The Texas Tribune: 30-Year-Old Capital Case Returns to Court, With Defense Alleging Bias

The United States Supreme Court overturned Mr. Banks’s death sentence in 2004, finding that the Bowie County prosecutors who tried the case suppressed evidence and deliberately covered their mistakes for decades.

“It’s really a remarkable tale of misconduct — just about every kind of thing the prosecution could do that was improper,” said Robert C. Owen, co-director of the Capital Punishment Center at the University of Texas School of Law, who was one of Mr. Banks’s appellate lawyers.

Now, the same district attorney’s office — including one of the same prosecutors who was involved in the original trial — is again seeking the death penalty for Mr. Banks. Despite the Supreme Court’s rebuke, James Elliott, who has been a prosecutor on the case for more than 30 years, has maintained that he will pursue Mr. Banks until he “gets what he deserves.”

At a hearing Monday in a Bowie County state district court, Mr. Banks’s lawyers will ask Judge Nathan E. White to disqualify Mr. Elliott and the local district attorney’s office from the case and to assign different lawyers to represent the state.

“Mr. Elliott’s misbehavior proves that he cannot serve as a disinterested prosecutor and is laboring under a conflict of interest that will prevent Mr. Banks from receiving a fair trial,” lawyers wrote in court documents.

Mr. Banks, who is black and was 21 when the crime was committed, was convicted of killing Mr. Whitehead, who was white, so he could take off with his car. The police found Mr. Whitehead’s body in a park near Texarkana and soon discovered that Mr. Banks had been with him on the last night he was seen alive.

There were no witnesses to the killing and no physical evidence linking Mr. Banks to it. The prosecution’s case relied largely on the testimony of Robert Farr and Charles Cook, both admitted drug users; Mr. Cook also had convictions for robbery by assault and forgery.

Mr. Cook told the jury that he met Mr. Banks in Dallas the morning after the murder. He said Mr. Banks had blood on his pants and told him he decided to “kill the white boy for the hell of it and take his car and come to Dallas.”

Mr. Farr testified that he, Mr. Banks and another man drove to Dallas on the day that Mr. Banks was arrested so Mr. Banks could retrieve a gun to use in armed robberies. Mr. Farr said Mr. Banks told him he would “take care of it” if any trouble arose.

Mr. Banks had no criminal history, and people who were with him and Mr. Whitehead on the last night that Mr. Whitehead was alive testified there was no ill will between the two. Nonetheless, an all-white Bowie County jury convicted Mr. Banks, who was sentenced to death.

In 1999 — almost 20 years after the trial — a federal judge forced Bowie County to open its case records, and Mr. Banks’s lawyers discovered a transcript showing that Mr. Cook’s testimony had been extensively rehearsed and coached. They also learned that the police had paid Mr. Farr, an informant who had an unreliable record, $200 for his role in the investigation.

Mr. Farr, in an affidavit, said he was afraid that the police would arrest him on drug charges. In exchange for the money, and to avoid jail, he agreed to set up Mr. Banks, he said, persuading him to drive to Dallas to get a gun.

Prosecutors allowed Mr. Cook and Mr. Farr to lie in court and never told jurors that their information was false, the Supreme Court found. Mr. Cook denied on the stand that anyone had helped him with his testimony, and Mr. Farr said he had not been paid for his help in the case. During closing arguments, Mr. Elliott told jurors that they should believe Mr. Cook and Mr. Farr.

In arguments before the Supreme Court, state lawyers did not dispute that Mr. Cook had been coached and that Mr. Farr was paid for his help. But they said Mr. Banks’s lawyers were at fault for not uncovering the information sooner.

The Supreme Court ruled that without the testimony of Mr. Cook and Mr. Farr, Mr. Banks might not have been sentenced to death. “It has long been established that the prosecution’s ‘deliberate deception of a court and jurors by the presentation of known false evidence is incompatible with rudimentary demands of justice,’?” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the court’s majority opinion.

Mr. Elliott declined to comment last week about the case. “We’re in litigation,” he said. “The newspaper is the wrong place to be trying cases — it just is. So I can’t give any comment.”

View the original article here

The Texas Tribune: Mixed Reviews for Brownsville Ban on Plastic Bags

“I have a whole bunch of these in my truck,” she said, noting that she often forgets to take them in when she shops.

