Wrecking Women's Healthcare - Texas Observer May/June 2023 Issue

WRECKING WOMEN’S HEALTHCARE

By JULIE POOLE

INVESTIGATING TEXAS SINCE 1954

Women’s Health on the Line

Low-income

CONTENTS

By JULIE POOLE

EDITOR’S NOTE

MAY/JUNE 2023

EDITOR- IN - CHIEF Gabriel Arana

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Ivan Armando Flores

SENIOR WRITER & EDITOR Lise Olsen

EDITOR-AT- LARGE Gayle Reaves

DIGITAL EDITOR Kit O’Connell

SENIOR WRITER & ASSISTANT EDITOR Gus Bova

SENIOR WRITER Justin Miller

STAFF WRITERS Delger Erdenesanaa, Josephine Lee, Michelle Pitcher

EDITORIAL FELLOW Sara Hutchinson

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER Tyler Lewis

POETRY EDITOR EMERITUS Naomi Shihab Nye

STAFF CARTOONIST Ben Sargent

COPY EDITOR Adam Muro

FACT CHECKER Christopher Collins, Zein Jardaneh

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

John Burnett, Sergio Chapa, Kim Nall, Roberto Ontiveros, Julie Poole, James Russell, & Naomi Shihab Nye

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Kathleen Fu, Clay Rodery & Drue Wagner

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Meridith Kohut, Gerald Kern, DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Lauren Benavides

MICHELLE PITCHER

BUSINESS MANAGER Nikki Kobiljak

TEXAS DEMOCRACY FOUNDATION BOARD

Lize Burr (interim board president), Terri Burke, Carlton Carl, Mark Horvit, Carrie James, Kathleen McElroy, Peter Ravella, Lizette Resendez, & Skye Perryman; Ronnie Dugger (emeritus), Abby Rapoport (emeritus), & Ron Rapoport (emeritus)

EDITORS EMERETI: Jake Bernstein, Nate Blakeslee, Lou Dubose, David Mann, Bob Moser, Kay Northcott, Geoff Rips, Andrea Valdez, & Forrest Wilder.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: M ichael Agresta, Asher Elbein, Alex Hannaford, Christopher Hooks, Steven G. Kellman, Robert Leleux, James McWilliams, Bill Minutaglio, Rachel Pearson, Robyn Ross, Brad Tyer, & Daniel Blue Tyx.

FOUNDING EDITOR Ronnie Dugger

OUR MISSION

We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of humankind as the foundation of democracy. We will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit.

On the last Sunday of March, I was playing hideand-seek with our golden retriever when I got a call from the editor-in-chief of the Texas Tribune: “Gabe, we have a 2,300-word story coming out.” Our board, he told me, had voted to lay off the Texas Observer staff and cease publication. The blood drained from my brain. We have a staff member with a baby on the way, one who just quit another career to start here, and several with cats that need to eat. All were going to be jobless with just days’ notice. With dread, I started calling our team. Then, something shifted: We began to talk about whether we could stop it.

GABRIEL ARANA Editor-in-Chief

The staff decided to make a simple but profound request to the board the next day: Let us try to raise the money we need. Let us try to save the place. If we can raise $200,000, one editor suggested, will you consider rescinding the layoffs? A board member asked, “Where are you going to get 200K?”

What some seemed to have forgotten was that the Observer is more than a magazine—it’s a movement with followers who read us for many different reasons. As I tweeted, “This is not a Walmart you can just shut down. … It’s an idea in the minds of our readers. Of the people who work here now. Of everyone who has worked here before. It belongs to the public. “

We sought advice, designed ads, talked to the press. Most important, our former managing director launched a GoFundMe that attracted an awe-inspiring $350,000.And then a miracle happened: The board voted to rescind the layoffs. We now have a fired-up board with new and old members, and we’re working together to make sure this thing is around not just for six months but for 69 more years. The immediate crisis is over, but times are still dark, and we need you. Subscribe to the magazine. Sign up for our free newsletter. Get one of our t-shirts. Write and tell me what you want to read about. Support us.

Let’s keep fighting.

POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE

TALLAHASSEE MY TEXAS

Is Ron DeSantis running the Lone Star State?

by

It’s become an inside joke among Capitol watchers that the best way to figure out what Governor Greg Abbott and the Republican Legislature are gonna do next is to read the Miami Herald—or better yet, follow Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Twitter.

While that’s a bit overstated, it’s truer than Abbott and his allies would care to admit. Long the biggest, baddest political perch in red state America, the Texas governorship is no longer the singular juggernaut it once was in national politics. DeSantis, boy wonder of the Sunshine State, availed himself of a GOP power vacuum that opened after Trump’s 2020 presidential loss, becoming the frontrunner among 2024 Republican presidential contenders whose names don’t end in rump. That status was further solidified by his nearly 20-point blowout reelection in 2022,

making Abbott’s own 11-point drubbing of Beto O’Rourke look downright quaint.

With a new GOP supermajority in both chambers of the Florida statehouse, DeSantis has advanced an agenda that is obsessively focused on so-called anti-wokeism, punishing public schools and teachers, LBTQ+ folks, the Disney corporation, and the free press via state-sanctioned culture policing.

For the past few years, Abbott has engaged DeSantis in a not-so-subtle shadow boxing match over who could use their emergency powers during the COVID-19 pandemic in the most perverse fashion or who could sign the most oppressive legislation into law. But the political feedback loop between Tallahassee and Austin, telegraphed by way of Fox News and Newsmax, has become all the more transparent during this state

of the Florida man’s hateful innovations into the Texas Senate. The little gov is, for instance, leading the charge on a bill that would prohibit any discussion of sexuality or gender in Texas’ K-12 classrooms—a more far-reaching version of DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” law that is limited to elementary schoolchildren. The Texas Senate has also passed a sweeping bill to ban all gender-affirming healthcare for transgender kids in Texas, which would go beyond Florida’s similar edict by outlawing care even for current patients.

While DeSantis’ allies have been speedrunning his political vendettas through the Florida legislature, the Yale and Harvard alum embarked on a national tour ostensibly to promote his literary opus entitled The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival Obviously, the book tour doubles as a dry run for his all-but-announced presidential bid. The tour brought him onto Texas turf this spring as an esteemed guest at two local GOP dinner events in Houston and Dallas, where he declared Florida to be an equal partner with the Lone Star State in the coming wars on wokeness.

“They know you don’t mess with Texas—and you don’t tread on Florida,” DeSantis declared at one event. “I really believe if it hadn’t been for Texas and Florida playing the role we have in this country in recent history, our entire country would be one big woke, neo-Marxist dumpster fire.” DeSantis never mentioned Abbott by name, referring to him only as “your governor.”

In April, DeSantis headed to Austin as

the marquee guest for an event hosted by the Cicero Institute, the personal think tank and lobbying operation of venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Since fleeing Silicon Valley for Texas as a self-declared political refugee, Lonsdale has quietly become a player in GOP politics here, developing close connections with Abbott-world.

Daniel Hodge, Abbott’s former longtime aide, is an advisor to Lonsdale’s venture capital firm 8VC and arranged a lunch between the investor and the governor in 2020. Abbott’s daughter also works for 8VC as an events coordinator.

Lonsdale is also a DeSantis donor and said he could support him for president, though he hasn’t officially endorsed.

Meanwhile, when the topic of DeSantis-Abbott tensions is raised, Abbott is quick to note that Texas has outpaced Florida with passage of a total abortion ban and permitless carry law, while insisting that he and Ron are buds. “DeSantis and I do a lot of things together,” he said in 2021. “We talk in ways and times that people have no idea about … and so I just kind of roll my eyes and scoff a little bit when people say these things.”

In Tallahassee, DeSantis allies seem to think the whole Abbott-DeSantis comparison is a cute parlor game for Austin insiders. “Not to be disrespectful to Gov. Abbott, but I don’t think there are many people in the DeSantis orbit who consider that to be a rivalry,” Brian Ballard, a top Florida lobbyist and powerbroker, said earlier this year. “I never

have anyone say to me, ‘Did [DeSantis] get that from Gov. Abbott? Did you see what Gov. Abbott did in Texas?’”

While DeSantis has certainly gotten the better of Abbott in raising his national profile and becoming the postTrump voice of grievance ideology, the actual tit-for-tat in their political arms race may not be all that relevant in a presidential primary several months out. DeSantis’ stature has already made him a target for Trump—who has launched his comeback campaign and dubbed the former “Ron DeSanctimonious.” And in presidential politics, the first thoroughbred out of the gate is often the first to stumble and fall. Just ask the last Florida governor (“please clap”) or the last Texas governor (“oops”) to enter a presidential race with a supposed frontrunner pedigree. Abbott and his political aides have done the typical dance around presidential speculation, saying he’s solely focused on the tasks at hand in the legislative session. By the time summer comes, DeSantis may well have melted down—and an indicted Trump may have absconded to Riyadh. Abbott and his political handlers are keeping their powder dry regarding his own rumored presidential ambitions, while leaving open the chance that maybe he’ll start sniffin’ around after sine die. The question then: Will Abbott, who’s become something of a petty tyrant here in Texas, where he’s spoiled by the safety of one-party rule, prove to be anything other than yet another governor out of his league?

legislative season.

One of Abbott’s first moves this year, uncharacteristically for a governor who usually stays behind the scenes in a session’s early days, was to throw his support behind a Senate bill that would ban certain foreign entities and citizens of countries like China and Iran from buying land on Texas soil. The pronouncement came five days after DeSantis held a press conference pledging to do the same in Florida. In February, a week after DeSantis pledged to ban “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) in state colleges, Abbott’s chief of staff Gardner Pate sent a memo to Texas agencies and universities warning that it was illegal to consider DEI principles in hiring decisions.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a politician in the same anti-woke warrior mold as DeSantis, has eagerly imported many

LOON STAR STATE

BEN SARGENT’S

JUSTIN MILLER

Photo-Illustration: Texas Observer; Shutterstock

CHARLATANS, FALSE PROPHETS, AND FLIMFLAMMERS

A veteran NPR reporter tells all about his misadventures in covering religion in America.

By JOHN BURNETT

My late father-in-law, an Episcopal priest, had a cartoon taped to his kitchen wall in Sherman that skewers an obnoxious feature of American religion. In the cartoon, a grinning devil, sitting on a throne surrounded by flames, instructs a horned apprentice, suitcase in hand, who is about to head upstairs to torture the human race.

“Remember to quote lots of Scripture,” Satan says.

If you work as a reporter for more than four decades in Texas, as I have, you will—regularly—encounter the most inappropriate, unfortunate and downright bizarre invocations of the Almighty. It’s enough to make me, a church-going Episcopalian who has—until now— kept my beliefs in the closet as a reporter, ruefully agree with the quip I saw on a refrigerator magnet. A man says to the Prince of Peace: “Please Jesus, protect me from your followers.”

Case in point: my interview years ago with an ambitious Texas Baptist pastor who had his eyes on the prized presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention. He was—surprise, surprise!—virulently antigay. So I asked him, if Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was all about agape, compassion, and selflessness, why did the preacher so forcefully condemn homosexuality?

“God did not intend for the human anus to be a sex object!” he blurted.

I thought to myself, “That’s the money

quote.” Too bad NPR will never let that on the air. But the parson, apparently, worried more how his proctological outburst would be received by his Baptist brethren. As soon as the interview ended and I’d put my microphone away, he asked brightly, “John, would you mind striking the anus quote?”

But wait, there’s more! Did you know that Jesus, who said the truth shall make you free, is also into banning books? Just ask right-wing Christians in Llano County who objected to a list of books in the public libraries in 2021.

The controversy began with a series for children: My Butt Is So Noisy!, I Broke My Butt!, and I Need a New Butt! (titles that I found satisfying to recite on the earnest airwaves of public radio.) Critics called the crude illustrations of bare bottoms “child porn.”

“I wrote the Butt Books for fun,” the bewildered author, Dawn McMillan, emailed me from her home in New Zealand. “They are silly stories bringing laughs while getting kids, especially boys, into reading.”

As I was covering that story, the role of the Divine in banning books eluded me, but not so for Bonnie Wallace, a conservative activist later appointed to the local library advisory board. In an email to county commissioners, she urged local pastors to “organize a weekly prayer vigil on this specific issue,” and concluded,

kids deserve the best.” I interviewed Rev. Richard Dortch, PTL executive vice president, at the Heritage Island water park. Should the millions spent on Heritage USA have been better directed to relieving suffering and poverty? I asked. He flashed a million-dollar smile and, without a note of irony, replied, “If Jesus were walking the earth today, John, I believe he would want a water park to minister to his followers.”

Bakker and Dortch ended up in federal prison for duping believers into investing in the development. Thanks to Bakker, PTL, which he intended to be Praise the Lord, has become known as Pass the Loot.

When someone comes and says, ‘I have all the answers,’ that’s seductive, especially for people who feel vulnerable.”

Of all the misguided religious movements I’ve chronicled, none comes close to the evangelical hordes that currently espouse Trumpism within the ideology of Christian Nationalism.

Early last year I traveled to Lenoir City, Tennessee—in the shadow of the Smoky Mountains—to attend a Sunday service at the Patriot Church, a barn-like building with a huge American flag painted on the outside. The name conflates Christian

Peters said as much in his sermon, “How Satan Destroys the World.”

I was sitting self-consciously on the front row, recording the service and taking notes.

“May God protect our children from this FILTH.”

The Llano County Commissioners Court ended up removing or restricting the Butt books and others about the KKK, racial castes in America, and teen sexuality. And in 2023, Texas—represented by selfanointed Christian book reviewers–still leads the nation in the spreading bonfire of book censorship.

The genius of aberrant Christianity, throughout history, seems to be how effortlessly it accommodates whatever the prophet du jour wants to get away with.

Part of the reason this bothers me is that, as a Christian, I find it repugnant to see the loving, peaceable teachings of Jesus distorted over and over. Worse, reporters often let conservative Christians get away with speaking for all believers.

Consider Heritage USA, one of my first stories for NPR, when I was a freelancer living in Atlanta. Back in the mid-1980s, televangelist couple Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker built this Christian wonderland in Fort Mill, South Carolina, to glorify God and line their pockets. It became America’s third-most popular theme park.

I had just been baptized and I was trying to figure out what it meant to live your faith, when I beheld Heritage USA. There was the “Christian shopping mall” and the Southern-baroque Heritage Grand Hotel where a guest told me, “The King’s

Remember David Koresh, the madman who led his Branch Davidians to mass immolation at their religious compound outside Waco in 1993? That was my first mega-story for NPR, and I practically lived at a cheap hotel in Bellmead throughout the 51-day standoff.

A lot has been written about the two disastrous raids launched by federal agents, but let’s not let Koresh off the hook. He was a beer-drinking, guitarplaying, skirt-chasing, gun-collecting rogue whose ability to quote long passages of Scripture apparently convinced his cult that he was a messianic figure right out of the Book of Revelation.

Koresh, né Vernon Howell, stockpiled assault rifles, raped underage girls, cuckolded male followers by sleeping with their wives, and told the Waco TribuneHerald, “Y’know, bein’ Christ ain’t nothin’.” Since I retired from NPR in January after 36 years, I’ve been trying to process all the church scandals and schisms and falls from grace that I’ve covered. They all shared the same throughline: People of faith trusted a man with Rev. before his name who seemed to have a hotline to God. I’ve asked myself how these charismatic figures, reeking with the musk of prophecy, led their gullible flocks into dark places over and over?

I posed that question to my friend, the Rev. Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, dean of the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin.

“People are attracted to certainty, to non-ambiguity,” she said. “Making decisions for yourself and doing the work of discernment, that’s really hard work.

OF ALL THE MISGUIDED RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS I’VE CHRONICLED, NONE

“The first lie was when the serpent told Eve to eat the apple!” thundered Peters, prowling the stage with a wireless mic. “And the second lie? The mainstream media. And NPR is sitting right over there.” The congregation eyed me suspiciously. I waved and smiled. When I finished my interviews and headed for the parking lot, several folks said they would pray for me. I’ve heard that line while reporting on religion for years. I’m gonna pray fer yew, John. To which I respond, “Great! I need the prayers and you need the practice.”

My wise father-in-law, the Episcopal priest, used to wince whenever I covered a Jim Bakker or a Jimmy Swaggart, because those scandals hurt all of Christendom and reinforced the age-old cynicism that organized religion is a con and all preachers are corrupt. I wish I had done more in my reporting life to quote the many inspiring, tolerant religious leaders. And I wish I had objected when conservative Christians piously purported to speak for all believers.

fervor with a truculent brand of American patriotism.

I asked a congregant, “Is this a Donald Trump church?”

“Yes,” replied Murray Clemetson, a law school student and father of three.“You go to flyover country and people have good moral values. They love the Lord and they want the best for our country. And that’s what Donald Trump represented,” he added, referring to the most explicitly selfinterested president in American history.

The Patriot Church believes that vaccinations violate religious freedom, the Jan. 6 rioters were freedom fighters, the Biden administration is illegitimate, and the media is the voice of evil. The Rev. Ken

Here’s where I get in trouble. I am a Christian so this might seem mildly heretical, but I disagree with people who say Christianity is the only way. Having reported on calamities in 30 countries, I’ve seen God at work in the world in myriad ways. At the end of the day, I agree with the sentiments of a popular muezzin (Muslim cantor) I interviewed at a Los Angeles mosque. Abdelwahab Benyoucef is an Algiers-born Hollywood actor—with classic good looks—who gets cast over and over as a Middle Eastern terrorist. Here’s what he had to say about the world’s major monotheistic religions.

