"You Can't Trust ICE," Says Houston's Opinion Editor. Do Voters Buy It?

Houston Chronicle opinion editor Evan Mintz joins Garrett Fulce to break down the fatal ICE shooting rocking Houston — and why the paper's own editorial board said flatly you can't trust the federal government's story. This is a rare inside look at how a major Texas newsroom decides what to publish when a story turns into a national flashpoint.

Evan explains why he leads with "biased for Houston" instead of left vs. right, walks through the shifting federal accounts of the Lorenzo Salgado Araujo shooting, and makes the business case Houston's business community has made for decades on immigration reform. Garrett and Evan also dig into why data centers have become a bizarre partisan football, and Evan makes his 15-year case for building the "Ike Dike."

Topics discussed:
- Evan Mintz's return to the Houston Chronicle and what "biased for Houston" really means
- How the Chronicle's editorial board decides which op-eds to run — left, right, and everywhere between
- The Houston ICE shooting: what changed between ICE's first statement and U.S. Attorney Aaron Reitz's account
- Comparing the ICE shooting to a separate HPD officer-involved shooting the same morning
- Why Houston's business community, not progressives, historically led the push for immigration reform
- Trump, Tom Homan, Susan Collins, John Whitmire, and Greg Abbott's competing reactions to the ICE vehicle-stop pause
- Why political "absolutists" end up driving policy on immigration
- Being "biased" for a city vs. being partisan — and why John Whitmire hates the word "politicize"
- Data centers as a new, oddly bipartisan flashpoint
- Evan's 15-year campaign for the "Ike Dike" coastal barrier

Guest: Evan Mintz, Opinion Editor, Houston Chronicle. Contact/social handle: Not stated in transcript — producer to fill in.

Chapters:
0:00 Welcome & Episode Preview 
0:46 Meet Evan Mintz, Houston Chronicle
8:24 Inside the ICE Shooting Ed Board Debate
16:53 Enforcement's Political Trap for the GOP
21:44 Why Absolutists Drive the Immigration Fight
24:04 Biased for Houston vs. Being Partisan
28:21 Data Centers Become a Partisan Football
31:17 The Ike Dike, Explained

Sources:
- Houston Public Media — By Michael Adkison, Andrew Schneider — July 15, 2026 — Texas Rangers will investigate ICE shooting in Houston. Here's what that means — https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/texas/2026/07/15/557147/ice-shooting-houston-texas-rangers-investigation-request/
- Click2Houston (KPRC) — July 16, 2026 — US Attorney Aaron Reitz speaks publicly for first time on fatal ICE shooting of Lorenzo Salgado in Houston — https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2026/07/16/us-attorney-aaron-reitz-speaks-publicly-for-first-time-on-fatal-ice-shooting-of-lorenzo-salgado-in-houston/
- The Texas Tribune — By Eleanor Klibanoff — July 9, 2026 — Aaron Reitz, former Texas AG candidate, picked as U.S. attorney — https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/09/texas-aaron-reitz-us-attorney-southern-district/
- CBS News — July 14, 2026 — ICE halts most vehicle stops after Maine, Texas shootings, sources say — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-agents-halt-vehicle-stops-after-shootings-maine-texas/
- KHOU 11 — By Jaime E. Galvan — Houston mayor calls for 90-day ICE moratorium after Trump backs traffic stops — https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/deadly-ice-shooting/trump-ice-traffic-stops-policy-pause/285-e8f9fa4b-ea64-4f54-9694-356ccb53fdd6
- Click2Houston (KPRC) — July 15, 2026 — Gov. Greg Abbott confirms Texas Rangers investigation into ICE shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2026/07/15/gov-greg-abbott-confirms-texas-rangers-investigation-into-ice-shooting-of-lorenzo-salgado-araujo/
- Office of the Texas Governor — July 17, 2026 — Governor Abbott Appoints Howden As Texas Secretary Of State — https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-appoints-howden-as-texas-secretary-of-state
- FOX 26 Houston — Officer-involved shooting in Highland Village, suspect taken to hospital — https://www.fox26houston.com/news/highland-village-shooting-officer-involved-shooting-reported-westheimer-road

Find us at seeingredpodcast.substack.com for full episodes. Follow us on all socials at @theseeingredpod and online at our website Seeing Red Podcast. x.com/gwfulce 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to the Sing Red Podcast. I'm your host, Garrett Folse. We have an incredible guest this week. That's right. The opinion editor from the Houston Chronicle, Evan Mintz, is with us this week. We're going to be talking about the flooding out in the hill country that I had to go through, as well as more developments on this ice shooting here in Houston. We're going to be talking about the appointment of the governor. We're going to be talking about the appointment by Governor Abbott for the new Secretary of State. We're going to be talking about the new U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Aaron Wright, for another show and his involvement now in the investigation of this ice shooting. But we're going to jump right into our conversation with Evan. Thank you so much for joining us today. Evan Mintz is the opinion editor at the Houston Chronicle. He's this is his second tenure there. He's worked in policy. He has a law degree, so don't hold that against him. But he's a really smart guy and a really great, left a lot of voices onto the pages of the of the Houston Chronicle opinion section. Evan, your first piece to intro reintroduce yourself to the Houston Chronicle community kind of like led with, I'm going to be biased, and then dot dot dot towards Houston. Can you kind of just explain what brought you back to the Chronicle last year and what did you mean by that?

SPEAKER_00 1:27

Sure. So first of all, thanks for having me. You know, and when I say I'm biased for Houston, I mean that we take a position that supports the things that are in the interest of the city, its future success, and the people who live here. It means being pro-growth, pro-trade, pro-energy, often means pro-oil and gas, and just trying to find ways to make sure that a top priority is just the quality of life and economic success of our region. And that should be a no-brainer. But what I found is that a lot of people can't help but view the world through a partisan lens that comes top down from this Washington, D.C. Democrats versus Republicans. And if you try to impose that framework on our region, uh you it's kind of like trying to shove like a square peg into a round hole. It just doesn't fit. If you try to think D versus R at City Council, you will end up with a lot of weird coalitions that don't really work. If you're trying to think, well, you know, I'm a Republican, so I want to support Republican issues, and then you go down to the port of Houston and hear them talk about how the tariffs are bad for them, you're going to suddenly realize that the things that are good for Houston aren't necessarily easy partisan answers. You know, we don't have folks who talk about immigration like how George H.W. Bush used to. We don't have Democrats who talk about oil and gas like how Gene Green used to. And my real effort here is to try to resuscitate that way of talking about our city. You know, uh Bill Archer, who just passed away, used to say, or people named after him, the Archer rule that the delegation from Houston should not publicly critique one another. Uh they should all be pulling in the same direction. That's really hard to do these days, but that's the goal to get everyone talking on the same wavelength about what is important for Houston.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