Ms. Orozco’s collection of tote bags stems from a recent ordinance in Brownsville, one of Texas’ poorest big cities: a ban on plastic checkout bags in virtually all businesses. The policy, which took effect in January, has eliminated more than 350,000 bags per day, according to Mayor Pat Ahumada, who said in an e-mail that it has “transformed our city from littered and dirty to a much cleaner city.”

Two other Texas communities, Fort Stockton and South Padre Island, have also approved bans on plastic bags, which will take effect in September and January, respectively. Several large cities, including Laredo and El Paso, have previously considered bans, and even the small town of Poteet, south of San Antonio, plans to assess its bag-banning options.

Brownsville’s policy, the first of its kind in Texas, has stirred controversy. While Ms. Orozco said she liked reusable bags because they helped the environment, others have concerns.

Edmundo Arizpe, 84, who left the A&V Lopez store clutching two small bags of peanuts, said that when he needed to buy lots of groceries, he often went to the nearby city of San Benito.

By driving, “I’m doing worse to the climate,” Mr. Arizpe said. He wishes the ban exempted customers spending more than $50.

The ordinance also worries Duro Bag, a large maker of paper bags with a factory in the city’s port, because, unlike bans elsewhere in the nation, it also restricts paper bags, said Christopher Klein, manager of strategic initiatives at the company.

Paper bags at many Brownsville checkout counters must be extra sturdy and have handles, which Mr. Klein calls “somewhat counterintuitive to reducing trash and litter.” (The requirement is intended to make paper bags reusable.) Duro Bag’s Brownsville factory does not make this kind of bag, but it plans to add equipment so it can; currently Duro Bag ships bags with handles in from another plant for distribution in Brownsville.

Legislation being considered by state lawmakers would encourage shoppers to recycle plastic bags by requiring large retailers like Walmart to place bag recycling bins prominently in their stores. It would also pre-empt local ordinances, however, and that worries advocates of bag bans who fear that it could derail local policies already in existence or under consideration.

Senator Troy Fraser, Republican of Horseshoe Bay, who sponsored the Senate legislation, said that his bill was “not moving” right now, but that a House version had made more progress. Mr. Fraser said he did not intend to overturn policies of cities with existing bans. In the long run, he said, “we would like to wean people off the using of not only plastic but paper” and shift Texans toward reusable bags.

Walmart has backed Mr. Fraser’s legislation, which it sees as more workable than all-out bans.

“Walmart is committed to reducing its plastic bag waste, but we would rather see voluntary programs to reduce plastic bag use” instead of stricter policies like Brownsville’s, said Daniel Morales, a company spokesman in Texas.

At one Brownsville Walmart, customers could be seen carrying bottles of juice or even prewrapped lettuce to their cars — without a bag. Walmart shoppers can still get plastic bags for $1, which is the standard fee established by the ordinance and which goes into a fund to clean up the city. Others opt to buy reusable blue bags for 25 cents, or take bags in with them.

Rose Timmer, executive director of Healthy Communities of Brownsville, which pushed for the ban, said tourists had called plastic bags “Texas wildflowers.”

In South Padre Island, the Surfrider Foundation strongly endorses the town’s ban, partly because plastic bags besmirch the dunes and harm seabirds and sea turtles.

“Using reusable bags is good,” said Rob Nixon, chairman of the group’s South Texas chapter. “They’re not only great shopping bags; they’re great beach bags as well.”

View the original article here

The Texas Tribune: Children’s Hospitals See Peril in Proposed Budgets

Despite some efforts to ease the blow to pediatric health care providers, Texas’ proposed budget cuts will most likely have a disproportionate effect on children’s hospitals. The financial implications will not mean halting operations, or necessarily curbing care, advocates for the hospitals say. Instead, said Ben Melson, chief financial officer at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, the result will be cutting back on expansions needed to serve a growing population and on efforts to recruit and retain the best specialists and faculty.

The reason for the heavier impact hinges on Medicaid, the joint state-federal health care program that covers nearly three million needy children in Texas. State lawmakers, facing a huge budget shortfall, cannot find the multibillion-dollar savings they need without cutting already skimpy rates for Medicaid providers.

