Houston 46, North Texas 25

New quarterback? No problem! The Cougars got back to their winning ways by upsetting North Texas (yes, the Mean Green were favored) in Denton, notching their first win against an FBS opponent for the season and emphatically answering questions as to the team's "will to fight" after starting quarterback D'Eriq King opted to redshirt for the rest of the 2019 season.

The Good: With King no longer behind center, it was up to second-string quarterback Clayton Tune to show that he could direct the offense. He performed well, completing 16 of 20 pass attempts for 124 yards and a touchdown. He also rushed for 100 yards. Patrick Carr ran for another 139 yards and three scores. The UH defense, meanwhile, held UNT's rushing attack to less than 100 yards on the evening.

It was a great night for UH special teams, as they scored touchdowns on a kick return (Marquez Stevenson, 82 yards) and a punt return (Bryson Smith, 60 yards) - the first time since October 1973 that the Coogs had two such returns for touchdowns in the same game.

The Bad: The Cougars’ pass defense continued to struggle, as UNT quarterback Mason Fine lit them up for 353 yards and two touchdowns. UNT actually outgained the Coogs in this game, 456 yards to 359 (however, these totals do not include kick return yards).

When the UH secondary wasn't covering poorly, they were tackling poorly. UNT’s final touchdown occurred because Cougar safety Deontay Anderson hit UNT wide receiver Jason Pirtle but failed to wrap him up, allowing Pirtle to bounce off of him and walk into the endzone.

The Cougar defense’s 21-game streak of recording at least one turnover also came to an end, as neither team turned the ball over in this game.

The Beautiful: the Green Brigade and the Spirit of Houston joined together at halftime for this wonderful rendition of America the Beautiful:



The announced attendance of 30,123 was an Apogee Stadium record.

What It Means: This was a much-needed win for the Cougars, and Clayton Tune showed that he is capable of running Dana Holgorsen's offense for the remainder of the season. UH now gets a much-needed week off before hosting Cincinnati on October 12.

The all-time series between Houston and North Texas is now tied at seven games apiece. The next edition of the Mean Green Cougar Red Bowl will occur at TDECU Stadium next year.

The legal supremacy of the automobile

In the United States, people are compelled to use the private automobile to fully participate in our society. Those that, for whatever reason, cannot or do not operate their own vehicle are essentially second-class citizens. University of Iowa law professor Gregory Shill aregues that this is by legal design:

It’s no secret that American public policy throughout the 20th century endorsed the car—for instance, by building a massive network of urban and interstate highways at public expense. Less well understood is how the legal framework governing American life enforces dependency on the automobile. To begin with, mundane road regulations embed automobile supremacy into federal, state, and local law. But inequities in traffic regulation are only the beginning. Land-use law, criminal law, torts, insurance, vehicle safety regulations, even the tax code—all these sources of law provide rewards to cooperate with what has become the dominant transport mode, and punishment for those who defy it. 

Let’s begin at the state and local levels. A key player in the story of automobile supremacy is single-family-only zoning, a shadow segregation regime that is now justifiably on the defensive for outlawing duplexes and apartments in huge swaths of the country. Through these and other land-use restrictions—laws that separate residential and commercial areas or require needlessly large yards—zoning rules scatter Americans across distances and highway-like roads that are impractical or dangerous to traverse on foot. The resulting densities are also too low to sustain high-frequency public transit.

Further entrenching automobile supremacy are laws that require landowners who build housing and office space to build housing for cars as well. In large part because of parking quotas, parking lots now cover more than a third of the land area of some U.S. cities; Houston is estimated to have 30 parking spaces for every resident. [More on this in a moment.] As the UCLA urban-planning professor Donald Shoup has written, this mismatch flows from legal mandates rather than market demand. Every employee who brings a car to the office essentially doubles the amount of space he takes up at work, and in urban areas his employer may be required by law to build him a $50,000 garage parking space.

Working in the transportation planning profession, I frequently hear the claim that private automobile use is the dominant form of transportation because "people love their cars," and that attempts to plan and promote alternative forms of transportation, such as pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure or more public transportation, are at best frivolous and at worst wasteful because "nobody chooses to use" them. As Shill points out, however, the automobile's dominance in our society isn't so much a "choice" but rather a "necessity" promogulated by almost a century's worth of policies that have favored its use over all other forms of transportation.

In addition to the factors he described above, Shill goes on to list policies such as tax deductions for mortgages and parking, design standards for vehicles, insurance requirements, and criminal law as examples that have prioritized the automobile. He continues:

Since the dawn of the automobile, governments have been slow to address its downsides. “We have gloated too much over the usefulness of the motor car,” said The New York World in a 1913 editorial. “We put it into reckless hands. We make no effective laws against its misuse.”

In the years since, American government at all levels crossed a line. Instead of merely accommodating some people’s desire to drive, our laws essentially force driving on all of us—by subsidizing it, by punishing people who don’t do it, by building a physical landscape that requires it, and by insulating reckless drivers from the consequences of their actions. To page through the law books today is to stumble again and again upon evidence of automobile supremacy. The range and depth of legal supports for driving is bewildering. But these laws, which are everywhere we look, are also opportunities.

Shill argues that all of these policies and laws encouraging and enforcing automobile supremacy could be reversed by the legislative bodies that enacted them to begin with, whether at the local, state or federal level. At the local level, zoning ordinances are one such example; city leaders could relax and reform these rules if they had the will to do so.* Other local ordinances that favor automobile use pertain to minimum parking regulations; in fact, and in regards to Houston and its parking-space-per-resident ratio that Shill mentioned earlier, City Council took a (small) step towards addressing that issue last week when it voted to exempt Midtown and the East End from the minimum parking regulations that the city imposes on development:

Market-based parking exempts areas from the citywide parking minimums, allowing property owners to provide the number of off-street parking spaces "they believe are necessary to service their customers," according to the planning department. "This change gives property owners more flexibility in the use o their property and removes a bureaucratically-imposed minimum that is based on one-size-fits-all analysis." The area, notes the planning department, has "sufficient multimodal transportation system, high transit ridership, and the existence of significant surface and parking garage spaces."

The expansion was supported by the East Downtown Management District and the Midtown Management District.

Even so, the "we need parking minimums because nobody chooses to walk" argument still made an appearance, courtesy of one councilmember who doesn't even represent any of the areas being exempted:

Councilmember Greg Travis, the only council member to vote against the amendment, insisted parking spaces were necessary because people wouldn't walk to destinations. "Today? Walk for two blocks, it's not going to happen."

In response, Mayor Sylvester Turner was quick to point out that the majority of businesses in the affected areas were supportive. The Kinder Houston Area Survey, meanwhile, has tracked the increasing desire for walkable urbanism among Houston-area residents.

Look: no realistic person is going to argue that private automobiles don't provide tremendous advantages when it comes to personal convenience, comfort and mobility. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't question the countless hours of our lives wasted by the congestion they cause, the 40,000 people killed every year by their use, the way they dictate our physical environment, or the way they essentially relegate those who don't own or operate them to second-class citizenship. It's well past time we as a society re-examined the laws and policies enacted at all levels of government that mandate automobile supremacy.