“Think of Wilshire Boulevard as Christianity. Santa Monica Boulevard is Islam. Montana Boulevard is Judaism. Take any of those boulevards and they all reach the Pacific Ocean, which is God.”

Legendary NPR reporter John Burnett of Austin recently retired and is now free to ride his bike, play his harmonica and write about whatever he wants.

CURRENTLY ESPOUSE

MINORITY REPORT, REDDIT EDITION

Gene Wu’s never been afraid to speak his mind. What’s he got to lose?

INTERVIEW BY GUS BOVA

these people back in their place.”

Would you call the governor a white supremacist?

I think, obviously, that’s something to be more careful about. A lot of these things have white supremacist roots— whether or not that’s the reason they’re carrying it, whether or not that’s where it came from—I don’t know.

Now in his sixth regular legislative session as a member of a largely powerless minority caucus, state Representative Gene Wu, a 45-year-old Houstonian, has cultivated a number of strategies for a Texas Democrat to stay busy. He battles trolls on Twitter; he searches for marginal ways to make state systems work better for vulnerable kids; and lately he’s taken off as a political communicator on Reddit.

An immigrant originally from China, he’s spent years battling xenophobia in Texas’ Capitol. In 2017, he gave a memorable and tearful floor speech decrying that year’s anti-“sanctuary cities” bill, and this year he fought against a bill that would have banned land sales to citizens from certain countries, including China. He represents a district where 71 percent speak a language other than English at home. He’s long been pugnacious on Twitter, and when Democrats in 2021 broke quorum to oppose anti-voting legislation, he was among the most strident and stubborn holdouts. In a recent development, he’s posted videos on Reddit explaining topics from lobbying to marijuana policy, sometimes while sipping a whiskey rocks. The Texas Observer spoke with him about bomb-throwing, Democratic discourse, and white supremacy.

TO: You’ve spent a decade now in the minority party in the Texas House of Representatives. Why?

Because somebody has to do it. Ultimately, my heart is in public policy, and there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be done outside of red-meat issues for either side. We’re in the Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee right now reforming Child Protective Services, the juvenile justice system. Those kinds of things need people to work on them regardless of whether you’re in power.

Some of your fellow House Democrats seem to have taken a more conciliatory approach toward Republican leadership and, in turn, gotten committee chairmanships. Do you think it’s more impactful to stick to principles than to try to play the game in that way?

I don’t think there’s a right answer either way. It’s publicly known that I’m not someone who bows to the Republican leadership, but at the same time, I’m not

openly antagonistic toward them except on certain policy issues. Everyone should just play to whatever their personality is. And obviously, there are some people who are just natural bomb-throwers. Go throw bombs, then. And some people are naturally more collaborative and cooperative.

I remember I was at home, on my laptop, when you gave that House floor speech against the anti-”sanctuary cities” bill way back in 2017.

Ah, yes.

A lot of people saw that, of course.

It went viral, 80 million views.

Yes.

I get random people, I remember very clearly, I was outside of Houston, and some teenage girl came up to me and said, “Hey, I want to tell you something from my father,” and then he comes over and the young girl says, “My dad

doesn’t speak English very well, but he told me to tell you that he saw you on the video, and it was really important for him.”

I think it was so affecting because you were explaining that everything lawmakers were saying that night struck you a certain way because you’re an immigrant yourself, right there in the same chamber as all of them.

And I represent a district that’s 80 percent immigrants, including many who are undocumented. They still take care of everyone. They clean everyone’s office buildings; they clean up people’s houses; they mow their yards; they make your food; and you guys are happy when they’re taking care of you, but now you want to abuse them.

Fast-forwarding to now, there is the bill, which you’ve helped push to modify, about Chinese citizens, other citizens, not being able to buy property. There’s also a border militia

bill. What’s gone wrong with our state’s attitude toward immigrants?

I don’t think it’s a state issue. This is a national movement that’s antiimmigrant, that’s toward rolling back minority participation, minority rights—everything. The anti-DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] stuff, the anti-CRT [critical race theory] stuff, the antiimmigrant movement. It’s all tied together under

one auspice: A lot of these little things had a very strong white-supremacist basis. From the 20,000foot view, America goes through these waves of extremism, these waves of anti-immigrant feelings, anti-Asian feelings, antiLatino feelings, and we’re just now at the crest of this wave. The anti-immigrant wave is coinciding with the anti-Black wave, the anti-Hispanic wave, the anti-LGBTQ+ wave. There’s a sense of “We have to put

I have to touch on Reddit. That’s your new thing lately getting media attention is that you are the lawmaker on Reddit.

I’ve been on Reddit for many years and would never post—just lurk and see the funny memes and watch people fight over stupid things. But what made me finally register an account was I had to do an Ask Me Anything [AMA] for President Joe Biden. Those kinds of things kicked me off and made me start having a formal account, or at least a nonburner account. I have a burner account—don’t worry about that.

I am an investigative reporter.

You will not find my burner account, I promise you; I don’t post anything on it.

Strictly lurking?

Strictly lurking. But one of the reasons I like it, especially coming off Twitter, which is now more obnoxious than ever, is that I’m by nature kind of a troll—I mean

more than kind of—but I also enjoy having a real discussion with people if they’re willing to listen and not just call people names. Reddit is especially good for these kinds of discussions because the way posts are voted up and down creates a system where if you’re going to troll, you better be really funny, because if your trolling is pathetic you’ll just get voted down; your comment will disappear. And the thing that made me say, “Fine I’ll do this,” is that I watched so many different people on Reddit say, “I’m genuinely frustrated with government, with my representation, and I don’t know what to do.”

So I finally had to jump in saying, “You can still do stuff, this is how you do it.” That is hard to explain in a tweet—and after you do like ten tweets in a thread, people stop reading it. But on Reddit, you can write this giant post and people will read through it and they’ll criticize something that’s, like, at the very bottom.

It’s a better version of democratic engagement and discussion.

Yeah, and I felt bad for people on Reddit who genuinely seem like they care, but they felt frustrated. I wanted to be able to say there is at least one person here who is listening to you; somebody in the government cares that you have thoughts and feelings.

Representative Gene Wu speaks at the Texas Capitol in August 2021. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

A WATCHDOG IN THE WATER WARS

Flooding and bureaucracy drove Mary Kelleher to run for a spot on a powerful North Texas river agency board.

By JAMES RUSSELL

Mary Kelleher knew she was moving to a floodplain when she bought a farm on Fort Worth’s east side in 2003. But the risk was worth it. “I just fell in love with it because there was still so much country over here,” she said.

She did not expect that, nearly two decades later, the 100 acres she loved would nearly cost her her livelihood, propel her into public office, and drive her to become a flood control activist.

At first the high-water incidents were about what she’d expected for a floodplain: manageable if you prepared. Her house was on a high point on the property, safely away from flood-prone areas.

But the water rose faster than usual in 2010, killing some of her livestock and ruining thousands of dollars of equipment. “Our sheep were down by the barn, and they got confused. Instead of running to the house and up to high ground, they ran toward the water,” she recalled tearfully. “I still have nightmares about watching the sheep wandering off [into the water] and never coming back up.”

What’s more, the water didn’t return to normal levels for about eight months.

Tropical Storm Hermine played a major role in the flooding, local officials told her, adding it would never happen again. But massive flooding did happen again, just two years later. This time, there was no tropical storm to blame. Instead, many local people blamed the water release policies of the Tarrant Regional Water District (TRWD). On the strength of outrage over those

policies and others, Kelleher was elected to the district’s board the following year.

“When I needed help from my elected officials, they looked the other way. I ran for election so no one would have to experience that at the water district,” she said.

For many years, the TRWD was a littleknown, uncontroversial agency that provided water to numerous Tarrant County cities and was responsible for flood control for 11 counties in North Texas.

But critics charged that the agency had gone astray from its flood control mission, was riddled with nepotism, and was abusing its eminent domain powers to carry out its billion-dollar Trinity River Vision project, ostensibly designed to improve flood control but also to remake about 800 acres north of downtown into a San Antonio Riverwalk-type development.

Opponents question whether the project, which has gone by several names over the years, will improve flood control at all, although its continually increasing price tag and increasing focus on economic development has eaten up federal funds available for actual flooding problems in the area. They object to the water board’s practices in forcing some private owners to sell their land for the project, and then reselling the land to private developers. Since the project started, three new bridges have been built over dry land (where the river is supposed to be rerouted), plus one apartment complex, a brewery and a drive-in movie theatre in the area the water

district has dubbed “Panther Island.”

A broad coalition of opponents recruited Kelleher to run. They ranged from billionaire hotelier Monty Bennett, a major conservative Republican donor in Dallas who joined the fight when the agency tried to put a pipeline through his East Texas ranch, to former state Representative Lon Burnam, once named the most liberal member of the Texas House.

Burnam joked that he’s had issues with the water district since the 1970s when he drove from Austin, where he was studying at the University of Texas, to vote for a pro-environmental candidate running for the board. However, the Fort Worth native found out he didn’t qualify to cast a ballot: His parents’ home in Benbrook, a Fort Worth suburb, was not part of the patchwork map of areas included in the water district’s boundaries.

Two decades later, in 1996, Burnam won election to the Texas House from a Fort Worth district that included downtown and the future Panther Island. While in the House, he filed numerous bills to reform the TRWD.

The agency is also a textbook tale of cronyism: U.S. Representative Kay Granger, R-Fort Worth, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, is one of the project’s biggest advocates and also the mother of J.D. Granger, who served for years, until 2022, as executive director of the Trinity River Vision Authority (TRVA), an unelected board that acts as a buffer

between the public and the elected water board. Then-TRWD General Manager Jim Oliver also landed his nephew Matt Oliver a gig as TRVA’s communications director. Kelleher is warm, joyful, and tough. Working in juvenile services for Tarrant County for two decades, she saw many harrowing cases. But her first term on the water board often brought her to tears. She was officially censured by her board colleagues. Jim Oliver stonewalled her when she asked for agency records. Her relationships with other board members were fractious. Still, Kelleher inched the board toward further studies of flooding in other areas of Fort Worth, not only in downtown and the other places that the agency had treated as priorities.

“The water district started taking a much more proactive approach. If they knew that a lot of rain was coming, they would discharge depending on the levels of the lake,” she said.

Her critics still sought revenge. She was defeated in 2017, placing fourth among five candidates. But Kelleher ran again and won in 2021.

These days, the board sometimes has a kumbaya feel, with Kelleher often voting with the board majority. But she still dissents sometimes, usually objecting on eminent domain and equity grounds to what her fellow directors want to do.

Doreen Geiger is a longtime Democratic activist in Fort Worth. She’s also a founder, with Burnam, of the Water District Accountability Project, monitoring the agency’s dealings. They are regular visitors at the TRWD’s monthly board meetings.

Geiger has been a fan of Kelleher’s since she met her in 2013. “Mary is the best one on the board for a lot of reasons. She’s not there to financially benefit. She cares about water, flooding and good governance,” she said.

“Her being there has been critical,”

Burnam said, although he thinks she’s been too quiet in her second term.

Geiger hopes more members like Kelleher will be elected in May to the two at-large seats (of five) that are up for election. Members serve four-year terms, and elections are staggered. Kelleher is up for reelection in 2025.

For Kelleher, the top concern is not the next election but making sure North Texas has the water resources it needs and the policies in place to control flooding. “Water—you can’t live with too much of it, but you can’t live without it. I mean, it’s just probably the most important natural resource that we have,” she said. “We have to be good guardians of it.”

Freelance journalist James Russell of Fort Worth has written for state and national publications, including City Lab, Next City, and Arts and Culture Texas

Supporters say Kelleher’s oftendissenting voice is critical on the water board. Gerald Kern for the Texas Observer

A USTIN

The antics of Attorney General Ken “I’m still under indictment” Paxton could often earn a mention here doing his part to retain Texas’s tile as the “Strangest State.” But things got weirder than usual when Paxton asked lawmakers to fork over $3.3 million for a settlement with four ex-employees who are SUING him for firing them after they reported his illegal activities to the FBI. But legislators balked. Even weirder, the Texas Legislature wrote the law that makes the state liable for damages and granted officials like Paxton immunity from paying for their own misbehavior.

LUFKIN

Since 1976, the Museum of East Texas has offered exhibits of art and sculpture in a historic building that once housed an Episcopal church. Museum officials often host inventive fundraisers, but after two long years of quarantine, they renamed their 2022 event the “Odd Ball,” inviting locals to don costumes and hats and act as weird as they wanted. For 2023, organizers prepared for lions, tigers, bears (and witches) since this year’s Odd Ball was set in Oz. Weeks in advance, tickets were already sold out.

HOUSTON

Firefighters are used to rescuing pets from blazes, but members of the East Montgomery County Fire Department weren’t prepared for the menagerie trapped inside a Houston home in March 2023. “Albino pythons, milk snakes, chicken snakes, alligators. ... I don’t know all the different types of lizards, I just know there were iguanas, bearded dragons—you name it, she had it,” Captain Kyle Foster told FOX 26. The department published a photo on Facebook of one firefighter holding a rescued snake coiled around his muscular arm. “Not what you are expecting to hear but we will rescue your animals too if possible,” the department wrote.

Lynne Dobson & Greg Wooldridge | Dale Linebarger | The McHam Project

Abby Rapoport | Ron Rapoport | Alec Rhodes

Gabriel Arana & Michael Collis | Beatriz Pérez & Vincent LoVoi | Abi Mallick | Peggy & Matt Winkler Carol M. Barger | Carlton Carl | Lois Chiles | Marian & Paul Cones|

Roxanne Elder & Scott Borders

Kyle & Noah Hawley | The Neavel Family | Janis & Joe Pinnelli

Greg Wooldridge | Elliott Harris | Don Gardner & Pat Murfin (in memory of John Henry Faulk and Larry lee) Samuel England Carol Barger | Ramona Adams Wade Arledge | John Bailey | Thomas Belden Katy Bettner | Karen Brown

| Declan Dunne | Robert Frump James Galbraith Dicky Grigg Charlie Gustin | Emily Hartstein Melissa Hawthorne

David Lee | Elena Marks | Independent Media Arts Foundation Carol Messer Bill Minutaglio | Kimberly Moore Elliott

Naishtat Peter Ravella | Elizabeth Rowland | Ben Sargent | Katherine Sugg | Martha Wells

Pat & Bud Smothers | Blaine Wesner | Charles Zeller

WOMEN’S HEALTH ON THE LINE

Low-income Texans depend on family planning clinics. The clinics depend on a program that’s in trouble.

By: JULIE POOLE

Photography by: MERIDITH KOHUT

Certified medical assistant Letty Almazan helps family nurse practitioner Linh Nguyen with an exam at a Corpus Christi clinic.

Mondays are Access Esperanza’s busiest days. Some of the women who come seeking care may wait for a couple of hours but, CEO Patricio Gonzales said, “We do not turn away patients.”

For his clients—most low-income and uninsured—waiting is worth it because the services are free.

Access Esperanza runs four family planning clinics serving roughly 15,000 patients a year in McAllen and nearby cities in the Rio Grande Valley where the average income is less than $20,000 per year. Gonzales said that for many of his patients, their yearly visit to one of his clinics may be the only time they even get their vitals checked. “We’re their only medical provider,” he said—it’s Access Esperanza or the emergency room.

In vast stretches of Texas, family planning clinics like Access Esperanza are a thin and threatened lifeline for low-income families. Getting any kind of healthcare can be difficult, especially in rural areas where the nearest hospital or clinic may be hours away and finding help to pay for it can be a nightmare. Until recently, patients could come in, fill out a relatively simple twopage application, and get care on the same day under a program called Healthy Texas Women (HTW). The program, which is the state’s largest safety net for reproductive healthcare, is a vital funding source for such clinics. It serves about 190,000 people a year.

In the past, clinic operators sent the applications off to the Texas Health and Human Services Commision (HHSC) in Austin and, usually within a couple of weeks, most were approved and the clinic was paid.

Not all the patients’ medical needs are covered by the program, but the basic screenings and exams save lives all the time—like the 55-year-old woman who came into Access Esperanza’s clinic in Mission “looking extremely pale, weak, and in need of a medical examination,” Gonzales said. Clinic workers determined she badly needed a blood transfusion and got her to a hospital ER. The next day, Gonzales got word that the clinic workers’ actions had saved the woman’s life.

But now the Healthy Texas Women program is unraveling, according to

providers and healthcare advocates interviewed for this story.

In March 2021, in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic and with little explanation to clinic operators, HHSC switched out the relatively simple HTW application for a 13-page application for Medicaid assistance. Things went downhill after that.

Family planning providers and others described the new paperwork as extremely complicated and, for many women, intimidating. As a result, they said, many applicants give up and go away, which probably means some will not get care anywhere else. Meanwhile, the health issues they bring to the clinics are often the kind that can’t wait. According to a state-generated report, the services most frequently sought by HTW applicants were treatment for gonorrhea and chlamydia or tests for pregnancy.

