Texas Tribune
Strict rules over delta-8 and delta-9 likely for Texas’ booming hemp industry
by By Karen Brooks Harper, The Texas Tribune – 2024-05-31 13:49:12
SUMMARY: Texas state Sen. Charles Perry is addressing issues stemming from a 2019 hemp legislation that unintentionally advanced a psychoactive hemp market in Texas. The legislation allowed the sale of low-dose THC products, leading to a surge in retail cannabis dispensaries. Despite Perry's warnings, the market's lack of regulation led to widespread availability of products enticing to youth and difficult to distinguish from illegal marijuana. The Texas Senate is now considering stricter regulations, including age limits, childproof packaging, and third-party testing. The aim is to better balance medicinal cannabis needs with market safety, amid ongoing debates on legalization and regulation.
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When Texas state Sen. Charles Perry sat down this week in a packed room at the state Capitol to hear testimony on whether to ban some psychoactive hemp products from being sold in the state, he already knew what was coming.
The Lubbock Republican's 2019 agricultural hemp legislation — a bipartisan, farmer-friendly bill — had opened up the state's hemp industry and, in doing so, touched off a massive new consumable hemp market in Texas as well.
Perry had suspected at the time, he said at a Senate committee hearing on Wednesday, that the new law would eventually be exploited by an expansive and unregulated retail market dealing in psychoactive products.
Sure enough, the sale of cannabis products in Texas soared as the loopholes Perry worried about in his own bill remained open for the next five years.
“I told these retailers, ‘If you guys screw this up by being cute and getting people high off it, there will be consequences,' ” he said during a Texas Senate State Affairs Committee interim hearing on consumable hemp on Wednesday. “I'm disappointed, but I'm not surprised that we are here today.”
Retail cannabis dispensaries sprang up by the thousands in the wake of Perry's legislation — an enabling statute that followed a similar federal farm bill the year before. Now, state lawmakers are waking up to a hemp-boom hangover and realizing that the time has long-since arrived to start getting a handle on an exploding market.
Five years after hemp sales were greenlit by state and federal regulators, Texas is home to more than 7,000 registered consumable hemp retail spots — in gas stations, store fronts, bars, coffee shops, strip malls and mobile trailers — selling gummies, candies, drinks, and smokeables with low-dose tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.
That certainly, Perry says now, was not the intent of the legislation. While stopping short of suggesting an outright ban on those products, Perry indicated that the burgeoning industry was in for some much stricter regulations — at the very least — when lawmakers convene in their regular session next year.
“With statute, we can clean this mess up that the industry chose to do,” Perry said. “Because clearly it was foretold this could happen, and now we've got people getting high off of something in Texas we have said we don't do, and it's by virtue of a very ‘cute' industry making a lot of money at people's expense. I hope we fix this. It's time. It's past time, actually.”
Consumable hemp products contain industrial hemp or hemp-derived cannabinoids, including the non-intoxicating cannabidiol known as CBD. They may not contain more than 0.3% concentration of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the intoxicating part of the cannabis plant that comes in forms known as delta-8, delta-9 and THCA.
The difference in the legal and illegal products lies in the plants from which they come. Hemp and marijuana plants are both cannabis plants. Marijuana plants have high THC. Hemp has low THC.
Texas is one of about a dozen states that has not legalized marijuana in any form for broad use. The state's very narrow Compassionate Use Program allows medical marijuana, which can contain up to 1% THC by weight, to be prescribed and distributed for a short list of conditions. About 8,000 people participate in the program.
But state and federal law allow dispensaries in Texas to sell hemp-derived products that look, taste and sometimes intoxicate similar to their more potent sibling — with no age limits, loose and inconsistent testing requirements, and no limit on the number of licenses allowed in the state.
And because only one THC form, delta-9, is singled out in the laws, products made with other types of THC — the synthesized molecule known as delta-8 with similar structure and effects and another one called THCA that's derived from immature plants — can be produced and sold within the gray area of the law and with no limits at all. There are at least 10 cannabinoids in the market right now, experts testified, and yet only one is regulated.
Absent that clarity, state health officials' attempts to regulate those products through agency rules have been met with lawsuits and injunctions.
Meanwhile, Texas rakes in taxes and fees as retailers thrive among increasing public calls for better research on and access to potential health benefits of low doses of THC and its non-psychoactive relative, CBD.
While the state comptroller's office doesn't keep track of how much sales tax the hemp industry brings in specifically, retailers testified that they are without a doubt contributing to the state's robust economy.
“We have already paid $1 million in state taxes, and we are one small fish in a big pond,” said Kyle Arora of Texas Happy Club LLC and Green Genius Supplies in Houston, who said he supports “a forward thinking approach that aligns with Texas' pro-business ethos.”
But some in the medical and scientific community warn that the products are often found to contain heavy metals, pesticides and fungus — not to mention much higher amounts of THC than the law allows.
They also expressed deep concern about how the brightly colored, sweet-tasting gummies, chocolatey brownies, and fizzy drinks in bright-colored cans are enticing to young people and sold in locations that are easy for them to find.