* I'd like to see more cities abandon conventional land-use zoning ordinances not only because they necessitate driving but also because they have become horribly misused. What started out as a way to protect residences from nuisance uses (e.g. factories, junkyards, slaughterhouses) has evolved into a tool to enforce socioeconomic exclusion. I witnessed this when I worked as a zoning officer in Denton and I am glad Houston does not have it (even though the lack of zoning obviously did not prevent Houston from becoming an automobile-dominated metropolis).

Why were homes built inside the reservoirs, anyway?

A previous post included an aerial photo of the Canyon Gate subdivision in Fort Bend County that was flooded when water from Barker Reservoir backed up into it. Which begs the question: since Canyon Gate was clearly behind the dam wall of the reservoir, why was it allowed to be built to begin with? And did the homeowners in that development understand the risk that the reservoir presented to their homes? Naomi Martin at the Dallas Morning News discovers that, for the most part, they did not:

Many of the victims knew little or nothing about the risk they faced. They never purchased flood insurance. They had no clue their homes were built within government reservoirs engineered in the 1940s to fill with billions of gallons of water in case of heavy rains. The undeveloped, government-owned land inside the reservoirs had a 1 percent chance of flooding in a given year. But residents' homes just upstream, in the so-called maximum pool of the reservoirs, had a significant chance of being intentionally flooded in the event of a major storm. 

"I feel cheated," said Binay Anand, 46, an engineer who lived with his wife and two kids in a $275,000 home in Canyon Gate, a subdivision in the maximum flood pool. "I was not aware — and none of the residents were aware — that this was flood-prone. If they would have told us, I would not have taken it." 

Anand said he and his neighbors only learned since Harvey that Fort Bend County had issued notice about the corps' plan to use their property as a reservoir on the original plat, which is the county's public land record approving the subdivisions. 

Politicians knew it. Bureaucrats knew it. Developers knew it. But homeowners appear to have been offered little to no notification. 

Even providing the most basic information in the plat's fine print was a political fight at the time, Fort Bend County officials said. 

"It took a yeoman's effort because the developers were saying, 'You can't make us do that,'" said Richard Stolleis, the Fort Bend county engineer. "It was a pretty significant battle — a high-level discussion — before these were put on the subdivision plat." 

County officials believed the plat's warning would be passed through the property's title to every prospective owner at closing. However, many residents said they never saw it. They may have overlooked it or missed it in a stack of documents, or their real estate agents and title workers may have not clearly explained the risk. State law doesn't require disclosure of such notes, experts said.

Not being in the real estate business, I don't know how often plats - and the language contained on them - are included in the pile of documents every homebuyer is presented with at closing. As somebody who used to process plats for the City of Denton, however, I do know that there is oftentimes critical information on that document, which is usually printed in a 24"x36" format, making the text and disclaimers impossible to read if it is reduced down to the legal size documents normally associated with real estate transactions.

As to why subdivisions such as Canyon Gate were allowed to be built inside the reservoir's dam walls to begin with, the simple truth is that there was nothing prohibiting them from being built there. They were outside of the 100-year floodplain property owned by the US Army Corps of Engineers:

The corps didn't feel the need to acquire all the land at the time the reservoirs were built, Long said, because that land was nothing but rice farms and fields where cattle grazed. 

It didn't stay that way. In 1997, developers came before Fort Bend County government for approval to put subdivisions on the pastures. Aware of the flood risk to the area, the county was in a bind. It didn't have the authority to prohibit development or establish zoning rules, said County Judge Robert Hebert, who has been in office since 2003.

Which, tangentially, brings me to something I've wanted to rant about: the idea that the lack of land-use zoning (the City of Houston being famous for being the largest city in the nation without it) is what "caused" Harvey's flooding, or made it worse than it otherwise would have been. This idea (which has been debunked here, and here, and here, and here, and here) isn't even relevant to Canyon Gate, because it is not inside Houston's city limits, and unincorporated areas under county jurisdiction do not have the authority under state law to implement zoning controls.

Beyond that fact, what I've come to understand is that, oftentimes, "zoning" is popularly conflated with "planning," even though they're not the same thing. The latter is a process a city undertakes to guide and regulate its development; the former is just one tool that a city can use in that process. Even though Houston doesn't have zoning, it is not a development free-for-all, and municipalities around Houston that do have zoning laws on the books, such as Bellaire, Missouri City, Friendswood, League City, Dickinson and Baytown, flooded as well.

The region (whether inside or outside of Houston's city limits) obviously needs better regulation in terms of construction in flood-prone areas, floodwater retention infrastructure, and preservation of pervious cover. But land use zoning (e.g. designating what properties can be single-family residential, multi-family residential, retail commercial, office commercial, industrial, institutional, agricultural, etc.) wouldn't make a difference: it would simply mean the same buildings, with the same impervious cover, would have been built in different places. (But what do I know? I'm just a native Houstonian and AICP-certified planner who did zoning work at the City of Denton.)

Getting off tangent, what is the future for homes in flood-prone areas, and entire subdivisions like Canyon Gate? I honestly have no clue, and I feel for the homeowners in these areas who have a lot of tough decisions ahead of them. Entire communities have hard choices to make in the wake of Harvey, and Memorial Day '15, and Tax Day '16. These events may represent a "new normal" that the region needs to come to terms with, and all options need to be on the table in order to confront it.

Buyouts and demolitions of at least some of the homes, apartments and other structures in areas that are chronically prone to flooding will obviously be required (this process has already begun, albeit at a very limited pace), but will not be suitable (or financially feasible) for every home that flooded during Harvey. Perhaps more homes will need to be elevated out of the floodplain or even retrofitted water-resistant materials to make them "floodwater ready." That won't be cheap, either. Nor will the construction of new stormwater detention and discharge structures, including, perhaps, a third flood control structure to augment the beleaguered Addicks and Barker Reservoirs.

As a final thought, the one thing we can probably do in the short term is to throw out the current floodplain maps. Not only have they done a poor job of predicting flooding, the entire concept of the "100-year floodplain" probably needs to be reconsidered as well.

Swamplot finally discovered Denton's "Little Houston" neighborhood

Took 'em long enough.

THE FASTEST way to Westheimer Rd., if you happen to be wandering north looking for it in the 76210 ZIP code, is a left off of Heights Blvd. and an immediate right off Gessner Dr. Lauren Meyers captured some scenes this weekend around the Summit Oaks subdivision on the south side of Denton, TX, which has a whole section of streets sharing names with major Houston roadway (with a few bizarro-world tweaks here and there, like Chimney Rock Dr. and an only-1-L Hilcroft Ave.)

The Summit Oaks (as opposed, perhaps, to the Compaq Center Oaks or Lakewood Church Oaks?) subdivision off of FM 2181/Teasley Road in south Denton (outlined in red in the Google Earth screenshot below) was platted in the late 1990s. All of its streets have Houston street names, even if some of them were misspelled. Needless to say, as a native Houstonian I thought it was rather humorous.

The Swamplot article intimates that the street names may have been inspired by the presence of a Houston Street in Denton State School, immediately to the subdivision's east. If I recall correctly however, the reason for the street names as much simpler: the developer was based in Houston and needed some street names that weren't already taken by other subdivisions in the rapidly-growing city. 

I was not the case manager for this particular development, although I do recall an attempt to convince the Summit Oaks developer and the developer of the subdivision directly to the north to create a roadway or pedestrian connection between Weslayan and Hollow Ridge, so that people (especially children) could get between the two neighborhoods without having to go all the way out on Teasley. They declined to make the connection because it wasn't required at the time; Denton's development code would later be updated to require such connectivity. 

