by Sasha Chavkin ProPublica, Feb. 2, 2011, 3 p.m.

Gulf spill paymaster Kenneth Feinberg today released a draft of his long-awaited methodology for deciding payments on final claims for damages from the BP oil spill 2013 and has endorsed an optimistic prediction of how quickly the region2019s economy will recover that is likely to spark controversy among claimants.

You can read Feinberg2019s proposed methodology here [1], as well as a report estimating the recovery period [2] for the Gulf of Mexico. Feinberg commissioned the report to help him figure out his compensation program.

As we2019ve noted, Feinberg initially said [3] he would release the methodology last December, and he explained the delays in its publication by emphasizing that 201CI2019ve got to get this right [4].201D

Feinberg2019s plan assumes that with the exception of oyster harvesters, the Gulf of Mexico will experience a full recovery by the end of 2012. Based on these predictions, he will pay claimants twice their estimated losses from 2010 for final claims, deducting any claims payments they have already received. Oyster harvesters, who he projects will face a slower recovery, will receive four times their losses from 2010.

The documents released today are draft proposals and not final rules, and a two-week comment period begins today in which the public can weigh in on Feinberg2019s plans.

Laurie Johnson, KUHF News [MP3]

September marks the third month in a row that Houston’s home sales are down. Margie Dorrance chairs HAR, the Houston Association of Realtors. HAR releases monthly numbers, tracking the housing market. Dorrance says September sales this year are down 18 percent from the same month last year.

“Our pricing is holding up unbelievably well. Single-family homes were up five percent, which is a really good thing. But the volume, meaning the number of sales, was down. What that’s telling us, quite honestly, is that some of the upper end was stronger. That is telling us there haven’t been that many people buying that many houses.”

Dorrance says there are a couple of reasons for the decline. One is the federal home buyer tax credit expired and the market dropped off after that. Another is people in the mid-range housing market, where most of the sales happen, are still cautious.

“The very bottom of pricing in the market, below $80,000, and the $500,000 and above were both up about 6.5 percent. And then it was those sales prices in the middle range that had the slow-downs.”

And the number of pending sales that had not yet closed at the end of September is also down, about 17 percent.Last month’s numbers also don’t reflect the current moratorium on foreclosures. Those factors suggest the probability of another month of declines when October’s numbers are tallied.

Sources and script after the jump
Awaiting reply from White campaign.

“Texas is on the right path. As your governor, job creation is my top priority.”

Text: Governor Rick Perry

“Since I took office, Texas has added more than 850,000 new jobs.”

Text: Texas has added more than 850,000 new jobs

SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS), current employment statistics, employees on nonfarm payrolls by state and selected industry sector, seasonally adjusted, from Jan. 2001 (when Gov. Perry took office) to Jan. 2010 (most recent official employment numbers).
Texas: Jan. 2001: 9,542,400; June 2010: 10,395,800; Change: 853,000 gain
Complete BLS nonfarm employment statistics (Jan. 2001-Aug. 2010) available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/38920588/BL…

“In fact, since 2005, 80 percent of the new private sector jobs in America … ”

Text: 80% of the new private sector jobs in America

“were created right here in Texas.”

Text: Created right here in Texas

SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS), current employment statistics, employees on private payrolls by state and selected industry sector, not seasonally adjusted
Texas: August 2005: 8,132,900; August 2010: 8,580,600; Change: 447,000 gain
Only eight other states plus District of Columbia increased their number of private sector jobs from Aug. 2005 to Aug. 2010 for a total of 116,300 new private sector jobs outside Texas.
Texas’ 447,700 new private sector jobs / 564,000 total in United States = 79.4 percent
Complete BLS private sector employment statistics (Aug. 2005-Aug. 2010) available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/38921591/BL…

“Texas is on the right track.”

“Low taxes … ”

Text: Low taxes

SOURCE: “Texas’ State/Local Tax Burden Among Nation’s Lowest,” Tax Foundation, http://www.taxfoundation.org/research…

“balanced budget … ”

Text: Balanced budget

SOURCE: LBB report on conference committee report from May 2009 for SB1 (the budget) http://www.lbb.state.tx.us/Bill_81/5_…

“and strong public schools … ”

Text: Strong public schools

SOURCES: “Closing the Expectations Gap,” Achive, March 2010, http://www.achieve.org/files/AchieveC…
EXCERPTS: “With the passage of HB 3 in June 2009, Texas became the only state that meets the minimum criteria Achieve believes necessary to measure and provide incentives for college and career readiness,” and, “Texas has the most comprehensive approach to college- and career-ready accountability.”
http://www.achieve.org/files/AchieveC… (Page 21)

“make Texas the number one state for job creation.”