Well, I for one appreciate it as someone who lives here in the Houston area. I know on X, there will be sometimes you'll post stuff from Republicans, and then you'll have people commenting one way, or you'll post stuff, and it's like, oh, typical liberal bias. And then you'll see people like me or Kenny Webster or other folks who've on from the conservative side who've had their pieces like published by the Chronicle coming to your defense saying, if you send him something and you can back up what you're saying, he will publish it. It doesn't matter what like where you come from on the spec of the ideological spectrum, you he he's gonna work with you. And like my favorite thing like you do is when people start complaining about it, it's like, well, send me an op-ed. And then you send the email address or the the viewpoints address to for people to submit stuff to. It's like, yeah, like you can complain about it, send me something, we'll publish it.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

We have these editorials, you know, they're the onsite editorials, the opinion of the paper. It's a little bit like being a judge thinking, okay, what is our president here? How do we apply it to the current facts? And you know, this is an editorial board that uh endorsed Romney in 2012, Clinton 2016, if you want to get a sense of sort of where the politics are. But at the same time, those op-eds, those outside writers, the goal of that whole section is to really show what the full spectrum of thoughtful political opinion is in Houston. You're gonna get folks on far left, you're gonna get folks on far right. And my challenge is trying to get all those people, all of those views in the paper. And I tell folks, listen, if we run 20 op-eds over a week or two, uh, you're not gonna agree with all of them. You're not gonna like all of them. But the goal is to get at least one of them where you read it and you go, yeah, that's me. That's that's my perspective. Now, the challenge I've got is learning that for a lot of people, they're not happy by seeing the one. They're just unhappy at seeing the 19. Uh and so just trying to get folks used to the reality that you're in a really big city with a lot of diversity, and it's not just cultural diversity, it's not just you know racial diversity, it's political diversity, and you should embrace that because when you have those, you know, I'll say kind but heated conversations, hopefully you're getting to the truth about something or at least a deeper understanding of how someone can be so opposed to something that you feel deeply about.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

Well, I think you do as bet as good a job as anyone that I've seen, at least trying to do that. And so I appreciate your your your efforts towards that. We're we're blessed to have that type of coverage here in Houston. What would you say is the most defining characteristic of the Houstonian? And I and I'll and I'll give you a second to think about that, but let me so let me preface it preface it for a moment. You know, Steinbeck, you know, summarizing Steinbeck, he said Texas is a state of mind, it's a religion in every sense of the word, and you can kind of take that down to the Houston level. What is the quintessential at that quintessential ethos of the Houstonian, of the Houston, of the of the of the of the Bayou and the Bayou City?

SPEAKER_00 6:27

You know, I think that Houston is a very outcomes-oriented, results-oriented city. If you can do the hard work and you know get what you promise that you're going to deliver, people like you. And there isn't a whole lot of fluff around that. It also means that we don't like things that are too fancy in many ways. So it's uh to, you know, for the lack of a better word. It's very just work hard, be successful, get those outcomes. There is a line in the heated pre-oil bus days of the early 1980s where folks would say you could put a gorilla in a suit, drop it in downtown Houston, and in a week it'd be a millionaire. And that's kind of the ideal the city that anyone can come from anywhere, come here, and people will not judge you on your background. They'll just judge you by how hard you work. And that's the real Houston in my mind.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

And I I think that that rings true. What's let's shift gears for a moment to kind of what's in the paper right now, not just on the on the pages of the reporting, but also on your opinion pages and from the edit board. There was this ice shooting, which we're gonna talk about, I'll talk about in depth a little bit later this episode, and that will be recorded a couple days after this. So there might be more newer we'll be I'll be operating from a different set of facts or more clarified facts, hopefully, in a couple days. But kind of where it sits now, which I'll just kind of show you some sausage making. This is being recorded on Friday afternoon before this episode comes out. What are you seeing and like what what are you saying from the edit board? Like what is what is what is the how's the paper covering it from both the journal side, but importantly for this conversation, from the opinion paper?