Gonzales said that, dating from the imposition of the new application, approvals of new HTW applications have ground to a near halt: Whereas most applications in the past were OK’d, now only about five out of every 100 are approved, he said.

That pattern has continued. Martha Zuniga, director of South Texas Family Planning, a nonprofit that operates six clinics in the Corpus Christi area, said that as of mid-February of this year, new HTW application approvals were down by 80-90 percent compared to that same time in 2021.

According to information provided by HHSC, in fiscal year 2020-21 application denials far outpaced approvals for women’s health programs in Texas—more than 461,000 were denied compared to about 292,000 approved and about 190,000 who actually received services.

There’s another problem: The speed at which HHSC either approves or denies applications has slowed tremendously. Whereas a turnaround of about two weeks had been standard, Zuniga said, some applications were still in limbo 45 or even 90 days after being filed.

That was a problem, Zuniga said, because such delays meant they couldn’t then bill that claim to another program. As a nonprofit with a mission to serve the uninsured and low-income population, she said, “We really do depend on those resources to work efficiently.”

In February, HHSC told Zuniga by email that until August 1 she will no longer have to hold pending HTW claims for 45 days before billing them to another funding source, the Family Planning Program. However, if Family Planning funding remains stagnant, this temporary reprieve won’t help much long-term.

The Family Planning Program, among other roles, acts as a fallback for clinics to get reimbursed for providing care to patients who can’t pay or whose bills don’t get paid by HTW or otherwise. When

a patient’s claim under HTW is denied, clinics can roll the unpaid claim over to that program.

Clinics contract with the state to receive lump-sum Family Planning grants on an annual basis, but the grants haven’t increased to keep up with the rising needs of people seeking care. As a result of that and the problems with HTW, grants frequently run out before the end of the fiscal year, and yet clinics are required by law to continue providing care to patients. Clinic operators can file “funds gone” claims with

the state—and then wait until sometime in the new fiscal year to be repaid, potentially adding months to the payment process.

All of this is threatening the financial viability of the family planning clinics that play a vital role in women’s healthcare in Texas. One provider said she already had to shut down one clinic last fall and suspend the operations of a second clinic temporarily.

Gonzales isn’t sure that the Healthy Texas Women program will make it through its current woes, and he knows that lives

are at stake. “I think [we’re] going to see this program bottom out, I hate to say this, by May or June,” he said.

Christina Bonner, chief operating officer of Women’s & Men’s Health Services of Coastal Bend, also got the OK for her clinics, for the next several months, to roll over HTW claims to Family Planning without delay. She said HHSC leaders and legislators have stepped up their advocacy for added funding for Family Planning and are looking for other ways to help. The clinics depend on HTW, and the lives

Chief operating officer Christina Bonner, medical assistant Jamie Villanueva, and supervisor Yvette Herrera look over paperwork at a clinic run by Women’s & Men’s Health Services of the Coastal Bend.

of low-income Texas women depend on those clinics. People like Brigitte Pittman and Erica Garcia Ginnett owe their lives to safety-net programs. In the case of Ginnett, a 34-year-old college student and mother of two young girls, South Texas Family Planning clinics in Kingsville and Corpus Christi saved her life twice—once after an ER doctor had refused to treat her uncontrollable bleeding and more recently when she developed breast cancer.

On March 8, the Corpus Christi clinic received a gift basket with things like juice packs, Lifesavers and Peeps candy, and a letter from Ginnett. “All of you are my lifesavers. You are my Peeps!” it said. “I can’t thank y’all enough for my life, because I might not have one if it weren’t for y’all.”

Stacey Pogue, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Every Texan, said that the clinics funded by the Family Planning Program (which also rely on Healthy Texas Women funding) “are the workhorses of the family planning network in Texas—they are the high-volume clinics, the long-standing clinics, they see a lot of

pregnancy testing, cancer screenings, and more. But when HTW applications are rejected or simply sit in the limbo of an HHSC backlog, the effect is to deny patients access to a program that has sufficient (mostly federal) funding and shove the costs of their care onto the underfunded Family Planning Program, thus increasing clinics’ financial woes. According to an HHSC report, the “funds gone” claims submitted by providers in fiscal year 2021 was $3.2 million—a figure that’s expected to rise.

For clinic operators, it has been a nailbiter. Waiting months for reimbursements can cause clinics to limit the amount of birth control packs provided to patients; cut doctors’ hours; struggle to cover rent, utilities, and salaries; and ultimately, close either temporarily or for good.

HTW into a Medicaid-funded program. The simple application had been negotiated away when the waiver was finally approved in January 2020.

According to HHSC Press Officer Tiffany Young, it was the federal agency that oversees Medicaid that forced the change in the application. Young said the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) insisted, as part of the waiver negotiations, that the new HTW application capture information needed to determine a number called MAGI—the patient’s Modified Adjusted Gross Income. Instead of basic income questions, applicants are asked to calculate the amount of their “pretax contributions per pay period, how often contributions are made, as well as the date contributed” for all members of their household.

people.” (Every Texan is the nonpartisan policy institute formerly known as the Center for Public Policy Priorities.)

Individual doctors make up the bulk of the practitioners who help provide reproductive healthcare to low-income Texans, Pogue said, but most reserve only a tiny fraction of their appointments for uninsured patients. Family planning clinics, on the other hand, serve low-income people almost exclusively.

To keep their doors open, the clinics rely on multiple funding streams: Healthy Texas Women, the Family Planning Program (which serves men and women), Breast and Cervical Cancer Services, and Title X, the federal program that provides affordable birth control and reproductive healthcare to low-income people. Each funding source is administered differently, and not all Texas clinics have access to the full range of funding. For patients without private insurance—the vast majority—clinics are required to screen first for Healthy Texas Women eligibility.

HTW patients can get annual exams, screenings for sexually transmitted infections, HIV testing, contraception,

For patients, moving claims to the Family Planning Program isn’t a great solution, Bonner said. “HTW as a health insurance is much more useful to a patient than the Family Planning Program because with [FPP], it’s not like you get a card that you can take anywhere. Whereas your HTW card is like private insurance. You can take it to any HTW provider.”

In September, Kristén Ylana, executive director of the Texas Women’s Health Caucus, organized a roundtable discussion to address concerns about the Healthy Texas Women program. Twelve clinic leaders from all corners of the state—Beaumont to Amarillo, the Rio Grande Valley to Dallas—made the trip to meet with legislators and HHSC officials.

Over the summer, a lot had transpired. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade. Providers with HTW funding are not allowed to provide or pay for abortions, but the decision affected them nonetheless: In May, when news of the impending decision leaked, clinics began seeing more patients seeking contraceptive care, a trend that has continued.

Gonzales and other providers were baffled about why the application had changed, when the simpler version was easier for both patients and staff. The reason, they learned, had to do with something called an 1115 Demonstration Waiver, submitted by Governor Greg Abbott in 2017 to turn

The tone of the form shifted as well, stressing that the patient is signing “under the penalty of perjury,” and that HHSC checks answers against “electronic databases and databases from the International Revenue Service (IRS), Social Security, the Department of Homeland Security, and/or a consumer reporting agency.”

If patients or their household members work informally at jobs where they don’t have to file income tax withholding forms, they’re at a disadvantage. So are people who work multiple jobs or who may have a hard time tracking down former employers for verification. If family members have clouded immigration status, patients may decide that completing the application is too much of a risk.

Providers noticed another issue: The 13-page application didn’t provide protection for victims of domestic abuse. On the simpler form, joint insurance information (with a parent or spouse) could be waived if the applicant was a victim of abuse, as are about 20 to 25 percent of patients seeking family planning care.

According to a CMS spokesperson, states can use a separate application for family planning coverage. But Texas chose to use the same application it uses for other Medicaid programs.

To complicate matters more, during HHSC’s negotiations with CMS a feature called “adjunctive eligibility” was stripped away. In the past, people who had

already qualified for other income-tested programs—like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or the Women, Infants, and Children supplemental nutrition program—automatically qualified for HTW. Now, however, they must submit the same documentation all over again.

The Healthy Texas Women program website is confusing. The “How to Apply” section says that applying for services is “easy” but also notes that the online application “works on desktop computers, but not on mobile phones or tablets”—a challenge for people who don’t have access to a computer or the internet.

Patients can download the form and print it instead, but that requires access to a printer. It also assumes they were able to find the form in the first place—there is no form labeled “Healthy Texas Women.”

Instead, it is listed under “Medicaid or CHIP, form H1205” (the 13-page version) or form H1010 (the 33-page version for HTW only).

Providers seldom know why applications

for HTW coverage are denied. Patients themselves get denial letters, but those may provide little information. In one case, a patient returned to share her letter with Access Esperanza. The letter didn’t list a reason, just six-digit codes. While at the clinic, the woman called HHSC to ask for clarification, Gonzales said, “but the wait time was over an hour, and she couldn’t complete the call.” A recording suggested she fill out the application all over again.

Clinic staffers help patients with applications, but extra visits to the clinic can be a struggle themselves, requiring childcare arrangements, time off from work, and reliable transportation. So clinic operators do their best to make healthcare a one-stop task. Bonner, of Women’s & Men’s Health Services of Coastal Bend, said her clinics offer gas cards and bus passes. Thanks to onsite pharmacies, women don’t have to make a return trip to get birth control supplies or to have IUDs inserted.

Gonzales said that when people first see the 13-page HTW form, their eyes widen. It takes patients as long as two hours to complete, pushing the overall visit time to four hours or more. “Sometimes people get

Family nurse practitioner Dana Buchanan performs an exam on Keren Garza at Women’s & Men’s Health Services of the Coastal Bend in Corpus Christi. Annual exams and cancer screenings are covered by the Healthy Texas Women program.

Family nurse practitioners Alexandra Miller, foreground, and Linh Nguyen analyze slides in the clinic’s lab.

so frustrated they leave.”

Peggy Smith sees the same problem among the 13- to 24-year-old students she serves as CEO of Teen Health Clinics, a program run by Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She said the application process for HTW coverage is incomprehensible and intimidating to young patients who are usually seeking birth control or STI treatment and who seldom have the family income information needed for the HTW form. That pushes their care costs onto the clinic’s Family Planning Program grant. When that money, as a result, ran out too quickly, Smith was forced to close one clinic and pause operations at another last fall. Three of her clinics are located in innercity high schools where few students have primary care doctors. Those schools are safety nets for such kids, she said, and also their “medical homes.”

Brigitte Pittman didn’t have a “medical home” until she found out about HTW, when she was more than a year into postpartum depression.

At the private Christian high school she attended in the Dallas area, Pittman said, abstinence was the only sex education taught. She was a college student before she learned about sexually transmitted diseases and birth control. Stephenville, in Erath County southwest of Fort Worth, where she went to college and still lives, has about 42,000 people, but according to the nonprofit group Power to Decide, not one publicly funded health center with a full range of contraceptive options is available. The group lists Erath County as a contraceptive desert.

Pittman was in her mid-30s—and the mom of three boys—before a friend told her about the Healthy Texas Women program. Pittman said the enrollment process was frustrating and difficult (she couldn’t find the short form online). But she got approved in 2017, kept up her eligibility by resubmitting information on her husband’s income every few months, and says HTW saved her life.

By 2017, Pittman had been without comprehensive healthcare for years, sometimes ending up in the emergency room “because I waited so long to seek help.” Her last pregnancy had been deemed high-risk: Her gestational diabetes had turned into long-term diabetes and her

postpartum anxiety had hung on. The dangers of another pregnancy have made her “highly uncomfortable [about] ever having more kids.”

Pittman said HTW gave her access to essential services such as birth control, annual exams, diabetes screenings and, finally, treatment for depression and anxiety. Now a single mom, she works from home for a company she likes and is training for a new position. Working from home gives her more time with her boys—a 12-year-old and 9-year-old twins.

Pittman was nervous and excited in February when she spoke in front of the Capitol for the first Texas Women’s Healthcare Coalition Advocacy Day. “I know that it”—HTW saving her life—“sounds like a stretch to say right now,” she told the audience. “I was in such a dark place.”

In October 2022, HHSC Deputy Executive Commissioner Wayne Salter told a Texas House panel on healthcare reform that 400 staff vacancies at his agency had led to a backlog of 70,000 Medicaid applications over 45 days old. By mid-February of this year, according to HHSC, that backlog had grown to 159,860 applications.

Also in February, Young, the HHSC press officer, said there is “currently no backlog for HTW-only applications. However, if an individual applies for HTW and other programs or Medicaid and other programs, HHSC must first assess eligibility for Medicaid programs before determining eligibility for HTW. There currently is a backlog for these types of applications.”

When the Texas Observer asked for clarification about HTW-only applications, Young pointed to form H1010, by which a patient can agree to forego other benefits and just apply for HTW. That would be faster, right? Apparently not. Young noted that Texas still requires all applications to go through a tiered screening system that checks patients for eligibility for Medicaid and another program as well as HTW. In short, there is no fast track for individuals just seeking help with birth control and STI screenings.

Zuniga, of South Texas Family Planning, pointed out that if HHSC was behind in processing applications, it would have been helpful for providers to know earlier.

“Providers like us are the backbone for the uninsured and low-income,” she said. “We are where they come and who they trust.”

Another bureaucratic threat is also about to hit the family clinics and their patients. The pandemic-related federal waiver that had extended Medicaid coverage for about 2.7 million Texans—mostly children and mothers—expired on March 31. HHSC has now begun a federally required review of the state’s entire Medicaid rolls, about 5.9 million people. Advocates fear that the health agency, already dealing with staff shortages and application backlogs, may be overwhelmed by the task.

If the path to family planning healthcare in Texas seems filled with potholes, it’s partly because the route goes through the battlefield of abortion.

Many of the holes in the healthcare coverage system for women in this state were once filled by Planned Parenthood health centers. But Republican state leaders fought a long and ultimately successful legal battle to bar Planned Parenthood—and any other organization associated with abortion—from receiving state-managed healthcare funds in Texas.

In 2011, the state cut funding for family planning programs from $111 million to less than $38 million. When Texas asked the Obama administration for a waiver that year to allow its Medicaid-funded programs to bar abortion providers from participating, the request was denied.

The Trump administration had no problem with the state excluding any abortion provider (or its non-abortionproviding affiliates) from Medicaid funding and approved the waiver. Before the Texas Legislature went after their funding, Planned Parenthood health centers “provided care to more than 40 percent of Texas’ Medicaid women’s health program patients,” said Sarah Wheat, chief external affairs officer at Planned Parenthood. Texas policies on women’s healthcare now are “a mess with lots of detours and roadblocks,” she said.

The waiver that denied funding to Planned Parenthood clinics will expire at the end of 2024. HHSC officials plan to seek a renewal. But Texas’ justification for banning an organization that no longer provides

abortions in the state is wearing thin.

Some clinic operators and women’s health advocates see glimmers of hope for Texas’ family planning clinics and the Healthy Texas Women program.

Pogue, for instance, is optimistic about legislation that would increase access to care: Senate Bill 807 would require health insurers to give patients the option of receiving 12 months of birth control supplies at one time.

House Bill 141 would make contraception available through the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Texas is one of only two states that don’t do that now, even though the program covers young people up to age 18 and part of their 19th year.

Kristen Lenau, health policy director with the Texas Women’s Healthcare Coalition, pointed out that the basic state budget proposal for the next two years includes $87 million—a 25 percent increase—for women’s healthcare programs.

Smith, CEO of Teen Health Clinics in Houston, is hoping Texas will adopt a

fast-track application for young patients. She knows of two states, Oregon and Mississippi, that use a two- page form that’s simple enough for underserved youth to fill out.

Bonner is hopeful that the proposed increase in funding for the Family Planning Program and possible midyear allocation to the program will help close her clinics’ funding shortfall created by Healthy Texas Women’s bureaucratic challenges.

“The new 13-page HTW application is an outrageous barrier to care, when you consider how limited the services it provides are, but HHSC is assisting providers in finding ways to work around it,” Bonner said.

Ayear ago, it seemed unlikely that Erica Garcia Ginnett would live long enough to watch her kids grow up.

Ginnett is a journalism student at Texas A&M UniversityKingsville who’s also active in theater. Her daughters are now 8 and 12. She was rehearsing a play in March 2022 when another actor shoved her during

a scene. As she pushed back, she felt a sudden loss of blood that soaked her pants. She’d been experiencing uncontrolled vaginal bleeding that had worsened over the course of a year, but this was urgent. Her husband, an EMT, was there and rushed her to the ER, where the doctor confirmed what the couple already suspected: Ginnett had a prolapsed uterus. She was prescribed birth control to help slow the bleeding, but a couple days later she lost consciousness after stepping out of the shower. That led to another ER visit, at which she saw a different doctor—or actually, he refused to see her, saying that someone so young couldn’t possibly have a prolapsed uterus. A concerned nurse practitioner encouraged Ginnett to go to another location where the practitioner worked, the local South Texas Family Planning Clinic. There, the nurse practitioner examined her, confirmed the prolapsed uterus, and prescribed a different birth control and a Depo-Provera shot to get the bleeding under control. And clinic staff helped her sign up for Healthy Texas Women coverage. It was wonderful, Ginnett said, to find

Informational pamphlets about sexually transmitted diseases are available free at the Corpus Christi clinic.

