The Globe-News is hypocritical and the City Council cowards

I’ve been a journalist for almost 20 years and in all that time I’ve never seen a community in which the newspaper of record was such a lapdog and so unwilling to do the real job of the Fourth Estate. It borders on journalistic malfeasance.

The City Council is on the verge of signing contracts for construction of a downtown convention center hotel and a parking garage with its master developer, Wallace Bajjali Development Partners. The councilors, led by Mayor Stiff Hair in all his arrogance, popped the plans on the community this past Wednesday. The one and only public meeting was last Thursday. The council and its cohorts have skulked behind the public’s back since 2010 and now, in less than a week, councilors plan to adopt contracts that break a string of promises to the taxpayers, citizens and voters of Amarillo.

The City Council told the public that no taxpayer money would be involved in this public-private partnership and that Wallace Bajjali would bring the $113 million miracle to fruition by Nov. 1, 2013. In fact, I sat in City Council meetings in which the publisher of the Amarillo Globe-News, Les Simpson, who was at the time chairman of the Downtown Amarillo Inc. board, said these developers would have “skin in the game.”

And that miracle would be the 300-room convention center hotel, a parking garage and a glorified baseball park that the leadership of this unfolding debacle called a multi-purpose event center. We now know that Wallace Bajjali promises for exotic financing to make the project fly were as false as its promises in Kingswood and Joplin.

The Nov. 1, 2013 deadline came and went and the City Council didn’t have the guts to call the game for what it was — a predictable failure from fourth-rate developer backed by a fifth-rate media outlet that blasphemes when it calls itself a newspaper. Instead, the council finessed the contract. The planning continued, with DAI, the Amarillo Local Government Corp. and City Council hiding behind “executive sessions” and never really leveling with the public about all the problems that have now come to light.

So, here we are, another attempt by the City Council to stuff something down our throats at the last minute — and likely this time to succeed. The hotel size has been reduced, the hotel developer, Newcrest, is the same one who successfully turned the Fisk Building into a Courtyard by Marriott. Anyone who believes this hotel deal needed Wallace Bajjali’s help clearly doesn’t understand Newcrest doesn’t need anyone’s help. In fact, a few years ago, there were rumors that DAI's executive director, Melissa Dailey, actively opposed the Fisk Building conversion to a hotel. How’s that for irony?

The upshot at this point is the city — that is us, folks — will own all this. The “all this” now excludes the much-vaunted ballpark — Melissa Dailey Stadium at Taxpayer Field — thereby repudiating the three-legged stool the City Council promised us.

Throughout all this time, the Amarillo Globe-News had the inside track to let the public know what was really unfolding in those official secret meetings — and who knows whether there were unofficial secret meetings. Remember, the paper’s publisher was not only on the DAI board; he was also on the LGC. Any journalist worth his salt would have made sure the public would learn about the public’s business. We now know that no journalist on the Globe-News staff worth his or her salt was allowed to do the real job of a reporter. And the Globe-News publisher, swimming in the sewerage of conflict of interest, proved the importance of his journalism degree from the University of Georgia was lost on him.

Now, suddenly, the Amarillo Globe-News is all concerned about the public’s right to know. In an editorialtoday (November 9, 2014), the Amarillo Globe-News has the unmitigated gall to write, “The city needs to allow residents time to understand and research the decisions and agreements that will be the foundation of what Amarillo will be for many years to come.”

The City Council, Downtown Amarillo Inc. and the Amarillo Local Government Corp. flew under the Amarillo Globe-News radar for at least four years, if not longer. All the time, the so-called newspaper did nothing and now at the 11^th Hour calls for transparency. All I can think of at this point to ask the Amarillo Globe-News that same question that Joseph Nye Welch, the United States Army’s counsel during the Sen. Joseph McCarthy(R-Wisc.) communist witch hunt, asked McCarthy.

“You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Why health reform won’t work — a historical perspective Part 1

The economic model of the United States’ health care system — which really isn’t a system — is not the supply and demand free market model some would have you believe. And some of those who want you to believe that it is a free market knows full well it isn’t, but fooling the public serves certain purposes.



And one of the business sectors foisting this lie on the public is the insurance industry.

It is little known that Blue Cross/Blue Shield not only has its roots in Texas, its seeds were planted by group of Dallas teachers contracting with Baylor University Hospital, according to University of Iowa master’s thesis by Frederic R. Hedinger also credited Baylor. What’s more important than that detail is the plan worked and that it spread across the country, especially during the Depression.

