.
Ryan Sitton and Wayne Christian faced off to become the GOP nominee for Railroad Commissioner.
Tuesday night’s runoff elections exhibited a clear pattern: the candidate who most convincingly wore the mantel of Tea Party conservatism won the night on the Republican side. But in the race for a seat on the Railroad Commission, the agency that regulates the oil and gas industry, the outcome was not so simple.
Wayne Christian, a former state lawmaker, lost that race even though he ran a campaign trying to “out-conservative” his opponent. Ryan Sitton, who owns an oil and gas engineering consulting firm, won.
That left many political reporters and pundits scratching their heads. Texas Observer politics writer Christopher Hooks summed it up in nicely when he tweeted: “Wonder why Wayne Christian is getting crushed tonight.”
Ryan Sitton was chosen as the Republican nominee for Reailroad Commissioner.
When former State Rep. Wayne Christian entered the GOP primary runoff for Railroad Commission 12 points ahead of his opponent, he had the backing of numerous Tea Party groups and Republican clubs. He looked very much like the favorite in his race against relative political newcomer Ryan Sitton.
Tuesday GOP voters upended those expectations, nominating Sitton to run in the general election for a seat on the Commission, which regulates the Texas oil and gas industry.
Sitton owns an oil and gas engineering consulting firm. He faced numerous questions in the primary and runoff over whether he could ethically regulate an industry to which he belongs. He initially said he would stay involved with his company if elected, a position from which he later backtracked. He also came under criticism for refusing to divulge his client list.
Little appeared to differentiate Christian and Sitton on policy issues. Both candidates stuck close to conservative positions on regulation, decrying what they describe as federal overreach and burdensome environmental rules. They also shared similar views on social issues unrelated to oil and gas, and reminded voters of their anti-abortion and pro-gun rights positions.
A father and daughter play on the beach in Galveston in 2005. A red tide in Galveston Bay is causing dead fish to wash up on shore this week.
Researchers suspect drought is the cause of a massive fish die off in the Galveston Bay where millions of shad, also known as skipjack, have washed ashore there in recent days. They’ve been found primarily around the communities of Kemah and Seabrook.
“We’ve never seen one to this scale in this location,” Texas Parks and Wildlife Biologist Heather Biggs told KUT’s Nathan Bernier. Though she said that it’s “very common to have fish kills within tributaries throughout the bay system due to low dissolved oxygen.”
Biggs says the cause is apparently the drought. Researchers suspect a lack of rainwater runoff into Galveston Bay resulted in oxygen-depleted waters, which caused the fish to die.
“When you have more runoff, you have more turbidity in the water, and you have more mixing in the water and so you have more oxygen,” Biggs said.
Ryan Sitton and Wayne Christian are facing off to become the GOP nominee for Railroad Commissioner.
Some political campaigns, like the race for governor or president, energize everyday people, grab the media spotlight, and spark heated public debate. Then there are races like the Republican primary runoff election for Texas Railroad Commissioner.
It’s a down-ballot race that many Texans know nothing about (the commission has nothing to do with railroads, rather it regulates Texas oil and gas industries). But that hasn’t stopped the race from getting increasingly negative as the primary runoff on May 27th approaches.
In fact, the lack of voter enthusiasm is likely part of what’s driving the negativity.
“You’ll see a big difference at the top of the ballot for people who vote in the Lieutenant Governor’s Race on the Republican side, who don’t vote when it gets down to this race,” says Ross Ramsey, co-founder and Executive Editor of the Texas Tribune.
Efforts to overhaul the system have failed in the past.
It’s a familiar story. A factory, a power plant, or maybe a landfill wants to open in Texas. People who live nearby worry about pollution, and protest the project. Their challenge goes to the State Office of Administrative Hearings and, eventually, to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Business groups have wanted to overhaul that process for a long time. It’s come up during almost every recent legislative session. And tomorrow, it will come up again at an interim meeting of the House Environmental Regulation Committee. The committee has been charged with looking at the process of “contested case hearings”  ahead of next year’s legislative session.
Here’s how contested case hearings work: to operate a business that pollutes in Texas, you need permits from the TCEQ. Contested cases happen when citizens or environmental groups challenge those permits. In some cases those challenges turn into hearings, not unlike court cases, with the companies and their opponents giving testimony and presenting evidence.
Business groups say the system is used as a blunt instrument to delay or block new development. But supporters say it’s the best check against improper permitting in a state as industry-friendly as Texas.
In Texas, many people suffer from "cedar fever," a winter allergy caused by the Ashe Juniper.
Thanks to all the pollen in the air, I spent the last few weeks coughing, wheezing and blowing my nose. Austin is infamous for bad allergy seasons. We have three of them: fall, winter, and spring. In the summer, it’s too hot for pollen (but the heat gives me something else to complain about).
An little-noticed part of the National Climate Assessment, released yesterday by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, explains how: climate change results in “more frost-free days and warmer seasonal air temperatures,” according to the report. That can mean longer pollen seasons.
Brad Gilde is a lawyer representing Bob and Lisa Parr.
When a Dallas jury awarded three million dollars to a North Texas family in their case against a drilling company, people wondered what it could mean for fracking and its opponents. But the case also highlights a growing health concern in Texas’ booming oil and gas fields.
For years, a lot of the debate around the drilling boom focused on its potential to pollute groundwater. Lately concerns over water seem to have been overtaken by a new worry, one exemplified in the recent multi-million dollar jury verdict.
“This lawsuit was really a lawsuit about air emissions from the totality of unconventional shale gas development,” Brad Gilde, a lawyer for the Parr family, tells StateImpact Texas.
The Parrs says drilling near their property made them sick. A Dallas jury agreed, awarding them nearly $3 million.
When a Dallas jury awarded a North Texas family $3 million for damages from natural gas drilling near their property last week, the Internet went wild. Opponents of hydraulic fracturing called it a landmark, a game changer, the first “anti-fracking” lawsuit to result in a jury award. In truth, the case involved not just fracking, but all the operations that go along with natural gas production.
It was brought by the the Parr family. They sued a drilling company, Aruba Petroleum, one of several gas companies that were operating near their North Texas ranch. The Parrs claimed they were poisoned by Aruba’s activities.
Their troubles started in late 2008. Lisa Parr had just married Bob and moved with her daughter, Emma, to his ranch in Wise county.
“I started feeling bad,” Lisa Parr recalls. “I blew it off as the flu.”
But as several months went by, she still felt sick.
“I had a rash throughout my body, my lymph node stuck out in my neck like the size of pecans,” she says. “There was four of them on each side.”
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