                                                                                                                                                          Google Earth

Fifteen years after I left the City of Denton, I'm still chuckling at the above screenshot. Not because of the names of the streets in Summit Oaks, but rather because of the property below it, at the southwest corner of Teasley and Ryan Road, circled in light blue.

Not long after I was hired at the City of Denton, I was assigned a case regarding a piece of property at the corner of Teasley and Lillian Miller, just to the north of the area shown on the above map. A developer wanted to put a Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market grocery store on that property. The councilmember for that part of Denton at the time (who was the socialite housewife of a local physican) was outraged. She did not want a Wal-Mart anything in the upscale neighborhoods she represented, so she rallied up her (equally elitist) constituents in opposition. People showed up to public meetings and P&Z meetings en masse, their NIMBY-fueled anger directed at staffers such as myself (even though we had no control over the brand of the store to be located there) just as much as at the developer. Faced with such tremendous opposition, the developer backed down and the property eventually became a CVS pharmacy.

A short time later, another developer approached the city about placing a Tom Thumb (the Dallas-Fort Worth equivalent of Randalls) on the piece of property circled in the map above. The same councilmember who was livid about the Wal-Mart proposal was ecstatic about this one, and helped to push the rezoning and platting of the property through the city's review and approval process (I was, once again, case manager) in hopes of bringing the high-end grocer to her area. It was only after the zoning and platting was completed that the developer discovered that, thanks to the city's byzantine liquor laws, beer and wine would not be permitted to be sold on that site. Tom Thumb backed out. (See my post about this from many years ago for more explanation.)

The land sat vacant, the councilmember got voted off council, I left the City of Denton, and a few years later local voters regularized Denton's liquor laws. The grocery store originally planned for the property was finally developed, as the photo above indicates.

But it isn't a Tom Thumb. It's...

Yeah, you guessed it.

Topo Chico

The New York Times has finally discovered what Texans have known for years: Topo Chico is the best sparkling water in the world.

This super bubbly agua mineral, in retro green-tinted glass bottles, has developed a fervent following here in Texas. Devotees stock entire refrigerators with the stuff and tattoo themselves with the brand’s logo, an Aztec princess who legend has it was healed by drinking the water, which emanates from an inactive volcano in Monterrey.

Bottles of Topo Chico are tabletop everywhere in Texas this time of year, including tatty taquerias in the Rio Grande Valley and reservations-only restaurants in Houston.

The water is often the finishing fizz in cocktails at the hippest bars in Austin and the sidecar to espresso drinks at indie coffee shops in Dallas. Don’t even ask for San Pellegrino or Perrier; they’re likely not served.

At supermarkets and bodegas, it’s hard to find a shopping cart that doesn’t contain a 12-pack of Topo Chico. According to the market research firm IRI, Topo Chico has captured 62 percent of imported sparkling water sales at grocery stores in Texas, and 74 percent at convenience stores.

Sales in the United States were around $58 million for the year ending in June, up 83 percent from 2012, no doubt helped by health-conscious consumers who are avoiding sugary and artificially sweetened carbonated soft drinks.

Social media posts indicate that Topo Chico is difficult to find outside Texas. Its American distributor, Interex, in Fort Worth, said it is available, albeit to a lesser extent, in 29 other states.

Okay, so I could probably do with the overwrought "Topo Chico is a hipster drink!" vibe of this article. I've never seen anybody with a Topo Chico tattoo, and, no, shopping carts lacking a 12-pack of Topo Chico are not "rare," at least where I shop. And for the record, the only type of Topo Chico that comes in "retro green-tinted glass bottles" is the lime-flavored variety; the original stuff comes in clear bottles. This journalistic overreach aside, I'm not surprised that Topo Chico claims the majority of imported sparkling water sales in Texas (take that, Gerolsteiner!): its popularity is unquestionable. But what exactly is Topo Chico?

To be sure, travelers and even locals in Mexico are warned against drinking the water, but Topo Chico has been bottled and consumed there since 1895.

Before that, travelers from the United States flocked to Monterrey to drink and bathe in what newspapers of the era called “thermal springs” at the base of Cerro del Topo Chico (“little mole hill”). The water was said to have great medicinal value in the treatment of tuberculosis, liver disorders and rheumatism.

Nowadays the water continues to be bottled at the source after a purification process that the bottler, Compañía Embotelladora Topo Chico, said does not alter the water’s natural mineral composition, which includes sodium, magnesium, calcium, potassium and manganese.

Carbonation is added, but just enough to restore any fizziness lost during purification, in keeping with  F.D.A. rules for products sold as sparkling water.

The bottler makes no health claims other than that the water “quenches thirst” and “aids in digestive processes.” But some Texans insist it’s the best hangover cure.

I don't know if Topo Chico makes my hangovers any better, but its fizziness certainly feels great on a parched morning-after throat.

Beyond any curative powers, many fans of Topo Chico will tell you that it just tastes good. Justin Yu, the chef and owner of Oxheart in Houston, said it’s better than the sparkling water he grew accustomed to drinking while doing internships in Europe.

“There’s nothing better than a cold Topo Chico after a long, hard service,” said Mr. Yu, who was named 2016 Best Chef Southwest by the James Beard Foundation. “I think it has a cleaner taste, it’s definitely the fizziest and I really enjoy the slight salinity.”

The cookbook author and “Top Chef” judge Gail Simmons got hooked on Topo Chico while filming in Austin five years ago. “I would get in deep discussions with friends there about why it’s such an obsession — was it the size of the bubbles, the salinity, the slight citrusy note?” she said. “I consumed it as much as possible when I was in Texas, and then I came home to New York and was a little distraught because I couldn’t get it anymore.”

I think I began drinking Topo Chico 15 or so years ago, when I was looking for a mineral water that would approximate the taste and effervescence of Ecuador's Güitig (which I drank out of necessity when I lived there; Ecuadorian tap water wasn't allowed anywhere near my mouth). The breakfast taco place near my work was one of the few places in Denton that carried Topo Chico, and I became a fan. Obviously over time a lot of other people here in Texas have, as well; Topo Chico used to be carried almost exclusively by Mexican restaurants and grocery stores in Hispanic neighborhoods, but it is now sold by the pallet at Costco.

But what's the big deal about Topo Chico? you might ask. Aren't all fizzy waters the same? In a word, no. There are perceptible differences between brands - the taste created by the mineral content, the amount of carbonation in the water - and I believe Topo Chico simply tastes (and feels) the best. Los Angeles Magazine agrees; last May they sampled eleven brands of sparkling water and decided that Topo Chico came out on top:

This is officially the fizz water that all other fizz waters should aspire to. Topo Chico won big for what was aptly described by Audie as a “slicing bubble” (we really ran out of adjectives to describe bubbles) and scored a full 11 points over Gerolsteiner. The cute, retro glass bottle packaging also won our hearts. Well done, Topo Chico—you might be the new Mexican Coke.

Now that the New York Times has discovered what the "cool Texans" are drinking, will Topo Chico become so popular that demand overwhelms the amount of water that the plant in Monterrey is able to produce, and the drink becomes increasingly expensive and hard to find? That's certainly a possibility, and the Chronicle's Craig Hlavaty fears the Topo Chico shortages to come. Fortunately, Topo Chico's distribution range in the States is limited - at least for now - and it appears that the nation has already adopted La Croix as the popular, in-demand sparkling water. I'm not worried that there's going to be a run on bottles of Topo Chico anytime soon.