The situation finds Texas lawmakers struggling to balance constituents demands for medicinal cannabis products with a wildly growing market that is outpacing meaningful regulation, enforcement and safety standards.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick gave them some direction, as well as an indication of his interest in the issue, earlier this year when he told the State Affairs committee to look into the sale of consumable hemp in Texas before lawmakers meet in 2025.
His charge to the panel included possibly banning products containing delta-8 and delta-9 or looking into more regulations on those products, as well as investigating their marketing to and access by children.
Banning any of the delta products outright was met with a smattering of support by anti-drug advocates and some parents, but saw mostly opposition from the witnesses this week.
The notion of better standards and more resources to enforce the law, however, was an idea that few people — from retailers to consumers, doctors to chemists to law enforcement to the lawmakers themselves— argued with during the five-hour discussion in Austin.
If they address the issue during the next session, lawmakers could consider age limits, childproof packaging, advertising restrictions, strict third-party testing rules, adjustments on how the THC is measured inside the products, and licensure of retailers instead of simple registration.
Several argued for regulations in conjunction with making the medical marijuana program more accessible, saying the state should keep both avenues available to those seeking their benefits.
“Many veterans prefer delta-8 and delta-9 because it's cheaper and more accessible,” David Bass, president and founder of Texas Veterans for Medical Mariuana. “Common sense regulations …are, in my opinion, more logical than banning them.”
Texas health and law enforcement officials painted a complex picture of their attempts to separate the legal from the illegal, to find useful ways to enforce vague laws with no dedicated staff, and to protect the rights of businesses owners and consumers to defend their access to a legal product.
Texas state troopers charged with enforcing drug laws find it difficult to determine if someone's vape pen, gummy or even smokeable flower in a pipe is the illegal marijuana or the legal consumable hemp — and therefore it's nearly impossible to enforce those laws, said Major Mark Melson of the Texas Department of Public Safety's criminal investigation division.
“There's a lack of clarity in current law,” Melson testified. “There are no roadside presumptive field tests that distinguish the differences. Drug-sniffing canines are unable to make the distinction between hemp and marijuana, and from an officer's perspective, it's not possible to make a distinction between legal and illegal based on sight and smell.”
State health and agriculture officials, who oversee the state's consumable and agricultural hemp industries respectively, said they have rules on the books that allow them to enforce things like the allowable level of THC in the legal products, the testing of those products, and whether a retailer or manufacturer is legally licensed or registered by the state.
But their staff is stretched, said Tommy Stevenson, who leads the Texas Department of State Health Services' consumer protection division. With the agency's six enforcement officials, he said, the state could do a visit to every retailer about once every five years. Another six are being trained to join them and that will help drop that to three years, he said. Most of the enforcement right now is complaint based, he said.
The hearing on Wednesday included a broader discussion over the potential expansion of the Compassionate Use Program and the potential for pot to be eventually legalized in Texas for recreational use as a way to raise state income, reduce competition with legal weed states, and decrease criminal activity around the black market.
State Sen. Jòse Menendez, D-San Antonio, said it's time Texas begin considering “the reality” of cannabis demand by residents, whether it's for medical or recreational uses, and potentially join other states that have passed cannabis laws that allow consumers to be able to trust that they're getting good products.
“We need to come to the realization that we opened the door,” Menendez said. “I'm not trying to be argumentative, but people have been getting high in this state for a long time. So people feel that by going to a vape shop and buying something, they're buying something that's safe. And the reality is that it's probably safer for them to use a product that's not currently legal in this state, and we need to have a long conversation about that.”
Both of those ideas, while supported by some grassroots on both ends of the political spectrum, have an uphill battle in socially conservative Texas.
“We had a conversation about that in 2019, and we were clear that in Texas we do not want to legalize pot,” said Perry, who supports the state's limited medical marijuana program but not wider expansion of marijuana laws.
There is a much higher chance, however, of movement on hemp, which has a less-divisive public persona thanks to its place in the wellness market, as well as the support it has in the agricultural community as a money crop for industrial use, such as for clothing and rope.
Consumers and retailers, who filled the committee hearing and an overflow room on Wednesday, argued passionately for the ability to continue buying and supplying products they argued had, in some cases, saved their lives, their marriages, their health and their mental states.
The current unregulated environment only serves bad actors, the retailers say, and lack of oversight threatens their industry's ability to survive long-term. On the flip side, a total ban would be no better, they argued.
“The impact of a ban would be far reaching and devastating,” Mary Tello, Co-Founder Green Haus Wellness in Austin, told senators. “Banning delta products would not only jeopardize businesses like mine but also undermine the economic and social fabric of our community. I urge policymakers to consider broader implications, and work toward solutions to support both public health and economic vitality.”
Medical marijuana advocates and industry insiders argue vehemently against the state allowing any sale of those products that would encourage replacing the medical-grade, higher-THC marijuana extracts and gummies that a few thousand Texans can obtain through the Compassionate Use Program, the state's narrow medical marijuana program.
The heavily regulated products in that program have much more research and oversight than the consumable hemp products in question, both on the state and federal level, and Texas probably has “one of the safest compassionate use programs in the country,” said Nico Richardson, CEO of Texas Original, the leading medical cannabis provider in the state.
