Moore County Journal

On this week’s episode, Matthew speaks with Ross, Cassi and Kate about the Texas Legislature’s move to limit Gov. Greg Abbott‘s power during a pandemic. They also discuss the University of Texas at Austin’s report on “The Eyes of Texas.”

Disclosure: University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Texans age 50 and older will be eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine beginning March 15, state health officials announced Wednesday.

“Expanding to ages 50 to 64 will continue the state’s priorities of protecting those at the greatest risk of severe outcomes and preserving the state’s health care system,” said Imelda Garcia, Department of State Health Services associate commissioner for laboratory and infectious disease services and chair of the Expert Vaccine Allocation Panel.

The move to expand eligibility to a new category of Texans — labeled 1C — means that vaccine availability is ramping up across the state. However, appointments may continue to be hard to find, as the number of eligible recipients outnumbers the vaccine supply. Before the Wednesday announcement, between 10 million and 13 million people — more than one-third of Texas’ population — were already eligible, according to state health officials.

Previously, doses of the vaccine were limited to front-line health care workers, long-term care residents and staff, people 65 year old and older or at least 16 with a qualifying health condition. Last week, teachers and child care workers also became eligible, after President Joe Biden’s administration directed states to prioritize school employees.

To date, nearly 7 million doses of the vaccine have been administered across Texas and more than 4.5 million people have received at least one dose, according to state data. In total, about 8.5% of the Texas population has been fully vaccinated.

In recent weeks, service workers, including grocery store and restaurant staff, have been advocating to be included in the next round of eligibility after spending nearly a year on the front lines of the pandemic.

Claudia Zapata, representative for the ATX Restaurant Organizing Project, said in a statement that she is “disappointed and angry but not surprised” that service workers were not given priority access to the vaccine.

The announcement comes on the same day that the statewide mask mandate ends, further stoking fear about the virus’ spread among those in the industry. On Monday, service workers gathered outside the Texas Capitol to protest the decision to roll back safety restrictions and demand that they be given access to the vaccine.

Federal recommendations suggest all essential workers not included in phases 1A and 1B be included in this next phase, though Texas has previously strayed from that advice.

Texas is still far from herd immunity — the level at which a sufficient proportion of the population is immune to COVID-19 to stop its spread. Experts estimate that between 70% and 80% of Texans will need to be vaccinated to cross that threshold. That amounts to nearly 100% of adults in the state.

The announcement of the expanded vaccine eligibility comes on the same day that the statewide mask mandate ends. The mandate was first implemented by Gov. Greg Abbott last July. On Monday, service workers gathered outside the Texas Capitol to protest the decision to roll back safety restrictions and demand that they be given access to the vaccine.

Abbott hinted about the vaccine announcement during a press conference last week, when he announced he was rescinding the mask mandate and allowing every business —including restaurants, bars, retail stores and sports stadiums — to operate at 100% capacity. Abbott cited a number of key COVID-19 metrics, including a decline in new hospitalizations and the statewide positivity rate, as evidence that Texas is “in a far better position now.”

In the nearly three months since Texas received its first shipments of the COVID-19 vaccine, supply has steadily increased. There are now three approved vaccines in the U.S. — Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, which both require two doses, and Johnson & Johnson, which requires one dose.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency and state emergency management officials have also begun running mass vaccination sites aimed at underserved communities in Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth. The sites are NRG Stadium in Houston, AT&T Stadium in Arlington and Fair Park in Dallas.

Concerns remain about equitable access to the vaccine. State Sen. Borris Miles, D-Houston, expressed frustration on Wednesday with the low vaccination rate among communities of color on which the pandemic has taken a disproportionate toll.

“I feel kind of that you broke my heart and broke your promise to me,” Miles told Garcia, chair of the EVAP, during a state Senate Health and Human Services Committee meeting.

The increasing number of vaccinated Texans has meant, for some, a return to some semblance of normalcy. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday announced that fully vaccinated people can visit safely with other vaccinated people and with small groups of unvaccinated people. But the CDC cautioned that COVID-19 still poses a grave public health risk, and urged everyone — including vaccinated people — to continue to wear masks and keep physical distance in public.

State health officials estimate that the vaccine will be available for the general public later this spring. Biden earlier this month said that the U.S. would have enough supply of the COVID-19 vaccine for every adult by the end of May.

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened to sue Travis County and the City of Austin if officials don’t back down on local orders that continue to require masks despite Gov. Greg Abbott ending the statewide mask mandate on Wednesday.

Austin and Travis County public health leaders recently announced they would continue to require masks, even though Abbott forbade local authorities from superseding his order. County judges can order COVID-19 restrictions if hospitalizations from the virus rise above 15% of the bed capacity in that hospital region for seven straight days.

Violating the city’s public health order would be a Class C misdemeanor, but the city planned to continue to only enforce “the most egregious cases,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler said in a video message posted late Tuesday before Paxton’s announcement.

Reference

Read Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s letter to the City of Austin and Travis County.