Children’s hospitals generally have much higher Medicaid populations than the average hospital — meaning rate reductions hit them harder. Their advocates estimate that the House’s budget would cost the hospitals a combined $275 million over two years; they say the version under consideration in the Senate would cost them roughly half that amount.

For Driscoll Children’s, where about 70 percent of patients are on Medicaid, the concern is not about preserving his bottom line, it is about just trying to break even. Both budget proposals “would essentially leave me a negative cash flow of about $10 million a year,” Mr. Woerner said.

Both the House and Senate versions of the budget lower Medicaid outpatient rates for children’s hospitals by 10 percent and reduce payments for nonurgent emergency room care. The House version goes even further, cutting inpatient children’s hospital rates, as well as all doctor and dentist reimbursement rates, by 10 percent.

While the Senate’s budget sharply reduces financing used to draw down a hefty federal match for children’s hospitals, the House’s zeroes it out altogether — at a loss of roughly $60 million, including the federal match, over the next biennium.

Bryan Sperry, president of the Children’s Hospital Association of Texas, said that on average, nearly 60 percent of the patients at the seven nonprofit children’s hospitals he represents are on Medicaid. In South Texas, Mr. Sperry said, that figure can reach 80 percent.

He estimates that for most Texas hospitals a 10 percent cut in the Medicaid rate would represent a loss of 1 percent of net patient revenue — but that for children’s hospitals, it would be up to 5 percent or 6 percent.

“We’re more dependent on Medicaid than any group of hospitals,” Mr. Sperry said. “Anything that happens to it has a big effect on us.”

Mr. Melson, of Texas Children’s Hospital, said his hospital stands to lose $4 million to $6 million a year through the proposed Medicaid cuts.

“We’re a high-acuity provider; we see a lot of critically ill children in our hospital,” he said. As the number of children in Texas continues to rise — it is expected to spike by another one million over the next decade — “we want to make sure we can continue to grow,” Mr. Melson said.

Mr. Sperry said children’s hospitals, which receive roughly one million outpatient visits and 500,000 emergency room visits a year, can “make it through the next two years” with the current Senate budget proposal, which could come up for a vote in the upper chamber as early as next week. The House version would be much tougher.

Regardless, Mr. Sperry said, lawmakers need to consider the long-term implications of clipping the wings of the hospitals that teach 70 percent of Texas’ pediatricians-in-training, especially as the country faces a growing shortage of physicians and specialists.

 

The Texas Tribune: State’s Top Universities Offer New Opportunity

It laid the groundwork for a new option for high school students eager to head to college before their graduation. If students demonstrate sufficient competency in English, math, science, a social science and a foreign language on tests like the Advanced Placement exam, they can receive a certificate that can be traded for a diploma at any time.

The kinks in this new system are currently being worked out in 16 districts and the KIPP charter schools, but it is expected to become available statewide this fall.

“Kids who are ready to move on — a lot of times, unfortunately, in the current system, those kids get bored,” said Reece Blincoe, superintendent of the Brownwood I.S.D. “They are bored out of their mind. Sometimes that can even lead them going the wrong direction instead of the right direction.”

What’s striking about this new initiative is the willingness of administrators at Texas’ top public universities to work together. The criteria used to evaluate students who want to leave high school early are controlled by the University of Texas and Texas A&M University. An early departing student may earn a certificate, which does not guarantee admission to either university, but it verifies that the recipient has met the standards for a top-tier research university.

Despite shrinking budgets, and a propensity of many flagship universities across the country to separate themselves from the demands of other educational institutions in their state, administrators at U.T. and A&M say they are actively involved in all aspects of the state’s education problems. But their efforts to engage in and even drive fundamental changes — like the new certificate program — are often overlooked in the state’s ongoing debate about higher education reforms.

“We collaborate with U.T. and others on these sorts of efforts regularly,” said R. Bowen Loftin, president of Texas A&M.

Representative Mike Villarreal, Democrat of San Antonio, who in the last legislative session added the amendment to the bill by Representative Rob Eissler, Republican of The Woodlands, said the involvement of U.T. and A&M was an important piece of the plan.

“That really sets the tone for the program,” Mr. Villarreal said. “It’s not about rushing students through high school. It’s really about excellence in education.”