Consumable hemp products with THCA and delta-8 and 9, by contrast, have not been approved by federal regulators for health uses — and nor has there been any federal stance taken against their health claims, underpinning the uncertainty around those products and opening the door to wide interpretation of their benefits.
The state has no jurisdiction over the out-of-state labs used to test the consumable hemp products for the legal limit of delta-9 and so no way to verify the results — and no legal requirement to test the levels of any other THC compound in the products, Richardson said. As a result, many products enter the market with THC levels well over the legal limit, he said.
Meanwhile, patients are exiting the medical pot program in droves because the regulatory environment surrounding it — while making the product safer — makes it a more expensive product and much harder to access than consumable hemp since it can't be distributed in dispensaries like hemp can, Richardson said.
The number of patients in his program, for example, has dropped by half since 2022, Richardson said. That threatens the existence of the program and puts patients at risk, he said.
“The intoxicating hemp industry in Texas has been marketed as something that's legal, safe and capable of self-regulation,” Richardson said. “However, many hemp products are highly intoxicating, more potent than what's offered in the medical CUP program, and dangerously unregulated.”
The committee plans to meet at least one more time to consider the issue and begin developing some plans for new legislation, senators said. Perry blasted the retail consumable hemp industry for what he described as its refusal to support regulatory changes in the past while now seeming “shocked at what's been happening.”
“This industry knew exactly who they were marketing to and how they were going to get that market opened up,” Perry said. “Now we've got their attention.”
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Texas Tribune
How Houston ISD’s takeover could change U.S. schools
by By Asher Lehrer-Small and Danya Pérez, Houston Landing, The Texas Tribune – 2024-07-03 16:43:08
SUMMARY: Houston ISD saw major changes this school year under state-appointed superintendent Mike Miles. New policies included rapid teaching methods, daily student quizzes, and hallway silence. These transformations resulted from a historic state takeover aimed at reshaping the district. The overhaul focused on tying teacher pay to test scores and resulted in notable test score improvements and higher teacher salaries but also sparked controversy and high teacher turnover. The long-term success of these measures remains debated, with some seeing potential for broader implementation and others viewing them as unsustainable. Miles' approach has faced mixed reactions, with ongoing observations and concerns about its future impact.
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Todo cambió. Everything changed.
That's how Arturo Monsiváis described life this year for his fifth-grade son, who attends Houston ISD's Raul Martinez Elementary School. Teachers raced through rapid-fire lessons. Students plugged away at daily quizzes. Administrators banned children from chatting in the hallways.
Sitting in the parent pickup line on the last day of school, Monsiváis said his son often complained that the new assignments were too difficult. But Monsiváis, a construction worker, wouldn't accept any excuses: Study hard, he advised.
“I tell my son, ‘Look, do you want to be working out here in the sun like me, or do you want to be in an office one day? Think about it,'” Monsiváis said.
The seismic changes seen by Monsiváis' son and the 180,000-plus students throughout HISD this school year are the result of the most dramatic state takeover of a school district in American history, a grand experiment that could reshape public education across Texas and the nation.
In stunningly swift fashion, HISD's state-appointed superintendent and school board have redesigned teaching and learning across the district, sought to tie teacher pay more closely to student test scores, boosted some teacher salaries by tens of thousands of dollars and slashed spending on many non-classroom expenses.
First: Demonstrators rally in front of Hattie Mae White Educational Support Center in opposition to a possible takeover of the HISD's elected board by the TEA. Last: From left, Jaelauryn Brown, 8, Jaedis Brown, 13, and Jaeson Brown, 4, walk through the front rotunda of Houston ISD's Wheatley High School in Houston's Greater Fifth Ward on June 1, 2023.
Credit:
Houston Landing file photo / Marie D. De Jesús | Houston Landing file photo / Antranik Tavitian
The changes in HISD rival some of the most significant shakeups to a public school system ever, yet they've received minimal national media attention to date.
Still, district leaders, citing private conversations with researchers and superintendents, said education leaders throughout the U.S. are following the HISD efforts to see whether they may be worth replicating. Adding to the intrigue: Texas lawmakers have looked in recent years to policies used by HISD's new superintendent, former Dallas Independent School District chief Mike Miles, as inspiration for statewide legislation.
“I think people are watching and waiting,” HISD Board Secretary Angela Lemond Flowers said. “We're stepping out there big, and it's important because we are a big district and we have lots of students that we need to make sure we're serving better. Not in the next generation. Not in five years. Like, immediately.”
Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles.
Credit:
Antranik Tavitian/Houston Landing
Miles, the chief architect of HISD's new blueprint, has pointed to early successes — including strong improvement in state test scores this year — as evidence that his model works where others have failed. For decades, Black and Latino children in urban school districts like Houston have trailed well behind wealthier and white students in school.
Miles' critics, however, have blasted his approach as an unproven, unwanted siege on the district orchestrated by Texas Republicans. They cite high teacher turnover headed into the next school year and long-term questions about the affordability of Miles' plans as indicators the effort may be doomed.