SPEAKER_00 8:13

You know, on the opinion side, you know, on that first day when the news really broke and it became apparent how big of a story this was, we had an editorial that said, we need to get to the truth, and you can't trust ice. And just to put it in context, that very morning, on that Tuesday morning, there were two big law enforcement shootings in Houston on different sides of town. One was was this ice shooting, uh, but the other was a man had gotten trailed by police officers. He was in what they believe was a stolen car. He wouldn't pull over. They eventually got him to pull over in the middle of Highland Village. For those who don't know, it's kind of a fancy shopping center. You know, it's where the uh Lululemon is. And they had him surrounded, all these officers in their cop cars, sirens on, uniforms, guns pulled, and he started to get out of the car. They thought they saw a weapon on him, and they shot him. He wasn't killed, he ended up in the hospital. He's going to be charged with many things. But that next day, when we got the reporting on it, we had the list of all the officers' names who were involved, a promise that an investigation was moving forward. And generally that was practice as normal. On the ice shooting, we still don't know who the officers are involved. They told us one thing that, oh, he tried to weaponize his car. Now, with Aaron Wrights, he had his statement just yesterday. There wasn't anything that he described as the drivers trying to run over officers or weaponize his car in a very intentional way. And you have this long track record of ICE in the past just saying things that simply aren't true when they're trying to justify their use of force. And in a city like Houston, where you've had a mayor who did not want to provoke the Trump administration, who is trying to keep his head down on the promise that we don't want our city to turn into Minneapolis, having this happen is kind of a betrayal of trust that we were trying to do the right thing, that HPD was working with ICE, and still this is happening in our city. And this is a city where, as far back as you can go in modern politics, you have had people here who are immigrants, documented or otherwise, and they've been here for a long time. And there's a reason why going back through the 90s, sort of the loudest advocates for immigration reform to create paths to legal residency weren't progressive groups. It was the city's center right business community because they could go to any kitchen, any construction site, any church. And you would see people there who were not born here, who maybe did not come here legally. But like I said, they are working hard. They are starting families, they are doing right by Houston. And I had my own personal column writing saying that this man, Lorenzo Salgado, he was not a U.S. citizen. I don't think there's any question about that. But in the ways that matter to our city, he was very much a Houstonian. And it's been frustrating to hear folks try to argue otherwise. And I think that gets to a perfect example of when I say that we want to be biased for Houston, and this comes into tension with folks who'd have a much more top-down from Washington, D.C. a partisan view of the world.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Yeah. I I look at it through a number of number of lenses, and I think when you look at it from that kind of the big picture, top down, I think one of the reasons why that we're getting so much input on this shooting that way is that it is a major news incident that is something that can be covered by the national media that now everyone has to address. And so, in that sense, as much as this is a Houston story, it is a national, you know, it was a Houston incident, it's a national story. It is, and you're gonna end up having those that crosstalk where the people talking about the issue aren't necessarily from Houston, probably more likely than not, they're not. So I like I wanted to address a couple things you said. One is kind of those loud center right voices. I think you're absolutely right that in times, you know, over the past over the late 20th century, that was where a large push came from. And then at the time you had the big pushback from the unions on the left against that because one of the reasons why the business community wants immigrant labor is because of the labor, it's because it's lower cost than what's here, you know, uh American citizens. And so there's always been that push and pull of that that on that on that issue beyond anything else, is that there are some serious economic issues for other people in the pipeline who are already here that that can cause consternation whenever you do have a large influx of uh immigrants.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Yeah, no, I think that's that's spot on. But I also think the the politics of it have changed in many ways too. First of all, you can see how the SEIU, which is a union, has been really sympathetic to uh the immigrant communities here in Houston. And maybe it's just that's who a lot of their workers are, second generation people who are natural-born citizens and get into these jobs that the SEIU is trying to unionize. Uh, but also there just simply aren't a whole lot of unions left in Houston. I was going back through our old archives to try to find the last time we'd endorsed a Democrat in the county judge race in the general election. And you had to go back to before 1972. And as I was flipping through those pages, there were all these headlines about how the meat cutters union representing the butchers at grocery stores were going on strike to demand a raise and about what that would mean for the cost of meat in Houston. And that's just a totally different world. You don't have unions like that anymore. Uh and so this sense that there were unions in, I think, Houston pushing back against that, that that's not what our city looks like. You know, maybe out of places like Ohio, you know, New York, Pennsylvania. But when I think I I think that's why when you've tried to get that Houston view on immigration up to D.C., it hasn't moved forward. My sincere hope is that after the midterms, I think the Democrats are going to take the House. I don't know about the Senate, but if you look at the history of immigration bills, they always die in the House. You can get something through the Senate. Senators know how to work together, they kind of have to, but it dies in the House. And so if you can get Democrats, ideally the Texas delegation, where we've got some really moderate Democrats, to sit down and think, okay, how can we write a bill that protects people like Lorenzo Salgado, who'd been here for more than 30 years, who had a family, was doing sort of everything right, the sort of person where I don't think there's a whole lot of folks who really want him deported. If you could write a bill to protect those folks, how could you do it in a way where it could pass out of the House and then pass out of the Senate and then really put it on Donald Trump's desk and see what he does with it? You're gonna end up writing something you're probably gonna lose some of your AOCs, you're gonna lose, you know, maybe your Greg Kazars, but you could pick up perhaps some moderate Republicans who really just want to see this issue taken off the table. So we'll see what happens. But that's something we've been writing about as well in these editorials, just thinking, how can we get Congress to solve this problem? Because there's a lot of blame that's going around, but very big picture. The fault is with Congress for refusing or failing to write a bill that reflects the immigration reality in our city. I hear from a lot of people saying he was here for 35 years. Why didn't he just go get legal status? It's not that easy. And it's not for lack of trying from a lot of people, it's a lack of an existence of a legal pathway. Congress hasn't made one. You know, I joke, it's kind of like if you're driving on the freeway and you're stuck in traffic and you need to go off the freeway, but TechSod hasn't built an off-ramp. And people go, well, why don't you just get off the freeway? Well, there's not an off-ramp. I mean, you could try to get in your truck and sort of go over the median, but that's not legal. And so if you ask why are a bunch of people here who haven't done it legally, like, well, we government hasn't played its role. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

Well, the immigration conversation as a as a as a in both Texas and across the country, when it comes to an issue, immigration is an issue where Republicans tend to do very, very well, while enforcement is right now showing that we're not doing very well on that. And so, I mean, when you look at the numbers, people like the fact that the borders effectively closed. We're not having a large influx of big big caravans or whatever coming through. But at the same time, people don't like what's happening in Minneapolis. They don't like that people keep being shot. And so a lot of that has to do with how Christy Gnome was running the program when she was Secretary of Homeland Security. And, you know, there's the new reporting out that they're gonna stop doing vehicle searches or something. So we'll see if they if that you know minimizes how many people they're having to shoot. Or not are necessarily having to, or shooting. So I think it's gonna I think a lot of what's going to end up happening is obviously gonna be influenced by how this election plays out and what exit polling says. If it the if the enforcement ends up being a big a big issue that drives voters and Republicans lose a lot of seats because of it, then I I wonder how that's going to influence a lame duck Trump in his last two years. Because he's gonna be driven by legacy at that point. There's really nothing else to be driven by. So yeah, it's an open question.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

I think that go ahead. I've talked to a good number of Republicans when we do our endorsement meetings, and some of them will, you know, kind of look around and get quiet and say, you know, like as we get into lame duck, we might be able to pass something. And I've read that there are efforts to try to get a discharge position on a Dream Act, though at this point I wonder if there might try to be uh some larger ambitions on that. But there there was that announced pause to vehicle stops, and I think that came after the shooting in Maine, which is similar to the one here in Houston. And you had Susan Collins pick up that phone and make that phone call DHS and say, you guys have got to take care of this. And we wrote a piece saying, well, thank you, Susan Collins. We kind of wish Ted Cruz or John Cornyn would have done that, but thank you, Susan Collins. And then you had Tom Homan on Fox News saying we're gonna do a pause, it's gonna be short-lived, we just got to make sure we're doing all of this right. Uh, you even had uh John Whitmeyer, who's a moderate Democrat. I don't think any progressives out there are really big fans of his, but he went on CNN and said, listen, I don't think that ICE should be doing immigration enforcement if they don't have proper training. Like clearly their vehicle stops have problems and they don't have body worn cameras. So we need to get that fixed before they can get back on the streets. And then even Greg Abbott came out and said, listen, ICE can do its job 100% without having to kill people. We need to do 100% immigration enforcement, but just not shoot people in the process. But throughout all of this, then you had Donald Trump go on Truth Social and say, no, they should keep doing the vehicle stops. They're doing a great job, uh, just keep going forward with it. And I think that reflects a mindset from a guy who's a longtime New Yorker, doesn't really understand what life is like here in Houston, probably doesn't spend a lot of time driving around in cars. And so I kind of wish we still had a few like real longtime Houstonians up in the White House to say, like, listen, you know, you're trying to overturn something that's been going on in this city for decades. I understand lots of Republicans who get frustrated with the recent arrivals that happened under the Biden administration, they allowed a lot of chaos at the border. Nobody wants to see that. Uh, and if there is a real dedicated effort to find recent arrivals and deport them, you know, the argument against it would be a lot weaker. Uh, but the fact that you have a White House that's just trying to do a broad net enforcement, really not caring about how closely tied people are to their communities, how long they've been here, whether or not they have a criminal record, whether or not they have a deportation order, it just seems blind to the reality on the ground.