Harrison Keller, the vice provost for higher education policy at U.T., who has quietly steered the new certificate initiative, said it was the first program of its kind in the country. “What you don’t have anywhere else is that it’s not just aligned with but it’s governed by the expectations of your two flagship universities,” Mr. Keller said.

Three weeks ago, at a meeting of the Association of American Universities, an elite group of research universities, William Powers Jr., president of the University of Texas, met with a handful of other presidents to discuss how higher-education leaders around the country could initiate similar efforts to address the faltering education pipeline.

“Education is in the news all the time,” Mr. Powers said later. “Leading institutions of higher education — A.A.U.-type universities — ought to be part of the solutions.”

In Austin, the Texas higher-education community has been locked in a debate over how to go about reforming higher education. The focus has largely centered around the reluctance of the U.T. system to embrace certain changes in higher education tied to accountability and productivity that have been championed by Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative research organization.

Mr. Powers said that the perception that his institution is in a defensive position when it comes to change, “is inaccurate and I’d even say ironic.”

He does take some of the responsibility for that erroneous impression. “If you take it in the aggregate,” Mr. Powers said, “the flagship universities have not been successful in projecting that innovation in higher education is taking place at these major public flagship universities.”

David Guenthner, a spokesman for the public-policy group, said he has recently been encouraged by comments from Mr. Powers and Mr. Loftin that signal an agreement about the need for reform in higher education.

“We just need to have a discussion about what exactly that looks like and what the objectives ought to be and the path to get there,” Mr. Guenthner said.

Many of the concerns of Mr. Guenthner and the policy foundation focus more on accountability and transparency than on college readiness in secondary education, although Mr. Guenthner said he supported efforts to speed the time to get a degree. Currently, 53 percent of U.T. freshmen get a degree in four years; the figure at A&M is slightly above 50 percent.

“My view is that ‘we’ve got to thoughtfully change’ has been a hallmark of my administration,” Mr. Powers said.

Mr. Powers noted that college readiness efforts increased productivity because the university could do its job at less cost when it had better-prepared students.

U.T. and A&M are also collaborating with high schools and community colleges to develop curriculum for secondary education that will pair with the new flagship-approved certificate. “We’re saying that if you want to make dramatic progress, we need to work on these issues before the kids get to us,” Mr. Keller said.

Mr. Blincoe, the Brownwood superintendent, said he is excited about the potential of the early readiness program.

“If it catches on, I think it would have far-reaching repercussions,” he said. “You could see us in 10 years moving more toward a competency-based model instead of seat-time.”

Its potential, Mr. Blincoe said, is enhanced by the participation of the flagship universities. Still, even though the initiative is barely off the ground, it is feeling the sting of the state’s fiscal woes. As part of the Legislature’s efforts to close the state’s multibillion-dollar budget shortfall, financing for an existing scholarship for students who graduate from high school early through traditional means has been zeroed out for at least the next two years.

A bill by Mr. Villarreal to create a similar financial incentive for students who take advantage of the new “Doogie Howser” program — financed by the money school districts save by no longer having to take care of them for a full four years — also appears stymied by concern over the budget.

Such problems have a way of bringing about new solutions, Mr. Villarreal said. “We are experiencing very tight times,” he said, “and so we’re having to question assumptions about how we do business.”

 

The Texas Tribune: Cartel Violence Complicates Tick Eradication Plan

At a temporary inspection site in the industrial sector of Laredo, home to the country’s largest inland port, the lowing of cows has been heard not far from the purring of the tractor-trailers that haul millions of dollars worth of goods from Mexico each day. For about the last year, Mexican cattle have been examined here before being cleared for shipment to the rest of Texas and beyond — part of an effort to eradicate a fever tick infestation that has plagued ranchers along the border for more than a century.

The tick carries an anemia-causing parasite that preys on cattle blood cells and spreads bovine babesiosis, which causes fever, paralysis and often leads to death if left untreated. Until last year, the inspections took place in Mexico, and ticked cattle were kept from the United States. But a ruthless battle between the Gulf and Los Zetas cartels in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas forced those inspection sites to close in March 2010.