Regardless of whether the HISD intervention becomes a shining success, a historic failure or something in between, it could help answer one of the most pressing questions in education: Can a large, urban public school district dramatically raise student achievement and shrink decades-old performance gaps, ultimately helping to close America's class divide?
“Back to the future”
The HISD intervention represents “by far the most bizarre state takeover that we've ever seen,” said Jonathan Collins, a Columbia University Teachers College associate professor who has worked with another takeover district, Providence Public Schools.
Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath.
Credit:
Houston Landing file photo/Sergio Flores
Typically, states take the reins of districts following major academic or financial scandals. HISD, by comparison, has scored at a “B” level in recent years under Texas' A-through-F rating system and kept its financial house in order.
But in 2019, HISD allowed one campus, Wheatley High School in Greater Fifth Ward, to receive a seventh straight failing grade from the state. Wheatley's scores triggered a Texas law — authored in 2015 by a Houston-area Democrat fed up with years of poor outcomes at some HISD schools — that gave Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath the right to replace the district's school board.
After three years of legal battles with HISD trustees, who tried to halt the takeover, Morath emerged victorious. He appointed Miles and nine local residents to run the district in June 2023.
Rather than focusing on the handful of HISD schools with the most flagrant academic underperformance, Miles overhauled a huge swath of the district — 85 out of roughly 270 schools — in his first year.
In doing so, Miles relied heavily on practices pioneered in the 2000s and 2010s by the so-called “education reform” movement, a loose collection of politicians, charter school organizers and district chiefs.
The group argued that instilling a “no-excuses” attitude toward student achievement and partially tying teacher pay to test score growth could dramatically improve American education. Miles implemented a similar playbook during his three-year stint leading Dallas ISD, an approach that helped improve student test scores but contributed to a near-doubling of the district's teacher turnover rate.
In recent years, the reform movement that inspired Miles' policies has largely fallen out of favor. The changes haven't consistently moved the needle on exam results nationwide, while high-stakes testing has become less popular.
But to Miles, the movement fell short for one main reason: It didn't go big enough.
So Miles required over 1,000 HISD teachers at over two dozen campuses to reapply for their jobs, ultimately replacing about half of them. He rearranged how educators teach students, requiring them to use an approach that mandates students must participate in class roughly every four minutes. And he rolled out new lesson plans for about a third of the district's schools that included short, daily quizzes in nearly all subjects.
Thomas Toch, the director of Georgetown University's FutureEd think tank, said Miles' approach “feels like sort of a ‘back to the future' moment.” The HISD overhaul currently represents “the largest effort to implement school improvement at scale,” Toch said.
While major public school reforms aren't new, the scope and speed of HISD's overhaul stand out.
Former District of Columbia Public Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee famously fought in the late 2000s to partially tie pay to exam score growth, but she didn't dictate classroom instruction techniques and school staffing models. New Orleans turned its 45,000-student district into an all-charter school system post-Hurricane Katrina, but fewer children saw big changes than in HISD. Even Miles' most ambitious reforms in Dallas targeted a fraction of the students as HISD.
“This is an effort, the largest in the country, to turn around a traditional, urban district,” Miles said. “That's what we're engaged in.”
First: A student works at a team center, Aug. 31, 2023, at Houston ISD's Sugar Grove Academy in Houston. Last: David Espinoza, at right, looks over his students' work during an Art of Thinking class at Houston Math, Science, and Technology Center High School in Houston on Jan. 25, 2024.
Credit:
Houston Landing file photo/Antranik Tavitian
A teacher helps a student in one of the team centers at Sugar Grove Academy in Houston on Aug. 31, 2023.
Credit:
Antranik Tavitian/Houston Landing
Wider model?
One year in, Miles' administration has scored some key victories.
The elementary and middle schools Miles targeted for changes saw, on average, a 7 percentage point increase in the share of students scoring at or above grade level on statewide reading and math tests, commonly known as the STAAR exams. Other HISD schools saw a 1 percentage point increase, while state averages slid in math and remained flat in reading.
“I think you can say pretty clearly that [the transformation model] has been working well,” Miles said when the scores came out.
HISD also has made some progress in meeting legal requirements for serving students with disabilities, an area in which the district has struggled for more than a decade, according to state-appointed conservators monitoring the district.
But other indicators could spell trouble for Miles' administration in year two and beyond.
As of early June, four weeks before educators' deadline to resign without penalty, roughly one-quarter of HISD's 11,000-plus teachers had left their positions ahead of the upcoming school year, district administrators said. Historically, HISD's teacher turnover rate has hovered around 15% to 20%.
The departures follow widespread complaints that, under Miles' leadership, district administrators micromanage teachers by frequently observing classroom instruction and providing feedback. David Berry, a former journalism teacher at Wisdom High School, recalled a fall meeting where district administrators scolded teachers for using student engagement strategies too infrequently.
“They proceeded to rip us apart,” said Berry, who plans to teach in a neighboring district next year. “I've never been talked to like that as a teacher, really, as a grownup.”
The financial viability of Miles' plans also remains in question. HISD ran a nearly $200 million deficit on a roughly $2.2 billion budget in Miles' first year, with much of the shortfall tied to dramatic increases in staffing and pay at overhauled schools. The district is budgeting a similar deficit next year, though it plans to use $80 million in unspecified property sales to lessen the blow.