SPEAKER_01 20:35

Well, let's kind of dive into something. I think this is a good issue to point it to point out, point it out on, is that there are absolutists who think that there anyone who's any immigrant, legal otherwise, naturalized citizens or whatever, shouldn't be here and they should all go back. And then there are those who think it should be completely open borders, free-flowing, whatever. Citizenship is a whatever, it's a social construct that should be abolished. You know, the we have a wide spectrum. But when you talk about the immigration issue, there are people, the people who are driving an issue are always people who are going to be more absolutists on either side. You're never going to have a voice in the middle saying, maybe let's have a nuanced, reasonable policy, and let's say let's go fight for that, because there's no, there's no there's no momentum there. You end up having the effect of effective policy being somewhere in that kind of middle zone, because you have the two poles pulling at it, but the people who are driving the policy are the absolutists, are the people on the at on the on the side on the polar opposites of one another. And so you end up having this situation where somebody like Donald Trump, on this issue, at least, is appealing to those people with his rhetoric and ends up catching an issue where a lot of people are agreeing with it because they're seeing the the downsides on the other side. The other from the other pole, and they just want to kind of go back to normal, or they at least want to counteract the policy for a short amount of time. But then you end up starting doing everything on the other pole, and you end up flipping the issue. And it's like you went too far because the where people were on it was they wanted to be somewhere in the middle, we don't know where, but neither of these options are actually what people want or would be a good policy. It's somewhere in the middle, we don't know, we need to fight it out. But there's just no tolerance or no the attention span for political attention span of folks is worse than it is when it comes to short form video and everything else. It's like they just want it and they want it now. And it's it's a it's a problem when it comes to any whole host of issues, especially when you get into party level stuff and party fights on purity tests of how far should someone want to go or whatever else. I'm of the opinion that you take the win, take the wins as they come and move on to the next thing and go back and fight for everything else you want down the road. And there's a whole bunch of people in my party, and it looks like on the left, too, with the rise they've had of the DSA of just folks who are like, we want it all, we on a wall right now, and we're impatient, they don't want to work the process. So that's where I kind of see that that's one of the things I'm taking away from this whole immigration fight over the past few years and over my whole life. But I kind of wanted to get into another topic with you, which is you you said you were gonna be biased. We talked kind of uh clarified that. You also said like uh one of the things I like to say is like there are a number of jobs that require you to be non-partisan, but when you work in politics, you're there's no job that's gonna require you to be non-political. If you are working for a government, whether you're a school teacher, whether you're a police officer, or whether you work at the legislature or whatever else, or if you're a journalist, your job is inherently political. You're talking about the issues that influence the politics, which are the how our society moves. There are gonna be jobs where you need to be nonpartisan. There are gonna be roles that are need to be nonpartisan, but I think that there is this consternation between people who are saying, well, let's take the politics out of this. Is there something, is that something you're seeing, or what is your take kind of on that general philosophy?

SPEAKER_00 24:25

You know, the Houston mayor, John Whitmeyer, has this bad habit of getting mad when he says that people politicize an issue. Don't politicize this issue. And I can't help but like sit there and kind of grimace because you're a politician, you're a mayor, everything you do is political, and you have to deal with treating it as politics. What you don't want people to do, like you said, is treat it as a partisan issue where people instantly go to their corners, instantly go to their D's and Rs. And you know, we do this endorsement process where we invite all the candidates to come in, we want to talk to all of them, and really try to help voters make an informed decision when they go cast their ballot. And I say, you know, we don't expect Democrats to not be Democrats, and you don't expect Republicans to not be Republicans. You expect people to know and care about the issues relevant to their constituents. And if you can't do that, then you're probably not gonna do too good of a job. And so if you have, you know, a Democrat coming in here saying we need to ban fracking because fracking's bad, like you're not a really good fit for Houston. But I've heard people say that. And so it's kind of my frustration with a lot of this is that people, you know, just talk like they're from Poughkeepsie, New York instead of Houston, Texas. You could just kind of pick anyone from anywhere and they'll have like wind them up in the same partisan talking points about any issue. I want to hear someone who can talk like they're a real Houstonian and that they really understand our values and what has brought success to the city. And so in that way, I want politicians to be good at politics. I want them to be able to build coalitions and understand policy and you know, move the needle and move the ball forward for the sake of everyone. And instead, what we get a lot of the time, particularly in the world of you know, pundits and folks online, is the second sense of negative partisanship. They don't care as much about moving their own ball forward as they care about stopping the other side. And they run more on attacking the other side rather than promoting their own. And sometimes, if you want to get your own thing passed, you're gonna have to compromise. You're gonna have to reach across the aisle. I was just looking at how John Cornyn was working with John Ossiff to try to pass a bill so that emergency alerts about flooding and such can be sent to people's cell phones over satellite signals, which new cell phones have built into them. If the whole usual emergency signal process just isn't working, your cell towers are down. And that seems like a pretty good bill. And it's something that's particularly relevant to Texas after these floods we've had, you know, this year, the floods we had last year. But getting it done also required John Cornyn to work with John Ossoff. And if you're the sort of person who says, I'm never gonna work with the other side, they're terrible, anything they want is bad, well, you're probably not gonna get anything done.