“The decision to require masks or otherwise impose COVID-19-related operating limits is expressly reserved to private businesses on their own premises. It does not rest with jurisdictions like the city of Austin or Travis County or their local health authorities,” Paxton wrote in a statement Wednesday. “We have already taken you to court under similar circumstances. You lost. If you continue to flout the law in this manner, we’ll take you to court again and you will lose again.”

Paxton gave local authorities until 6 p.m. to come into compliance with the governor’s order, rescind local COVID-19 mandates and retract related public statements. The order stated it would “supersede any conflicting order issued by local officials.”

.@MayorAdler & @AndyBrownATX, you and local health authorities have until 6:00pm today to rescind any mask mandates or business-operating restrictions and come into full compliance with GA-34 ➡️ https://t.co/Bz5DQsw8IV

Otherwise, on behalf of the State of Texas, I will sue you. pic.twitter.com/IP9UpZPplh

— Texas Attorney General (@TXAG) March 10, 2021

“Otherwise, on behalf of the state of Texas,” Paxton wrote, “I will sue you.”

Neither the city nor the county is backing down.

“I listen to doctors, not to politicians like our attorney general,” Travis County Judge Andy Brown said in an interview, explaining that that is the message he hopes his residents receive. “It’s not the time to take our masks off.”

Brown said the continued mask mandate comes from the county’s public health authority — not from his emergency powers due to the pandemic. Under that interpretation, he says the county should be legally able to require masks. The discussion to remove a mask mandate shouldn’t begin until 80% of the county is vaccinated, Brown said. It’s currently at 9%, he said.

“We will fight Gov. Abbott and Attorney General Paxton’s assault against doctors and data for as long as we possibly can,” Adler said in a statement.

Paxton’s office successfully challenged Austin and Travis officials’ attempts to restrict holiday restaurant operations around New Year’s. But Brown argued that the order remained in effect over the holiday while the suit was being argued, and that there was demonstrated improvement as a result.

Texas on Wednesday became the most populous state in the country not to have a mask mandate, with over half the country requiring them in public. This comes as an average of nearly 200 people every day are dying in the state from COVID-19 and as new, more contagious COVID-19 variants spread in the state. Several leaders have criticized Abbott’s decision to end the mask mandate, including President Joe Biden, who called it a “big mistake.” Other lawmakers and some business owners have praised the move.

Efforts to vaccinate the population continue, with experts saying achieving herd immunity would take nearly every adult Texan being vaccinated. About 8.5% of Texas’ 29 million people were fully vaccinated as of Monday, and the state expanded vaccine eligibility to all Texans older than 50 on Wednesday. But the number of eligible recipients already outnumbered the supply prior to the expansion, meaning it may be hard to quickly secure an appointment.

While Abbott said city officials cannot require the use of masks in public, businesses can require them inside their venues. Dozens of businesses in Austin have announced they will independently require masks, as well as many more around the state. Some already fear backlash from customers.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo addressed the end of the mask mandate during a Wednesday press conference, saying that the fight against COVID-19 is ongoing — with only about 1 in 10 of county residents older than 16 who are fully vaccinated.

Hidalgo thanked business owners who are continuing to require masking in their businesses.

“We know you’ve been there from the beginning, leading, supporting our population,” she said. “And as unfair as it is, you carrying this burden of keeping the community safe, is an enormous public service.”

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House on Wednesday passed a massive spending bill, intended to offset the health and economic damage inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic, that will send direct payments to millions of Texans and billions of dollars in aid for state and local governments and schools.

The measure will now head to President Joe Biden’s desk. Biden is expected to sign it Friday.

Known as the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion bill shores up and builds upon previous COVID-19 spending bill provisions. But while the $2.2 trillion CARES Act that passed almost a year ago had significant buy-in from both parties, the American Rescue Plan passed solely with Democratic votes in both the House and Senate. The bill passed the House with all Republicans voting against it, and all but one House Democrat supported the plan. Within the Texas delegation, the vote was party line. On Saturday, both of the state’s Republican senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, voted against the bill.

The bill’s scope is sweeping. Broadly speaking, it will distribute stimulus checks as large $1,400 to millions of Americans, another $350 billion to cities and states that experienced declines in tax revenue and increases in expenses, and $130 billion toward education. The bill also funds an additional $300 in unemployment payments per week until early September.

But within that massive $1.9 trillion sum, there are also specific provisions to financially bolster American farmers, the food supply, imperiled restaurants, vaccine distribution, COVID-19 testing and contact tracing, medical supplies, the health care workforce, refitting public elementary and secondary schools to mitigate transmission of the virus, students who’ve experienced a lag in learning over the last year, childhood and adult nutrition, homeowners and renters, national endowments for the arts and humanities, child care, funeral assistance, veterans, airlines, airports, nursing facilities, aid for state and local governments, and support for union pensions.

It also includes an expanded child income tax credit that, starting this summer, could allow for the distribution to parents of checks to of up to $250 dollars per month for school-age children and $300 per month for children under 5. Researchers have estimated that it could lift around 40% of children out of poverty.

