Plaza de Armas TX

Redistricting confusion has played havoc with this state’s political maps and primary schedule over the last few months. Last Saturday, however, it may have actually botched the results of a couple of school-district races.

North East ISD has come under fire this week because district officials misinformed candidates in NEISD’s three trustee races about their district boundaries, and didn’t correct the information until the second day of early voting. For Tom Lessner, who lost his race by six votes, and Betty Daise, who came up only 67 votes short in her election, all this misdirection might have made the difference between winning and losing.

The root of the problem will be familiar to anyone who has followed the way redistricting has paralyzed Texas politics for much of the last year. Early this year, North East ISD submitted new district maps to the U.S. Justice Department, with the expectation that those maps would be used for this year’s election. But the Justice Department has been slow to approve the maps, and as the May election approached, district officials realized they’d need to revert back to their old 2001 maps.

Towing companies are finding out what it feels like to have something they depend on unexpectedly taken away. The City of San Antonio is drastically cutting what towing companies can charge, and the fight could eventually wind up in court.

“This has kind of reached a boiling point now,” said San Antonio Police Chief William McManus. San Antonio companies have been following state regulations that allow wrecker services to charge close to $300 for a non-consent tow if there is no local ordinance.

But after a series of reports by my fellow Trouble Shooter reporter Jaie Avila, the city unearthed an ordinance from 2002, which clearly states: "the maximum fee a licensee may charge for towing is $85." The Chief and the City Attorney Michael Barnard looked closely at the ordinance, consulted with state officials and decided they will enforce that $85 towing price cap.

Justice of the Peace Stephen Walker’s courtroom on the Northwest side is packed several days a week with teenagers on the verge of dropping out of high school. Many sit next to their parents, who face charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Walker requires these troubled teens to finish their high-school education. But lately, more of them are coming back with suspicious sheepskins. “When we see this, we shake our heads and go, oh God, we got another one,” says Walker, who has started warning kids in his court to stay away from for-profit schools that claim to offer a quick high-school diploma. “From what we see, they are a diploma mill. You fill this out, give us your money and take this little test, and you got a diploma. That's not how education works."

Bexar County Prosecutor Kevin O’Connell is a campaign natural, dropping his father’s NYPD tenure into a sentence as deftly as a Texan might mention he’s an Aggie.

“I kind of grew up with the guys with the badges on,” he says.

O’Connell, a 20-year vet of the DA's office, is one of two candidates in the Republican primary for the 175th District Court, a seat that will be defended in November by Judge Mary Roman. By all accounts, he’s the favorite in the May 29 contest, even without his family’s law-enforcement credentials.

Allen Tharp, the founder and CEO of the Lion & Rose pubs, will become the new president of the San Antonio Tea Party, according to a local Tea Party activist.

Tharp will replace George Rodriguez, who became the first Latino president of a major Tea Party chapter when he took over the leadership of SATP in February 2011. Rodriguez announced his resignation last week, a move that was the subject of a May 12 San Antonio Express-News column by Brian Chasnoff. The column noted that Rodriguez had reversed his earlier declaration of support for the 2012-2017 municipal bond program, in the face of overwhelming Tea Party opposition to the bond.

Rodriguez insists, however, that he was not forced out over his position on the bond program. Mac McDowell, a local Tea Party activist who also hosts “The Boiling Point,” a conservative talk show on 92.5 The Patriot, agrees, saying that Rodriguez did face pressure from the Tea Party rank-and-file, but not over the bond program.

In late February, the Express-News ran a story about a VIA Metropolitan Transit public work session in which CEO Keith Parker and board members discussed strategies for increasing the agency’s meager budget. The heart of the piece was board chair and connected politico Henry Muñoz III’s suggestion that board members should be making more campaign contributions to people like Gov. Rick Perry, who had vetoed an initiative that would have allowed VIA busses to use some highway shoulders.

But missing from the coverage was any analysis of how VIA’s funding stacks up against other transit agencies. Admittedly, it’s difficult to do a robust comparison of metropolitan transit agencies, which have different funding sources, service areas, and demographic realities underlying their routes. I was not able to find a recent, comprehensive study of transit agency funding, but in a preliminary survey of seven agency budgets in 2011, I found VIA has the lowest budget coupled with one of the largest service areas.