Besides... Even if Topo Chico does become the national rage, I'm not going to become the sparkling water version of the guy who liked a particular band until they became popular and stop drinking it. It's just too good of a drink to pass up.

Retroblogging

This blog didn't really begin in earnest until the late spring of 2006. However, I had been blogging for at least two years earlier, on my old, out-of-date website that I finally put out if its misery a couple of weeks ago.

There were some things I wrote on my first "blog" that I wanted to keep. For example, posts regarding Kirby's birth, posts about Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the exploits of the Cougars and the Astros, my trip to Japan, my very first trip to Dubai.

So I went through all of them, decided which ones I wanted to keep, and moved them to this blog. I backdated them to the date I originally published them on my old website. I generally cut and pasted them as they were originally written, only lightly editing them. I didn't even strip out the hyperlinks in many of them, even though a lot of them are now unfortunately dead.

I note at the bottom of each post the date they were "retroblogged" (today, August 23, 2015) and in many cases add a sentence or two to update what I wrote.

Thus, every entry now on this blog from 2004, all but one entry from 2005, and one entry from 2006 are imports from my old website. There are 40 of them in total. They all carry the "retroblog" tag.
Some what I think are the more noteworthy of these "retroblogs" are as follows:

July 18, 2004: Local homeowners complain about development in spite of Houston's lack of zoning

August 21, 2004: Kirby's birth

October 12, 2004: Astros get past the Atlanta Braves to win their first-ever postseason series

November 16, 2004: 2004 Presidential Election thoughts (aka, they both sucked)

November 22. 2004: The Coogs conclude a disappointing season

December 27, 2004: Houston experiences a White Christmas

March 15, 2005: Disco lives! at the University of North Texas library

April 25, 2005: Political instability continues in Ecuador as another president is forced out of office

September 8, 2005: Pondering the future of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

September 25, 2005: The disaster that was the Hurricane Rita evacuation

October 12, 2005: The "Kat-Rita Bowl:" Houston 35, Tulane 14 in Lafayette

October 20, 2005: The Astros are going to the World Series (and I'm going to Japan!)

December 7, 2005: College football teams that got Screwed and Shafted by bowl selection committees

December 10, 2005: Pictures and a review of my trip to Japan in October 2005

February 19, 2006: Pictures and a review of my trip to Dubai in January 2006

It was truly interesting to go back and read all of those old blog entries - many of which I hadn't looked at in years - to see how things were and what my life was like a decade ago.

There is still some material I saved from my old website that I might put on this blog in the future, but I probably won't be backdating them as I did with the above posts.

Two quick election observations

1. Not to belabor the same thought that is being made all over the rest of the internet today, but I think we can forget about Texas being a "purple" or "battleground" state anytime soon.

Yes, this was an election that the Republicans were going to dominate, both nationwide and at the state level. But when the Democratic candidates for statewide office can't even break forty percent against sleazeballs like Greg Abbott or Dan Patrick - or moreover, when statewide Democratic candidates actually lose vote share compared to four years ago - then all the bluster about demographic trends or better voter identification and turnout methods or Battleground Texas or whatever just looks silly.

I'm sure we'll continue to hear about "Texas turning blue" in 2016, and 2018, and 2020. I'm equally sure that state Democrats are not going to have any luck getting their candidates elected to any statewide office in any of those years. If ever. 

2. The state might well be solidly conservative, but my former home of Denton is clearly becoming more liberal. First, there's this:

Denton became the first Texas city to ban hydraulic fracturing Tuesday after a citizen-driven proposition cruised to a landslide victory at the polls.

Final returns showed the fracking ban passing by a whopping 59-41 percent margin all night long. While dozens of cities in New York and elsewhere have banned fracking, Texas is oil and gas country. So Denton’s proposition over the rights of a Texas city to police what happens within its borders pushed it into the national spotlight.

Ed Soph, treasurer of Pass the Ban, said the turnout sent a message.

“The responsible citizens of Denton have spoken — loudly and clearly,” Soph said.

When I worked for the City of Denton, and the Barnett Shale play exploded, everybody was rushing to get special gas well plats approved so that they could drill in and around the city. It was simply the "Texas" thing to do and was largely without controversy. I do remember Mr. Soph being one of the few people who spoke against drilling, and I also remember that he was regarded by local business leaders and elected officials as a tree-hugging jazz professor from UNT whose opinion didn't matter. Looks like times have changed.

The fracking ban will be challenged in court, but yesterday's election result is nevertheless noteworthy, especially considering how opponents of the ban outspent proponents by a massive margin but still lost by a margin of almost 20 percentage points.

Then there's this:

Liquor sales are now legal in Denton, after thousands of voters chose to make all alcoholic beverages legal to sell.

The vote means that Denton bars and restaurants no longer have to get special permits as private clubs to sell hard alcohol, and that businesses can start selling bottles of hard liquor starting Jan. 1.

I've written about the "wet-dry line" in the City of Denton before: basically, beer and wine sales at grocery stores and restaurants were limited to the city's 1977 boundaries, and any land annexed into the city after 1977 was dry. I spent many a meeting trying to explain to prospective convenience store owners why they could not sell beer in wine at their prospective location, even though the convenience store on the other side of the street was already selling alcohol. It was confusing, to say the least, but I was told that it would never change: the the city's churches would fight any attempt to move the wet-dry line, and the city's conservative voters would fall in line behind them. The same went for liquor stores ever being allowed inside Denton city limits.

Well, the wet-dry line was finally erased by a local election in 2006, which was amazing enough. Yesterday's vote, which allows liquor stores inside the city as well as does away with the city's silly "private club" permits for mixed drinks at restaurants and bars, is nothing short of miraculous.

Again, it appears that times have changed.

All aboard the A-Train

At the beginning of the week, the Denton County Transportation Authority inaugurated its "A-Train" commuter rail service:

At 4:57 a.m., the Denton County Transportation Authority’s first official A-train ride chugged down the 21-mile track on its first southbound trek to Carrollton, where passengers can connect to DART rail. Passengers hope the train will catch on and become a practical option for residents and commuters here.

I have high hopes for this commuter rail line not only because it should have a decent reverse-commute component of UNT and TWU students heading from Dallas into Denton, but also because it parallels an already-congested Interstate 35E which is about to undergo several years of highly-disruptive reconstruction. In fact, I would argue that the A-Train meets Christof Spieler's eight habits of highly-effective commuter rail lines very well.

I'm admittedly biased; I was part of the team that planned and designed this new transit service and I'm proud to see it come to fruition. But ultimately, the people who live, work and study in Denton and Lewisville will decide if the A -Train is successful or not. The Dallas Morning News has more.

Denton puts two high schools in state finals

Citizens of Denton had much to cheer about yesterday, as two of their teams were playing in state high school football championship games. Guyer High School faced off against Cibolo Steele in the Class 5A Division II championship, while Ryan High School met Lake Travis in the Class 4A Division I championship.

Alas, neither team was able to bring home any hardware. Guyer lost to Cibolo Steele 21-24, while Ryan lost to Lake Travis 7-27. The games were played back-to-back at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington.