SPEAKER_01 27:11

I think that's absolutely right. I think there's a number of issues that are not particularly polarized at this point, but some oddly are. So if you look at different infrastructure projects, if you look at something like light rail, if you it's it's extraordinarily polarized, and yeah, but like not necessarily along party lines. You have basically Yimbies versus NIMBY's, which is to say pro-growth versus I don't want this stuff near my house, folks, that are are are fighting on stuff.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

So I've always data centers, I think, are a really good example of that. If you look at how data centers go, that's the thing where opinion has moved crazily on data centers, and all these people are against data centers and politicians trying to use data centers to hit the other side. And I look at that and I'm just thinking to myself, you know, Texas is a place where we like to build things, and we don't want our, you know, power bills to be too high, we don't want our water bills to be too high, we don't want to run out of water, and so we want to manage the externalities in a smart way. But just the way that data centers have become this partisan issue blows my mind. I really can't understand it. And then I hear the governor say something like, Well, we're gonna we're gonna ban the data centers so they can't be built in rural communities. I think, well, I guess that's good for the rural communities if they don't like them, but what about the suburbs? And what about the cities? If they're bad, they're bad, and if they're good, they're good. And to try to pander to a like distinct voting block because they're upset about something sort of gives the way the game here.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

Well, and I think on data centers in particular, I it's a really interesting issue because people are mostly afraid of AI. Yeah. For any number of reasons, but like they just don't really understand what it's doing. They have ideas from science fiction about what it could do and where it's at and all this stuff. And so there's that kind of latent anxiety around it. But then politicians realize that they've been kicking the can down the road in nearly every state on key infrastructure when it comes to power, whether it's grid reliability, power lines, energy generation, and then to a certain degree on if they have enough water and uh storage and all that, and they're realizing, oh, we can just blame the data centers, or we can just make the data centers pay for this if we do this the right way, because we haven't figured out how to fund it yet. And so I think there's a lot of opportunistic opportunism from politicians to cast blame for things that have nothing to do with data centers. Not really, it's bad energy policy or bad infrastructure policy over the years. Like because every report card you see shows American infrastructure has been decaying. And while a lot of stuff's been being built, yeah, a lot of stuff's been falling apart too across the country. And so that's where I that's where my that's I have not dug as deep into that thought as I'd like to when it comes to research to back it up. But I'm seeing like you see, I'm seeing all sorts of whether it's propaganda or talking points from people on all sides of it all the time since I've written some stuff, including for your paper, yeah, on this issue. And so I I see a lot of it. I think that data center is an interesting point of it. I think there's some other key infrastructure that some people think should be built. Why don't you tell the folks of Senior Grant? That what everyone who follows you on Twitter already knows a little bit about. Let's talk about the Ike dike.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

Well, I I've been advocating for the construction of an Ike dike for I think 15 years now. The idea came up after Hurricane Ike barely missed Houston. It's one of the most destructive hurricanes in American history, uh, but it curved right at the end towards the east. And so it if it hadn't done that, the because of the way that hurricanes rotate, it would have driven this wall of water up into Galveston Bay, up the ship channel, and just deluged the entire oil and gas infrastructure around Houston with just this sea of water that would have knocked over uh storage tanks, destroyed pipelines, destroyed refineries, and all of this would have poured into the water that was being washed up Buffalo Bayou into the city. Uh I've heard experts refer to it as the greatest potential ecological disaster since Chernobyl. You know, it would have been three times the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But instead of the middle of the wilderness where you have a bunch of dead ducks, instead it would be in the middle of an urban area of about 8 million people. So in response, Rick Perry, immediately after the hurricane, called together a coalition of experts to come up with a plan. And their plan was to build a very large extension, more or less, of the Galveston seawall all the way down the island and onto Bolivar Peninsula with a seagate in the middle that you could close to keep out any big storm surge that was coming. And as this plan has moved forward, there's been lots of iterations about what it specifically would look like. The cost has gone up. The engineering challenges are just multitudinous, if that's a real word. But it's still moving forward. And this is something that where you have a lot of Democrats and Republicans bought in. I hear questions from uh some experts whether this is a worthwhile use of money. We're up at perhaps $50 billion. Could you spend that amount of money on other programs that will get done quicker? Maybe. I just don't know what they are yet. And until there's any other thing on the table that we can consider, this seems like the best plan. The only other alternative that I've heard from folks is to really aggressively retreat from flood-prone areas. And that means emptying entire neighborhoods. It means really prohibiting where we can build. And I think that in many ways, uh access to the ocean and access to the bay is a birthright for everyone here. And we want to make it easier for people to enjoy it and relish in it and live near it. But we also have to do so in a way that's safe. And building the Eichdike can make that happen. I also think that if you just look at the incredible threats that the shutdown of the Strait of Ormuz would pose to the global economy in terms of access to not just oil and gas, but other products like uh plastics and fertilizers, uh, those are things that come out of Houston that we make those here. And if you have a disaster that shuts down access or you know, physically destroys a lot of this infrastructure, there will be massive consequences, not just for Houston, not just for the country, but for the entire world.

SPEAKER_01 34:12

Yeah, I've I mean that been I've been following you and then other folks talking about the Eik Dike since you know it's been uh one of those things that's been talked about as major infrastructure that we need to build at some point. My fear is that, like with the rivers sirens, that all are going off this week, and we've are having far fewer reports of missing and dead with a much longer flooding event than what happened with the Camp Mystic floods and over a wide, much wider area. Well, we had to have those Camp Mystic floods. We didn't have to, but like we did like another piece I wrote for the Chronicle after the Cat Mystic floods was like governments work at the speed of shame. Like they don't do it until they're shamed into spending the money when it's that big a ticket, because like what's the constituency for it? It's the entire city of Houston, it's everyone in America, but it's really kind of it's so far out in our mind of oh, it would take a cat two or cat three taking that direct hit of a few mile radius. Like, you know, what are the odds of that? Not as small as you would hope. Right. And it's something where it's like, yeah, it's fifty billion dollars. It's fifty billion dollars you can't spend on education or you can't spend on the military. But it's trillions of dollars, probably well, north of a trillion dollars, if not more, haven't looked at the estimates of what that damage would do to just facilities and then the lost labor in production for having all those facilities offline for an indefinite period of time.