“organizations that are there to help people who don’t know the system, don’t know what routes you have to take, what forms you have to fill out … and they say, ‘Come sit in my office and let’s work on this together.’”

Ginnett and her husband couldn’t afford health insurance through his employer; the $800 biweekly premiums would have eaten most of his paycheck. Their kids are on CHIP. She had tried earlier for Medicaid benefits but was only approved for them during her pregnancies. Without continuing Medicaid help, she had lost her regular OB-GYN care. In September, Ginnett found a lump in her left breast. The nurse practitioner at South Texas Family Planning recommended she get it checked out. When doctors found that the lump was cancerous and recommended a partial mastectomy, the clinic staff helped her to enroll in the Medicaid for Breast and Cervical Cancer program. Two months later she had a partial mastectomy. Unfortunately, because her cancer was estrogen driven, she had to stop taking birth control, which brought back the uncontrollable bleeding and led to anemia. She was grateful that her Medicaid policy covered a full hysterectomy in February.

She’s about to head into five years of chemotherapy, just as the unwinding of Medicaid in Texas begins. She’s less concerned about losing coverage herself— she’s been assured she won’t—than about her kids who need to stay on CHIP for their medications.

When Ginnett was able to begin seeing a gynecologist regularly through Medicaid for Breast and Cervical Cancer, she finally learned that the bleeding had been caused by a large fibroid tumor in her uterus, which was found after her hysterectomy. When she dropped off the gift basket at the South Texas clinic’s Corpus Christi location, Ginnett hugged the staff member who accepted it, and cried.

Ginnett said she hopes that people looking for healthcare won’t get discouraged.

“You’re going to get a lot of ‘No’s’ when you’re searching for something, but when you finally get the ‘Yes, I can help you,’ the ‘Yes, I know what we need to do,’ it’s worth it,” she said. “Because it means your life. It’s the difference between getting to see your kids graduate from high school or not.”

Clinic supervisor Yvette Herrera, left, advises Mariella Ureña about birth control options. As a full-time nurse aide making $12 an hour, Ureña said she can afford neither having children nor paying for birth control, so she depends on the services she gets through Healthy Texas Women.

WHO JUDGES THE JUDGES?

A bizarre Dallas case involving the alleged impersonation of a judge on Zoom tests the state’s opaque system of judicial accountability.

By: MICHELLE PITCHER

Illustrations by CLAY RODERY

ike most judges, Amber Givens moved much of her court’s business online as the pall of COVID-19 hung over Dallas in the summer of 2021. On August 3, what initially seemed like a routine Zoom meeting with lawyers turned into the impetus for a prolonged public and legal drama with the 43-year-old district judge at its heart.

Givens, who has presided over the 282nd District Court in Dallas since 2015, had trouble logging in to her Zoom account that morning, a familiar woe for all who transitioned to virtual work during the pandemic. It didn’t seem like too much of a problem—she had a relatively light docket that day. One meeting involved a man named Floyd Aaron, who’d been accused of violating the conditions of the deferred adjudication of his 2015 burglary charge.

Before the meeting, Givens asked her court coordinator, Arceola Warfield—known by many regulars at the courthouse as “Arce”—to log into the judge’s account and announce that the judge would participate via speakerphone, according to affidavits obtained by the Texas Observer.

Longtime defense attorney Tim Jefferey, representing Aaron, attended the Zoom meeting while Assistant District Attorney Eduardo Carranza represented the state. A handful of others, including probation officers, logged on.

Some participants understood that Warfield, the court coordinator, continued to use the judge’s Zoom account, although the video was off and a photo of Givens appeared onscreen. To courtroom regulars, Warfield’s voice sounded distinct from Givens’ confident, orotund tone. At one point, the coordinator asked the court reporter to go on the record—something the judge normally does.

At least one lawyer said it wasn’t clear Warfield was the one behind the Zoom picture—during the meeting, the defendant addressed Warfield as “your honor” on at least one occasion—and word of this ambiguity made its way to leaders of the Dallas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association (DCDLA), which represents more than 600 lawyers. The group’s board of directors filed a formal complaint against Givens with the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, alleging that Givens had instructed her court coordinator to

impersonate her.

Givens has denied that she instructed her employee to impersonate her, calling the allegation “absurd,” according to the Dallas Morning News.

In an affidavit, Warfield later said her request to go on the record was tonguein-cheek. “I jokingly said to Lisa Jackson, our court reporter, ‘Let’s go on the record.’ This was a joke because I said it after Judge Givens told the parties she was getting off the call,” Warfield wrote. “I recall that several people in attendance on the Zoom call laughed in response.”

Other participants in the Zoom call— including court reporter Lisa Jackson and Dallas County sheriff’s deputies Kenneth Brame and David Podraza—also provided sworn statements saying they knew the voice behind Givens’ photo was her staff member.

“Arceola Warfield never presented herself as Judge Givens,” Podraza said in an affidavit. “When she was addressed as ‘Judge,’ Arceola Warfield quickly corrected and identified herself as ‘Arce.’”

The accusations spurred the Public Integrity Unit of the Texas Rangers to launch its own investigation, which is ongoing.

Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot recused himself from investigating the claims, leaving the task to the DA of nearby Kaufman County. Creuzot and the Texas Rangers declined to comment.

But this wasn’t the first time the DCDLA had raised concerns about Givens. The group lodged at least three previous complaints about the judge’s behavior toward attorneys and about the way she streamed hearings on Facebook. In part because of the number of attorneys involved with the complaints, Givens either recused herself or was removed from a staggering number of cases in 2022. Ray Wheless, the administrative judge in charge of the region since 2018, told a Dallas news station, “I’ve never seen this many recusals in one county. I’ve never heard of it, never seen it.”

Behind the scenes, prosecutors have joined defense attorneys in criticizing Givens’ courtroom behavior. In March, prosecutors in a high-profile murder case requested Givens be removed from the trial, claiming she was biased against the state based on her courtroom comments. Voters, on the other

hand, have continued to back her.

Givens, who took home $172,000 annually as of last year (the maximum pay allowed by law for a judge in her position with her experience) was elected to her third term in 2022. Givens provided publicly filed documents but declined to comment further. But she told the Dallas Morning News, “These claims are unsubstantiated” in a statement issued in response to the 2021 complaint. “This is a false narrative motivated to suppress the will of the community and to pressure me to discontinue the progress we are making toward change in the court system.”

The situation in the Dallas County Courthouse remains tense as defense lawyers and prosecutors who want Givens off the bench wait for the results of multiple investigations.

So far, both sides seems to be trusting the process.

But Givens’ critics say the drawnout criminal and judicial misconduct investigations are only worsening the damage in Dallas courts. In contrast, Givens and some supporters suggest that the way the allegations against her have been made public show how the Texas judicial accountability system, normally bureaucratic and secretive, can be weaponized.

The pandemic has ushered in its share of unusual judicial misconduct complaints. Just last year, the commission disciplined judges in 78 cases. In February 2022, Clyde Black, a justice of the peace in Houston County, was publicly admonished after he said he would release anyone brought into court for violating the “stay at home” orders imposed in the pandemic’s early days. In April, Barbara Stalder with the 280th Family Protective Order Court in Harris County was reprimanded for ordering attorneys to be shackled during court proceedings. Judge Bonnie Rangel with the 171st District Court in El Paso County received a public warning in August based on complaints that she verbally abused attorneys—in one instance yelling at lawyers for 20 minutes during a Zoom hearing.

All of these decisions came from the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, a

Prayer to Georgia O’Keeffe

—Kim Nail

I want to live in the negative space of your landscapes, recede into shadows on the horizon soft like an echo, a ghost note. Desert mother, I see you cloistered in your Model A in a swarm of bees, painting fever dreams in gold and ochre—

I want to be still. I am a lens, setting fires in the sand with insolent focus. Teach me to be an aperture, quiet and clean as bleached bones, speaking only to water.

Dallas poet and educator Kim Nall co-curates and emcees the Raising Our Voices Alumni Reading Series for Carlow University, from which she holds an MFA degree.

13-member appointed board responsible for holding elected judges accountable in Texas. Every state has some form of judicial conduct oversight body meant to determine whether elected or appointed jurists violate laws, judicial canons, or ethical norms. Texas’ commission was established via a constitutional provision in 1965. The commission is made up of unpaid appointees who serve staggered six-year terms. A considerable portion of the commissioners—judges, attorneys, and nonlawyers—are avowed Republicans (the governor, the Texas Supreme Court, and the

said she’s certain that some of Abbott’s staff and lawyers knew how she’d voted because of questions they asked her in a meeting held afterward. In response, she asked if they were expecting her to vote in line with Abbott’s views because she was an appointee. They told her they would never try to direct a person’s vote. “Well, that’s exactly what it sounds like you’re trying to do,” the member said she replied. Her nomination was revoked just two months after the meeting.

In 2022, the agency had 14 full-time employees—including attorneys and investigators—who do the legwork of sifting through, analyzing, and investigating complaints. But it’s understaffed, and its leadership claims its $1.2 million budget is a stretch for its growing workload. New York State’s Commission on Judicial Conduct has a budget over $7 million, and the agency reported receiving about the same number of complaints as Texas as of 2021. Last year was the first time since fiscal year 2018 that the Texas commission managed to dispose of more complaints than were filed. By the end of FY 2022, only 169 complaints had been pending a year or more, a significant decrease in its prior backlog.

But in the FY 2022 report, Chairman David Schenck—a Dallas appellate judge who was appointed to the commission by the Texas Supreme Court in 2020—warned the small agency won’t be able to keep up that pace.

state bar all appoint members).

The political nature of these appointments is sometimes obvious: In 2019, Governor Greg Abbott revoked the nominations of two members—who served several months while awaiting Texas Senate confirmation—after they voted to sanction a Waco judge who had refused to conduct same-sex marriages.

One of those members, who asked not to be named, said there is “no question” in her mind that she was removed because of how she voted. Commission votes are supposed to be secret, but the member

“The Commission’s recent high level of productivity is not likely to be sustainable given current staffing levels. Our commission oversees far more judges than its … counterparts in other large states, and yet it operates with a fraction of the authorized staff,” he wrote. The commission already spends most of its budget on staff and travel, but also must shell out money to hire outside counsel to defend itself against two lawsuits after Attorney General Ken Paxton declined to help. Schenk said he was unable to speak with the Observer due to statutory limitations on his public comments.

The commission resolved a record number of complaints—2,229—in FY 2022. Its workload grew in part because of a constitutional amendment Texas voters passed in November 2021 that expanded the agency’s authority to include candidates

for judicial office.

In some ways, the judicial accountability system mirrors the court system over which judges preside. But key differences contribute to the massive caseload for the agency’s relatively small size. Complaints to the commission can arise from anywhere, including news stories. Unlike in civil court, people can file complaints anonymously or on someone else’s behalf since the commission does not “require a complainant to have firsthand knowledge of the alleged misconduct.” In Givens’ case, the DCDLA board as a group submitted complaints related to the judge’s treatment of individual defense attorneys and prosecutors. Nationwide, more than 90 percent of

named), a recommendation to the Texas Supreme Court for the judge’s removal, or even a referral for a criminal investigation.

The commission issued 40 public sanctions and 38 private sanctions. Two judges were referred to law enforcement for potential criminal charges.

Action is most common against justices of the peace and slightly more rare against district court judges—powerful jurists who handle the state’s felony criminal cases, including death penalty trials, or oversee high-stakes civil disputes. Twenty-five of the 856 complaints issued against district judges in FY 2022 resulted in disciplinary action.

“Judicial conduct commissions hold an awkward position in the justice system,”

take action against a judge directly rather than just making recommendations to the Texas Supreme Court. It’s one of 34 state commissions that keeps complaints confidential until the commission finds probable cause that misconduct occurred, according to the National Center for State Courts. Oregon is the only state that allows hearings to be public—in most other states, proceedings generally remain confidential unless the commission recommends public discipline or until the Supreme Court issues an order.

For all its power, the body has precious little oversight. The agency has argued that it’s immune even from review by the Sunset Advisory Commission, which evaluates the

complaints submitted to state judicial misconduct commissions get dismissed, often because complainants asked agencies to weigh in on something outside their jurisdiction, according to Cynthia Gray, director of the Center of Judicial Ethics at the National Center for State Courts. And this is a crucial point: These commissions remain leashed in order to protect the independence of the courts. Only about 1 percent of filings result in judges stepping down or being publicly disciplined, and nine out of 10 misbehaving judges kept their jobs after committing misconduct, according to investigations by NBC News in 2021 and Reuters in 2020.

In FY 2022, only 78 of the 2,229 complaints (about 3 percent) disposed of by the Texas commission resulted in disciplinary action—which can include everything from a private sanction (where the judge is not

writes Gray in a paper titled “How Judicial Conduct Commissions Work.” “The public, pointing to the high complaint-dismissal rate, accuses them of white-washing judicial misconduct. The media generally discovers them only in the event of a scandal, accusing them of being secretive and obscure. Some judges accuse them of engaging in witch hunts and acting as kangaroo courts or Star Chambers or, at most, grudgingly accept them as a necessary evil.”

But Gray told the Observer that she’s never heard of another complaint like the one against Givens. “No judge has been publicly disciplined for having a staff member impersonate her during a Zoom meeting, and I have not heard of any other allegations of a judge doing that,” Gray wrote in an email.

The Texas commission, and similar bodies in 21 states, are empowered to

efficiency of other state agencies.

Often, the public is kept in the dark. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct operates under a constitutionally guaranteed shroud of secrecy. The agency is exempt from the Texas Public Information Act.

Complaints occasionally get leaked by the complainants, who aren’t beholden to the same confidentiality rules as agency employees of the accused judges, as was the case with Givens.

Givens was among more than a dozen Black women on the ticket for local judicial office when she first ran in Dallas in 2014, part of a historic wave of women of color vying for seats on the bench. This recent push to diversify the historically white judiciary is not unique to Dallas—Harris County swore in a record number of Black women judges on New Year’s Day in 2019.

Givens has practiced law in Texas and in New York, where she got her J.D. from Syracuse University. She has a background both as a defense attorney and an assistant DA. She received her undergraduate degree at Tuskegee University in Alabama, where she was the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter. She spent eight years practicing law, twice the amount of

experience required to be a district judge, before running as a Democrat.

Since she took office in 2015, her courtroom has repeatedly come under scrutiny, including by county commissioners in 2022, for having disposed of the fewest cases of any Dallas County felony court over three years—4,572— according to a report from KERA News. But judges are far from the only players with

the power to push or delay cases. Many cases have stalled in the pandemic. As of January 2023, more than 39,000 active and inactive criminal cases were pending in all Dallas County district courts, according to the state Office of Court Administration. In 2022, Givens beat two challengers—both former judges—in the Democratic primary with over 50 percent of the vote, though by then reports about judicial misconduct

“NO JUDGE HAS BEEN PUBLICLY DISCIPLINED FOR HAVING A STAFF MEMBER IMPERSONATE HER DURING A ZOOM MEETING.”

complaints had appeared in the Dallas Morning News. She remains highly visible in the community, holding public panel discussions about the criminal justice system and helping run a youth education program.

But among Dallas defense attorneys, Givens’ reputation is poor. In a 2021 poll administered by the DCDLA, where members were asked to grade judges based on things like temperament, communication, and impartiality, Givens received the lowest overall score—9.6 out of 30. That was just over half of the next-lowest judge’s score.

In contrast, Audra Riley, a Black woman elected to Dallas County Criminal Court No. 3 in 2020, received one of the highest ratings, 28.2.

Ed Gray, a Dallas political commentator, has repeatedly interviewed Givens on his internet radio show “The Commish.” He told the Observer he believes Givens and other Black women on the bench face undue scrutiny and discrimination. “Her demeanor outside of the courtroom has a lot to do with this as well—she’s young, and she’s hip, so to speak,” Gray said. “I’ve heard some people indicate that they don’t like the way she walks. They don’t like the way her hair looks. … Something as superficial as how she looks.”

Some in the local defense community disagree with the claims about Givens.

Charles Maduka, a defense attorney in Dallas for 34 years, said the allegations don’t ring true to him. “She was elected to preside and dispense justice fairly, not to be friends with defense lawyers or make them happy,” he said. “This whole thing is just politics.”

In the summer of 2022, more than a dozen attorneys filed requests for Givens to be removed from cases, citing alleged bias. This slew of requested removals and recusals rocked the courthouse, forcing about 100 cases to be reassigned to other judges. These requests highlight the strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction many attorneys have expressed with Givens.

The first official complaint about Givens came soon after she live-streamed a video of a hearing on her Facebook page on June 11, 2020.

The hearing involved a woman named Shaniqua Wilson, who had been accused of violating conditions of her deferred adjudication

after pleading guilty to forging a $1,647.83 check in 2016. Shortly after the video stream began, Givens asked Assistant District Attorney Jamie Young if the state rested. Young responded, and Givens, apparently having not heard the response, asked Young to repeat herself.

“I said yes,” Young told the judge. Givens, staring at the camera, replied: “Are you talking to me? Counsel, I’m instructing you that your tone, you might need to change it.”

“I’m sorry, your honor,” Young said. “I don’t have a tone. I think I’m a little confused.” Givens then began to lecture Young.

posting court videos on Facebook—and for interacting with commenters after the fact.