Still, if HISD can continue to post strong test scores, history suggests Miles' model could soon spread beyond Houston.
Texas lawmakers, inspired by Miles' work, passed legislation in 2019 that allocated money to school districts that adopted teacher evaluation systems like the one he used in Dallas. Texas districts received nearly $140 million in 2022-23 under the law.
They also passed a law that allowed long-struggling campuses to skirt closure by replicating a turnaround plan Miles implemented in Dallas. Participating schools have to provide high levels of feedback on instruction, extend school hours and offer incentives for top-rated teachers and principals.
Miles last fall said his Houston work is “not a test case” for statewide policy. More recently, however, he alluded to the possibility of his model being implemented more widely.
“There's a lot of interest across the country, mostly from people who are educators, of what's happening here,” Miles said in a May interview. “This actually could be a proof point for others if it can be done.”
Harvard Graduate School of Education economist Thomas Kane, who has researched students struggling to rebound from the pandemic nationwide, said he believes HISD's overhaul could interest many district leaders.
“If there have been substantial improvements in student achievement gains simultaneously with improvements in student attendance, I think that will grab a lot of attention nationally and will make people curious about the Houston reforms,” Kane said.
Kourtney Revels, at center, the mother of a third-grade student at Houston ISD's Elmore Elementary School, confronts district staff limiting public access to a June 2023 school board meeting at HISD headquarters in northwest Houston.
Credit:
Annie Mulligan for Houston Landi
Community appetite
Even if HISD produces remarkable gains in the coming years, many elected school boards — which answer directly to local voters, unlike Miles and the state-appointed board — might not stomach upheaval on the level of Houston.
Miles' policies, coupled with his bulldozer style of leadership, have prompted family protests and student walkouts throughout his first year. Typically, more than 100 community members criticize his administration during school board meetings. In one particularly heated exchange from June, a district administrator repeatedly yelled “scoreboard” at a group of jeering audience members while pointing to a screen displaying student test scores.
Even some families that approached Miles' arrival with hopefulness have turned against the district's leadership. Tish Ochoa, the mother of an HISD middle schooler, said she began the school year “cautiously optimistic” but soured on Miles' plans as she heard reports of stressed-out teachers and changes to high-performing schools.
“I wouldn't say that I was like, ‘Rah-rah takeover,' but I was also like, ‘I hope this works.' I was supportive of the new administration coming in,” Ochoa said. “I don't feel that way anymore.”
Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles observes a classroom on Aug. 11, 2023, at Sugar Grove Academy in Houston's Sharpstown neighborhood.
Credit:
Houston Landing file photo/Antranik Tavitian
Miles has argued that many families quietly back his administration. However, few community members have spoken out in support of his efforts, save for a handful of nonprofits and civic groups largely backed by big-dollar philanthropy or business organizations.
At HISD's overhauled schools, many parents said they're open to timers ticking in classroom corners and rapid-fire quizzes — so long as their children aren't left behind.
“I don't care about the changes,” McReynolds Middle School mother Christina Balderas said. “The only thing I care about is when my daughter gets home and she tells me, ‘This is what I learned today, mom.' They can have all the changes in the world that they need.”
In the next few years, Morath likely will begin gradually bringing some of HISD's elected trustees back onto the school board, as outlined in state law. From there, they will decide which Miles policies to keep or dismantle.
Three of HISD's nine elected trustees responded to interview requests for this story: Sue Deigaard, Plácido Gómez and Dani Hernandez. They said they want to see multiple years of data on the impact of Miles' approach before solidifying their impressions.
Most said they would reverse unpopular details of Miles' plan, such as requiring some children to carry a traffic cone to the bathroom as a hall pass, but they found early evidence of the academic impact promising.
“If I had to make a decision right now of whether to continue [the overhaul model], I would,” said Gómez, who represents parts of eastern and central HISD. “There isn't enough data to say, ‘This definitely works,' but there's enough for me to want to continue on this path.”
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Texas Tribune
Fight over trans medical care is at center of leaked Houston health records case
by By Dante Motley, The Texas Tribune – 2024-07-03 15:56:06
SUMMARY: Dr. Eithan Haim, formerly of Texas Children's Hospital, faced charges for allegedly breaching patient privacy laws by leaking confidential information about trans children's treatments to a conservative activist. The activist publicized the information, inciting conservative outrage and prompting Attorney General Ken Paxton's investigation. Haim, now charged federally, denies wrongdoing, claiming his actions aimed to expose the hospital's practices. His supporters, including Republican politicians and conservative media, view him as a whistleblower and martyr against transgender care. Critics argue his leak endangered families and fueled misleading conservative rhetoric. Haim is defended by Ryan Patrick, ex-U.S. attorney and son of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
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As the Texas Legislature considered banning the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatment for trans kids last year, a Houston doctor breached the record system of Texas Children's Hospital in Houston — the largest pediatric hospital in the country.
Dr. Eithan Haim, a former employee of the hospital, retrieved the personal information of underage patients who were not under his care, and illegally leaked them to a conservative activist, court documents allege.