“It’s become too dangerous for the veterinarians to conduct their inspections on the cattle that are going to be imported into Texas from Mexico,” said Roland Garcia, a Texas Ranger commissioned by the Department of Public Safety and the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. “That’s why these temporary pens in Laredo and Pharr have been established. I don’t know how long ‘temporary’ could be. It depends on how things settle out in Mexico.”

The inspection site is not the only modification being made because of cartel violence.

The United States government takes the lead on regulating cattle in the “buffer,” or permanent quarantine, zone, where fever ticks thrive. It stretches more than 500 miles across the Texas border from Del Rio to Brownsville, an area of about 550,000 acres. Temporary zones are also established if an outbreak spreads beyond that. Ed Bowers, the United States Department of Agriculture’s director of field operations for the Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program, said the zone is currently 1.5 million acres, including a large swath of Dimmit and Starr counties.

Mr. Bowers and his 97-member staff compose the U.S.D.A.’s fever tick riders, who patrol hundreds of miles of Texas border on horseback searching for infested stray Mexican cattle. Recent floods that have destroyed natural barriers and man-made fences have enabled their migration past the border, potentially aiding in the spread of the tick. And the tick riders have been forced to adjust their routes farther away from the border.

“We don’t do our patrol like we did a year ago, which was visible to Mexico and riding right down the riverbank,” Mr. Bowers said. “We don’t make a target of ourselves, but we still have to patrol that permanent quarantine zone and make sure there aren’t any Mexican strays.”

The economic consequences of an extended outbreak in Texas could be dire. An infestation outside the current quarantine zones — even one considered relatively small by industry experts — would still cost $123 million in the first year alone, according to a study conducted in 2010 by the Agricultural & Food Policy Center at Texas A&M University. An outbreak spreading to the historic range that includes Texas, a portion of California and 12 Southern states east to Florida and north to Virginia would cost about $1.2 billion in the first year, according to the study.

Texas would have the most to lose, as it currently has more than 13.3 million head of cattle, including 5.14 million beef cows, representing 16.4 percent of the nation’s total. The value of the livestock is about $11.7 billion. Todd Staples, the Texas commissioner of agriculture, estimates that Texas imported about 512,000 feeder cattle from Mexico in 2010, or about half of the 1.2 million the country imported..

The economic potential of the industry explains the activity level at the inspection site in Laredo. Dr. Beall Barbee, the port veterinarian with the U.S.D.A.’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and his crew of six go through painstaking procedures to inspect every head of cattle imported from Mexico. A herd of six to eight feeder cattle, each weighing between 300 and 500 pounds, is corralled into a pen, and their heads, ears, bellies, rears and topsides are manually inspected. Then, one by one, they are forced into a dipping vat of pesticide, herded in to a pen to dry and shipped off to their buyers.

“It’s poisonous enough that you don’t want any on you,” Dr. Barbee said last week of the pesticide. “But there’s not a lot to the process. We just need to make sure they don’t have any ticks on them. The goal is not to find any, and some days we don’t.”

Adding to the safety concerns are the looming budget woes in Austin and Washington, which could affect the program.

“You know how Washington is,” Mr. Bowers said. “Even with the best minds hoping, that doesn’t mean that Congress might not cut,” he said. “But I would say that all indications are that they would support us as much as they could.”

If financing levels remain close to the current $13 million allocated annually for the project, that should allow what Mr. Bowers characterizes as the continued success of the program to proceed with release of almost two-thirds of the temporary zone.

His confidence is not matched in Austin. As budget writers there grapple with a projected shortfall that could exceed $25 billion, the state’s contribution to the fever tick eradication efforts could be scaled back significantly. The Texas Animal Health Commission plays a lesser role, but it assists the U.S.D.A. on the riverbanks and throughout the infested areas in South Texas. Preliminary budget recommendations show the agency facing a cut of about $2.6 million of its current budget, but the financing mechanism is changing from entirely general-revenue funds to a partial fee-based model, which puts the onus on the agency to sustain its own financing.

“We took the position that we weren’t going to question the politics or the budgetary considerations and just try and solve the problem,” said Dr. Dee Ellis, the state veterinarian. “If we are unsuccessful, if we had to accept the proposed budget cuts of about 50 percent of our agency, it would absolutely impact the fever tick program.”