SPEAKER_00 35:45

It only has to work once, is the thing. You just have to get, you know, use it once and it pays for itself. The last time I checked, when you have to shut down the port of Houston, the Houston Ship Channel, which has happened every now and then because of crashes or other things, you're basically losing a billion dollars a day. And I would imagine that where oil prices are right now and inflation's happened, it's probably $2 billion a day today. And so that's something that we have to take seriously. And it's hard to plan for the future unless you've had that past disaster. But I think that's why we keep calling it the Ike dike, to remind people of the disasters that have already happened. And it's perplexing in some ways, like when we had Hurricane Harvey, that's what led to an increased interest in the Ike dike. But Harvey is the sort of disaster that the Ike dike would not prevent. You know, there's an equivalent of the Ike Dike, like a Harvey version of the Ike dike that Lizzie Fletcher and Maureen Latrell are working on to build a massive tunnel system that would divert water out of the Addicts and Barker Dams and Buffalo Bayou towards Galveston Bay in the Gulf of Mexico. And so there are these other super projects that uh politicians and planners are working on to protect our city from flooding.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

Well, and let's just, yeah, let's just I'll let's explain that the difference between those two types of events real fast. One is when hurricane initially hits, you have all the wind damage, and then when it comes on shore, you have storm surge, which is a the water it's pushing forward with the wind and other factors, pushes that water from the from the sea up of different water just into the shore, up river bank pathways, et cetera. What happened with Harvey was because of high pressure systems, the the storm system sat on Houston and Beaumont and just dumped all of its water and didn't move on. So it was just not even slow moving, it was a non-moving storm portion that just sat and just dumped and dumped and dumped. That wasn't a wind issue, so there was no storm surge. It was just normal, not normal, it was very much not normal, but like the typical kind of average rain. No, well, I'm not saying this wrong. It was a lot of rain. Yeah. But it wasn't there wasn't seawater, it was rainwater.

SPEAKER_00 37:56

Yeah, it's this is a sort of a freshwater versus saltwater thing. You know, you need your projects to prepare for those freshwater storms, and you need your projects to perform for those saltwater storms. And usually, you know, it's those the salt water, the hurricanes that are the real devastating ones. But what we've seen over the past several years is that you've had just a lot of really big storms. You know, and Harvey started as a hurricane and just kind of sat there and sat there. And you've also had these random other floods, these Derechos, this Tax Day flood, Memorial Day flood that are very unexpected. And you have to prepare for that. And one of the things that we've run into is that we've built a whole lot across the region. We've paved a lot of prairie, not thinking about how that would affect runoff. We have much better uh flood control rules now than we used to, but we didn't do it soon enough. And we also find ourselves in these weird situations where you have to think critically about what it is we're trying to prevent with the land use regulations that we put in place after disasters to prevent them from happening again. And I was talking to a developer who uh was pointing out that if you try to do, say, green to gray somewhere, you know, in Houston, Harris County, you're paving something that used to be, you know, grasslands and put concrete on it and you're gonna have runoff. And so part of the rule is like you have to make sure that you've got a cistern or detention or something to deal with the increased runoff so that it is basically as if you're not there. It's the way it was before. But if you were to say go to an old parking lot that's downtown Houston, it's been around for 20 years, and you want to build something new on that, maybe you even want to put in a little rain garden so that it's you know better than it is now, just concrete. Well, that automatically triggers the land use regulation so that you have to build as if you were turning something that was just open prairie into concrete, even though the thing you are building would not have any actual effect on new runoff. You know, it's been grandfathered in and now you've triggered it. And so if you look at this and think like, well, if we're treating these two things equally, it kind of incentivizes folks to go out and pave the prairie because it's a whole lot easier to do a construction project out there where the land is cheaper and it's easier to do your siding than it would be to try to do some infill. Uh and so how do you sit down and explain to voters and explain to Houstonians? We want to loosen up some of the anti-flood regulations. They get mad at you, and perfectly reasonable that they would. And so it's tough to deal with these disasters in the moment. It's tough to deal with them after the fact. The politics is hard. And if people only look at these things as a partisan opportunity to cudgel the other side, then you're not going to have a chance for folks to say, okay, let's sit down and figure out how we can write the best rules possible.

SPEAKER_01 40:56

Well, it's it's a frustration in that there's a lot of common sense that runs afoul of what we've learned to be actually effective. You know, the kind of the one that comes to mind is that red light cameras caused more accidents than they prevented. And then the corollary to that is, but those accidents that they caused were far less fatal than the accidents from before. Right. It's like so is there's this two-step, there's second-order effects. Oh, there's more accidents now because people are slamming on their brakes and they're getting into fender benders. But there's fewer people who are having accidents because they ran the light and getting T-boned, which causes fatalities and serious injuries. Exactly. Okay, but you have that conversation. There's a nuance to the conversation versus is this a public safety issue or is this a cash cow or whatever? And it's just people, most people do not invest a tremendous amount of time into every single issue. They will probably, if they become it, they will become quasi-experts on one or two, they'll figure out who their team is based off that issue. And when it comes to other things, if they get involved in politics, they will just have a reflexive response to it. And that's the kind of the politics we live in. And I think conversations like this one, like the ones on the pages of the Houston Chronicle, are key towards doing our part to put ideas out there that can possibly have a change for our community. And I think that you're doing a great job of helping of being kind of the moderator of the Houston of the political discourse in Houston. So thanks, Evan, for doing that in your role. Tell tell the people on the show here, tell them where they can find your byline and all the information about the Houston Chronicle.

SPEAKER_00 42:43

Well, you can read our opinion content at HoustonCronicle.comslash opinion. You can also follow the Houston Chronicle on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. Uh, you can find me on Twitter. I'm there far too much at Evan7257. You can also email me at uh evan.mintz at HoustonCronicle.com. I'm happy to get your emails. I'm also very happy to get any op ed submissions you might have. So send them my way. And if it's, you know, not up to stuff yet, I'm happy to work with you to try to get it there.

SPEAKER_01 43:16

I highly recommend if you are somebody who thinks that you have something, uh, an opinion or a thought, whether it's new or whether it's an old thought that you think just you could say it better, Evan and his team will work with you to make sure that you know your point that you the way you want it is conveyed. So I would highly recommend if if you're someone who's the thinking about writing an op-ed to go ahead and do it. And I'll say this so Evan doesn't have to try and get under 700 words. Uh they'll run they'll run longer stuff occasionally. Yeah. Uh but if you might if you get it to a point where it's 1200 words and you can't possibly take anywhere else, they might help you be able to take out some more words and find some fluff in there. You don't think sluff.

SPEAKER_00 44:00

But yeah, and even if you just want to do a short, you know, letter to the editor, 150 words, you know, we run those all the time too. Those are great.