The activist published them, and conservative outrage followed. Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation. The Legislature passed the ban within days.
More than a year later, federal prosecutors have charged Haim with violating patient privacy laws.
Those actions and the indictment that followed have thrust him into the center of one of the most emotional and divisive issues in Texas politics. Prosecutors are accusing him of feeding the public misleading information to damage his old hospital's reputation and “promote his own personal agenda.” The Texas GOP is backing him.
Advocates for trans rights say the case is an example of how often misleading conservative rhetoric has only made it more dangerous for Texas families with trans children. They cast the recent legislation targeting gay and trans people as part of a broader effort in Texas and across many states dominated by conservative politicians to stigmatize and punish queer people in ways that profoundly upend the lives of tens of thousands of families.
Meanwhile, Haim is being hailed as a martyr by conservatives in Texas and beyond who assert he is a victim of political persecution. On the conversative podcast circuit and elsewhere, they call transition-related care for kids child abuse and describe the doctors and parents that provide it as abusers.
Members of Congress have written in support of him. Supporters have raised nearly $1 million for his defense. He's being represented in court by Ryan Patrick, a prominent former U.S. attorney during the Trump administration who is the son of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
Haim has pleaded not guilty. He has said that his actions were intended to expose the hospital's transgender care program.
“I maintained from day one that I have done nothing wrong,” Haim said last week outside the courthouse, The Houston Chronicle reported. “We're going to fight this tooth and nail to stand up for whistleblowers everywhere.”
Haim was released on a $10,000 bond and now faces 10 years in federal prison and a maximum fine of $250,000. On his fundraising site, Haim said he did not break the law since the documents were redacted and “no personally identifiable patient health information was disclosed.”
Transition-related care covers a wide range of treatments. It can include such social steps as adopting new pronouns or changing one's style of dress. It can also mean medical interventions such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries, though those are rarer for children. These treatments are for gender dysphoria, the distress that arises when a person's gender identity does not align with their birth-assigned sex. The American Medical Association has defended such care, arguing that such treatments are essential for the well-being of transgender youth.
Concerns about transition-related health care for kids started to gain steam in Texas in February 2022, when Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate instances of transition-related care for transgender children as child abuse.
In response, Texas Children's Hospital announced that it would pause the prescription of hormone therapies for transgender kids. The hospital said the decision was made to “safeguard our health care professionals and impacted families from potential legal ramifications.”
Months later, a state supreme court ruling stated that while DFPS was allowed to conduct such investigations, the governor's directive was not a legally binding instruction and they did not have to.
Haim said that the hospital continued these practices in secret. In the charges against him, prosecutors noted that Haim received training on health privacy regulations and attended “numerous trainings related to anonymous reporting of any instances of misconduct, ethic violations or child abuse.” But, they said, Haim did not report concerns to any supervisors, anonymous hotlines or Child Protective Services.
Instead, he turned over redacted versions of the medical records to conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo, who published an article in May 2023 reporting that the hospital continued administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors and linking to the documents. In the report, Rufo names physicians and details the types of procedures they were conducting. The leaked documents are no longer available though that article. The hospital did not respond to a request for comment, but has said in the past that the care it provides meets legal requirements.
At the time of the leak, such treatments had not yet been made illegal in Texas.
There is no situation in which a doctor should publicly disclose any patient's medical information without consent, said Johnathan Gooch, a spokesperson for an LGBT-rights group, Equality Texas. This release of information puts families at risk, Gooch said.
“In an age where people make a game of figuring out where a random pin is on Google Maps, people are very good at searching the internet,” Gooch said. “Doxxing people has become very popular in radical circles. So it definitely puts the health and well being of these families and their children at risk to be exposed, especially when that exposure is in a hyperpolarized environment.”
But Haim and his supporters argue that he took a brave stand to expose misconduct.
In a letter to the prosecutor, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, denounced what he called “selective prosecution and the weaponization of the Department of Justice against political opponents.”
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland similarly suggesting misuse of law enforcement to ideologically target detractors and requesting information for the House Judiciary Committee. U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, supported Hiam in a news conference last Wednesday where he said that Haim did nothing wrong.
And two Republican state lawmakers, Rep. Brian Harrison of Midlothian and Sen. Mayes Middleton of Galveston, have written to the state Health and Human Services Commission criticizing the alleged use of Medicaid funds to cover these treatments. In their letter, they laud Haim and say that the hospital committed child abuse.
Harrison told The Texas Tribune that the support for Haim is indicative of the ways Texas is “trying to protect children.” Propelled by similar statements about “protecting children,” anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has received significant attention in the Texas legislature over the past few years — a sentiment that has inspired actions like Haim's.
After his indictment, Haim was celebrated by various far-right websites and forums. Rufo described him as a “whistleblower.”
“If Haim prevails, other courageous doctors and medical professionals will follow his lead and speak out,” Rufo wrote in a City Journal article.
However, prosecutors have questioned Haim's motives. The indictment argues, Haim committed “malicious harm” to the hospital and its patients. The hospital faced “financial loss, medical delays … as well as threats and harm to its patients and esteemed physicians.”
