Small Town, Global Village

From "Mineola Police Report," the Mineola Monitor, Jan. 6 edition:

Dec. 23 - A person reported that they bought an Ipod off the internet and sent their money to China and received some shoes in return. The matter was turned over to the FBI.

The Aloysius Chronicles, Part III: Does the Incoming Houston Councilman from Pearland Practice an “Alternative Lifestyle,” and If So What Sort?

More from the public record regarding Al Hoang (a/k/a Hoang Duy Hung), who’s to be sworn-in Monday as the new Houston councilman from District F, thus continuing what apparently has become a tradition of the district being represented by people who don’t live there:

1. Hoang, after first refusing to speak with the Houston Chronicle about residency issues raised by the public record, and in fact after hanging up the phone on reporter Mike Snyder (an auspicious start in media relations for a rookie officeholder), on Dec. 28 emailed the Chronicle informing it that the homestead exemption claimed on his property at 4403 Bugle in District F was carried over from the previous owner in Harris County Appraisal District records. This was confirmed by HCAD. This bit of late-breaking information eliminated “any concern that Hoang and his wife had wrongly claimed exemptions on separate properties,” as the Chronicle cautiously parsed it in story posted on Dec. 28. But it did not, as we’ll incautiously add, eliminate concern that DISTRICT F WILL AGAIN BE REPRESENTED BY A CARPETBAGGER WHO DIDN’T MEET THE RESIDENCY REQUIREMENT TO RUN FOR THE OFFICE (either the legal requirement or the non-legal requirement––that is, the real-world one in which decent, honorable people know and generally agree on what words such as “residency” mean). And while it appears to be technically wrong to report, as we did, that Hoang “claimed” the exemption, he didn’t exactly disclaim it, either, and according to what HCAD told the Chronicle he can still benefit from the break on his tax bill due Jan. 31, even though he’s been listed as owning the house for most of last year.

2. This late-breaking information does not eliminate the fact that Hoang’s wife, or his wife-of-record, claims a homestead exemption on a house at 2702 Sunfish Dr. in Pearland in Brazoria County (that’s far out of District F, for the record). The deed on the house was transferred from Hoang to his wife in March 2008, according to Brazoria County Appraisal District records. But his homestead exemption-claiming wife, or maybe it’s just someone with a name identical to hers, is registered to vote at 4403 Bugle in District F (that’s far outside of Pearland, for the record), along with Al Hoang and three other full-size adults (that’s 5 in total). So his wife lives in Pearland––Texas law allows the homestead exemption only on the owner’s “primary place of residence”––but is registered to vote in District F in Houston.

3. One of the five adults listing their voter-registration address as 4403 Bugle is a Duyen K. Trinh. A Duyen Kim Trinh is listed on Hoang’s campaign Web site as having been on Hoang’s campaign staff in some unspecified “voter outreach” capacity. According to Harris County appraisal district records, Hoang took ownership of the residence at 4403 Bugle on March 3 of this year from a Duyen K. Trinh. Of course, residency does not mean “home ownership,” so it’s possible that Hoang was bunking down at 4403 Bugle prior to acquiring the property. Perhaps his wife and the the three young children they appear to have (judging by the photos on his Web site) were also bunking there, along with the three other adults registered there to vote. It’s possible, as the structure encloses about 1,900 square feet and contains 3 bedrooms, according to HCAD, but it’d be a tight fit for all.

4. In his exchange with the Chronicle of Dec. 28 Hoang also “provided a Texas Department of Public Safety document showing the Bugle address was applied to his driver's license in May 2008,” according to the paper, a fact that was confirmed by the DPS. As one astute comment affixed to the Chronicle story noted, this came shortly after Hoang’s candidacy for a Harris County district judgeship in the March 4, 2008 Republican primary (he finished third in a field of three). The following day, Hoang was recorded as deeding the Pearland property to his wife, meaning he was a Brazoria County homeowner when he ran for a Harris County judgeship.