“A judge would never engage a member of the public watching in the gallery this way,” the complaint reads. “Judge Givens crossed a very clear line and allowed her desire for public adoration to supersede her obligations to remain impartial and professional.”

The complaint says that could be viewed as an intimidation tactic on top of being “an inappropriate exchange between the judge and a member of the public.”

The association’s subsequent two complaints raised concerns about Givens’ “belittling” treatment of defense attorneys.

Altogether, the complaints allege Givens has committed numerous ethics violations, including violating state judicial canons that dictate judges must be “patient, dignified and courteous to litigants, jurors, witnesses, lawyers and others with whom the judge deals in an official capacity,” and that judges “shall not be swayed by partisan interests, public clamor, or fear of criticism.”

Douglas Huff, who became DCDLA president in January, said even the appearance of judicial bias is also dangerous to a court, as outlined in another canon of the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct. “Ultimately, that can cause cases to be overturned, that can cause appeals to take place—all based on the appearance of impropriety,” Huff told the Observer.

when the fourth complaint against Givens was filed. She runs a private practice in Dallas that handles cases from first-degree felonies down to Class B misdemeanors. In December 2022, she had more than 100 clients. She said there is a pervasive problem in the Dallas County Courthouse with judges—including Givens—not being held accountable. “She’s not respectful of our time or what else is going on or that somebody’s sitting in jail longer. Her court is just very inefficient.”

Branan was not present for the Zoom call in which a staff member allegedly impersonated Givens, but she attended an unrelated matter before Givens that same day. She said when she logged onto Zoom, she saw Givens’ picture on screen but recognized Warfield’s voice asking about the situation. Branan said she and Warfield discussed the matter in full. They were about to summon Branan’s client, but then discovered the client was in quarantine due to COVID-19 exposure. It wasn’t until the end of the call that Branan remembers Warfield clarifying that she was not the judge. “I feel like if my client wasn’t in quarantine, she would have done the same thing on mine,” Branan said, referring to the alleged Zoom impersonation.

more cases there. At the time, she said she told her bosses, “I’m not getting on Zoom to be harassed by her again. … I’m not sitting here to be patronized by her again.” She left the DA’s office a short time after making those remarks.

As allegations about Givens’ behavior made headlines, she sprang to her own defense—albeit in a limited capacity, as judges often can’t speak publicly about legal matters. Givens provided investigators with screenshots of an email chain from DCDLA, where members expressed a goal of removing Givens from the bench. Her team pointed to this as a reason to be skeptical of their claims, but Lillian Hardwick, an attorney considered an expert on judicial ethics and misconduct matters in Texas, told the Observer such a motivation is likely common among complainants. The commission’s own rule states that “a lawyer having knowledge that a judge has committed a violation of applicable rules of judicial conduct that raises a substantial question as to the judge’s fitness for office shall inform the appropriate authority.”

them in 2016 for finding a defendant guilty after accusing them of failing to deliberate and of being too harsh.

Hawthorne ran against Givens—with the full-throated support of some DCDLA members—in the Democratic primary in 2022 and lost.

Huff, the current DCDLA president, said the main frustration he has with the existing judicial accountability system is the waiting game. Complaints filed against Givens in 2020—before his term as president—remain unresolved. “We have put our names on the line,” Huff said. “We have done these things not because we don’t like somebody. It’s because there’s a problem here that is damaging to our clients and the judiciary as a whole. It takes away the credibility of Dallas judges, and we have some great Dallas judges.”

During the tongue-lashing, Young remained unemotional. Meanwhile, the judge’s Facebook friends began commenting in real time in support of Givens, saying things like “I LOVE AMBER,” and “Let her know! Check that tone!”

When one commenter posted that the attorney had been disrespectful, Givens replied by providing Young’s supervisor’s name and phone number.

DCDLA’s board filed its first complaint against Givens in July, describing that hearing and alleging that the judge “consistently demonstrated a poor judicial temperament, highlighted by aggression, condescension, and disrespect towards attorneys practicing in her court.” The complaint specifically called out Givens for

In January 2022, Givens filed what’s called a 202 lawsuit against the DCDLA and several of its members individually. That legal action could have enabled her to investigate DCDLA and some of its officers on suspicion of defamation. She argued that its attorneys—one of whom vocally supported her political opponent, whom Givens also sought to depose in the suit—were knowingly misrepresenting the situation in the midst of her reelection.

Generally, public figures like Givens can only successfully sue for defamation if they can prove a person made false claims and did so with “actual malice,” meaning the person lied intentionally in order to damage the reputation of the public figure. A judge later dismissed the suit.

Amanda Branan, a criminal defense attorney with 10 years’ experience, was targeted by name in Givens’ lawsuit. A solo practitioner, Branan served as the president of DCDLA in 2021

Because of the ongoing dispute with Givens, Branan is one of several lawyers who have filed motions asking to have Givens removed from their cases. But she said Givens habitually ignores requests for recusal past the usual deadlines. “What happened is that, like most things in that court, they go into some black hole or something and you get ignored.”

Branan said the core of the issue is that it’s become difficult for defense attorneys to effectively practice in Givens’ court. “Her behavior has just gotten worse and worse over time. When things are brought to her attention, she doesn’t change them,” she said. “It’s almost like rules don’t apply to her. She’s made clear that she wants to be more of a movie star than a public servant.”

Some prosecutors have also reported problems with Givens. One former employee of the Dallas District Attorney’s Office—who asked that her name not be used but who worked as a prosecutor for over five years—said she had so much trouble during her six-month stint in Givens’ courtroom that she refused to try

The fact that complaints were supported by so many lawyers—represented by the DCDLA—could be considered unusual, though there have been other Texas cases where groups came together to file judicial misconduct complaints.

Complaints abound about Texas judges not showing up to court, mistreating lawyers, or showing bias against one side— factors at the heart of complaints against Givens—have resulted in rare disciplinary action against other judges. Many such disciplinary actions target judges who made procedural slipups, behaviors that may look harmless to the public. But other instances of misconduct appear more blatant, including judges who used racist rhetoric on the bench or on social media or who misused their power to try to influence the decisions of juries or of other judges.

One Dallas County district judge who faced disciplinary action from the commission was former 203rd Judicial District Court Judge Teresa Hawthorne. The commission publicly reprimanded Hawthorne in 2017 after she attempted to sway a Lubbock County judge who was in charge of a case involving her nephew. In another instance also addressed in the reprimand, jurors alleged she chastised

Maduka, the defense attorney who supports Givens, said he trusts that the dust will settle and the truth—whatever it may be—will come to light. The commission, he said, “has the investigative tools to look into it and see if it has merits. If it doesn’t, they dismiss. If it does, well, they bring down sanctions. But I would trust that that body works the way it’s supposed to work.”

But whether the commission actually has the tools necessary to sort through the messy allegations is a question mark. The commission’s power is undermined by understaffing and by the sheer volume of complaints it fields each year. Complaints often linger for months, even years. Givens’ complaints have been in limbo for nearly three years now.

High-profile cases like Givens’ turn the public’s attention temporarily to the systems of judicial accountability in Texas, but not for long. Although the judicial commission oversees elected officials— and even has the power to recommend their removal from office—members of the public are given very little insight into who judges the judges.

The complaints against Givens—despite taking place against the backdrop of a Zoom court—didn’t jump out to Hardwick as particularly outrageous. “After having researched and written about judicial discipline since 2002, nothing really surprises me,” she said.

“WE HAVE PUT OUR NAMES ON THE LINE... NOT BECAUSE WE DON’T LIKE SOMEBODY. IT’S BECAUSE THERE’S A PROBLEM HERE THAT IS DAMAGING TO OUR CLIENTS AND THE JUDICIARY.”

DOW’S RIVER

On the Brazos, one chemical company reigns supreme.

By DELGER ERDENESANAA

This is Part 3 of “Drifting Toward Disaster,” a Texas Observer series about lifechanging challenges facing Texans and their rivers. Read Part 1: “The Second Rio Grande,” and Part 2: “Breaking the Brazos” on our website.

Photography by MERIDITH KOHUT

One January day in 1971, Sharron Stewart stood with two friends on the banks of the Brazos River in Freeport, near where the 800mile river empties into the Gulf of Mexico. It was the stretch of the Brazos where Dow, one of the world’s biggest chemical companies, releases wastewater from its massive local complex. Stewart and her friends—one a Dow electrician—looked down at the green water flowing by and threw in a log.

The group was conducting a citizen science experiment to see where Dow’s wastewater traveled after entering the Brazos. The ad hoc investigators followed their log to an inlet of Galveston Bay—a tremendously productive, biodiverse habitat of oyster reefs and marshes that provides a nursery for the Gulf’s marine life.

Dow, one of the Texas Gulf Coast’s biggest industrial water polluters according to wastewater permit data, was drawn to Freeport in 1940 by its deepwater port and abundant oyster reefs. The company used oyster shells to extract magnesium from seawater, sending the mineral to factories building airplanes for use in World War II. But by the early 1970s, the same reefs that attracted Dow were being threatened by pollution.

At the time, Stewart was a young mother who had recently moved to Lake Jackson, a company town built to house Dow’s workers. Soon after the move, she and her daughter began having trouble breathing.

Gradually, Stewart learned all she could about what companies dumped into the air and water in an era when Americans had little legal protection. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was new, and the Clean Water Act had yet to become law. Stewart joined a union-led group, the now-defunct Citizens’ Survival Committee, which advocated for a safer environment.

In November 1971, Stewart was one of few citizens brave enough to speak at a meeting that the 1-year-old EPA convened to discuss water quality in Galveston Bay. “Why must we wait until we have irreparable damage to do something?” she asked. “I thought we were trying to abate pollution sources before they occur.”

Fifty years later, some things have improved on the Brazos. Pollution from Dow and other chemical plants is regulated under permits issued through the 1972

Clean Water Act. These plants are “a whole lot better than they were,” Stewart said. But the river remains under threat, and she worries that some hard-won environmental protections are eroding away.

Records obtained by the Texas Observer in late 2022 show the 7,000-acre Dow chemical complex in the Freeport area dominates the river more than ever. Data from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) show the company repeatedly violated federal standards for industrial wastewater over the past five years—and has

significant portion of the water that Graves canoed down in 1957 had long been destined for the intake pumps of Dow. And once the company’s plants are done with the water, they don’t always return it in the same condition.

Today, Dow-Freeport is the largest chemical plant complex in the Western Hemisphere, with more than 4,000 employees and 3,000 on-site contractors. Dow is the biggest source of toxic pollution in the Lower Brazos Watershed, according to the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory and related reports by Environment America. Instead of producing magnesium for airplanes, Dow now churns out a dizzying array of chemical compounds, many bound for the plastics industry.

Between 2018 and 2022, Dow-Freeport violated federal limits on pH, solid waste, or other chemicals more than 20 times, according to TCEQ records on the facility’s wastewater permit issued through the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (a result of the Clean Water Act). Most troubling are the facility’s excessive releases of copper, which can be toxic to fish and other marine life in high concentrations, and of chemical compounds called halocarbons—some of which are highly toxic to both wildlife and humans.

faced minimal consequences for doing so.

In many ways, the Brazos is the state’s patron river. It cradled colonial Texas’ first capital, San Felipe de Austin. It inspired John Graves’ iconic book Goodbye to a River and spawned a conservation movement.

Despite this legacy, the Brazos is now a captive and contaminated river. As a “navigable” waterway, the river ostensibly belongs to the public. But in reality, a

Running large plants like Dow’s requires staggering amounts of water. The company is allowed to divert more than 200,000 acre-feet each year from the Brazos—almost double what the City of Austin draws from the Colorado River for municipal drinking water. And Dow is continuing to expand: The company is building a new polyethylene plant in Freeport set to open in 2025, according to reporting by the Brazosport Facts. While Dow has water conservation and sustainability goals, it’s also using its tremendous economic and political clout to muscle other water users out of the way. What’s more, Dow-Freeport is operating with a wastewater permit that expired in 2019 but has been “administratively continued” by TCEQ, according to an agency spokesperson. That means Dow is allowed to follow outdated rules while a TCEQ review of the facility’s new draft permit drags on.

“It is concerning that this is coming up

Sharron Stewart’s home in Lake Jackson is filled with books and photos attesting to her decades of environmental activism.

“WHY MUST WE WAIT UNTIL WE HAVE IRREPARABLE DAMAGE TO DO SOMETHING,”

on five years, which is, frankly, the length of time a new permit would have been,” said Josh Kratka, a senior staff attorney at the National Environmental Law Center. While Kratka doesn’t know what’s transpiring between Dow and TCEQ specifically, he explained that many companies try to convince regulators that they can’t reasonably comply with pollution limits in order to delay enforcement. “Rather than really crack down, enforcing a solution quickly, the regulators just give them more time,” he said.

A 2019 TCEQ report shows that Dow is negotiating for higher effluent limits. The agency spokesperson said Dow has “a very complex permit application” that involves additional wastewater streams and regulatory changes to prevent fish from being sucked into industrial plants’ cooling systems or getting trapped against screens. It’s hard for anyone to oppose Dow, said Sharron Stewart, who after all these years remains an environmental activist. “Nothing can be done without their say-so,” she said of Dow’s role on the Brazos. “Most government entities are not going to go against their wishes, even if their wishes are wrong.”

The Brazos rises just west of Lubbock and flows southeast all the way through Texas to its mouth in Freeport. While part of the Upper Brazos is protected as the John Graves Scenic Riverway, the river’s bottom half gets less attention from conservationists.

One of lower river’s biggest champions is Bruce Bodson, a biologist-turned-lawyer who runs an organization called Lower Brazos Riverwatch out of Sugar Land. Nearly every week, Bodson can be found pushing off into the brown, silt-filled waters of the Brazos in a canoe or kayak. He uses improvised boat launches, like one in Brazos Bend State Park that’s just a muddy wedge of gentler slope along the river’s famously steep banks.

Bodson has become something of a 21st-century Graves, albeit a less solitary one. He often has a handful of volunteers paddling alongside him, watching for illegal dumping and leaking oil and gas pipes. He has plans to start measuring populations of threatened freshwater mussels.

“As far as I know, below Waco we’re the only primarily environmental organization that deals with the river. It’s pretty much an orphan,” Bodson said. The nonprofit has approximately 150 members in communities along the river from Waco to Freeport.

Bodson tries to keep an eye on the biggest users and biggest polluters on the river—including Dow, although his organization primarily focuses its efforts upstream. Bodson learned through a TCEQ newsletter that Dow was fined in 2021 for some of its wastewater permit violations. The fine was the result of a 2019 inspection of the Freeport facility by TCEQ that found excessive discharges of copper and halocarbons. But even Bodson didn’t know those details of the company’s recent water pollution issues until contacted by the Observer, which obtained the records only after repeated requests.

As with most Texas rivers, the water flowing between the Brazos’ banks is already spoken for. In the late 1800s, Texas began selling off surface water rights to the first bidder—creating a “first in time, first in right,” system. On the Lower Brazos, Dow is one of the majority shareholders. Most of Dow’s rights date back to 1942, meaning its water use has legal priority over anyone with newer rights.

About 30,000 acre-feet of this water is stored in Dow’s Harris and Brazoria reservoirs, giant impoundments near the cities of Angleton and Lake Jackson. These reservoirs are owned and operated by Dow, though they also supply water to eight area cities through a contract with the Brazosport Water Authority.

For years, Dow employees had a hunting and fishing club at the Harris Reservoir, which at one time was stocked with bass, catfish, and crappie. On Google Maps, a five-star review of the reservoir reads, “Great hidden gem of a perk for working with Dow.” Then at the end of 2018, the gates closed even to employees and club members. The company kicked off its expansion project, applying for permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and TCEQ to nearly triple its reservoir capacity. Once finished, around early 2026, the expanded reservoir will serve as drought insurance for Dow’s plant complex in Freeport, about 30 miles downstream.

Bruce Bodson, the executive director of the nonprofit, Lower Brazos Riverwatch, paddles next to construction debris that was illegally dumped into the Brazos River.

Harris is a storage reservoir, meaning its primary purpose is to divert and store water from the Brazos when it’s rainy and flows are strong. Dow can use banked water during drier times.

Bodson worries the project could lead to greater flood risks downstream. The company plans to build an outlet to Oyster Creek, an offshoot of the Brazos River that already floods during storms. Fort Bend County, home to the prosperous suburbs of Houston where Bodson and his organization are based, built levees right up against the Brazos instead of leaving room for the floodplain. So floodwater from the Brazos and from Oyster Creek has nowhere to go except farther south—meaning smaller and poorer communities in Brazoria County take the brunt of the damage.

Fort Bend “created a fire hose and pointed it at the next county south,” Bodson said. “There’s more people down there that are more vulnerable.”

In a federal environmental impact statement, Dow contends that its reservoir expansion includes plans to manage flood risk by increasing Oyster Creek’s capacity. “As part of obtaining required construction permits, extensive studies and modeling have been completed to understand and mitigate potential flooding risks,” a Dow spokesperson wrote via email, adding that the project “can be built without impacting flooding or the 100 year flood elevation in either the Brazos or Oyster Creek watersheds.” The permit application remains under review by the Army Corps, though Dow is planning to hire construction contractors soon. The Army Corps did not respond to the Observer’s questions for this story.