And opponents of the state's crackdown on translation-related care are concerned about the politicians backing Haim.
To Gooch, of Equality Texas, the rhetoric and actions of state officials are worrying. He says there is a “direct connection” between the words of Texas politicians and the experiences of trans people in the state.
“We've seen many families moving away in order to keep providing health care to their young people,” Gooch said. “And then those who had to stay in Texas, if they didn't have the means to leave, have been forced to spend massive amounts of money to travel across state lines in order to get regular checkups.“
Disclosure: Equality Texas and Texas Children's Hospital have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Just in: Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming; U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania; and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!
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The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Texas Tribune
Gov. Abbott’s border wall will take around 30 years, $20B
by By Jasper Scherer, The Texas Tribune – 2024-07-03 05:00:00
SUMMARY: Governor Greg Abbott announced a state-funded border wall along Texas' Mexico border three years ago, resulting in 34 miles of steel bollards so far, at a cost of $25 million per mile. The fragmented wall faces challenges like securing land rights, with plans to cover 100 miles by 2026. Critics, including Democrats and some Republicans, argue the wall is costly and ineffective, while Abbott claims it helps combat illegal immigration. The project is part of Abbott's $11 billion border security initiative, but acquiring private land remains a significant hurdle. The wall's projected full completion could take 30 years and $20 billion.
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Three years after Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas would take the extraordinary step of building a state-funded wall along the Mexico border, he has 34 miles of steel bollards to show for it.
That infrastructure — which has so far run up a price tag of some $25 million per mile — isn't yet a contiguous wall. It has gone up in bits and pieces spread across at least six counties on Texas' 1,254-mile southern border. Progress has been hampered by the state's struggles to secure land access, one of myriad challenges signaling a long and enormously expensive slog ahead for Abbott.
Nonetheless, state contractors have already propped up more wall mileage than former President Donald Trump's administration managed to build in Texas, and Abbott's wall project is plowing ahead at a quickened pace. State officials hope to erect a total of 100 miles by the end of 2026, at a rate of about half a mile per week. The governor frequently shares video of wall construction on social media and has credited the project with helping combat immigration flows. To date, though, steel barriers cover just 4% of the more than 800 miles identified by state officials as “in need of some kind of a barrier.” And at its current rate — assuming officials somehow persuade all private landowners along the way to turn their property over to the state — construction would take around 30 years and upwards of $20 billion to finish.
Under Abbott's direction, state lawmakers have approved more than $3 billion for the wall since 2021, making it one of the biggest items under the GOP governor's $11 billion border crackdown known as Operation Lone Star. The rest of the money is being used for items like flooding the border with state police and National Guard soldiers and transporting migrants to Democrat-controlled cities outside Texas, all of which Abbott and other Republicans say is needed to stem the historic number of migrants trying to enter the country.
Democrats and immigration advocates have cast the wall project as a taxpayer-funded pipe dream that will do nothing to address the root causes driving the immigration crisis. And they say the governor, in reviving what was once a hallmark of Trump's agenda, is using public money to boost his political stock.
Even some immigration-hawk Republicans are showing unease about the mounting costs of the wall.
“I am, too, concerned that we're spending a whole lot of money to give the appearance of doing something rather than taking the problem on to actually solve it, and until we do that, I don't expect to see much happen,” state Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, said last fall before voting in committee to spend another $1.5 billion in wall funding.
Abbott's office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Acquiring land
The construction pace has largely hinged on the state's success securing rights to build the wall through privately owned borderland. Early on, the project showed little signs of life as state contractors struggled to obtain the needed easements. But things picked up last year as the state began working out more agreements covering larger tracts. Through mid-June, officials had secured 79 easements covering about 59 miles of the border, according to Mike Novak, executive director of the Texas Facilities Commission, which is overseeing the effort.
At a facilities commission meeting last month, Novak said state officials were in various stages of negotiation with landowners over another 113 miles.
“We knew from the beginning that this was going to be the choke point, you know, one of the most challenging parts of this program,” Novak said of land acquisition. “And it proved true. But we've remained steadfast.”
Officials had built 33.5 miles of wall through June 14, a facilities commission spokesperson said.
The state's ability to secure land rights has also dictated the wall's location, though officials say they have focused on areas pinpointed by the Department of Public Safety as the “highest priority.” TFC officials have declined to share exactly where the wall is being built, citing security concerns, though Novak recently said construction was underway on wall segments in Cameron, Maverick, Starr, Val Verde, Webb and Zapata counties.
Though the Texas-Mexico border spans more than 1,200 miles, Abbott's budget director, Sarah Hicks, told a Senate panel in 2022 that DPS had identified 805 miles “as vulnerable, or [that] is in need of some kind of a barrier.” Another 180 miles are covered by natural barriers, mostly in the Big Bend region of West Texas, while existing barriers already cover another 140 miles, according to state officials.
Novak has said the pace of building about half a mile of wall per week is expected to continue for the “foreseeable future.” At that rate, about 100 miles would go up every four years, with the full 805 miles covered sometime after 2050, when Abbott would be in his 90s.