5. While the driver’s license change-of-address suggests that Hoang at least was crossing his legal i’s in preparation for running in District F, he did not cross his t’s, because, as the Chronicle previously reported, Al Hoang was listed at the 2702 Sunfish address in Pearland for 2009 taxing purposes on property he owns in Galveston County. He's also still listed as having a residential phone at 2702 Sunfish, in addition to one at 4403 Bugle.

6. From the available public record, and in lieu of some explanation from Al Hoang (supplied by doing something apparently totally out of character, like speaking by phone or in-person to a reporter or other interested party), one can only conclude that Al Hoang is involved in one of those “alternative lifestyles” that one of his supporters sniggeringly mentioned in a comment left on this blog after the Dec. 12 runoff election. Now we don’t really care what alternative lifestyle Al Hoang may be pursuing––we’re fairly libertarian in these matters and it’s OK by us whichever way he may swing, as long as it’s with a two-legged adult(s) somewhere above the age of consent––but Al Hoang claims to care a great deal about such personal proclivities, as evidenced by this statement on his Web site:

“While some of his opponents might advocate for gays and liberals’ rights, Al is defending Christian and family values.”*

Yes, Mr. Family Values Who Claims Not to Live With His Wife, let’s not be concerned with the rights of gay people, especially those of the new mayor and veteran at-large councilwoman you’ll supposedly be working with to secure those infrastructure improvements you’ve promised to District F.

7. We’ll not belabor this point at present, but Hoang, at least as of Dec. 31, had made no move to amend the bad-joke campaign finance reports he filed, which are devoid of dates of even one contribution or expense and or otherwise so messed-up we wouldn’t even begin to try to describe them. We suspect that even an entity with subpoena power, such as the district attorney or the Texas Ethics Commission, would have a hard time getting to the bottom of Al Hoang’s campaign finances, but we do hope someone gives it a shot.

8. Al Hoang as councilman promises great City Hall entertainment for the coming two years. We just wish he wasn’t going to be our councilman (in a democracy, of course, one gets the government one deserves).

*Hoang seems to have had an interesting life, if the bio posted on his campaign Web site is anywhere near the truth (and we certainly wouldn’t take it at face value): After graduating from high school “Al became a Christian religious brother spending his 4 years in fasting, prayers, and meditations,” it says. This explains the “Aloysius”––a fine Irish-Catholic name, redolent of fish sticks on Friday and stiff-necked Jesuits stalking the hallways with yardsticks––and may also explain Al’s rather unyielding Augustinian/Manichaean worldview: “A Vote for Conservative vs. Liberal is a Vote for Right vs. Wrong.” Hoang ‘s site also says that after he graduated from UH he “came back to Vietnam voicing for human rights and freedom. In 1992, the Communist Regime imprisoned him 15 months in solitary confinement for his belief in Democracy. The U.S Department of States intervened and he was released back to the U.S in 1993.” OK, that would also explain the Manichaean worldview (if true).

To be continued (sorry) as developments warrant.

Stein Watch: The Holiday Week in Stein

Shortly after launching our much-ballyhooed and universally applauded Bob Stein Watch we realized that we may have gnawed off more than our occasionally tetchy tummy is capable of digesting. It would take a battalion (or two) of researchers, working night and day, to keep abreast of the many Bartlett’s-ready quotations and public appearances/pronouncements of the noted Rice University political scientist. We are but a one-man, close-to-the-ground, volunteer operation and most likely will prove woefully inadequate for the task. But in for a dime, in for dollar, as the saying goes, so without further ado we present what we hope will be a full and complete Stein Watch for the week of 12-27-09 through 01-02-10 (barring any surprise guest commentaries by Bob Stein at half times of upcoming bowl games):

Dec. 29: The professor, identified as “Bob Stein, Channel 11 political expert,” makes a brief appearance––we’re talking all of 10 seconds––in the middle of a report on Kay Bailey Hutchison’s “new transportation plan.” Stein apparently was on hand for English-language translation, saying something close to this:

“I think that what Senator Hutchison was saying is that if you don't like transportation, blame TxDOT, and if you’re gonna blame TxDOT, blame the man who made all the appointments to that commission.”