Dow’s water rights have long been a point of contention up and down the Brazos. But during Texas’ miserable 2011-2015 drought, these tensions exploded into an all-out legal battle that engulfed the whole state.

As the historic drought began, Dow asserted its senior water rights for the first time. At Dow’s behest, TCEQ cut off water to users with more recent rights, except for cities and power plants, which the agency exempted so people in the region wouldn’t run out of drinking water or electricity.

“Really for the first time, farmers were being told that they could not exercise their water rights,” recalled Jay Bragg, an associate director in the Texas Farm Bureau’s commodity and regulatory activities division. Although the river was flowing past parched farms, its water was already claimed by Dow, which waited downstream.

The Texas Farm Bureau stepped in. But the advocacy group targeted TCEQ rather than Dow, suing the agency for allowing cities and utilities to skip the priority line. Bragg said that strictly enforcing water rights would allow everyone in line

getting water even during severe drought. Ever since, a passive-aggressive line like this one has appeared in TCEQ’s biennial reports to the state Legislature: “Under the TCEQ v. Texas Farm Bureau decision, if suspension is necessary to satisfy a priority call by a senior or superior water right holder, TCEQ will not be able to exempt any junior water rights. This includes exemptions based on public health, safety, or welfare concerns.”

Around the same time in 2014, TCEQ created a watermaster for the Brazos, an official who monitors and enforces water use according to seniority. By then, Dow had banded together with other senior rights holders—including Houston-based power company NRG and the Gulf Coast Water Authority—to form the Lower Brazos River Coalition. The group pushed for the watermaster program in large part because they wanted to restrain junior users upstream.

“What we saw in 2011 and again in 2013 was the water wasn’t getting all the way down to the lower end of the Brazos. And so we felt that we needed to protect [our] interests,” said Ivan Langford, who was then general manager of the Gulf Coast Water Authority and is now retired. “Once it was all said and done, it became a tremendous tool to manage the water of the river.”

The watermaster program becomes critical during droughts and low flows. The Brazos watermaster is now one of four in Texas, with the others overseeing segments of the Rio Grande, Lower Colorado, and multiple river basins in South Texas. Increasingly, Texas’ rivers need referees to enforce the law and preempt fights—a signal that the state’s surface water is truly becoming scarce.

to plan accordingly and conserve water if needed. The case crawled through the court system, first in Travis County, then the 13th Court of Appeals and the Texas Supreme Court. In the end, the courts sided with the Farm Bureau, ruling that TCEQ lacks authority to prioritize junior rights holders. In other words, the law backed Dow’s domination of the river. The decision meant that any big company with older water rights can keep the public from

Experts and environmentalists generally support the watermaster system. But watermasters are not all-powerful. “When it doesn’t rain, the watermaster doesn’t make it rain,” Bragg said. The Brazos watermaster has had to curtail some individuals’ and farms’ water use every year since 2018, according to records provided by TCEQ.

“We’ve issued a whole lot of water rights—basically more water rights than there really is water in the river during dry years,” noted Myron Hess, a water

Biologist-turned-lawyer Bruce Bodson leads the nonprofit Lower Brazos Riverwatch, whose members monitor pollution and wildlife on the Brazos River from Waco to Freeport.

“We’ve issued a whole lot of water rights — basically more water rights than there really is water in the river during dry years.”

policy attorney affiliated with the Texas Living Waters Project, a consortium of conservation groups. When most rights were issued, the state ignored the need to leave some water in rivers to protect ecosystems, he said.

As the climate warms, the problems will get worse. A 2021 report from the state climatologist’s office at Texas A&M University explains that Texas might see slightly more rain in the future, especially in the form of extreme storms. But rising temperatures will lead to more evaporation from soil and surface water, worsening the consequences of droughts and causing greater evaporation from reservoirs.

Meanwhile, thanks to TCEQ v. Texas Farm Bureau, the state remains hamstrung in its ability to safeguard water supply for city dwellers and power generators, including during heat waves and winter freezes that strain the electrical grid.

Dow has set a goal to reduce water use 20 percent per pound of product by 2025 at six facilities, including Freeport, according to its most recent Environmental, Social, and Governance report. In 2013, the Freeport complex received a TCEQ award for its water conservation measures—like using more seawater and wastewater, and reducing its freshwater use by 10 percent in approximately two years.

The corporation does not expect to use more freshwater after its expansion: “Dow strives to offset water needed for growth with conservation,” the company’s spokesperson said.

Outside Dow’s gates, demand for Brazos River water continues to increase.

Relatively large cities on the Lower Brazos like Angleton, Lake Jackson, and Freeport began getting drinking water from the river in the 1980s. Smaller towns and villages like Surfside Beach and Quintana Beach still rely on groundwater wells. Both communities have had water quality issues, with high arsenic levels detected in Surfside’s water supply most recently in 2016.

Many residents don’t trust their homes’ tap water. The city halls in both Surfside and Quintana have an unusual feature: outdoor public taps where residents can draw purified water. On a February afternoon in Surfside Beach, Mayor Gregg

Bisso opened a closet just inside his city hall’s front door to reveal a reverse osmosis system humming away, providing extra treatment to the village’s well water. The machine is hooked up to that outside tap, which people visit throughout the week on golf carts laden with water jugs.

Surfside, a community full of colorful beach houses on stilts, has about 800 yearround residents. But during the summer, several thousand people might visit on any given day. In the early 2000s, Surfside saw

officials agreed to provide some water to Surfside, and Bisso’s employees have since been busy building the necessary infrastructure. “Everyone knew we were going to have to do this sooner or later,” the mayor said.

In February, Surfside’s Public Works Director Erik Ingram showed off the village’s updated “Swordfish” pump station, a small building suspended above one new well. This plant will receive Freeport’s water and mix it with Surfside’s well water at a roughly 2:1 ratio. The main purpose is to increase water supply. But it will have the added bonus of providing cleaner water, Bisso noted.

During the Observer’s visit, Surfside’s plant had everything it needed to start accepting and mixing Freeport water save for some electrical and communications equipment. The new water source is scheduled to start flowing on April 5. None of these communities, however, have priority over Dow if and when shortages occur.

Local governments, environmentalists, farmers, and other companies in the region seem very aware of growing water supply issues and of Dow’s domination of Brazos water rights. But the flip side of Dow’s presence on the Brazos—the wastewater it puts back into the river—gets less attention, even while evidence quietly piles up that Dow isn’t a good steward of the iconic river it has claimed as its own.

agencies, TCEQ has a habit of levying relatively small fines and often forgiving them if offenders take corrective actions.

A TCEQ spokesperson said via email that Dow’s exceedances happened when one of the company’s onsite tenants released cooling water and when some of Dow’s pipes leaked during Texas’ recent winter freezes. The spokesperson noted that Dow returned to compliance in September 2021, although the Observer found further examples of suspended solids and halocarbon exceedances after that in TCEQ permit records.

Dow’s spokesperson told the Observer: “Dow follows a root cause investigation process and has responded to TCEQ with appropriate findings and mitigation measures,” adding that the company does not project significant changes in

wastewater discharges as a result of its current expansion.

In its 2021 enforcement order, TCEQ classified those violations as “minor” or “moderate” and wrote that the facility discharged amounts of pollutants that would not be harmful to human health or the environment. But Kratka said the pollutants Dow dumps—notably copper and “purgeable halocarbons”—could pose serious environmental problems if too much enters the Brazos.

According to TCEQ’s 2019 inspection report, Dow released 1,2-dichloroethane, a halocarbon that can cause liver and kidney problems when inhaled or swallowed and is a probable human carcinogen. DowFreeport reported releasing two other halocarbons in its routine disclosures to the EPA Toxics Release Inventory for 2019,

2020, and 2021: 1,2-dichloropropane and 1,3-dichloropropene, both of which are considered likely human carcinogens by the EPA. Tony Dutzik, an associate director and environmental policy analyst at Frontier Group who researches industrial water pollution, explained that chemicals reported under Dow’s wastewater permit should overlap with the Toxics Release Inventory. Because Dow’s wastewater outfalls sit near the mouth of the Brazos, its wastewater may pose more problems for the coast and the Gulf than for the river itself. Coastal ecosystems and fisheries— like the oyster reefs that once fueled Dow’s production of magnesium—likely suffer the greatest harm, explained Alex Ortiz, a water resource specialist at the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter. There’s another potential source of

multiple summer weekends when water pressure dropped so sharply that people couldn’t get water up to their homes. Since then, the village’s public utility has drilled deeper wells and built a water tower, which has helped.

But Surfside still needs more water, so it’s turning to its larger neighbor, the City of Freeport. Four years ago, Freeport

In 2019, TCEQ conducted a routine inspection of Dow’s Freeport plants that found the chemical company had exceeded EPA effluent limits on pH, suspended solids, copper, and purgeable halocarbons. TCEQ fined Dow $28,350 in 2021 for those violations, with the option to donate $11,340 of the fine to Friends of the River San Bernard to preserve natural wetlands. The state agency promised to forgive another $5,670 upon Dow fulfilling conditions for getting its wastewater under control.

Kratka, the National Environmental Law Center attorney, laughed at these amounts. “That’s a pretty low fine. Especially for a company like Dow,” he said. In 2021, Dow earned $3.2 billion in gross profits. Compared to other states’ environmental

Erik Ingram, the public works director for Surfside Beach, and John Foster, the utilities supervisor, check equipment at one of the village’s groundwater wells.

“WHAT WE SAW IN 2011 AND AGAIN IN 2013 WAS THE WATER WASN’T GETTING ALL THE WAY DOWN TO THE LOWER END OF THE BRAZOS.”

pollution that can compound the problem. Dow and other companies manufacture miniscule plastic pellets, called nurdles or microplastics, that sometimes spill into the environment. “The concentration of other toxic chemicals that can attach themselves to individual nurdles can be thousands of times higher than within the ambient water,” Ortiz said. “That is really concerning because then we have these individual particles that are acting as essentially toxic sponges.”

These tiny toxic sponges are eaten by shellfish (including the struggling Gulf oysters), shrimp, and small fish. The small creatures then are eaten by larger ones— including humans—with the toxic plastics becoming more concentrated at each level of the food chain. Animals that consume nurdles can starve because their digestive systems become blocked or they feel full without having eaten actual food.

Dow’s current permit doesn’t mention nurdles but forbids the complex from discharging “floating solids or visible foam in other than trace amounts.”

This standard language in other TCEQ wastewater permits has been used to punish another company in Texas for plastic nurdle pollution: Using the rule on floating solids, longtime coastal activist Diane Wilson sued Formosa Plastics in 2017. In 2019, a federal judge ordered the company to pay a $50 million settlement.

While Dow-Freeport does manufacture plastic nurdles, Dow’s spokesperson wrote in an email to the Observer that nurdles have not contributed to the facility’s total suspended solids exceedances documented by TCEQ. Those exceedances typically happen during storms, when intense rain washes dirt and silt into wastewater streams, according to the company spokesperson.

A citizen science initiative called Nurdle Patrol, organized by the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas, has documented nurdles around Freeport on the Brazos River, the Intracoastal Waterway, and on the area’s popular public beaches—though other stretches of the Texas coast have far more nurdles. (There are also other potential sources of microplastics near Freeport, not just Dow.) Recognizing this danger, TCEQ proposed a new rule last year that

would have required companies to show they’re taking preventative measures to keep microplastics from escaping into the environment. But Dow, along with the Texas Chemical Council, opposed this move and TCEQ dropped the idea.

Along the Brazos overall, a lot of pollution comes from cities’ wastewater and runoff from farms. But industrial pollution is uniquely toxic. A 2022 report by Environment America—which Tony Dutzik co-authored—found that the watershed receiving Dow-Freeport’s wastewater is the second-most polluted watershed in the United States by toxicityweighted chemicals.

The fact that this toxic pollution isn’t being properly controlled reflects poorly on Dow and on TCEQ, activists and experts say. Many believe the agency does not effectively regulate industry, citing other cases of exceedances and low fines.

In 2021, more than 20 environmental groups petitioned the EPA to withdraw TCEQ’s delegated authority to administer wastewater permits under the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System, the type of permit Dow has violated.

“Industrial facilities in Texas exceeded wastewater discharge permits more than any other state in the nation in 2018,” the petition noted. In January 2023, the EPA wrote to the petitioners confirming it’s conducting an “informal investigation” of the allegations in the petition.

Sharron Stewart still lives in a red brick house on the corner of a quiet street in Lake Jackson, the Dow company town. Big windows let sunlight wash over dozens of paintings, many depicting the ocean, including some Stewart painted herself. Her peaceful home provides a stark contrast to the looming industrial backdrop just downriver.

At 84, Stewart has given up painting, but she still attends public meetings to speak out against polluters. Her house is full of books on environmental law, oil spills, and coastal activism. A bookshelf near her front door holds memorabilia from her decades-long career as an advocate for the ocean, for our air and waterways, and for human health.

Dow is not the only industrial polluter on the Lower Brazos. Between Lake Jackson and Freeport is a miles-long maze of pipes, smokestacks, and storage tanks emblazoned with logos that read like a who’s who of the petrochemical industry. There’s the sprawling BASF complex, Huntsman, SI Group, and several other chemical manufacturers, as well as natural gas exporters Freeport LNG and Phillips 66. In the middle of it all is the Port of Freeport, which receives 3,000 container ships each year.

Locals like Stewart are regularly subjected to air and water pollution from these facilities and their incessant traffic. Particularly hard hit is Freeport’s East End, a historically Black neighborhood, surrounded on three sides by industry and the port. After suffering from disproportionate pollution for decades, the once-bustling neighborhood is now being swallowed up by the port.

The same week she spoke to the Observer in her home, Stewart drove to Freeport to comment on the imminent reopening of Freeport LNG after an explosion the previous year.

“This just sort of fell onto me,” she said of her years of environmental activism, “and this was worth doing.” The trouble is, no one has really stepped up to succeed Stewart in holding the region’s most powerful company accountable. While this corner of the Gulf Coast has plenty of environmental activists, many are busy fighting air pollution—which affects locals more immediately—and new facilities like Freeport LNG. Older chemical companies like Dow seem to be getting a free pass on water pollution by escaping public scrutiny.

As of March 2023, Dow-Freeport’s wastewater permit remains in limbo at TCEQ. The company benefits from the Brazos watermaster program and the TCEQ v. Texas Farm Bureau decision at the expense of junior water rights holders. The impending expansion of Dow’s Harris Reservoir stands to consolidate the company’s hold over the Brazos River even further.

“They’re the policy-maker for the river,” Stewart said. “No matter who works on it, the decisions are ultimately theirs.”

The smokestacks of Dow and other petrochemical plants dominate the skyline in the Lower Brazos River watershed around Freeport

TEXAS NEEDS AN OBSERVER— THAT’S WHY WE NEED YOU

Thanks to our readers, alums, and friends in Mastodon’s Fediverse who reached out and kept us alive.

by TEXAS OBSERVER STAFF

Texas Needs an Observer.

The staff of the Texas Observer would like to extend our biggest high five and our utmost gratitude to the 4,800 (!) people who donated to our GoFundMe. You saved the day and helped make this issue and our ongoing reboot of this muckraking, truth-telling magazine possible.

Some supporters are longtime readers who knew Molly Ivins or have served on the board of the Texas Democracy Foundation, our nonprofit parent. Others recently befriended us on social media platform Mastodon. Many words of solidarity came from beloved TXO alums, including journalists who started their careers here. Olivia Messer—whose first investigation of sexual misconduct by Texas legislators was published by the Observer (a story no other outlet would touch)—wrote: “I’m paralyzed by sadness for what was my first real reporting home and what was, for Texas, a place uniquely and steadfastly dedicated to holding a spotlight onto injustice and oppression.”

Readers from as far away as New Zealand

and Canada spotted our SOS in the New York Times, the Daily Beast, Mother Jones, the Guardian, Democracy Now, and in the Nation, which declared: “This magazine can be saved. Indeed, it must be saved. And the journalists who produce it must be assured the financial security they need to keep speaking truth to power in 2024 and beyond.” Our biggest donation—$10,000—came from a generous angel investor who wanted to remain anonymous. Many more of you gave what you could even in tax season, from $10 to $1,000. Every dollar made a difference. You literally stopped the doors from closing— and have given us time to rebuild.

In the thick of our fight for survival, some staffers were brought to tears by the more than 200 individual messages of support. It turns out that many more people than we knew believe in the free press, in investigative reporting, and in the Observer. Here’s some of the reasons why, as contributors like J.J. Hermesso and David Millar said, “Texas needs an Observer.”

all the Texas Observer has given me.” —Eric Dafoe

“The legacy of Molly Ivins and so many others needs to carry on!” —Eric Hanselman

“We need progressive voices in Texas, now more than ever.” — Everard

Santamarina

“The Observer is essential if there’s any hope for the future of my native state.” —France Davis

“We need more progressive voices in Texas, not fewer.” —Frank Brill

“We need to save the journalism profession, especially in areas where authoritarianism is taking hold and threatens all.” —Gary Blog

“Molly Ivins was my spirit animal.” —Hilary Jetty “Survive and endure, baby!” —Jacob Wagner

“We need a voice to counter the Bozos my fellow Texans keep electing to office.” —James Brannon

“The Texas Observer is honorable, venerable, and essential.”