Nevertheless, it's pretty remarkable for a school district to put two schools in the finals in the same year; according to the Denton Record-Chronicle's Brett Vito, this hasn't happened since 1962. Keep in mind that Denton ISD, which includes the City of Denton as well as surrounding communities, isn't a particularly massive school district: its total enrollment of about 23,000 students is dwarfed by districts in and around Houston, Dallas, Austin and other Texas metropolitan areas.

Obviously the kids from Guyer and Ryan would have preferred to win their respective championships, but they should nevertheless be proud of what they've accomplished. Guyer High School didn't even exist until a few years ago!

Closer to home, congratulations are in order for the Pearland Oilers, who captured the Class 5A Division I title with a 28-24 victory over Euless Trinity last night.

Dodgeball comes to an end

Although the news is a week old at this point, this blog cannot go without noting that "Dodgeball Time" has come to an end at the University of North Texas. Faced with the reality of yet another losing season, UNT Director of Athletics Rick Villareal last week decided to relieve Todd Dodge of his duties as head coach of the Mean Green.

One could argue that it was in bad form for Villareal to fire Dodge before the season had ended, or to can him in spite of the substantial number of injuries (it turns out that the Houston Cougars aren't the only team in the nation to lose both their starting and second-string quarterbacks in a single game) the Mean Green have suffered this season.

But in the game of college football, it all comes down to wins and losses. And Todd Dodge, in spite of his pedigree as an outstanding high school football coach, could simply not find wins at the college level. He never won more than two games in any season as the Mean Green's head coach and he leaves North Texas with an abysmal 6-37 record in his three-and-a-half seasons at the helm. For a school that used to dominate, however briefly, the Sun Belt Conference and which is opening a new stadium next fall, this was simply unacceptable.

Especially considering the heartbreaking manner in which some of UNT's losses this season have occurred: a one-point loss at home to Rice last month. Another one-point loss at home to the Ragin' Cajuns early this month. These are both bad teams and these are not results that will excite the Mean Green fan base or fill UNT's new stadium next year. For that reason, a change had to be made.

Offensive coordinator Mike Canales will take over as the interim coach for the Mean Green.

Not to gloat or anything, but...

...it's kind of cool to see this kind of development planned for a rail station that I helped locate.

This particular corner of Lewisville, close to the intersection of I-35E and the 121 Bypass and right across the Interstate from Vista Ridge Mall, has already seen significant retail, office park and multifamily development. So the kind of density, land use and amenity mix being planned makes sense for this area. My only question is how they'll deal with the floodplain issues.

Kuff and Greg have more.

New stadium for North Texas; could one be on the way for Houston?

The University of North Texas announced last Thursday that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board had approved their request to build a new football stadium in Denton. Groundbreaking is to occur later this month, with construction scheduled to be completed in time for the 2011 season. The new stadium will be located on the other side of Interstate 35E from Fouts Field and will seat about 30,000.

This is a great step forward for the struggling Mean Green football program. 57-year-old Fouts Field was old and lacking in amenities and its sightlines weren't great. Denton ISD's new stadium on the north side of Loop 288 put it to shame, and it's hard to recruit high school students that are used to better facilities than the ones your school is offering.

The University of Houston is in the same boat. As much as I love Robertson Stadium, the fact is that it is even older than Fouts Field - it was built in 1940 - and is simply substandard in terms of amenities such as locker rooms, press boxes, restrooms, concession areas, luxury suites and the like. It really needs to be upgraded, or even replaced. To that end, the University has just put out a Request for Qualifications (see .pdf here) for a feasibility study to renovate or even replace Robertson Stadium. Several options are going to be considered, including the possible construction of a new stadium on the intermural fields at the corner of Cullen and I-45 (a prospect that is appealing to me) or on the other side of Brays Bayou from campus in MacGregor Park. Any new stadium would have to have a capacity of 40,000 fans, up from Robertson's current capacity of about 32,000.

The RFQ comes as no surprise, as new Athletics Director Mack Rhoades has experience building new stadia from his time at Akron and was brought to Houston precisely for this reason. What is a bit of a surprise is the speed at which the University of Houston wants the study completed; the RFQ closes on November 23rd and the study could begin as soon as early January 2010. Clearly, the University of Houston administration wants to move forward with these facilities upgrades as soon as possible.

Houston doesn't need zoning, but it does need better development regulations

Early last week, Andrew at neoHouston had an interesting article about the ongoing controversy regarding the Ashby High Rise, a residential tower proposed to be built amidst a neighborhood of single-family homes near Rice University. Andrew explains that, in other cities, this controversy would be handled by a set of land-use regulations known as zoning. He provides some history of zoning and explains why this form of land-use regulation is not right for Houston, but also laments some of the drawbacks to Houston's current approach towards land development regulation:

Houston has avoided the worst of these policies by staying away from conventional zoning. Ironically, however, Houston has adopted many of the same ordinances and policies of other cities. As an example: when platting land for development, if the developer does not explicitly denote another land use, the city REQUIRES the land be restricted to single-family residential uses. Because these regulations are hard-coded into the legal description of the land they are extraordinarily difficult to change in the future. Houston also has parking and setback requirements taken straight out of the conventional zoning world.

The result of the regulations we have are the same as the results of the regulations in other cities: low density, pedestrian-hostile development disproportionately dominates the city – not because this is all the market demands, but because it’s all that is legal to build. Doing anything different exposes a developer to a regulatory situation that’s a headache at best and a nightmare at worst.

So while we like to think that we’re scarcely regulated, the facts are quite different. Houston has a pretty average amount of land use regulation, but where it is different is the scattered and unpredictable way in which the City enforces its regulations. The Ashby development is the poster-child for the problems with Houston’s approach.

As somebody who served as a development review planner for three years in a Texas city with zoning (Denton), I completely agree that Houston has done well by avoiding this form of regulation. Ideological arguments against zoning aside - I'm no enemy of the free markets myself, although I don't agree with the idea that "markets always know best" and believe that at least some regulations are necessary - I have a pragmatic objection to conventional ("Euclidean") zoning being implemented in Houston. Simply put, trying to implement zoning in a city as developed as Houston is today would be a messy exercise in futility. I liken it to closing the barn door after the horse has escaped, because it would do about as much good.

For Texas cities, the zoning amendment process is regulated by Section 211 of the Texas Local Government Code. It requires, among other things, public hearings for proposed zoning changes, notification of adjacent property owners, a recommendation on the proposed zoning by a municipality's appointed planning commission, and final approval by the city's elected governing body (i.e. city council; because amendments to the zoning map are essentially amendments to municipal law, they must be ultimately approved by the city's law-making body). This process is a lengthy as it is cumbersome. Generally, a simple majority of council votes is needed to approve zoning amendments. However, in cases where property owners representing 20 percent or more of the land area surrounding the property proposed to be rezoned are in opposition to the amendment, or if the planning commission recommends against the proposed change, then a supermajority (75 percent) of council votes are required to approve the change. In this way, surrounding property owners, for better or for worse, have a great deal of influence in how adjacent properties are used.