(As Channel 11 reporter Lee McGuire noted, although not in these exact words, a major plank of the Hutchison plan is to stomp on the dessicated carcass of the Trans-Texas Corridor.)

Dec. 29: Outgoing Mayor Bill White announces a new commission to study the city’s term limit provisions, with appointees to include, among the other usual suspects, the husband of the mayor's agenda director, Robert M. Stein of Rice Univeristy. (Appointments to such august bodies apparently rate the formal “Robert,” while Channel 11 must prefer the folksier, TV-friendly "Bob" for its political commentary.)

Stein fans across the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area were moved to wonder whether this appointment will pose a conflict that will prevent Our Man Bob from publicly declaiming on the term-limits issue.

Time, as always, will tell.

One for the Home Team!

After reading the Dec. 22 dispatch in the Houston Chronicle by Bernardo Fallas, the reporter who covers the Houston Dynamo for the daily newspaper, our first thought was, “This Bernardo Fallas must have a sister who works for the Dynamo organization.”

No, no. We’re the ingenuous, naive sort, and such a connection wouldn’t naturally occur to us, at least during our waking hours. We just thought Fallas’s story was overly generous in detailing the arguments of the Dynamo management and Major League Soccer as to why “soccer-specific” stadiums and the necessity of the franchises “controlling revenue streams” are the keys to growing the domestic MLS to “compete with the best leagues in Europe and South America.” But that’s just our opinion, and opinions are like ... well, you know what they say.

The timing of the story also struck us as a bit suspicious, coming just 10 days after a mayoral election in which Dynamo president Oliver Luck and the team ownership, in the individual and corporate persons of California billionaire Philip Anshutz, Brener Sports and Entertainment of Beverly Hills and ex-boxing champ Oscar de la Hoya, put their money on the wrong pony. As Fallas himself put it:

...the Dynamo — whose move to Houston in late 2005 was due, in large part, to local government’s receptiveness to the idea of a public-private partnership for a soccer stadium in the Bayou City — wait for negotiations with the city of Houston and Harris County to resume after the recent mayoral election brought them to a standstill.

A cynical sort––not us, though––might believe that a little prodding in the daily paper would help move matters along.

As it turns out, of course, Fallas does have a sister who works for the Dynamo, a connection first brought to our attention by eagle-eyed Anne Linehan of blogHouston, who pointed to the similarity in the last names of the Chronicle reporter and Ana B. Fallas-Scarborough, listed as the Dynamo’s executive assistant/HR rep (true, not a high-level, policy-making position). Benardo Fallas confirmed the relationship for us, assured us it had no bearing on the story in question or his coverage in general, and told us it that “to insinuate otherwise would be both imprudent and an insult to my professionalism as a journalist.”

OK, imprudent is our middle name (actually, our middle initial is M. and our last name is Prudent, which is German, so heavy accent on the first syllable), but since Mr. Fallas promptly and graciously responded to our inquiry, thus freeing us to get on with the business of returning ill-fitting Christmas gifts, we’ll turn this space over to him for extended elaboration:

I informed my superiors the moment I learned my sister was being considered for a job with the team. Since the decision was to keep me on the beat, we have strived to maintain a healthy professional distance.

I sense you (or some of your readers)* may have an issue (and understandably so) with MLS' and the team's argument that teams need to control revenue streams in order to "make it."

The argument that MLS teams need to control revenue streams to become financially viable enterprises is one made time and again by teams and league (as well as teams in other pro leagues). It is the first answer you would get if you called Oliver Luck or Don Garber and asked them why an MLS team needs a stadium.

What I did is I presented that argument while noting that there's opposition to the idea of the Dynamo having public help in their pursuit of a stadium.

I was asked by my superiors to write about the emergence of MLS stadiums and how that relates to the Dynamo, and I think I did just that.