SOURCES:
U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, current employment statistics, employees on nonfarm payrolls by state and selected industry sector, seasonally adjusted, from Jan. 2001 (when Gov. Perry took office) to Jan. 2010 (most recent official employment numbers).
Texas: Jan. 2001: 9,542,400; June 2010: 10,395,800; Change: 853,000 gain
United States: Jan. 2001: 122,856,800; June 2010: 119,671,800, Change: 3,185,000 loss
Complete BLS nonfarm employment statistics (Jan. 2001-Aug. 2010) available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/38920588/BL…
“By any measure, Texas tops nation in job creation,” Houston Chronicle, 8/24/10, http://blogs.chron.com/txpotomac/2010…

Securing our future. Governor Rick Perry.

Texas ranks in the bottom third of states—34th nationally—in a state-by-state study of our children’s well-being, according to the 2010 KIDS COUNT Data Book. The study reveals that Texas has the third highest teen birth rate in the nation, and a child poverty rate well above the rest of the U.S.

By Shelley Koffler, KERA News

Governor Rick Perry said today there will be no televised debate with democrat Bill White. But in press conferences the rivals for governor are debating the size the of the state budget gap. White believes the shortfall will be twice as big as Perry projects.

by Todd Wiseman
September 14, 2010

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/ccKlNs.

by Mose Buchele
September 7, 2010

Ask anybody — from the president of the United States to your high school guidance counselor — and you’ll probably hear the same, seemingly obvious thing: Higher education is the key to financial advancement. But is everybody going to college a realistic goal? And would the world really be better if we achieved it? Mose Buchele of KUT News reports.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/beci9s.

by Reeve Hamilton, The Texas Tribune
August 30, 2010

They came by the tens of thousands, forced from homes by a wall of water and rescued from the horrors of mass shelters only after days of suffering. Bus after bus deposited throngs of the poorest people from one of America’s poorest cities into Houston — perhaps the only nearby metropolis with the wherewithal to handle the influx. Others from Louisiana, those with more means, had fled to Texas even before the storm hit land. 

The uneasy arrangement was a shotgun marriage from the beginning: Many New Orleanians had no choice in whether or where they went, and Houstonians had no choice, for humanity’s sake, but to take them in.

Five years later, residents of the Bayou City remain conflicted about the experience: deeply proud of their role yet suspicious of the newcomers’ impact, according to Rice University researchers who have explored the effects of the historic population replanting on Houston’s economy, crime, social services and collective psyche. Despite the city’s lauded efforts in comforting the Louisiana diaspora, Houston Mayor Annise Parker did not mark Sunday’s Katrina anniversary in any official way. “We put out the welcome mat and stepped in to lend a hand to our neighbors in need,” she says of the massive relief effort the city mounted as exiles poured in, “but Katrina was not our disaster.”

At its peak after the storm, estimates of the evacuees in Houston grew as high as 250,000 people. A year later, reports indicated as many as 150,000 remained. Five years later, Parker says, “I don’t know what the number is, and I don’t believe we will ever know, nor should we need it any longer. They are Houstonians.” 

Many in Houston have not always been so magnanimous. Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice, remembers scratching his head when the black woman behind the cash register at his neighborhood grocery complained about “these people” — pointing to black people. “I realized she meant the people from New Orleans,” Stein says. “There was a lot of antipathy there.”

Audio highlights: Klineberg, Stein, Ho and Wilson

The stresses of suddenly adjusting for thousands of new residents were numerous. “There were schools that were crowded,” Parker recalls. “The lowest social strata here felt the evacuees cut in line. There was the perception of an increase in crime and a big increase in homicides among evacuees.”

Some of the concerns have dissipated with time. Evidence suggests that Texas public schools, took on the challenge with a certain degree of success. According to a study released in April by the Texas Education Agency, public schools in Houston and elsewhere “substantially” closed the performance gaps between Texas students and 7,600 Louisiana exiles in grade school.

The myth of a Katrina crime wave 

The myth of a widespread post-Katrina crime wave has been largely debunked. Earlier this year, a study published in the Journal of Criminal Justice concluded “the contention that displaced persons altered a city’s crime problem found limited support.” Moderate increases in homicides were detected in Houston, but not a pattern of crime that could be attributable to the new population. In San Antonio — which took in roughly 30,000 evacuees — no significant crime increase was detected.

In 2007, Stein, at the request of then-mayor Bill White, prepared a memo detailing how apartment complexes that housed large populations of New Orleans transplants did experience a spike in crime. But the acts were almost exclusively evacuee-on-evacuee, with no spillover effect. “You had a lot of crime,” Stein says. “But it was so contained that you could literally live two blocks away from the apartment complex and — unless you were there when the police car entered the complex — you wouldn’t know about it.”

Meanwhile, other problems are harder to shake off. Rice economics professor Vivian Ho, collaborating with political science professor Rick Wilson, surveyed evacuees in Houston’s rescue centers about their health status. They found a group with high levels of chronic disease, poor access to health care and a high reliance on Medicaid and the state’s children’s health insurance programs. The issues were exacerbated by the trauma of the flood — nearly 30 percent of those surveyed said their health declined as a result, which stifled the job search for many. In a system already struggling with a higher-than-average percentage of uninsured, Ho says, “to add more individuals on to that — who need appropriate health care [and who] don’t have jobs — it’s an important situation that got looked over. It’s going to continue to be a financial burden to our system.”