—James Galbraith

“We need more journalism like this. Independent, honest and with a focus on preserving the natural resources of Texas instead of making money exploiting them.” —Jennifer Hilliard

“I had to make a second donation to note that Mastodon was one of the ways I learned about this fundraiser. It was all over my timeline!” —Jeri Dansky

“Keep up your essential journalism no matter what!” —Jim Ball

“Independent media is worth protecting.” —Jim Hill

“The Texas Observer is indispensable.” —Joe McLaughlin

“100% support investigative journalism—especially from the Texas Observer! Well-researched facts supporting the reports and stories on politics are vital to us all. T.O. must survive to help keep Texas a reasonable place to live and work.” —Joe-Beth Kirkpatrick

“We need the Texas Observer.” —John Cotter

“Texas needs you more than ever.” —John Haynes

“Supporting essential journalism and the journalists who do the work” —John Moritz

“Preserve democracy!” —John Sutherland

“I’ve read the Observer for like 10 years. Nothing really like it in Texas.” —John Thurmond

“Crush it, y’all.” —Julie Poole

“Texas needs investigative journalism!” —Justin Dorrell

“Texas needs independent journalism now more than ever.” — Justin Williams

“The Texas Observer fights the good fight on the side of the angels. It gives me hope.” —Karen Brown

“I’ve been reading the Observer for 50 years, when Northcott and Ivins were writing about the Dirty Thirty. All things must end someday, but neither the T.O. nor I are ready yet.” —Khalil Ayoub

“I gave even though the Observer doesn’t recognize me as a true Texan since I don’t live in Texas time. Been reading the Observer for about 60 years, the last 50 in El Paso.” —Kitty Schild

“From the Fediverse.” —Long Tong

“It is critical to keep this quality of journalism alive in Texas.”

—Lori McAndrews

“I want to support journalism here in Texas.” —Lucinda Kapral

“Real journalism matters.” —Marc Anderson

“We need journalism like the Observer supplies. Wish I had more to give.” —Margaret Mitchell

“Texas needs to be observed; now more than ever.”

—Marie Piazza

“I want the Texas Observer to survive. Molly Ivins would want that.” —Marie Smith

“Keep up the good fight. Texas is in shambles and needs journalists like you to get the truth out to people and to expose the corruption of the government nitwits running the state.”

—Gayna Dupont

“Scrappy little group. I’m hoping you’ve got this!”

—Gloria Sanderson

“Long time subscriber. Happy to know you will continue the good trouble.” —Guadalupe Peña

“Remember the Alamo, Goliath, and Molly Ivins!!!!!! Save the Texas Observer and piss off Texas Republicans!!!!” —Harold Willis

“This is a great cause.” —Henry Wong

“In solidarity from a fellow journalist.” —Jordan Smith

“I was a longtime subscriber and supporter of the TO, back in the 1980’s and onward. Just can’t stand the idea of it falling silent. There’s so much more muck to rake! —Joshua Hayes

“I know and respect Texans who fight against voter suppression, women’s right to choose, the influence of Donald Trump and other threats to our democracy.” —Joyce Kaiser

“I am conservative and disagree with the typical slant of the Observer. I love the passion, and want to be challenged in my thought process. They have not convinced me yet, but I look forward to the ongoing challenge.” —Julie Chavez

“Wishing the best to all staffers at the TxO. From a former colleague.” —Kolten Parker

“I have enjoyed Texas Observer articles for years—and have appreciated many in-depth articles on our state’s natural resources and people. Even in the age of free, accessible, online information, quality journalism like this is worth an investment.” —Leah Cuddeback

“It’s absurd that we might lose a voice like the Texas Observer over so little money and in such a way. The relentless and critical work of Observer staff is the real heart of the publication, and they should be treated as such.” —Lenna Mendoza

“Your work is too meaningful, too germane, too pressing to the health of our democracy to end.” —Linda Zhou

“Glad to be a small help to such a wonderful cause.” —Mark Harrington

“Grateful for all the great work TX Observer journalists do to speak the truth and help hold those in power accountable. We need their work now more than ever in TX!” —Mark McKim

“Read about it on Mastodon. I value the reporting and want to help.” —Matt Ferrel

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. Molly Ivins,” quoted by Melissa Hawthorne

“We need progressive voices in Texas, now more than ever.”

“We need a voice to counter the Bozos my fellow Texans keep electing to office.”

“I believe in open government and transparency. I believe that our democracy is in danger from an anti-politics of hatred and intolerance.” —Michael Puttonen

“A free press is vital to our Democracy. Fascism is taking hold in Texas, courtesy of the state’s anti-democratic GOP leaders. The Texas Observer must keep going to inform Texans about what’s happening.” —Michele Hilmer

“Keep raising hell Observer staff!” —Michelle Willoughby

“Solidarity from a fellow TX journalist. The work you do is vital.” —Miranda

Suarez

“We continue to need these voices!!!” —Nancy E. Lewis

“The Texas Observer has been a beacon of critical, in-depth reporting and important commentary for nearly 70 years. Let’s keep that tradition alive!” —Nick

Schwellenbach

“I want to give the TO a fighting chance to reinvent itself in a fiscally sustainable incarnation. I hope to help buy time for y’all to figure out if that’s possible.” —Nina Meigs

“Texas seriously needs the journalism.” —Pablo Lastra

“Good luck. You are needed now more than ever.” —Patricia

Pomerleau

“Not only TX, but the entire USA needs credible, fact-based journalism & critical thinkers: now, more than ever.” —Paul Watlington

“The Texas Observer is too important a voice to lose.” —Pete Morris

“I support local news, whether it’s in Pasadena Texas or in Pasadena California. You’ll never know what the bastards are doing when reporters aren’t covering those beats. Here’s a little coin to help stay in the fight.” —Phil Hopkins

“Texas needs more small journalism outfits, not fewer. Also, they’re one of the few organizations taking Mastodon seriously.” —Preston Maness

“I started my career at this place and my life would have been very different without the Observer taking a chance on me. I know that countless others cut their teeth penning stories for TO, and our state and the press corp is better for it.” —Priscila

Mosqueda

“The Texas Observer provides essential information to counterbalance the forces of radical conservatism in Texas. It is a necessary and essential publication. Please, don’t go away.” — Priscilla

A. Wright

“Thanks to Mother Jones for alerting many of us to this situation. Hope this helps, and that the Texas Observer lives on.” —Rachel Anne Jenkins

“The falsehoods being spread by far-right media and politicians needs to be fought by reporting of facts. This is especially true in red states such as Texas.” —Randolph Faux

“I believe in you.” —Ray Chapman-Wilson

“It’s free and reliable news.” —Refugio Guajardo

“I support independent media!” —Rex Schrader

“A Canadian stands with you. Keep fighting the good fight.” —Rob Bos

“Honest journalists are our under-celebrated heroes. Who else will reveal truths the Powerful don’t want the rest of us to know? Journalists are always among the first to be arrested in authoritarian societies. I wonder why? KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!” —Roger Levin

“I donated because I see what the extreme right wing is doing to the rights of the people of this state (especially right to healthcare). For this reason, we are in dire need of independent reporting by the Texas Observer, freedom of the press baby!” —Ruben Rosas

“Texans need this historical source of Truth as Republican officials in Austin attempt to destroy our government, our public schools and our health care system.” —Sally J. Andrade

“Had the privilege of meeting Ronnie Dugger back in the day. I desperately want to see the Texas Observer survive!!”

—Sarah Gonzales

“I’m a loyal subscriber who values quality journalism. Texas needs y’all.” —Sarah Self-Walbrick

“My father, Alex Dickie, was an early supporter, a Democrat of Texas, with Frankie Randolph and Creekmore Fath. Also, the Old Observer is very important to many.” —Sarah Todd

“The Texas Observer is too important to lose!” —Scott Sperling

“This important and historic Texas news source is too vital to be allowed to go away!” —Sherry L Hill

“We need investigative journalism more than ever.”

—Shoshana Arai

“I wish I could give more! Thank you ” —Stephanie Stebbins

“We read about this on Mastodon.” —Steve Kohler

good long-form journalism.” —Steven Wishnia

“The Observer is the only independent voice calling out the rich and powerful.” —Susan Chizeck

“To support liberal values and independent journalism in Texas.” —Sverre Amundsen

“For years the Observer has been keeping an eye on our state politics with integrity and tenacity. It’s a Texas treasure.” —Tasca Shadix

“It’s crucially important that the Texas Observer ’s distinct style of journalism perseveres, so it can persist in reporting the truth, especially as it concerns the boondoggle that is the border wall and the kabuki theater that is Operation Lone Star.” —Tim Sullivan

“We support local independent journalism! Every little bit helps!” —Tina Malone

“Molly lives!” —Todd R Yarbrough

“Liberal voices are needed in Red Texas.” —Travis Good

“The Texas Observer provides essential coverage.” —Valeri Bogucki

“I know how important the Observer is to Texas—it is the REAL ‘Eyes of Texas!’” —Victory Chase

“What an appalling way to treat any human beings. What an appalling way to reward your solid, necessary work. Thank you for sounding the alarm and good luck.” —Virginia Raymond

“It pains me that this is happening and it’s partly because subscribers like me let their subscription lapse. Argh!!! We can’t lose this institution!” —Wayne Surber

“We cannot permit smaller news outlets to fail. They represent the voices of the people and are not controlled by giant media companies. The right wants them silenced. We cannot allow that to happen on our watch.” —Robert Alfieri

“I believe the Texas Observer is needed to review and report on the Texas legislature and Texas politics.” —Robert Nunis

“We can’t let the bad guys off the hook. The Observer helps spread the word about critical developments in Texas and helps hold wrongdoers accountable” —Robin Hall

“Best investigative journalism in the state.” —Robin Jett

“Truth in Texas disappears without this totally trusted place!”—Rodney Brow

“I don’t live in Texas, but my grandchildren do, and I’m thinking about their future. It will be a better place if the Observer keeps publishing—it’s one of the few independent publications left doing

“I learned about this on Mastodon and think it’s important.” — Wilhem Oliva

“I started reading the Texas Observer while I was in college, over 50 years ago. Please keep it going!” —William Crosier

“TX needs freedom of expression and facts in the press!” —Winnifred Overton

“Independent journalism questions the status quo that corporate media and change-resistant politicians and bureaucrats will not. Be an upstander, not a bystander!” —Wolf Sittler

“I support nonprofit news, especially the Texas Observer. We need this org, and I wish I could do more to keep it going.” —Steven M. Alford

“The Texas Observer is indispensable.”

“The Texas Observer is too important a voice to lose.”

POSTCARD

200,000 STEPS

grew up in northwest Austin at the edge of the Texas Hill Country, where hiking through the woods and playing in creeks were daily activities. So, I’ve always been an “outdoors person.” After moving to Houston for a journalism job, I quickly began running and biking along the city’s mostly concrete-lined bayous. Then an environmental activist told me something intriguing: Just an hour north of the traffic and skyscrapers of downtown Houston is the 96-mile Lone Star Hiking Trail, the longest footpath in Texas.

During April 2020, I began a quest to hike the full trail along with a friend in my “COVID bubble.” It was a sunny and unseasonably hot day as we embarked from mile marker zero inside the 163,000acre Sam Houston National Forest. So early in the pandemic, we hiked without seeing another person, hearing a car on the road, or spotting an airplane in the sky. The only sounds were chirping birds, squirrels and lizards scurrying, and the wind blowing through the leaves.

It was a Coronavirus-safe activity and I was hooked.

On maps, the national forest is depicted as a massive patch of public land. But on the ground, hundreds of U.S. Forest Service tracts are broken up by private timberlands, farms and ranches, and a growing number of rural homes and subdivisions. Mostly flat to rolling terrain, the forest is laced with creeks as well as

the east and west forks of the San Jacinto River and the not-so-scenic lanes of Interstate 45.

Starting near Richards and ending near Cleveland, the Lone Star Hiking Trail proper is 96 miles through the forest with five optional loops adding another 32 miles. Depending on one’s height and weight, that’s roughly 200,000 steps.

Given a pace of about three miles per hour, it would take roughly 32 hours to hike the entire trail nonstop. Hiking about eight hours per day means less than a week of hiking and camping.

But that’s not the path I chose. It took me sixteen trips with various friends over two years to hike the entire trail. Confession: We weren’t disciplined about it; sometimes weeks or months lapsed between forays. Most often, I’d park my car at one of the 15 trailheads and we’d hike for five or six miles and then head back. On every visit, the trail provided valuable relief with its clean air, social distancing, and an escape from the four-wall confinement of lockdown and stress. Our slower approach allowed us to experience the forest in all four seasons.

Spring is marked by fresh light green leaves, wildflowers and white color pops of dogwood and magnolia blossoms. The summer can be brutally hot, but it’s the best time to enjoy Lake Conroe or Double Lake. The fall brings orange, red, and yellow hues as purple beautyberries

and red yaupon holly berries ripen in the understory. Pine trees and oaks stay green during winter while colonies of colorful mushrooms and fungus sprout on the forest floor.

I shared our hikes on Twitter and Instagram, and the Lone Star Hiking Trail became a hit with my social media followers too.

It’s much easier to hike the trail virtually. To do it in person, you need plenty of water, snacks, insect repellent, spare socks, powder, paper towels and wipes, and willingness to rough it, since there are no bathrooms or vending machines aside from spartan amenities at the Stubblefield and Double Lake campgrounds. Good walking shoes and long pants with high socks reduce risks of scratches, bug bites and ticks. Snakes on this trail mostly flee from people. However, mosquitoes and spiders are fearless. Early morning hikes meant the person in the lead breaks overnight cobwebs. Scat with fur signaled coyotes and bobcats, but the most worrisome signs were the wallows and rooting of feral pigs. My worst fear was encountering hogs, which can attack when frightened or startled. Luckily, we never saw any.

Sam Houston is one of the state’s four national forests created by Cingress during the Great Depression. The timber industry previously clear-cut large swaths of the Piney Woods. State lawmakers

bought hundreds of barren tracts in 1933, with the intent of adding them to the national forest system. President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed Angelina, Davy Crockett, Sabine, and Sam Houston national forests in October 1936. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps planted millions of trees. The U.S. Forest Service gave the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club permission to build the trail in 1967. The trail and all its loops were complete by 1978. It’s big enough that you can easily get lost. I’m an experienced outdoorsman, but we’ve gotten lost on the Lone Star Hiking Trail, marked by small reflective markers nailed into the trunks of trees. It’s easy to lose track of the markers after leaving U.S. Forest Service land and walking down a rural road to the next section. Cellphone service can be spotty, so it’s best to download Lone Star Hiking Trail Club maps in advance. But not all of this wilderness is protected. Legally distinct from national parks and refuges, national forests can be used for hunting, fishing, timber, grazing, mining, oil, and natural gas. By law, the U.S. Forest Service must manage Sam Houston with no single resource emphasized over others. To that point, the 163,000 acres also include trails for ATVs, mountain bikes, and horses. Lakes are stocked with bluegill, largemouth bass, and catfish. Oil wells and easements for pipelines and power lines are common. Historically, wildfires kept the forest from getting too dense and unhealthy. Today, the U.S. Forest Service uses controlled burns and sustainable timber harvesting in efforts to control a pest known as the southern pine beetle and improve habitat for the red-cockaded woodpecker, an endangered species that favors open “pine savannas” and nests

from April to June. Over the decades, environmentalists and forest managers have sparred in court over forestry practices related to the beetle and woodpecker. I looked for those woodpeckers, but only heard their distinctive high-pitched chirps and tap tap-tapping hidden in the canopy.

Sprawl and suburbanization are the biggest threat to the forest and to this trail. I-45, the busy thoroughfare connecting Houston and Dallas, divides it in two, creating a formidable barrier for wildlife and people. The Texas Department of Transportation spent

next trail section.

Country-club communities such as Elkins Lake and the Texas Grand Ranch subdivision with its two- to five-acre lots allow people to live at the edge of the forest. As an unintended result, nonnative ornamental plants are escaping into the wild and becoming invasive species. The average person may not notice, but I kept spotting exotic plants like nandina, wax-leaf ligustrum, Chinese tallow, chinaberry, bamboo, and hardy orange all along the trail.

millions improving a 15-mile stretch of highway between Huntsville and New Waverly but spent little on allowing hikers or wildlife to cross safely under the roadway where cars speed past a white 67-foot statue of Texas founding father Sam Houston.

I wish the Texas legislature would use some of its $32.7 billion budget surplus to create a buffer for this trail—and improve the crossings that either don’t exist or have been damaged and make a throughhike so challenging. Unfortunately, this year has seen news in the opposite direction: The state recently lost a lovely park further north on the I-45 corridor that offered its own woodland paths.

In theory, animals can use the narrow corridor where Big Chinquapin Creek goes under the highway, but hikers must trudge four miles along three rural roadways and the I-45 frontage road in order to reach the

Volunteers with the Lone Star Hiking Club and the Houston area Sierra Club maintain the trail and try to clear out invaders. I’d love to give back and join them one day. But it’s a big job—and progress is often slow. A vehicle bridge to the Stubblefield Campground washed out during Hurricane Harvey in August 2017 but was not rebuilt until 2022. A footbridge over scenic and shaded bluffs of the east fork of the San Jacinto River in the Magnolia section of the trail was destroyed more than eight years ago and never replaced. Hikers are forced to take a complex detour, though I opted to park my car at the next trailhead and walk to the opposite bank.