Mr. Fallas strikes us as an earnest and thoughtful young man trying to make his way in the world, but these unnamed superiors of his are doing him and their newspaper a disservice if they are aware of the sibling connection and are still assigning him to do a story on what essentially is a political issue that arouses considerable hostility on both sides. (As we noted to Fallas, even his reporting of games, team personnel moves and other non-political matters might come into question if he and the daily newspaper actually had any competition and there was another reporter from another organization assigned as a Dynamo beat reporter. Fallas later informed us that he doubles-up at the Chronicle as both a copy editor and soccer reporter; we’d caution him against over-excelling at either of these jobs, lest he wind up also shouldering the paper’s transportation beat while passing his off-evenings as a part-time society columnist.)

On a semi-related note, since the negotiations over the new soccer-specific stadium appear to hinge on Harris County’s agreement to participate in a Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, the Chronicle reported on Wednesday that the outgoing City Council voted expand the Midtown TIRZ by 8 acres to include “the Asia House, the Buffalo Soldiers Museum and the Museum of African-American culture.” Kind of an interesting farewell of sorts, since we were under the impression that the departing mayor was not exactly a fan of the TIRZ mechanism (one of the good things about him, in our inconsequential book) and the incoming one most pointedly made an issue of not expending tax dollars, or too many tax dollars, on “museums” and “stadiums” and the like in this time of, um, fiscal austerity.

The version of the story in our damp home-delivered edition was all of 3 paragraphs and unbylined, but the online version included this seen-it-comin’-a-mile-away graf:

Councilman James Rodriguez, while supporting the changes, said he wanted to see plans for development of a Latino heritage museum within the same zone in Midtown.

We only hope that we can raise the money, and find a suitable and affordable location within the Midtown TIRZ, to get our planned Museum for the Study and Furtherance of Peckerwood Culture up and running in time to take advantage of the “$5 million in improvements to cultural and public facilities.”

By the way, possibly because of some apparent oversight neither this story nor Mr. Fallas's Dec. 22 work included a quote from Bob Stein.

*Mr. Fallas here makes the probably unsupportable supposition that we have readers, plural.

Beaumont: What Houston Should Aspire to Be

It may be some years before Beaumont elects a gay mayor. And while residents there can rightly take pride in the Babe Didrikson Zaharias* Park, they have no poopy-precious downtown development tool such as Discovery Green of which to boast. There appears to be but one standalone Starbucks in the entirety of Beaumont, and the city’s nightlife opportunities have been much diminished since the Red Carpet Inn burned down many years ago. Yet there is one place where Beaumont has it all over Houston. According to what is no doubt the handiwork of some internationally recognized advertising and marketing genius, Beaumont has the cleanest restrooms in Texas. That, anyway, is what a billboard somewhere west of Beaumont proclaims.

It is possible that this message has been greeting visitors for many months, if not years, and we had previously missed it. We usually keep our eyes on the road and our hands upon the wheel, but last week we were riding shotgun and happened to be wide awake as our jolly caravan approached Jefferson County. We were just sorry that we had no pressing need to avail our self of a public toilet at that particular point in our journey.

Our personal knowledge of Beaumont’s public facilities is scant and much dated––we’re better acquainted with those in Vidor––yet we have no reason at all to disbelieve the town’s haughty claim to superiority. It was, after all, on a billboard.

We ask: Can Houston offer the same assurances to the road-weary traveler?

*A real person of notable accomplishment––if you can't identify her and at least two of the sports at which she excelled, please pack your things and go back to whereever it is you came from ASAP.

¿Dónde Está Bob?