The reality of perception

Some of the longest-lingering effects are those visited upon the Houston psyche. Sociology professor Stephen Klineberg tracks such perceptions in the Houston Area Survey, an annual snapshot of Houstonians’ attitudes that is approaching its 30th consecutive year of operation. In a city long-dominated by a shrinking population of white males, the Katrina experience forced Houston to face its rapidly increasing diversity in ways it never had before, Klineberg says.

To put it bluntly, the sudden surge in outsiders — many black and poor — prompted a starkly negative turn in attitudes toward immigrants and minorities, one that worsened with time and only recently has begun to ease. The percentage of Houstonians calling the experience a good thing for the city dropped from 32 percent in 2006 to just seven percent in 2008, though over the last two years, that number has risen slightly to 11 percent. The percentage calling the Katrina experience a bad thing for Houston currently sits at 59 percent, down from a peak of 70 percent in 2008. Similar trend lines appear in general questions about attitudes toward diversity and immigration. Those saying increasing immigration mostly strengthens society dropped from 57 percent in 2005 to 44 percent in 2007. Houstonians calling increasing ethnic diversity a source of strength for the city dipped from 69 percent before the storm to 60 percent in 2008. This year, it returned to pre-storm levels. 

More than anything, Klineberg was struck by how Katrina — more than any event documented by his survey — revealed seemingly irreconcilable disparities between the lived experiences of different races. Seventy-eight percent of black Houstonians said the government would have responded more quickly if the New Orleans population had been predominantly white. Seventy percent of the white Houstonians said it wouldn’t have made a difference. “It’s about as striking a difference as you can imagine,” Klineberg says.

The hidden evacuees

Of course, the mass relocation was not limited to poor black New Orleanians. Large slices of the evacuee population assimilated under the radar of popular perceptions and stereotypes. Klineberg notes that an estimated 9,000 Vietnamese evacuees came to Houston. Instead of taking shelter in the public offerings, they were largely absorbed by the 46,000 Vietnamese families in Houston.

Evacuees can be divided into two starkly different groups: the voluntary — generally those with the connections and means to get out before Katrina hit — and the involuntary second wave that came after Katrina, shipped in from shelters like the Superdome and the city’s convention center. Many, without the means to evacuate, had been pulled from rooftops in the Lower Ninth Ward and eastern New Orleans, where up to 20 feet of water had ripped through houses, knocking some off their foundations. The poorer latter group, more easily accessible to reporters in the confines of the Astrodome and FEMA housing, dominated the coverage and literally colored perceptions of the evacuee population. Rick Wilson conducted a number of social experiments with individuals in the rescue centers and found them to be, as a group, highly cooperative, conscientious and willing to share. “One of the things I wanted to do was dispel this myth that, when you get traumatized, or when government collapses or fails, it doesn’t mean people just start running around and killing each other,” he says. “And they don’t.”

Ultimately, the story of post-Katrina Houston is one of thousands finding a home — by choice or necessity — in a diverse metropolis of about 5.5 million. “Has it affected the culture of the city?” Yeah, it’s had an impact,” Wilson says. “Has it fundamentally altered the city? I don’t know about that. Has it made the city think about itself? Sure. Has it made Houston the new New Orleans? Nope.”

Parker says her office receives daily reports from former New Orleanians who have planted roots, bought homes, obtained jobs and enrolled their children in school. “For many, Houston has been a good move,” she says. Though, she acknowledges, “There are also many that still yearn to return to New Orleans.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/cFf4HR.

by Ben Philpott, The Texas Tribune
August 18, 2010

Last week, Republicans loudly complained about a just-approved bill that would send $830 million in federal education funds to Texas with strings attached. But as Ben Philpott of KUT News and the Tribune reports, Democrats have their own reason to balk.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://trib.it/d5p77D.

by John Burnet

Mexico’s drug cartel war has killed more than 28,000 people in four years, but some of the collateral damage has not been as noticeable. A trio of famous, Prohibition-era cantinas in Mexican border cities, having survived more than 80 turbulent years, are in deep trouble.

On a recent weekday, a headline in Mexico’s El Diario newspaper screams: “Juarez is the Center of the Country’s Narco-War.” That can’t be good for business at the Kentucky Club, a venerable saloon that’s been here since 1920, three blocks from the international bridge that connects Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas.

“Actually, in these times, the wave of violence here in Juarez is tremendous,” says Raul Martinez, who has been the doorman at the Kentucky Club for 25 years. “Before, we had to turn people away, we were so full — $10 or $20 wouldn’t get you in. Now, I wish we had customers” (NPR).