Instituting a conventional zoning ordinance in Houston would mean several things: the local planning bureaucracy would need to be enormously expanded in order to handle the tremendous caseload that zoning enforcement and amendment actions in the nation's fourth-largest city would entail. Much of this expanded bureaucracy would be funded through developer application fees, increasing the "cost of doing business" for developers, and there would still probably be at least some supplementary funding required of this larger bureaucracy through the city's general, taxpayer-funded account. Because Houston has been unzoned for so long, there would invariably be kaleidoscopic array of nonconforming uses and structures that would have to be dealt with, and a multitude of variance requests and rezoning applications (following the process I outlined above) would result. Planning Commission and City Council meetings are long enough as it is today; adding a bunch of zoning cases to every meeting's agenda would make these meetings even longer. It also would create a very divisive political process, pitting existing property owners screaming "NIMBY" against developers looking to profitably development property they own. Land use disputes here in Houston are generally rare because people recognize that the city has limited powers to regulate them; indeed, the the controversy surrounding the Ashby High Rise is unique due to its rarity. In Denton, which at the time I worked there had five percent of Houston's population, such controversies occurred with regularity.

As an alternative to Euclidean land-use controls, Andrew suggests a form-based approach to development regulation:

Fortunately, there’s a straightforward solution for the issues Houston is facing. The Congress for the New Urbanism is an organization that has been dedicated to the development and advancement of new municipal policies to make urbanism in cities legal again. One of the tools the CNU has advocated is called “SmartCode.”

SmartCode is an effort to combine the many facets of development regulation (subdivision and platting regulations, building regulations, traffic and parking regulations, etc) into a single, streamlined, compact document. Its entire goal is to stay away from land-use controls (which unreasonably inhibit the market and create constant conflict at City Hall), and focus on simple, predictable, results-oriented standards.

In essence, SmartCode divides different scales of buildings into different “transect-zones”, defines how the street should be designed to accommodate the needs of different scales of development, and leaves the rest to the market. Contrary to popular belief, SmartCode is not about “style;” the standard code does not contain any.

A form-based approach Andrew is suggesting could regulate aspects of development such as building height and setbacks. I don't think any such code should regulate aspects of development such as minimum lot size or dimension or, outside of certain special districts in neighborhoods, historic areas or around transit stations, building design. In not even sure such a code should regulate standards such as lot coverage or landscaping, although, given Houston's historic flooding problems, there might be some restrictions on the maximum amount of permeable area allowed on a lot in order to retain and absorb rainwater runoff. I agree with Andrew that minimum parking standards should be scrapped. Let individual developers decide how much or how little parking they need for the development they are proposing, and encourage creative collaboration between neighboring property owners on shared or community parking facilities. Obviously, land uses and densities (in the form of floor-to-area ratios for commercial development and units per acre for residential development) would not be regulated.

However, because it would divide the city into zones that regulate development, and also because form-based regulations would, at least indirectly, affect the type of use and density of a given property, it is certain that such SmartCode would still be considered a type of zoning and therefore subject to Section 211 of Texas Local Government Code. That suggests that the same drawbacks that a standard zoning ordinance would entail - a larger municipal bureaucracy, a multitude of nonconforming structures that need to be regulated, the slow, expensive and cumbersome zoning amendment process, the power of adjacent property owners to limit development based on supermajority requirements, longer Planning Commission and City Council meetings, owner-versus-developer controversies and a polarized political environment - would also result from a form-based code.

With that said, I don't think these problems would manifest themselves to the same degree as would occur under a traditional, use-based zoning code. As Andrew explains, the relative simplicity of the regulatory framework involved in such a code could keep these issues to a minimum:

Because of how few requirements there would be, the most common request for variances would almost certainly be for added height as areas originally categorized as T3 or T4 develop more intensely. The city policy should be for a simple “upgrade” from one category to the next highest so long as the developer builds infrastructure – most importantly street connectivity – appropriate to the intensity of development.

Based on my experience in Denton, the greatest controversy surrounding zoning amendments was generated by the proposed land use change itself; the size and placement of what would be permitted under a zoning change oftentimes wasn't an issue or was a secondary issue to the change in land use itself. By eliminating regulations relating to land use or density from a Houston-specific form-based code and limiting the variance and amendment process to building height and placement, the bureaucratic caseload generated relative to a traditional zoning code would likely be reduced, as would the potential for controversy. This is not to say that no proposed changes - upgrading a property from one transect type to another - would generate controversy; there would likely be less of it, and it would be narrowly focused, but it would still be there.

Given that outcome, as of right now I am not fully convinced that a form-based code is the type of development control that Houston needs, although I do think Andrew makes a compelling case for it and I'm certain it's a better alternative than traditional land-use-based zoning. What I am convinced of is this: as Houston's urban core continues to densify, conflicts like the one surrounding the Ashby High Rise that are still relatively rare today are without a doubt going to become more and more common in the future. My fear is that some point, more and more citizens are going to become affected by these controversies and are going to become disillusioned with the City's current approach to land development regulations such that they are going to demand a mechanism to deal with these disputes, including traditional use-based zoning (and in that regard its worth noting that Houston's last attempt at zoning in 1993 barely failed in a referendum). The conversation regarding development regulations that Andrew is putting forward is something that the City of Houston needs to have sooner rather than later.

Ten years in the real world

Ten years ago today, on June 10, 1999, I became a full-time, productive member of society when I began work as an employee of the City of Denton, Texas.

I had just finished up graduate school a few weeks before and this was my first "real" job. I had had jobs before, of course, whether it be a menial summertime job at a now-defunct amusement park or a decent job at an architectural consulting firm I held for several months between the end of my undergraduate education at the University of Houston and the beginning of grad school at the University of Texas at Austin. Technically, in fact, I hadn't even finished with graduate school when I took the job in Denton; I wouldn't receive my diploma until I turned in my professional report that following November. But Denton was my first "professional" job: school was over and from now on, this is what I was going to be doing. And I've been doing it ever since.

Normally, this is where I'd write something cliché about "has it really been that long?" or about "how time flies." But I can't, because it really, truly feels like it's been ten years since my "real life" began. That's probably because so much "real life" has happened between then and now: Lori and I lived in Lewisville for one year, then we moved to Denton so I could be closer to work and she could be closer to her classes at the University of North Texas, 9/11 occurred, Lori got her master's degree, I quit Denton, we moved back to Houston, I found another job, we got married, we moved into an apartment in Midtown, Kirby was born, I changed jobs, we brought a house, the Astros went to the World Series, Lori's brother moved in with us, Lori's mother died, Hurricane Ike came... At lot of stuff, whether good or bad, has occurred over the past decade. For that reason, my first day at the City of Denton really seems like something that happened a long time ago. Life evolves over time, and that's absolutely what's happened to my life over the past decade.

It is said that over the course of life you are supposed to become both smarter and richer. Richer, yes - I'm thankful that I'm in the the best position, financially, that I've ever been in - but smarter? Eh. I am certainly more cynical today than I was a decade ago, but I don't know if that counts. What does matter is that this past ten years in the "real world" has been, on balance and in spite of the hardships, a lot of fun. And since I still have a lot of the "real world" ahead of me - it will be another thirty years, at the earliest, before I can retire - I can only hope that the next few decades are as interesting and as fun as the last one has been.

What do New Orleans and Denton have in common?

According to the US Census Bureau, New Olreans and Denton are two of the top ten fastest-growing large cities in the United States. New Orleans, which continues to repopulate following the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, grew by 13.8% in the year that ended July 1, 2007, making it the fastest-growing large city in the United States. As of a year ago, the Census Bureau estimated the Big Easy's population at 239,124. It is doubtlessly even larger today, but is still nowhere near its 2000 population of 484,674.