Since hardly a day seems to go by when Bob Stein doesn’t show up in either the Houston Chronicle or on Channel 11 pontificating on some subject or another, we at Slampo’s Place are launching yet another invaluable public service by inaugurating our Bob Stein Watch so that fans of the Rice University political scientist can keep up with his many and varied utterances with a minimum of exertion. Our first installment finds Dr. Bob dispensing the conventional wisdom down in the middle of a Christmas Eve story by the Chronicle’s Stewart M. Powell, which relayed the startling news that one of our two Republican senators, John Cornyn, is turning into slightly less of a hypocrite because of his chairmanship of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. In this one, the regular-guy “Bob” is supplanted by the formal “Robert,” perhaps because the story was written out of Washington D.C. by a reporter who uses his middle initial in his byline or perhaps because a house style and uniform editing are two of the many fusty journalism traditions that have been jettisoned by the daily newspaper in this age of diminished resources and It Girl society columnists. Anyway, here’s Bob:

The senator is “caught in a terrible pickle,” says Rice University political scientist Robert Stein, co-author of Perpetuating the Pork Barrel. “Legislators’ support back home usually lies with their ability to take care of constituents. But Republicans’ anti-spending campaign puts that at risk.”

Ahh, that was so good we wanna play it again:

The senator is “caught in a terrible pickle,” says Rice University political scientist Robert Stein, co-author of Perpetuating the Pork Barrel. “Legislators’ support back home usually lies with their ability to take care of constituents. But Republicans’ anti-spending campaign puts that at risk.”

It is possible, even probable, that Doc Stein has made more recent appearances in the local media since Christmas Eve, but we have been in Louisiana for the past three days, well beyond the internationally recognized Bob Stein Zone.

Merry Christmas, Aloysius: The Newly Elected Houston City Councilman from Brazoria County Just Doesn't Want to Talk About It

Thanks to the able reportage of the Chronicle's Mike Snyder, we now have a fuller portrait of Houston councilman-elect Al Hoang, who, as noted in this space recently, did not legally meet the residency requirement to run for the District F seat he won on Dec. 12 and whose campaign finance reports don't exactly fulfill the legal requirements demanded of these disclosures. The picture ain't that pretty at all. (Up high and for the record: Snyder contacted us before publication of his story and we requested that this humble blog be left out of it, based mostly on the timeless "What's in it for us?" calculation but also not to detract from the serious nature of the enterprise.*)

What's truly amazing about Snyder's story––aside from the pathetic defense of Hoang offered by county Republican chairman Jared Woodfill, in yet another manifestation of the tiresome partisanship that now infests local municipal politics**––was Hoang's refusal to even discuss the residency issue with the reporter. First, he apparently issued a Gary Hart-like challenge to Snyder to "prove it," then hung up the phone when the reporter contacted him later after meeting the challenge. Think about that: A newly elected public official flat-out refuses to discuss legitimate issues of concern raised by the public record with the city's leading daily newspaper. We know the power of the printed press is much diminished, but this is not a real politic way to begin a career as an elected officeholder (hopefully, one of very short duration).

Instead of trying to come up with some half-assed explanation, Hoang resorted to the first refuge of the scoundrel, telling the newspaper, "You're trying to pick on me." We can only surmise that the unstated reasoning was "Because I'm Vietnamese." This is the sort of matter that inevitably ends up with one set of white people calling another set of white people racists. Watch.

So what is to be done? Oh, the new Houston City Council could actually do something about it, but won't, for at least five reasons we can think of, starting with, "We don't want to be bothered with this." Perhaps another elected official with subpoena power wouldn't feel as constrained by political sensitivities. Or perhaps she would. At the very least, Hoang should be subjected to unceasing public embarrassment, as well as a stiff fine from the Texas Ethics Commission for his campaign finance reports (which he, a lawyer, weirdly insisted to the Chronicle met the requirements of the law, which they clearly don't).

In the meantime, we extend our sincerest wishes to Aloysius Hoang and family for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We just hope Santa Claus can sort through the confusion and alight at the correct address, whether it's 2702 Sunfish Dr. in Pearland, or 10001 Westpark Dr., Apt. 83, in Houston City Council District G, or 4403 Bugle Dr in Houston City Council District F, or....

To be continued.

*More for the record: While we did vote for Mike Laster, Hoang's runoff opponent, we have had no contact whatsoever with Laster or anyone connected with him, and he wouldn't know us if he ran over us with a shopping cart at the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market.

**Yes, Democrats have gotten much worse about this, but then again there are a lot more Democrats than Republicans in the city limits.