Blue Cross was a benefit plan, meaning it paid for what the doctors thought the patient needed. If the patient needed surgery, the patient got it. And Blue Cross paid the hospital for its charges. The premiums were based on community ratings, which meant that the entire population’s medical needs were estimated and were the basis for the premiums.

Meanwhile, in California, Kaiser-Permanente was formed, becoming the first true HMO. It was a closed panel HMO because the physicians worked for the Permanente Medical Group and the medical group contracted with the insurance plan, Kaiser, which also owned the hospitals. This gave the insurers control of the costs and it succeeded in lowering costs of health corer.

But something happened on the way to the 21st Century.

First, some hospitals and some doctors took advantage of the benefit plans’ no-questions-asked fee-for-service system. Some greedy doctors (surgeons got most of the bad rap) got profligate with diagnoses based on wallet biopsies and performed hysterectomies and tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies. The old joke about hysterectomies was that the only criteria for those procedures were the presence of a uterus and a Blue Cross card, and the uterus wasn’t always needed.

The few rotten apples spoiled the basic for everyone because as people who paid for health care discovered the greed and looked for ways to curb the abuses. So began such things as peer review and utilization review, with the former being doctors who looked over each others’ shoulders and the latter involving non-doctors — and that opened the door for the insurance companies to gain control of the medical decision-making.

Kaiser had a better handle on how to deal with inappropriate utilization. The Permanente Medical Group, which contracted with Kaiser, was essentially told: Here are X-number of lives and our actuarial tables tell us that they will require Y-amount of care. So, here’s the math and the dollars. You take care of folks within that amount and anything you do over it, you eat; you keep the difference to distribute among yourselves.

The doctors watched over the utilization and took care of the over-users. In short, at this point, they retained some semblance of control of the decision-making.

Another part of the story is important and coincides with these mid-20th Centaury events.

Recognize that the structure of the system was that the hospitals were predominantly nonprofit and so there was a certain lack of business pressure with respect to performance and the bottom line. In addition, the people with the financial responsibility on board of directors were the moneyed movers and shakers of the community. Physicians, while having plenty of interest in the hospitals’ functioning well, were neither employees nor contractors. They were free agents within their own organization.

In some communities, working with the medical staff was like herding cats. It’s not that the doctors were evil. It’s that they wanted some things and the hospitals sometimes couldn’t give it. The entire structure was complicated.

At the same time — this was post-World War II and Korea — the population was growing, the need for a full range of services was being demanded and the federal government was there to help. The passage the Hill-Burton Act spurred a boom in hospital contraction that lasted from the late forties until the mid-1970s. While the main purpose was to build hospitals in communities that didn’t have them — read rural — like most federal programs, people who played the game well got the money and hospitals sprang up everywhere. Or, existing hospitals got new wings.

Policymakers came to realize, however, that supply created its own demand. If a hospital built the beds, ORs and x-ray suites and so on, they had to be used to cover the debt service. At the micro level, the community had to pay for the over-building and cover the costs of the resources. At the macro level, pumping patients through the system to fill beds and finance the growth added up to higher costs for the country.

And guess what came along to help fill them? Medicare and Medicaid. They created another revenue stream for the system. In economic terms, they created demand. Remember, though, that some of that demand wasn’t need based on clinical judgment and evidence-based medicine. The model for paying doctors by the procedure and service still prevailed in the early days of those huge programs.

But they also filled hospitals and clinics and added to the total medical and health care costs for the nation. Combine this influx of revenue with the supply creating its own demand, and medical costs skyrocketed. By the way, some researchers noticed that all of these medial resources didn’t lower what were then considered key indicators of a nation’s health — infant and material mortality, life expectancy and other measures of morbidly and mortality.

Around the mid-1960s, scientific advances and medical technology were having a greater effect on medical care .The first kidney transplant had already occurred in Boston in the 1950s. By 1967, Dr. Christian Barnard stunned the world with the first heart transplant. The first CAT scanner came along in the 1970s, but the people who came up with the idea had developed it in the 1960s. And so it went.

But, for all the good the technology did, and it did no doubt, it also drove up the costs. And it was around the mid-1960s we began to hear the word “crisis,” which we’re still hearing today. Some of those people taking about “crisis” were members of Congress. One would think that if they could call it a crisis for 40-plus years, they might have found a way to solve it, but that’s another story.