The earliest wall construction has cost roughly $25 million to $30 million per mile, according to TFC officials. That would amount to $20 billion to $24 billion for the entire 805-mile span, or about three times the cost of paying every Texas public university student's tuition last year. The estimate does not account for the cost of maintaining the wall once it is built, which TFC estimates will cost around $500,000 per mile each year.
Lubbock state Sen. Charles Perry, who last year carried Texas' new immigration law that allows state police to arrest people for illegally crossing the Mexico border, is another Republican who has expressed concern about the wall's cost.
“I am for border security. I am not against a wall. But to me, at least from what I can tell, it is a perpetual circle. We're on the hamster wheel,” Perry said last fall as he prepared to vote for the $1.5 billion wall funding bill. “[At some point] the response has not to be more money for infrastructure. At some point this state must draw the line in the sand.”
Still, no Texas Republican has voted against border wall funding. Lawmakers approved nearly $2.5 billion for the effort in the state's current two-year budget — more than was allotted in state funds to all but a handful of state agencies, and more than twice what Texas spends on its court and juvenile justice systems.
State Rep. Christina Morales, D-Houston, said she doesn't think Texas' GOP leadership “really understands why people are crossing in the first place.”
“Spending billions of dollars on a wall really does not address the root causes of the migration that's happening,” said Morales, who is vice chair of the House's Mexican American Legislative Caucus. “What we should be investing in is our education, our health care, real solutions for problems that are happening right now in Texas.”
Since 2021, federal officials have recorded an average of about 2 million illegal border crossings a year, a record that Abbott has attributed to President Joe Biden for rolling back some of Trump's border policies. The governor has touted the wall construction as a way for Texas to “address the border crisis while President Biden has sat idly by.” Biden and other Democrats have blamed Republicans for shooting down a sweeping bipartisan border deal earlier this year.
The scope of Texas' wall construction — and Abbott's broader border security efforts — are unprecedented in nature, as the federal government is generally responsible for immigration enforcement and the costs associated with it.
Even with the state's improved pace securing easements, Novak has said land access remains the biggest challenge for the project, and “it'll probably remain that way through most of the program.” The Trump administration encountered the same issue after the former president famously said he would build the wall and make Mexico pay for it. Even using the federal government's power to seize some borderland, Trump's administration built just 21 miles of new wall along the Texas-Mexico border.
The painstaking negotiations are required for Texas' wall because lawmakers barred the use of eminent domain to gain land access.
Last year, state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, filed legislation to change that, arguing TFC officials could only build a complete wall if they were authorized to use eminent domain powers. The proposal failed to make it through the Senate, though Creighton said he plans to file it again for the session that starts next January.
“Of course, we can continue to negotiate with ranchers, but that is a very slow process,” Creighton said. “And it's an incomplete process, because there will always be holdouts for different reasons.”
Creighton, one of the upper chamber's more conservative members, said he still supports using state funds to build a border wall, even as some of his GOP colleagues have raised objections.
“I say no to waste, inefficiencies, potential fraud and unreasonable spending as much as any member,” Creighton said. “But … there are times, with all of that fiscal conservatism, that we have to use the money that we save efficiently to protect Texans and Texas.”
“A difficult and complex task”
Most border wall advocates acknowledge barriers alone will not deter people from trying to enter the country illegally. But they say a wall would work if paired with more law enforcement officers and technology, arguing it would slow down attempted crossers to give border agents more time to apprehend them and encourage migrants to seek asylum via ports of entry.
But smuggling gangs have used ordinary power tools to saw through parts of Trump's wall and scaled it using disposable ladders. Some immigration experts say border walls fail to solve the underlying factors driving people to migrate, such as the poverty, violence and political upheaval in Central America, Haiti and Venezuela that is driving millions to flee and straining U.S. resources at the border.
“Walls do not achieve the objectives for which they are said to be erected; they have limited effects in stemming insurgencies and do not block unwanted [migrant] flows, but rather lead to a re-routing of migrants to other paths,” wrote Élisabeth Vallet of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in a 2022 report.
Those sorts of objections have done nothing to deter Abbott and GOP lawmakers, who are armed with a huge budget surplus and polling that shows a majority of Texas voters support the state's wall effort and overall border spending. More than 90% of Republican voters support the wall, with 74% voicing “strong” support, according to an April poll by the Texas Politics Project.
With construction plunging ahead, Novak has projected confidence about the wall's status, pointing to the recent progress after an initial slow start, which saw officials build less than 2 miles in the 12 months after Abbott announced the effort.
It's not just land access that complicates wall construction, Novak said at the June TFC meeting, where he ticked off a list of other factors: changing soil conditions that require “complicated engineering solutions”; steering clear of irrigation systems when building on agricultural land; weather; and “sensitivity” to cattle, oil and gas and hunting operations.
“It's a difficult and complex task, at best,” Novak said. “But with that said, we're whipping it. The latest stats reflect what I like to call just steadfast progress.”
Just in: Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming; U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pennsylvania; and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt will take the stage at The Texas Tribune Festival, Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Buy tickets today!
The post Gov. Abbott's border wall will take around 30 years, $20B appeared first on TexasTribune.org.
The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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