 

The Texas Tribune: Cartel Violence Complicates Tick Eradication Plan

At a temporary inspection site in the industrial sector of Laredo, home to the country’s largest inland port, the lowing of cows has been heard not far from the purring of the tractor-trailers that haul millions of dollars worth of goods from Mexico each day. For about the last year, Mexican cattle have been examined here before being cleared for shipment to the rest of Texas and beyond — part of an effort to eradicate a fever tick infestation that has plagued ranchers along the border for more than a century.

The tick carries an anemia-causing parasite that preys on cattle blood cells and spreads bovine babesiosis, which causes fever, paralysis and often leads to death if left untreated. Until last year, the inspections took place in Mexico, and ticked cattle were kept from the United States. But a ruthless battle between the Gulf and Los Zetas cartels in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas forced those inspection sites to close in March 2010.

“It’s become too dangerous for the veterinarians to conduct their inspections on the cattle that are going to be imported into Texas from Mexico,” said Roland Garcia, a Texas Ranger commissioned by the Department of Public Safety and the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. “That’s why these temporary pens in Laredo and Pharr have been established. I don’t know how long ‘temporary’ could be. It depends on how things settle out in Mexico.”

The inspection site is not the only modification being made because of cartel violence.

The United States government takes the lead on regulating cattle in the “buffer,” or permanent quarantine, zone, where fever ticks thrive. It stretches more than 500 miles across the Texas border from Del Rio to Brownsville, an area of about 550,000 acres. Temporary zones are also established if an outbreak spreads beyond that. Ed Bowers, the United States Department of Agriculture’s director of field operations for the Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program, said the zone is currently 1.5 million acres, including a large swath of Dimmit and Starr counties.

Mr. Bowers and his 97-member staff compose the U.S.D.A.’s fever tick riders, who patrol hundreds of miles of Texas border on horseback searching for infested stray Mexican cattle. Recent floods that have destroyed natural barriers and man-made fences have enabled their migration past the border, potentially aiding in the spread of the tick. And the tick riders have been forced to adjust their routes farther away from the border.

“We don’t do our patrol like we did a year ago, which was visible to Mexico and riding right down the riverbank,” Mr. Bowers said. “We don’t make a target of ourselves, but we still have to patrol that permanent quarantine zone and make sure there aren’t any Mexican strays.”

The economic consequences of an extended outbreak in Texas could be dire. An infestation outside the current quarantine zones — even one considered relatively small by industry experts — would still cost $123 million in the first year alone, according to a study conducted in 2010 by the Agricultural & Food Policy Center at Texas A&M University. An outbreak spreading to the historic range that includes Texas, a portion of California and 12 Southern states east to Florida and north to Virginia would cost about $1.2 billion in the first year, according to the study.

Texas would have the most to lose, as it currently has more than 13.3 million head of cattle, including 5.14 million beef cows, representing 16.4 percent of the nation’s total. The value of the livestock is about $11.7 billion. Todd Staples, the Texas commissioner of agriculture, estimates that Texas imported about 512,000 feeder cattle from Mexico in 2010, or about half of the 1.2 million the country imported..

The economic potential of the industry explains the activity level at the inspection site in Laredo. Dr. Beall Barbee, the port veterinarian with the U.S.D.A.’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and his crew of six go through painstaking procedures to inspect every head of cattle imported from Mexico. A herd of six to eight feeder cattle, each weighing between 300 and 500 pounds, is corralled into a pen, and their heads, ears, bellies, rears and topsides are manually inspected. Then, one by one, they are forced into a dipping vat of pesticide, herded in to a pen to dry and shipped off to their buyers.

“It’s poisonous enough that you don’t want any on you,” Dr. Barbee said last week of the pesticide. “But there’s not a lot to the process. We just need to make sure they don’t have any ticks on them. The goal is not to find any, and some days we don’t.”

Adding to the safety concerns are the looming budget woes in Austin and Washington, which could affect the program.

“You know how Washington is,” Mr. Bowers said. “Even with the best minds hoping, that doesn’t mean that Congress might not cut,” he said. “But I would say that all indications are that they would support us as much as they could.”

If financing levels remain close to the current $13 million allocated annually for the project, that should allow what Mr. Bowers characterizes as the continued success of the program to proceed with release of almost two-thirds of the temporary zone.

