Bell’s East Texas Tour Gets Good Press

Chris Bell’s Healthy Texas tour—during which he’s outlining his environmental platform which includes issues related to state parks—got some good press in East Texas this weekend from the Tyler Morning Telegraph, Longview News-Journal, the Marshall News-Messenger, and Palestine Herald-Press.

The Tyler and Palestine papers covered the Texas State Railroad leg of Bell’s tour, while the Longview and Marshall papers covered the Caddo Lake portion.

Here are some snippits from the TMT coverage:

“Sorry, Rick, but trusting you to protect state parks is like asking an arsonist to put out a fire,” Bell said at a press conference at the Texas State Railroad’s Palestine depot - his first stop in a tour of the state parks aimed at highlighting his “Healthy Texas” environment plan. His plan calls for raising or eliminating the cap on the sporting goods tax - the primary source of revenue for Texas parks - and for a constitutional amendment to protect hunting and fishing habitats.

The Texas State Railroad, which runs from Palestine to Rusk, costs the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department about three times its potential revenue each year to maintain.

The train operation was supposed to get an additional $500,000 this spring from the state, but that deal has fallen through, and a bill during the special session that would have propped up the railroad’s budget died.

The railroad is now in jeopardy of being shut down.

Bell said that the railroad is just one of the state parks suffering to the brink of closure. Texas ranks 49th in state park funding, and per capita, Texans spend $1.20 on state parks annually, compared to the national average of $7.50.

Money problems have been mounting at state parks for years, forcing Texas Parks and Wildlife to cut park hours and staff and limit maintenance.

Bell said that the Battleship Texas is held together with “tape and Silly Putty,” and that the elevator at the San Jacinto Monument no longer goes all the way to the top.

“Seriously, sometimes the punch line writes itself,” he said.

Good lord! I wasn’t aware of the Battleship Texas and San Jacinto Monument problems; this story gets worse and worse.

Bell also discussed the sporting goods tax issue:

“For every dollar that Texans pay toward the sporting goods tax, less than 20 cents wind up making it here to our state parks,” Bell said. “Now, after years of treating this parks money as nothing more than a slush fund to cover his own incompetence, (Perry) is calling for an additional 10 percent budget cut for state parks.”

He said he is disgusted that Perry and Strayhorn have talked about privatizing state parks.

Bell said raising entrance fees to pay for services that the sporting goods tax is supposed to cover is double tax fraud on the part of Perry and state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, an independent gubernatorial candidate.

“(It’s double tax fraud), whether it’s raising tuition at state colleges, raising the cost of medical care by kicking kids off the CHIP program, or slapping toll plazas on every highway they can find. They aren’t competent enough to balance the budget legitimately and they aren’t honest enough to admit to us when they pass these backdoor tax hikes,” Bell said.

Removing or raising the cap would give the parks money to survive, he said. Rep. Harvey Hilderbran, R-Kerrville, has worked for years to introduce legislation to lift the revenue cap.

“Perry loves to tell us how proud he is of Texas. I just wish that every once in a while, he’d act that way,” Bell said.

With Bell on the stop were Fred Head, candidate for Comptroller; AG Nominee David Van Os, Land Commissioner Nominee VaLinda Hathcox; Maggie Charleton (D-Bryan), SOBE 9; Hank Gilbert, Agriculture Commissioner nominee; Charlie Thompson, CD-5 nominee, and state house candidate Sharon Davis (D-Palestine).

And, just in case you forgot about the depth of the entire statewide ticket in terms of experience, check out this from the Palestine paper:

Holding a photograph of himself in front of the construction of the Texas State Railroad, Head reminded those in attendance that he had been involved in the process to get the railroad set up as a state park in the early 1970s, and he criticized state officials from the area for not doing more to protect the park, including State Rep. Todd Staples (R-Palestine).

The Marshall and Longview papers focused on Caddo Lake, a major environmental issue in the area.

Evidently, the timing of Bell’s stop in Marshall couldn’t have been timed better/ Check out the main headline on the Marshall News Messenger’s website for Monday:

Pirkey is top mercury polluter in nation
Harrison County power plant tops list of national environmental group

Here are the details on that environmental mess:

American Electric Power’s Pirkey coal-fired power plant in Harrison County was ranked the nation’s worst mercury polluter in a report released here last week.

The plant, located southwest of Marshall, had a mercury emission rate of 219 pounds per million megawatt-hours, officials said. TXU’s Martin Lake plant, located about 30 miles from Marshall, was ranked No. 5 in the nation in total carbon dioxide emissions, the Environmental Integrity Group said.

Texas leads the country in the emissions of mercury from its power plants, claiming four of the top seven slots and 10 rankings overall in that category in a report listing the country’s ‘‘50 dirtiest power plants.”

Woah.

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