SPEAKER_01 44:08

Absolutely. Well, Evan, thank you so much for joining us. I hope to have you on again soon. And thanks for doing again what you're doing, for at least being, like I said, the moderator of the political discourse here in Houston with the role as opinion editor over at the Houston. Thanks again to Evan Mintz for coming on to the show. You know, my hope was that by us having a conversation, you would have a better understanding of how the opinion section of a major newspaper really impacts not just the political discourse, but how news is covered, how politicians process that news, and then how that turns into action. And kind of, you know, the fact that if you have an idea, you got to start somewhere. And sometimes that's one of the places those ideas can germinate and really influence just how things work in this state. So thanks again to Evan for coming on the show. Now, I want to talk about a major story that's been happening in Texas. There's been more hill country flooding over the past week that has kind of dominated local news last week. And there's a lot to this story and how things have happened. As you may recall, especially since I talked about it recently, there was massive flooding last year around July 4th, Camp Mystic floods, and those the anniversary of that had happened recently. And you know, a lot of people died. Over 100 people passed away, 27 at Camp Mystic. And, you know, a lot of different legislative fixes went into place to try and prevent that kind of a disaster in the future. Well, it seems as if those fixes, and at least the the awareness of how severe these storms can be, have played a major part in the fact that we had probably worse flooding across the whole area in the in this past week. And only two people so far have been confirmed to be to have passed. I I'm not sure of how many missing there may be that might that might number could rise. But I mean that's just a a well well-run emergency management situation on the ground in the hill country over the past week. So congratulations to those folks. But this does still leave massive property damage across the region. I drove through the stretch of US 90 between San Antonio and the border on Monday. It was dry. The dry Frio River, dry. The Frio River right next to it, dry. A lot of the creeks and rivers were, if they weren't completely dry, were very nearly dry, very small trickles going through. And when I drove back on Wednesday, skip me the flooding had the started really in earnest on Monday and into Tuesday. Uh, when I drove back through on Wednesday, some of the roads I drove on aren't there anymore. Some of them got washed out or destroyed, more or less. Some of the sections of bridges I drove on were nearly being overtaken, like the water was nearly going over the road. It was quite bad. I know parts of that road had been closed the day before and they had been reopened, so I was able to get it back. So like it's hard. I was trying to get through as quickly as possible, and I had a goal to not stop in the flood area, so because I didn't want to add more than I had to to get home to the local strain and the of like on resources. So I sh did my best to get all the way through San Antonio before I had to stop for any purpose. And so I didn't take pictures. But it uh the f the photos you're see you've seen, the drone footage, the the news footage. I mean, it's epic in its scale. It's uh doesn't even come close to capturing just the the devastation, but also this the mighty power of how water interacts in the whole country. It is you know these these rivers that are typically look like creeks, and people laugh at oh Texas rivers, I mean, looked like East Coast, like looked like the Potomac upstream, looked like the the I mean, hell, the the Nueasis looked exactly like the Potomac near the DC area, but like rushing, rushing, rushing. And so it was it was very, I mean, it was wide. I don't even know how to describe it. I'm not my words aren't doing it justice, and neither can the photos. I just know that like areas that I drove through the day before and that were dry, like I went and I stopped on Monday to get ice for a cooler, and I was walking out, I had my hands full, somebody had walked in, saw my hands were full, jump back out, hold the door for me. Uh I was like, No, I was really taken aback by it having coming from the city where that doesn't happen as often, like being back in the good parts of Texas, just having that kind of neighborly attitude. And then when I drove by that same service station on the way back, the water was already up to it. And it's just uh my heart goes out to those folks, and I want to make sure that we're talking about it, but at the same time, this is an area where this happens. Texas is known for this boom bust of it's either flooding or it's in drought. Uh, and we get all of our water at once, and we have to capture it so we can have that water to use throughout all the other the dry times. And no better point of this than the fact that all these lakes, all these uh we call them lakes, they're reservoirs. These are floodwater retention areas. Lake Travis is full. I think Canyon Lake went from 60% full to 100% full. And all these places I they like I think the Mansfield Dam, which is what holds back most of it, holds back Lake Travis on the Colorado. I haven't seen for sure, but it looked like unless I looked, they were projecting it was probably gonna be the first time they had to open the floodgates on Lake Travis in several, several years. This is a big event for Texas. It's both devastating to the peer property and people who are in areas where the water went outside of the flood control, and it's also exactly what Texas needs for our system of water management to work. Lake Corpus Christi, as of a few months ago, was down to 8%. Choke Canyon is still down around 10%. And these are the two things, two areas that are served that serve Corpus Christi. And Corpus Christi is in a level one, like worst-case scenario, water emergency, because none of the no rater river, no water had come into their either of their resort reserves. They had abandoned their desalination plan, and they'd improved with the with the and Corpus Christi had approved with the idea that they were going to build that desalination plant more industrial oil and gas, like refining factories to come online. Well, they never built the water and they the what they started to drain it, and we were starting to get really, really low. Well, with the rain from the past week, past weeks, Corpus Christi in that watershed, Lake Corpus Christi had gone up to about 30%. And with how things, the waters moves down, it's really rushing up near where it was actually raining. But those riverbeds have been so dry, and there's so much debris and the natural floods happening that by the time that this episode airs and into this week, we're going to start seeing massive, we should start to see massive intakes of water into those reservoirs. It's entirely possible. We'll see how that lands, and I'll and I'll report back on it next week. But like the water emergency in Corpus Christi, at least in the short term, like, is it gonna break scenario like mo like imminently, seems to have been staved off for a few years just from this last couple, these monsoon rains. And that's the boom and bust. Texas has figured this out over generations. Water has always been an issue for Texas, it'll always be an issue for Texas because of how our water comes in. It's not consistent, it is dry, dry, dry. Oh my gosh, the heavens are falling on us. What can we do to capture all this water? And that's why we have so many lakes and so many systems in place to really keep that going. So at the same time, that's all happening. There's a tropical depression that's formed off the coastal Florida. Now, this isn't like the kind of big storm that usually hit the hurricane or tropical storms that hit, but they start in the Atlantic and they build up steam and they come and they hit, and it's a big wind emergency. This isn't gonna be a major, this shouldn't be a major issue for most of Texas because it's gonna be hitting areas that weren't as soggy as whatever else, but like it's it's not picking up steam, it's coming around the coast. By the time it hits Texas, it's either gonna be a low-grade tropical storm, if not having gone back to a tropical depression. It'll dump some water on us. Depending on how it tracks, it could hit Corpus and hit the same river basin and might allow actually for more water to be captured by the lake Corpus Christi and Choke Canyon. One of the issues that they don't the reason why they're not exactly sure how much water is going to fill into those lakes I mentioned before, especially those downstream lakes, is the river, the whole riverbed's been so dry for so long that water is going to have to fill in a bunch of like pits and canyons and like little creeks and all these other things, it's gonna have to fill in and it's gonna have to soak into the ground. That riverbed's gonna have to soak in, it's gonna soak in water. And so a lot of the water