U.S. Rep. Al Green, a Houston Democrat, touted his contributions into the bill of money for small-business lending and toward enforcing fair housing.

“When the deadly novel coronavirus reached the United States more than a year ago, many of us would have never imagined the severe health and economic toll it would take on our nation,” he said in a news release. “However, it has been and continues to be my priority to ensure all my constituents – including those who have suffered from contracting the virus themselves or losing a loved one to it, job loss, inadequate access to health care, hunger, risk of eviction or foreclosure, or business closure – receive the necessary relief to weather and recover from this storm.”

Republicans have opposed the bill, however, saying that it’s too broad and includes massive amounts of spending that is permanent and not directly related to the coronavirus. They blamed Democrats for the lack of GOP support for the legislation.

“It’s because this is not COVID relief. It’s a $2 trillion blue-state boondoggle and a Trojan horse for their reckless partisan policies,” U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Lubbock, said on the House floor. “It’s because Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi is throwing your tax dollars at Democrat cronies like a float captain throws beads at a Mardi Gras parade.”

The House passed a previous version of this bill in late February, but Democratic moderates in the Senate were successful in scaling back the legislation. The original House bill also included a minimum wage hike to $15 per hour, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled out that provision.

Like most of the major spending and tax cut bills passed by both parties over the last decade, the American Rescue Plan is expected to contribute to the federal deficit. Most economists argue, however, in favor of some deficit spending during periods of economic distress.

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Are we going to pay for last month’s blackouts as ratepayers or as taxpayers?

Assuming the state’s elected officials make some changes in the wake of the freeze and the blackouts after the Valentine’s Day weekend, and assuming those changes are expensive, the money has to come from someplace.

Some of the changes would be pricey, though it’s next to impossible to estimate costs until you’ve got a working to-do list. But if “weatherizing” or “winterizing” the electricity grid was cheap, the companies in that food chain would have done it years ago.

Just one piece of that puzzle — weatherizing natural gas wells — merited a chart in a long report after a freeze and blackouts in 2011 in Texas written by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. To get 50,000 gas wells into winter-fighting shape would cost between $125 million and $1.75 billion — a huge range dependent on the extent of the weatherizing.

That’s before you even get to electric generation, transmission and distribution.

And if it was cheap, the Texas Legislature would have required weatherization after that February 2011 storm. That same report from FERC/NERC recommended such a requirement, along with enhanced weather planning: “… The task force recommends that planning take into account not only forecasts but also historical weather patterns, so that the required procedures accommodate unusually severe events. Statutes should ideally direct utility commissions to develop best winterization practices for its state, and make winterization plans mandatory.”

Instead, the Texas Legislature required the Public Utility Commission to collect reports from electric companies detailing their weatherization prep, or the lack of it. Weatherization wasn’t required, but reports about it were.

Reports, as it turns out, didn’t keep Texans warm during almost a week of freezing weather last month.

And so, the idea of requiring winter prep is back.

House Speaker Dade Phelan put seven power outage-inspired bills on his priority list for the current legislative session. They include weatherizing the electricity infrastructure in the state, creating a statewide alert system for storms and power outages and overhauling the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the nonprofit that operates the state’s electric grid.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called for the heads of ERCOT’s CEO and all three appointed Public Utility Commissioners. Within just a few days, he was 75% of the way through the list, after ERCOT’s board fired Bill Magness and the PUC’s DeAnn Walker and Shelly Botkin, both appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, resigned. Only Arthur D’Andrea, another Abbott appointee, remains at the PUC.

ERCOT’s board will name a new CEO, in the current scheme of things — a scheme that could be changed if lawmakers rework the grid operator’s governance. One legislative proposal would make it a state agency — to increase its accountability to the elected officials in the Capitol. That didn’t work particularly well with the PUC, as an example, but lawmakers will have some say over the replacement commissioners there; gubernatorial appointees have to win confirmation from Patrick’s Senate. ERCOT, at present, has more independence from the state’s political class.

How those politicians handle this could figure into the 2022 elections, which are, for them, not far away. The party primaries are less than a year away, and fundraising and politicking will begin in earnest when the legislative session ends in three months. The blaming and shaming is well underway, and lawmakers still have to come up with a reasonable list of preventions that will keep blackouts like February’s from happening again.

That two-step is an old one, designed to keep the blame, and voters’ ire, focused on appointees and hired executives and off of the people in the executive and legislative branches who are supposed to oversee them. That list starts with the governor and includes the legislators who cooked up the current regulatory operation and rules that failed so miserably just a few weeks ago.

The other step? To win credit, at the same time, from voters for the politicians who come in and clean up the mess left by their predecessors — and in some cases, those politicians themselves.

And they’ll have to figure out how to pay for it — whether that is, as Abbott has proposed, an expense the state’s taxpayers should shoulder, or as others have suggested, a requirement for private companies to assume, and to pass along to their rate-paying customers.

We’re supposed to get more reliable electrical power out of all this, and we should, too. Either as taxpayers or as ratepayers, we’re going to get the bill.