Even as the pandemic fades, I’m still going back for more, particularly to hike the loops outside the main trail. To me, this escape seems even more valuable with Houston growing at a pace that will see it overtake Chicago as the third-largest U.S. city. Even as the metropolitan area expands in all directions, the forest still offers respite.

Lone Star Hiking Trail offers respite from the pandemic and urban sprawl.

Story and Photo By Sergio Chapa

Sergio Chapa is a Houston-based journalist and the author of a forthcoming book on the USMexico border.

POSTPARTUM PAGE-TURNER

by ROBERTO ONTIVEROS

journal writing of the dystopian hero Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984, as if the only private writing a new mother might expect to accomplish must take place covertly and by itemizing the losses of personal liberties in a feigned Google search. This list of prebaby pleasures includes poetry, napping, sex, and sleeping in—all the minor marvels of a comfortable life that now exist as outlandish and out-ofreach luxuries.

At Button’s cry, our narrator’s body responds immediately and irrespective of any plans she had to take a shower: “I unhook my unapologetically maternal bra and watch my nipples leak. Small seethrough white droplets drip down to the floor; My body weeps for Button.”

lovestruck girl, I find myself hoping that he will come visit again,” she says and starts to count the ways she might accidentally kill her baby.

Our protagonist’s stab at self-soothing takes the form of daydreams about a “sacred island” birthing center where a mom can leave her child to the elements and receive no judgment.

Austin author Szilvia Molnar’s debut novel The Nursery, a memoir-looking work about a new mother suppressing baby-harming thoughts, is an engaging experiment in uncomfortable empathy that finds its tonal antecedents in cerebral body horror movies like David Cronenberg’s The Brood and David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and its stylistic sisterhood in the early avant-garde confessionals of French novelist and screen writer Marguerite Duras.

Expressing the parasitic pain her unnamed narrator experiences while nursing her newborn, Molnar writes: “With a hand on the back of her head, I put her face toward my nipple and a toothless mouth opens. She latches on with lips soft as a fish. I squirm from the initial discomfort of her bite.”

Our heroine, a translator of Swedish literature who refers to her infant as a leech and calls her “Button,” goes on to detail the rushed hospital room moments after delivery as a kind of bartering of bodily fluids stalled by medical devices: “Liquids poured out of me, liquids were pushed into my veins, and a catheter was pricked into

my urethra.”

Molnar describes her character’s recovery with a detached, almost philosophical fatalism. “Strange how quickly blood stops being frightening after giving birth,” the postnatal protagonist observes in a morose meditation on how unadjusted she feels to her new role as a mother.

“Before Button arrived, I walked everywhere and leaving the apartment was a simple undertaking,” she says. “During a break from the library or my writing desk where most of my work takes place, I often ventured out onto the busy streets and hoped that the beat of the city would kick a word or two out in front of me, some phrase, idea, or feeling that could be of use for whatever text I was translating at the time.”

Now, at the mercy of her child’s hunger, the woman once accustomed to happily ruminating on the aesthetic possibilities inherent in root words, describes herself as “a milk bar.”

“Milk is on my skin, its residue around my nipples, dried under my breast, wet under my armpit, or milk rests in day-old sweat,”

she laments the degradations linked to lactation, and asks: “When am I ever really clean anymore?”

Her not-quite-rhetorical cry addresses both the nutritious scum on her body and the sick thoughts in her mind.

Our narrator attempts to quell racing thoughts and resentments of motherhood with Google searches that look like confessions being smuggled out to the Cloud:

I suppose I used to believe in scribbling in notebooks

writing letters

sealing envelopes shut slipping notes

The narrator types her catalog of nevermores into the search engine in a manner that ironically recalls the secret

The succinct and almost epigram-laden language of The Nursery roils and recedes in waves of anticipation and flashback, and our narrator, who asserts that her “state might be a portrayal of the elasticity of time,” is caught between temporal intangibles.

Her husband John, a supportive mate who (upon hearing his wife’s infanticidal fantasies) will end up hiding the kitchen knives, gently mocks her by asking why Scandinavians are so obsessed with death.

When our narrator asks what he means, John reminds her that the last four books she translated were about “a wife getting cancer, a son overdosing, then a child dying, and then a mother dying right after giving birth.”

John’s assessment is not exactly off. The Nursery explores an OCD-level of superstitious dread that has our heroine’s internet searches going from concerns about the dangers of swaddling to questions about whether or not one can die from sleep deprivation or a bleeding anus. Her infatuation with death, in fact, extends also to the merely decrepit, as she has a strange attraction to a recently widowed elderly upstairs neighbor named Peter who carries an oxygen tank around, plays the accordion, and is some kind of expert on moss. “As gullible as any

“Picture a giant maternity ward on top of a mountain. That’s where we should give birth because there we will be smothered in nurses and pillows, pampered with dim lights, fresh fruit, ice cream, croissants, olives, cheese, and foot rubs,” she rhapsodizes, extending the utopic amenities to a job-placement program and housing help should the worst case scenario occur. “If the baby doesn’t survive but you do, you are granted permanent residency on the island. You may pursue any unfulfilled dream on the island. Be an artist or a baker, a chemist or a welder, a sailor or a French teacher. Take that ikebana class you’ve always wanted to. The place is big enough for you to carve out a new life of your own choosing and small enough not to frighten you about making a change.”

Fantasies of mythical midwifery in this Thomas Mann-like Themyscira give way to the harsh fluorescents of hospital birth, and pamphlets that ask new moms: “Do you wish to harm your child?”

The tenebrous attention Molnar offers to her taboo topic is, outside of transgressive cinema, almost never examined, let alone made into such art. Works this brave are not allowed to exist unless they are exceptional.

The Nursery, which impossibly exists as the inaugural example of a page-turner about postpartum depression, might also be the last word on the subject.

Roberto Ontiveros is an artist, critic and fiction writer; his work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle the Threepenny Review the Dallas Morning News and others.

The Nursery

By Szilvia Molnar Pantheon 208 pp, $26

Austin author’s new memoir about motherhood is both engaging—and disturbing.

DEEP IN THE HEARTS OF CHILDREN

Being a public poet in Texas for 50 years

by NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Photography by SERGIO FLORES

Asixth-grader wearing a yellow floral dress waved me down, then sidled up to my car window in Albany, Texas. I was pulling out of her school parking lot for the last time.

“Thanks for coming,” she said. “I always knew there had to be another poemist out there somewhere.”

In 1974, my fiction writing professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Robert Flynn, had casually mentioned a fledgling program being sponsored by the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA). Called Artists in Education or Artists in the Schools, this program sent practicing artists in various disciplines into classrooms around the state (and many other states, such as New York, California, and Hawai’i) for short residencies, to encourage kids of all ages. I was about to graduate and had few plans for the future aside from paying back my college loan and writing.

Like a true professional, I traveled to Austin for my interview without a CV or single sample of my poetry. My dad drove me. I had lots of enthusiasm, though, and got the job on the spot. Into the schools of Texas!

Did I have any experience? Working for a summer journalism institute, literary magazine division, with high school writers at Trinity was all. Had I taken

any education courses? Not one. Zen Buddhism, handmade pottery, Sufism, art history, hymnology—perfect preparation. Did I have any books out? Of course not.

little more poetry could help us all better live our lives.

I said I’d like to do it for two years. My only local mentor, Rosemary Catacalos of San Antonio, had been working in schools for a few years already. “Check in with her,” the TCA people suggested. She had never been to college, had worked as a journalist, and would go on to become a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellow, the poet laureate of Texas, and my dear friend for 51 years. Rosemary said things like “Just give kids space. Read aloud. Use great examples.” Some Nova Scotians I met on a rainy street in Halifax handed me a Kenneth Koch book, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, about working with poetry in schools, in which Koch said teaching was not really what took place. “It’s more like letting the children discover something they already have.”

The words just jumped into the quiet. The words blasted into the dark.

—Seth Hansford

I was 22. We’d made construction paper poetry booklets when I was in second grade, back in the unheard-of province of Ferguson, Missouri. But I’d been sending my poems to magazines since I was 7 and believed anyone could do it. Certainly a

Driving the back roads of Texas in my old 1965 Mercedes Benz with an open sunroof, a full library of thin poetry books in wooden crates in my back seat, and Townes Van Zandt cassette tapes, the state opened up in front of me. Before computers, email, social media, Google Maps, we visiting artists found all the

places we needed to go. For years and years, I would find that poetry lived everywhere—Longview, Del Rio, Abilene, Amarillo. Voices, voices, voices. Corpus Christi kids blew my mind, they were so eloquent. I wondered if it had something to do with living next to that silvery, glittering water. In fact, all the kids were eloquent. Not once did I stumble upon any far-flung Texas community where poetry didn’t already live.

State arts commissions used a matching-funds system to pay for artist

residencies—schools paid the other half. The hope was, if a school wished to invite more artists, or wanted a return visit, they would pick up the full bill themselves—this often happened. In those days, artists in the schools were paid no per diem, so some of us chose to stay with hospitable families, so as not to spend too much of our income on motels. I once made a public request for a six-week lodging in Temple, having had no invitations, and a kind woman from Zenith Street stood up in the back row and said I was welcome

to her extra bedroom. New friends and relatives appeared everywhere—in Albany, Kingsville, and on a Comstock ranch where, for the first and last time in my life, I would ride a horse to work.

Classroom methods felt so simple— exposure and enthusiasm about writing and poetry were more important than expertise. I did not teach lists of poetry definitions. I did not encourage rhyme or dreaded cinquain or limerick forms. Essentially, I did not teach forms. Forever a proponent of “free verse” or “open

“I ALWAYS KNEW THERE HAD TO BE ANOTHER POEMIST OUT THERE SOMEWHERE.”

Texas Observer Poetry Editor Naomi Shihab Nye reads at the Poetry Out Loud competition in Austin in March.

The Road Between San Antonio and Comstock, Texas

—Naomi Shihab Nye

I think of it as a bloodline, clean thread stretching west, mind emptying so gently as it ranged farther from billboards, chains, farther from access roads, exits, deeper into sky, that road is why I love this state, despite politics, pronouncements, the boy called Cody in Comstock who wrote me, a year after I visited his class,  Basically poetry changed everything, it made me see where I was, could you please come back and stay forever?

Finding his letter again thirty years later, looking him up to learn he died young, cowboy hat over his downturned face, I want to say Your roads are still stretching outwards, the fields you walked through, we are here soaking in the mystery of time, trapped in our little houses, scared of a virus, feeling connected through the spaces, all of these new ways, and I remember you.

form” poetry, I banked on descriptions of topics, discussions of sample poems (always three, so young writers wouldn’t parallel the samples too closely), writing and sharing times. This was long before the TCA would promote the marvelous Poetry Out Loud national competition in memorization and recitation of other people’s poems, continuing today. I worked in public schools, private and parochial schools, large, small, and in-between. I’d often request the “at-risk” students if a school asked me to focus on the “gifted

and talented.” Only once did I ever feel scared—when some cowboys trailed me from a Comanche diner to my motel parking lot. I started driving in circles, then drove back downtown for a while, so they couldn’t see what room I entered. Later I pushed the ragged chair in my room up against the door. We had poetry programs, hallway exhibitions of illustrated poetry, to which parents were invited, handmade anthologies (I would stay up late at night, typing the poems for school print shops),

songs written by kids that became part of a marvelous cassette tape project, distributed throughout the San Antonio ISD, and plenty of joy and laughter. A Westside San Antonio principal integrated lines of poetry into every morning’s intercom announcement. Years later when librarians would ask me, “What did you do when kids made fun of one another’s work?” I could honestly say, “To my knowledge, they never did.” One time a teacher made fun of a boy who’d written about his brain, by saying, “I didn’t even

realize you had one,” but the students were always respectful in my presence.

I believe my grandmother lives/ beyond death, in my mirror.—Brenda L.

Burmeister

I don’t recall any fraught conversations or troubles around religion, politics, transgender students, abortions, guns, banned books, etc. Were we smarter then? When the wars in Iraq (to which I was adamantly opposed) kicked off, I recall asking myself what poetry could do. Maybe sharing poems by regular people of Iraq, moms and dads with worries and troubles of their own, might help Texas students think of the human beings everywhere who suffer and dream. Teachers at Hockaday School in Dallas urged me to make an international anthology, including such voices. And my life as an anthologist began. Of course, when one does the same job for a long time, testimonials materialize.

Teachers would report things like, “Johnny started turning in his math homework after that poetry workshop. What does poetry have to do with math?” A San Antonio eighth-grader with an F average in English won the national Scholastic Writing contest in poetry. A girl chased me down in an H-E-B to say, “Just wanted you to know that keeping that observation notebook ended up saving my life.”

Another girl I met randomly on a street said keeping a notebook had helped her realize what her life path should be. A mom began weeping one day when she saw me in line behind her at CVS. “Why is it,” she said, “that only once in my life was I invited to share my real voice?” For any of us who thought poetry mattered in the big picture in the beginning, we only came to think it mattered a lot more than we might have dreamed.

When I was born, it was like a big ocean with one fish. / Then it was like I

was not the only one in the ocean. /And when I was bigger, it was like an elephant in a jar.—Homer Soto

I never wanted to “turn people into poets.” I just wanted them to realize how rich their own experience was, how much material they had, to know that writing was their friend, and if they felt comfortable writing things down, their lives would be easier, whatever path they chose. To meet a librarian in George West who sponsored the “Find Your Book” project for seniors, so when they walked across the stage to collect their diplomas, “their” book would be mentioned as their favorite—a kind of handle on identity—was a revelation. Having lunch with students who were having trouble “finding their book,” I suggested local writers—J. Frank Dobie perhaps?—writers from Mexico, cross-cultural writers, and POETRY! Some of them had not even considered poetry. Years rolled by and unfortunately testing became a lot more important. The rising

Performers listen to what’s happening on stage at this spring’s Poetry Out Loud competition.

Texas, Out Driving

—Naomi Shihab Nye

The Solid Rock Church of Kerrville has moved to another location. It says so on the sign under its name – Solid Rock.

Also the entire town of Comfort appears to be for sale. this does not feel comforting at all.

How many times we drove these curves, pale fence posts, bent cedars… but nothing needs us here.

Nothing we said, thought, forgot, took root in the ditch around the bend. I always want to stop at historic markers, see what happened long before, but the pull of motion keeps a car going, passing by till next time, which soon won’t come, even when everything we know says slow.

stress level in classroom curriculums felt palpable. Not one teacher I ever met suggested affection for the standardized testing obsession. It felt as if teachers had lost some of their personal creative agency along the way—the ability to manage their own academic time clocks and expectations for students. I kept remembering the brilliant Texas journalist Bill Moyers saying he had fallen in love with poetry because his high school English teacher in Marshall always read his class a poem right after lunch. It wasn’t for an assignment or a future test, it was simply for pleasure. What happened to pleasure?

Not one person ever said that writing poetry hurt them. It didn’t take that long to write a rough draft of a poem, after all. You could sneak it into a day.

One summer in San Antonio, I accepted a volunteer assignment to visit a community center where kids experiencing trouble with reading and writing were taking a mandatory course. The maintenance director met me outside.

“Sorry to say, our air conditioning’s out.” Oh well, Bill Moyers hadn’t gone to high school with air conditioning.

Inside the steamy room of middle-school participants, a hip-hoppy guy waved his hand. “Do you think it’s possible to fall in love with a single word?”

Uh, yes I do. Realizing how this might go wrong, I nodded and said, “Do you have such a word?”

He took a breath. “Yes, I do! LYRICAL.”

And another great day with language began.

My voice can be a swan/and speak with its wings/but behind it is a shadow/that looks like the world.—Vangie

Castillo

Forever I will be grateful to the Texas Commission on the Arts for taking chances

on so many of us, for believing in classrooms, kids, and teachers, artists and writers. I will be grateful to the hundreds of Texas schools that accepted and welcomed us. I went on to work all over the world, but Texas schools stayed deep in the center of my heart. Bolstered by TCA’s idealism and vast Texas-sized community spirit, the wandering artists turned in handwritten reports about every residency, containing samples of work, mailing them in large brown envelopes to Austin. I always drew stars next to the address.

Naomi Shihab Nye was the poetry editor of the Texas Observer for 28 years. She was also the poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine in 2020-2021 and has written or edited around 35 books. The lines of poetry quoted here were written by the students she met in the TCA visiting artists program.

TOGETHER, WE OBSERVE TEXAS.

PHARR

An El Paso member gives. A whistleblower in Austin leaks proof of corruption. A Molly fan in Mesquite names us in her estate plans. A Houston student peruses at the library. A San Marcos activist appreciates investigative journalism. An RGV member orders merch. A San Antonio reader joins the MOLLY Awards gala.

Naomi Shihab Nye says she never tried to turn kids into poets, but just to help them “realize how rich their own experience was.”

An Evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning author

Annette Gordon-Reed has been postponed.

Annette Gordon-Reed, author of “Juneteenth” and the landmark “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings,” grew up in Texas and then distinguished herself as an historian, author and Harvard professor.

For sponsorship information, contact: events@texasobserver.org