Denton was the tenth-fastest-growing large city in the United States. The Census Bureau estimated its one-year growth rate at 4.7%, with a population of 115,506 as of July 1st of last year. The fact that Denton has been growing so rapidly (it crossed the 90,000 threshold in 2000, when I worked and lived there) is not a surprise to me; the fact that Denton is considered a "large city" by the Census Bureau is, on the other hand, a bit of a surprise. And Denton wasn't even the fastest-growing city in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex for the year ending July 1, 2007, either: McKinney, next door in Collin County, had a growth rate of eight percent, making it the third-fastest growing large city in the nation.

And here's another interesting tidbit from the Census Bureau:

In terms of sheer numbers, Houston led the nation's cities in numerical increase during the period. Houston added 38,932 residents in the year ended July 1, 2007 to reach 2.2 million.

In spite of that, Houston might not be the nation's fourth-largest city when the 2010 census is taken. The Census Bureau estimates that Houston is currently tied with Phoenix, Arizona at the number four position with 1.6 million inhabitants each.

New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago are still the first, second and third-largest municipalities in the United States, respectively.

Denton replaces its mayor

What has turned out to be a surprisingly long, controversial and expensive mayoral election has finally come to an end:

Voters ousted Denton Mayor Perry McNeill on Saturday, handing the city’s top elected position to rival Mark Burroughs.

Burroughs won decisively with 62 percent of the vote, capping an unusually costly and bitter race between two former City Council colleagues.

“I’m just so pleased and so proud,” Burroughs said. “I hope that I live up to the trust that’s been placed in me today. I’ll try very hard to do so.”

McNeill, 72, a retired professor and engineer, is the first Denton mayor to lose a re-election bid in nearly two decades.

“The people have spoken,” he said. “I guess I’m going to have a little more free time.”

A runoff election was required because no candidate won a majority of votes in last month's first round. The fact that Burroughs came very close to winning that four-candidate election, however, seemed to suggest that McNeill's stint as mayor was in jeaopardy.

Interestingly, turnout for this runoff was over 500 votes higher than for the first round; a total of 3,866 voters, or seven percent of Denton's typically apathetic base of registered voters, cast ballots in the runoff.

The election itself was one of the nastier ones in Denton's recent political history. McNeill and Burroughs were both targets of an unsuccessful attempt to remove their names from the ballot on the basis that their candidacies violated the city's term limits. The election itself was rife with other charges and conflicts:

Burroughs also faced questions over potential conflicts of interest. His law firm, Sawko & Burroughs, collects delinquent taxes for many local governments, including the city of Denton.

Burroughs has repeatedly said the contracts aren’t a conflict because his firm’s payments come from fees levied on taxpayers’ past-due amounts, not from government coffers.

Local activist Bob Clifton distributed several mailers criticizing Burroughs’ government contracts and level of spending on the race. Together, Burroughs and McNeill spent nearly $84,000 on their campaigns, with Burroughs’ spending accounting for more than 60 percent of the total.

Last month, Burroughs sued in an attempt to stop Clifton’s mailers, arguing that Clifton was violating state law by not disclosing who was funding them.

Clifton denied wrongdoing but faces a possible contempt-of-court ruling after he failed to meet a court-ordered deadline Tuesday to turn over his financial records.

McNeill also faced controversies, including over whether his mailers exaggerated his accomplishments and included names of people who weren’t supporting his candidacy.

The mayor also drew fire for an automated phone survey that critics called a thinly veiled attack on Burroughs. The survey, which did not identify its source, asked respondents whether having a “part-time mayor” or one who collected overdue taxes from “struggling” families and businesses would bother them.

McNeill, who campaigned as a “full-time mayor,” admitted funding the survey but said he was simply trying to measure public opinion.

I never would have guessed that an election between Perry McNeill and Mark Burroughs would turn out to be such a nasty and expensive affair. Both McNeill and Burroughs were on the "pro-business" side of the "neighborhoods versus businesses" divide that has historically characterized local politics, and when I worked for the City of Denton I thought both of them to be generally pleasant and level-headed. There might be a political backstory here to which I am not privy, but the ease with which Burroughs unseated an incumbent mayor suggest there was a lot of dissatisfaction with McNeill's administration. Elections under these circumstances can get ugly. McNeill probably realized early on that there was a tide of dissent against him and felt it necessary to create as many doubts about Burroughs as he could in order to retain his seat in the mayor's office. Ultimately, it did not work.

Burroughs will be sworn in as mayor at tonight's city council meeting.

Denton election headed to runoff

Following up on the controversial municipal election in Denton, Texas: it looks like it's not over yet.

Denton Mayor Perry McNeill and rival Mark Burroughs are headed for a runoff after neither secured a majority of the vote in Saturday’s mayoral race.

Two other candidates, businessman Justin Bell and college student Darac Favre, combined to receive about 12 percent of the 3,330 votes cast — preventing either McNeill or Burroughs from reaching 50 percent and extending a bruising campaign for an­other month.

Mark Burroughs, a former councilmember, received 1,620 votes, or 48.6 percent of the total, in yesterday's ballot. Perry McNeill received 1,305 votes, or 39.2. The fact that Burroughs came just 46 votes short of winning the election outright clearly gave McNeill cause for concern:

McNeill, 72, a retired professor and engineer who is seeking a second term, said Saturday’s results surprised him. He is trying not to become the first mayor since 1990 to lose a re-election bid.

“I thought we might win outright, but that’s fine,” McNeill said. “We’ll just go forward.”

I've always thought of both Perry and Mark as amicable people, so it comes as some surprise to me that this mayoral election has apparently been one of the uglier ones in Denton's recent political history. McNeill and Burroughs, as well as concilmember Pete Kamp, faced lawsuits related to the city's interpretation of its term limits. Burroughs came under conflict-of-interest scrutiny related to the work his law firm does for the city, and the amount of money he spent in the campaign ($45,000, compared to McNeill's $16,600) also became an issue. For Burroughs, that worked out to just under $28 per vote in another poorly-participated local election.

McNeill expressed disappointment with the turnout, which represented about 6 percent of Denton’s 55,289 registered voters. He said he would continue to campaign on his record. “I think I have a good record, and I’m surprised we didn’t have more folks recognize that,” McNeill said. “So I’m just going to push that harder.”

I'm not sure why Perry should be so surprised; turnout for municipal elections in Denton has historically been abysmal. It's not just due to the large numbers of transient students living in the city, either; when I lived and worked in Denton I noticed that so many longtime residents couldn't be bothered to participate in municipal processes, be they public hearings for zoning changes or local elections. I can't help but wonder if the city's practice of staggered term cycles, wherein the mayor and two at-large seats are up for election in even-numbered years and the four district council seats are up for election in odd-numbered years, is at least partly to blame. Very few other cities stagger terms like this, and I can see how local voters would find it confusing.

In other election news, councilmember Joe Mulroy narrowly won re-election, Pete Kamp successfully made the jump from district councilmember to at-large councilmember, and Rudy Moreno narrowly won the district seat being vacated by Kamp. Like Perry McNeill, Mulroy and Moreno served on the city's Planning and Zoning Commission while I was an employee there. I always thought the Rudy Moreno was an informed and sensible voice on the Commission, so I'm glad to see him on Council.

The runoff election for Mr. McNeill and Mr. Burroughs will be held on June 14th.