is going to stay there and kind of whatever else. But when that's already happened, if you have another storm come through and put more water on it, well, that water is now already is that what that stuff's already filled in, so more of that water is now gonna flow down to where it could be. So keep we're gonna keep an eye on the the Gulf storm. We're gonna be keeping an eye on golf storms all year, but you know, this is this is how Texas works. If you're new here or if you're new to paying attention to it, the rain comes and then it goes for a few years and it comes back. It's odd that it happened back to back years. I did want to mention something about 500-year floods or 100-year floods. It is not unusual for the same a state the size of Texas to have 100 or 500-year floods across the state on a fairly yearly basis. All of those 500-year floods are the probability that it happens in a smaller location. And so when you have a state the size of Texas having a 500-year flood, well, they're different types of events, and so there's more than one type of 500-year event. It's not not all not all storms are created equal, not all types of storms are created equal. And the area that it could cover, you know, the when the stuff hit, for example, Kerrville last time, it didn't hit Uvaldi the same way, or it didn't hit, you know, somewhere downriver the same way. So that other area didn't have a 500-year storm, just Kerville did. And so each kind of area is expected to have the probabilities, it's a bad way of explaining it to people because the probabilities and the areas of what is probable over how large an area aren't exactly clear to most people, and it's definitely not clear on a uh on a first pass. And so it's something that the meteorological and kind of water management people are working on for trying to find different ways to explain the intensity or severity of an event instead of using that old kind of way of doing it. So that's just something to keep in mind. A lot of stuff's going on on that front, and I think you know, Texas is you know, we're we're we're we're in this we're in a spot where we're capturing water. And, you know, because of all the work we've done over the years, we're going to be getting a lot of it. I do think it's interesting, you know, how much mod more water could we have uh prevented from going into people's homes or mitigated or captured or other some otherwise been able to utilize in the future after if we had passed this $5 billion amendment that we did last year, five years ago, 10 years ago. But, you know, the next round we'll we'll probably have even more. So that's how that that topic's breaking down. Now we mentioned it in the interview with Evan, which we recorded a few days before this. I wanted to wait to have a little bit more information uh before I talked about it. But I did want to clarify or just kind of talk about a couple things. Former guest on the show, Aaron Wrights, has been appointed who did not make the runoff for U.S. for he was running for Texas Attorney General at the time. Did not make the runoff, was in private practice, uh, was appointed by President Trump to serve as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas. District is broken, Texas is broken up into four districts and to kind of share the load. The Southern District covers Houston and I think down to Corpus in the Valley. But it is a you know, it's a district that where the the U.S. attorney is in is the is the political appointee, so it's point appointed by the president that's in charge of the prosecution of criminal of federal criminal proceedings in that area. And so this new ish, so this case involving Lorenzo Salgado that we talked about in previous weeks is following the investigation is falling underneath that office. And so Aaron did a pretty good video speaking straight to camera like this, kind of explaining where they were within the investigation, what information they did know at the time. This is put out about a week ago from publication of this. So I'd say go look at it, but that information will be stale and should be stale. But it was a good effort by Aaron to kind of get in front of the story. It was a good effort by Aaron to kind of be transparent with what the government's doing and taking place to see whether or not the ICE agents involved committed crimes in when they killed Lorenzo Salgado. Because there's that's a clear fact of the case is that ICE agents killed somebody in the course of trying to apprehend people to deport them. And so there's still more to be coming out about this. I want to do a we talked about it, I think, enough in the interview with Evan. I still think it's going to be it's not going to be a major political football. It could evolve into one still. But my my inclination is that the facts of the case are not going to lend themselves particularly well as a political football type issue. They do they do feed a feed a narrative the Democrats' narrative of bad immigration enforcement policy, and that is something that could spell trouble for Republicans in November. But it it's well, we're gonna wait and see, we're gonna wait and see how that plays out a little bit more to kind of figure that out because the facts of the case are still in question. So Governor Abbott appointed a new Secretary of State to replace the outgoing Jane Nelson. Uh, he picked a longtime advisor to governors before him, a man named Robert Howden, uh, who was currently serving who is before this serving as legislative director for Governor Abbott's official office. Uh he had previously worked in the Republican administrations going back to Bill Clements. He's worked for a number of different trade associations, leading all sorts of efforts on all sorts of things. He's the kind of person who has experience running large organizations, has political know-how, knows how the Capitol works. He's exactly the type of person you, if you've been watching this show, you know that Governor Abbott would pick for this type of role. But the other person who is considered, or was you know, whose name was floated around, was State Representative Nate Schatzlein. Nate is Chatzlein is in his 30s. He's he's served in ministry and he served in the capital and as a state representative. He hasn't really run a large organization. The Secretary of State's office is a large bureaucracy because it covers all of business filings. It covers elections and all sorts of stuff. And so you were expecting somebody who had more experience running that versus somebody on the political side. Because unlike other states, whether you elect your Secretary of State, so then they have some sort of political impetus to go do stuff. Secretary of State in Texas is appointed by the governor and they just have to go and do the job. Now, it's an in considered an interim appointment. When the Senate gavels back in, they'll have to approve it. From what I can tell, it'll likely get Senate approval. But you know, if there's some sort of controversy between now and then, it could lead to, you know, the governor having to make another appointment down the road. But the pro Robert Howden will serve in that position until through at least the Senate gets back into session in January. So he inherits a big fight over closed primaries and how that's going to litigate over the next few months. There's controversy there because governors come out in four closed primary primaries. There are a number of issues at of law that need to be litigated or legislated instead of litigated with how stuff is codified into statute. And so even if Howden drops his opposition to the lawsuit, it he may do it. There's all sorts of wrangling that's gonna have to happen. There's gonna have to be legislation that happens in order for the primaries to close in a way without there to be there's gonna be litigation around this one way or the other. There's gonna be legislation around this one way or the other. And Howden should be a good pick to help marshal or to help shepherd that through the process so that we have clean elections coming for the next primary election in March of 2028. So got a couple years in one big legislative session to get that figured out. I think he's a good man for the job based off of his resume. I don't know him, never met him, but it seems like he'd be a good pick. And he seems to, from all my people who I've talked to in the Capitol, he's well respected and should be able to get people on board to make sure that this is done correctly. So thanks again to Evan Ments for coming on the show. It was a great episode, it was a great interview. So thank you so much for you know spending the time with me to kind of talk about your vision for Houston and for how an editorial page should actually be should work. And I'm so excited for who our next guests are going to be coming down the pipeline. You're gonna be in for a real treat if you're following along each week. So make sure you subscribe, like, comment, tell me what what you liked about the conversation with Evan, what you didn't. But until then, I'll see you next week. Okay. Bye guys.