His confidence is not matched in Austin. As budget writers there grapple with a projected shortfall that could exceed $25 billion, the state’s contribution to the fever tick eradication efforts could be scaled back significantly. The Texas Animal Health Commission plays a lesser role, but it assists the U.S.D.A. on the riverbanks and throughout the infested areas in South Texas. Preliminary budget recommendations show the agency facing a cut of about $2.6 million of its current budget, but the financing mechanism is changing from entirely general-revenue funds to a partial fee-based model, which puts the onus on the agency to sustain its own financing.

“We took the position that we weren’t going to question the politics or the budgetary considerations and just try and solve the problem,” said Dr. Dee Ellis, the state veterinarian. “If we are unsuccessful, if we had to accept the proposed budget cuts of about 50 percent of our agency, it would absolutely impact the fever tick program.”

 

The Texas Tribune: House Bill on Student Testing Reopens a Familiar Debate

It did not, he said, lower testing standards. Nor did it delay the planned 2011-12 rollout of the state’s more rigorous Staar exams.

Mr. Eissler was setting out to correct what he called the “misrepresentations” and “false claims” surrounding the bill, which, despite its overwhelming support in the House — more than two-thirds of his colleagues signed on to it, and only five voted against it —?has generated vocal opposition from some within education circles who view it as a dramatic retreat from hard-won reforms.

The bill also reveals a divergence between the Legislature’s two public education chiefs — Mr. Eissler, who heads the House Public Education Committee, and his counterpart in the upper chamber, Senator Florence Shapiro, Republican of Plano — on how the state should hold students and educators accountable.

Ms. Shapiro staunchly supports moving forward with the testing standards in H.B. 3, the 2009 legislation that set up the transition to the new Staar exams from the state’s current TAKS subject area tests .

“It’s a shame that it’s happened at the very same time that we are having problems with the budget,” Ms. Shapiro said, “but that doesn’t change the idea that this is the direction we should be going.”

Worried about how operating with fewer teachers will affect classroom instruction and whether they will be able to afford updated textbooks, districts have pushed to delay the new exams.

H.B. 500 makes significant modifications to H.B. 3, with the goals of reducing costs and easing districts’ concerns that the new testing regimen could lead to large numbers of students failing to graduate. Instead of the end-of-course Staar exams counting 15 percent of a student’s final grade, H.B. 500 permits school districts to set their own policies. It also would allow districts to suspend a new requirement that students receive a cumulative score on 12 exams in four subject areas to graduate; instead, students would have to pass a total of four exams, one in each subject.

Business groups —?including the Texas Association of Business, the Texas Coalition for a Competitive Workforce and the Austin Chamber of Commerce — oppose the measure because they believe it represents a step back for student accountability.

Drew Scheberle, a senior vice president at the Austin Chamber, said H.B. 500 “represents the first time in 25 years that we would actually reduce the expectations for graduation.”

To some extent, the divide between Mr. Eissler and Ms. Shapiro is a rehashing of an old battle between the House and Senate on student testing.

“This is basically a fight we had two years ago in conference committee, when the Senate wanted the standards as they are on the books today, and the House wanted relaxed graduation standards,” said Andrew C. Erben, president of the Texas Institute for Education Reform, which opposes Mr. Eissler’s bill.

The House more than the Senate has traditionally aligned with school districts on student accountability, Mr. Scheberle said. “The House has not always been the strongest on this issue,” he said. “It has usually been the Senate.”

Now, lawmakers in the House are looking for ways to soften the blow of their stark budget, which allocates about $4 billion less to public education than the Senate. “The House is dealing in a very different arena than the Senate is dealing,” Ms. Shapiro said. “If I was in their shoes and didn’t have money for textbooks, I didn’t have any money to keep our teachers or to keep our schools whole, I would be looking for ways to lessen the pressure, too.”

Mr. Eissler told his colleagues that his bill represented the “middle ground” between those who want a delay of the Staar tests and those who want to hold firm. On Friday, he acknowledged he had “some missionary work” to do in the Senate.

“It’s not like there’s a difference in philosophy,” he said. “It’s a difference in application. Florence Shapiro and I agree that we need to have rigor, relevance, and responsibility or strong accountability, but how that translates to day-to-day operation in the school district is what made H.B. 500.”