Denton election crisis averted

Following up on last week's post, it appears that Denton's upcoming mayoral race will not be thrown into turmoil after all:

A district judge Monday allowed Denton Mayor Perry McNeill and two other candidates to remain on the May 10 ballot, after a lawsuit challenged their eligibility.

Visiting Judge David Evans said he would not intervene in an election that is under way. Early voting in the City Council races starts April 28, but city officials said they already sent out two absentee ballots.

The judge did not rule on the merits of the lawsuit, which alleges that McNeill, Mayor Pro Tem Pete Kamp and former council member Mark Burroughs would violate the city’s term limits by winning another term. City attorneys say the candidates are eligible to run because none is seeking more than three consecutive terms in the same seat.

The judge appeared to take a dim view of Denton's attorneys' interpetation of the city's term limits in a hearing last week, but realized that a ruling against the city this close to the election would create great turmoil and therefore decided not to interfere. The question regarding the meaning of Denton's term limits is still unanswered. Now, however, perhaps it is something that the citizens of Denton, rather than the courts, can resolve.

Denton's election is May 10.

Election trouble brewing in Denton?

This is interesting:

A district judge expressed doubt Monday over Denton Mayor Perry McNeill’s and Mayor Pro Tem Pete Kamp’s eligibility to run in the May 10 election.

Visiting Judge David Evans said he had a “hard time” accepting Denton city attorneys’ argument that City Council members could bypass term limits by running for different seats, as McNeill and Kamp are attempting.

The City of Denton was scheduled to hold municipal elections on May 10. Retired UNT engineering professor Perry McNeill, who became mayor two years ago, is up for re-election, and three council positions - one district and two at-large - are up for grabs as well. However, the entire election could be thrown into disarray if a group of local plantiffs - including two political challengers who probably have little chance of being elected otherwise - get their way.

The suit claims that the city charter prevents McNeill, (former councilmember Mark) Burroughs and at-large District 5 candidate Kamp from running because each already was elected to at least three council terms. The five plaintiffs include mayoral challenger Justin Bell and Kamp’s rival for District 5, Mike Sutton.

The charter prevents members from being elected to more than three consecutive two-year terms. But city attorneys say members can serve more than six years by running for a different council seat, including mayor, or sitting out at least one term and running again for the same seat.

McNeill, Burroughs and Kamp say they are eligible based on that interpretation of the charter, which city attorneys have supported for years.

This is how I always understood how Denton's term limits worked: candidates could not run for the same office more than three consecutive times, but could stand for re-election if they sat out for one term or ran for a different office. This is what all three of the named candidates have done: Mark Burroughs sat out for a few years after completing his three alloted terms in 2004, Perry McNeill ran for mayor in 2006 after serving as a councilmember for two-and-a-half terms, and Pete Kamp is moving from a district council seat to an at-large council seat.

I used to be a supporter of term limits, but after seeing how they've worked in Houston, where they were implemented seventeen years ago, I no longer think they are a good idea. This legal fight over their implementation in Denton, which is costing taxpayer dollars to resolve and which could throw a city's democratic process into turmoil, obviously doesn't cause me to view term limits any more favorably.

Evans has set a follow-up hearing for Monday morning. If he rules for the plantiffs, the City of Denton will obviously appeal, but the damage to the May 10th election may already be done. Ballots have already been printed, absentee voting begins April 28th, and, if the ruling stands, at least one at-large council seat will end up as an uncontested election.

Stay tuned.

Dodgeball time in Denton

There's a good write-up about new University of North Texas head football coach Todd Dodge on usatoday.com right now. It includes this frightening tidbit about his past, which I did not know before I read the article:

In the spring of 1987 the former standout University of Texas quarterback was working for an electric company in Austin while he finished coursework at the university. During routine service, he touched an industrial meter that blew up, propelling Dodge a dozen feet away.

When he regained consciousness, Dodge, who'd been a record-setting passer at Jefferson High in Port Arthur, Texas, and who wanted to coach, worried about his future because he was supposed to start an assistant coaching job that fall.

"The skin was dripping off my hands," he said, tracing the faded scars as he sat in his UNT office on a recent morning. "I thought to myself, 'I'm not on fire, but I'm smoldering.' That ordeal made me a tougher man."

Doctors told Dodge, who also suffered burns on his face and neck, that he might lose his fingers. But he defied their prediction. He wore special gloves as his skin healed, gave self-pity the cold shoulder, showed up for work in the fall season and eventually became a coach who electrified the atmosphere for players, fans and communities. His (high school football powerhouse Southlake) Carroll teams won four Class 5A state titles.

The adversity that Todd Dodge will face in rebuilding a struggling program in major college football's worst conference might not be as severe as the adversity he faced following his accident. But it's no stretch to say that Dodge still has his work cut out for him. Few national observers expect great thinks from North Texas this fall; the football prediction website collegefootballpoll.com, whose Congrove Computer Rankings system has accurately predicted the Mean Green's final record six out of the last twelve seasons (and come within a single game on three other occasions), foresees an abysmal 2-10 fall campaign for UNT. The preseason magazines aren't showing much love for North Texas, either: Athlon and Lindy expect the Eagles to finish seventh in the eight-team Sun Belt, and Phil Steele and Street & Smith foresee UNT finishing at the very bottom. Even his fellow Sun Belt coaches aren't expecting much; at the annual Sun Belt media gathering, North Texas was picked to finish seventh out of eight teams. Brutal out-of-conference games at Oklahoma and Arkansas are not exactly going to be helpful, either.

However, Dodge's arrival in Denton is already paying dividends, His decision to leave Southlake Carroll, where his phenomenal success included a 79-1 record over the last five seasons, to take the reigns at North Texas created a great deal of buzz in a Metroplex that generally pays little attention to its local college football teams. Dodge's plans to reinvigorate a North Texas football program that once won four straight Sun Belt Conference titles but has since fallen on hard times by abandoning previous coach Darrell Dickey's ground-based offense for a more open "spread" offense have also created excitement. The reaction from the North Texas faithful is overwhelming. Football season ticket sales have increased a whopping 40.5%; contributions to the Mean Green Club, a fundraising and booster organization, rose by over 24 percent. And other famous Texas coaches have also voiced their support:

"If you were gauging deals in Texas, North Texas made the best deal," says former (University of Texas) Longhorns coach Fred Akers, who coached Dodge at Texas. "I think Todd Dodge, with his charisma, is going to be exactly what they need."

There's no question that Todd Dodge knows football. He played at both the high school and college levels before becoming a legend at Southlake Carroll. But transitions from the high school level to the college level are not always easy. Art Briles, a former head coach at Class 3A powerhouse Stephenville, seems to be doing well here at the University of Houston. But the transition doesn't always work out well; the article recounts the story of Gerry Faust, a celebrated high school coach whose transition to the helm at Notre Dame ended ingloriously five years later with a 30-26-1 record. It remains to be seen just how successful Dodge will be at this level. And, given the current state of disarray at North Texas, it's probably too much to expect a momentous turnaround to occur in 2007.

But Dodge's hiring has already given North Texas one thing it desperately needs: hope. It's clear that the fans are buying into the Dodgeball era at North Texas. The players are, as well.

"He wants the best out of all of us," (running back Jamario) Thomas says. "I just can't wait to see what happens."

This, incidentally, is not Todd Dodge's first stint at the University of North Texas. He was UNT's passing game coordinator in 1992 and 1993.