A Post-Chronicle memory

I still have the clip of my first Post column from 1985. Sorry, folks, there were no links in those days.

In a post on her Gray Matters site, the Houston Chronicle’s Lisa Gray has used the announcement that the paper is moving to the old Houston Post building to collect memories about the Post from former staffers and others. I have never set foot in that building, but I will always be grateful to those who did.

Lisa’s post includes a comment from me that the Post was the first professional paper to publish my columns. There’s a little more to the story. In mid-1985, I was writing a column and editing the opinion page for The Battlation, the student newspaper at Texas A&M. One of my professors (Don Sneed, for any former Batt-ratts reading this) got an op-ed published in the Post and the editor, Charles Rankin, mentioned that the Post was always on the lookout for younger voices to put on the opinion pages. The professor suggested I send them something.

So I mailed a dot-matrix printout of a column I wrote about some controversy involving the Doonesbury cartoon strip. The Post not only published it, they paid me $50.

From then on, I would send the Post pieces from time to time, and over the next couple of years I probably had a dozen or so that appeared in print. I tried something similar with the Chronicle, but it didn’t pay for op-eds, so I focused on the Post. Some of my columns even generated responses from readers in Houston.

I had hoped to parlay the opportunity into an editorial internship that the Post offered under Lynn Ashby, but my wife got an internship for her master’s working Dallas. So we moved there and I became a business writer. But I will always be grateful to the Post for giving me my first taste of big city journalism.

Fire Fight: Houston’s pension battle heats up

My column in the latest issue of Texas Monthly discusses the battle between Houston Mayor Annise Parker and the Houston Firefighters’ Relief and Retirement Fund. Parker has sued the pension fund twice, seeking to give the city more say over the contributions it’s required to make. The pension, though, has little incentive to come to the bargaining table.

The offices of the Houston Firefighters’ Relief and Retirement Fund are nestled in a wooded enclave near the George Bush Intercontinental Airport. On a cold, wet morning in early February, behind the glass doors and the blond-brick facade, the building offered refuge from the harsh reality outside. For more than 6,500 active firefighters and retirees, the HFRRF itself does exactly that, providing protection against forces that want to reduce their retirement benefits. And recently those forces—once relegated to the realm of argument and public pressure—have turned to a full-scale legal assault.

In January Mayor Annise Parker brought suit against the fund, seeking changes to a thirties-era state law that has left the city powerless to control the amount it must contribute to the firefighters’ retirement. The suit is the second in as many years, and Todd Clark, the fund’s chairman, says he has no intention of bending to Parker’s demands. Sitting in the HFRRF’s second-floor boardroom, Clark dismisses the lawsuits as a political vendetta against the firefighters, who supported Parker’s opponents in the past three elections. He claims that she wants to gain control of the pension and slash its benefits to pay for other city programs. “We’re being attacked by this mayor, and we’ve been attacked since day one,” he says. For her part, Parker claims that she simply wants to have a say in how much the city commits to retirees.

While Houston is faring better than many other cities, it is, like cash-strapped municipalities across the country, confronting an ugly truth: thanks to rising health care expenses and longer life spans, cities are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to afford the open-ended promises made to workers in years past. Pensions like the $3.7 billion managed by the HFRRF are an anachronism in the modern American workplace, where cheaper, “self-directed” retirement plans such as 401(k)s tend to dominate, at least in the private sector. Houston’s firefighters have a defined-benefit plan, which means the fund must pay for employees’ retirement benefits for as long as they live, regardless of the actual cost.

Generous public-sector pension plans have endured because city leaders have realized that boosting retirement benefits is a lot easier than raising salaries. Raises, after all, come out of the current budget. Pensions don’t have to be paid for decades—long after the current leaders are out of office. “It’s just a complete abdication of responsibility,” says Shad Rowe, a Dallas investment manager and a former member of the state’s Pension Review Board. “It isn’t a problem that gets better as you ignore it.”

Read more here.

“Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas does not love you!”

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Anthony Pizzitola, a Houston autograph collector. With the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination coming up, he wanted to share a particular item from his collection with me. I wrote about Pizzitola last year, after the death of astronaut Neil Armstrong. Pizzitola wrote a book about Armstrong’s autograph, among the most sought-after signatures in the world, and he has an extensive collection of them. His collection, though, is far more extensive than just astronauts. He often tries to get famous people to write a quote they’re known for above their signatures.

He sent me the image above — the autograph of former Texas First Lady Nellie Connally, under the words she spoke to President John F. Kennedy moments before he was shot. They were probably the last words Kennedy ever heard. I was familiar with the quote, but seeing it written in Connally’s own hand gave me chills.

Pizzitola said he wasn’t sure how Connally would react when he approached her at a book signing in 2004 and asked her to write the words. She simply commented that no one had ever asked her for that before and honored his request.

I’m not the only one who found this story interesting. The Houston Chronicle’s Kyrie O’Connor wrote about Pizzitola and his collection today as well. 

The Feds and Fracking: A Chicken or Egg Question

A gas drilling rig in the Barnett Shale, where George Mitchell pioneered the hydraulic fracturing techniques (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My story on Houston oilman George P. Mitchell in the latest issue of Texas Monthly is still behind the paywall, but a sidebar I wrote on the role of the federal government in developing hydraulic fracturing technology is now posted on the magazine’s web site.

I interviewed Dan Steward, one of Mitchell’s former geologists, who inadvertently sparked the controversy with comments he made several years ago. In this piece, Steward sets the record straight.

His conclusion: the feds funded some of the early research that enabled Mitchell to develop commercially successful fracking techniques, but the government’s role wasn’t as great as some federal officials contend.

Steward’s conclusion: “George probably could have done it without the government. The government would not have done it without George.”

`The Energy Hunter’ in the next Texas Monthly

Texas Monthly has released its cover for the November issue, which includes my story on how Houston oilman George P. Mitchell changed the world. The issue will be available on newsstands Oct. 24. An online version of the story should be available later this week.

On Nov. 19, I’ll be moderating a 6 p.m. panel discussion at Rice University on the sustainability of hydraulic fracturing. We’ll discuss how long the shale boom may last and how we should use it to prepare for the future. The panelists are Arthur Berman of Labyrinth Consulting, Kenneth Medlock with the Center for Energy Studies at Rice’s Baker Institute, and Scott Tinker, director of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas. If you’d like to attend, RSVP here.