One of the answers Congress had for cutting costs in the 1970s was to control capital expenditures. It passed a series of law establishing coordinated planning for communities that required states to institute programs to assure that expensive capital expenditures could be justified by community need and not duplicate other services. This was called Certificate of Need, or CON, and remains on the books in some states. If a hospital wanted a new CAT scanner, or someone wanted to build a new nursing home, they had to get approved through a process that justified the expense. The theory was that if s need was proven, the utilization would be optimized.

Some hospital administrators understood this was a good thing for the community, the nation and the system. But as a group they fought CON. Then they got smart and began to work with their doctors and gamed the system — except in two hospital towns. Behind the scenes, medical equipment and hospital construction interests (contractors, architects, etc.) fought CON. But despite the political nature of the local competition for new toys, many felt that the legislation provided for a rational distribution of resources and to some degree held back the growth of health care costs, if only a little.

Was the approach to controlling costs by treating the system as a quasi-public utility a success?

Policymakers will never know. The programs were not in place long enough to fully test them because in 1982, something happened to change the landscape once again.

That and how these forces got the United States to where the system is today are in the next installment.

Is Amarillo's purchase of a train station on the right track?

EuroStar trains poised to return to London from
Paris' Gard du Nord station.

The potential of Amtrak’s Southwest Chief is all over the news the last few days, with the attention in Amarillo triggered, in part, by the City Commission’s decision to spend $2.6 million to buy the old Santa Fe train station. Normally I would be doing back flips of joy over that kind of news. But this time I am a wary that this is another in a long line of the City Commission’s stupid and ill-conceived fiscal profligacy.



I would like to remind the community that The Amarillo Independent broke this story more than a year ago after attending a “Rail Summit” in Fort Worth in august 2012. At that meeting, we learned that the cost for keeping the Chief on its present route — the so-called traditional one — would be $100 million over the next 10 years. Those dollars were to maintain the tracks from Kansas into Colorado and over Raton Pass into New Mexico so the train could travel the 79 mph needed to meet its schedule.

While calling 79 mph high-speed is laughable, it is also no secret that the United States is far behind Europe with transportation infrastructure, so, I guess, in American terms, it is. But both in Great Britain and on the continent, trains cruise in the triple-digit range. An intercity train from London to York or Peterborough in England, somewhat the equivalent of going, say, from Fort Worth to Amarillo, travels at 125 mph. And, of course, the EuroStar connecting London to Paris in 2½ hours or less zips across parts of the countryside at 186 mph. Other trains on the continent run much faster as do the bullet trains in Japan. And all this rail travel is generally safe, greener than flying and contributes to less crowded skies. The U.S. should do the same, but it seems we are better these days at bombing and destroying countries than building up our own.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway has stopped freight service over the Raton Pass trackage and curtailed right of way maintenance; the Chief could not run “high speed” on the tracks. Colorado, New Mexico and Kansas were asked to come up with the money, but not only have they not so far, but New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez also cut and ran from a contract to buy BNSF tracks from Raton to Lamy. That deal would have let the New Mexico Railrunner serve the route from Belen, N.M. to Raton, N.M., opening opportunities for economic development and funneling passengers to the Chief.

As the time grows short and communities along the traditional route panic about losing service, The Garden City Telegram reported the cost of the maintenance doubled to $200 million. That puts the traditional route farther out of reach but it bodes well for the train being routed along the BNSF Trans-Con, which would take the Chief through Amarillo and into Clovis before turning west for the remaining miles to Los Angeles.

So, while there is a certain nostalgic appeal to using the old Santa Fe depot as the Amtrak station, the City Commission and city leadership have not leveled with the community about the full cost. Nor, have they told us about any of the alternatives, some of which could be much cheaper. First, the building isn’t worth $2.6 million and, even with the additional land that City Manager Jarrett Atkinson said was part of the deal, I have to ask if that is the highest and best use. I understand that the platform needs significant renovation to meet Amtrak’s standards and no one has posited what those dollars would be or from when they would come. Nor, if the station were to become a multi-modal hub à la the old Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque or the multi-modal center in Fort Worth, have the commissioners and the city told us what those costs would be and how those expenses would be funded. This will be especially tricky in light of the “no new taxes” pledge for downtown development.

Further, while the appeal is undeniable for the Amtrak stop to be downtown, were any options explored for another location?

The decision for routing the Chief through here is a long way off, but I commend the city leadership for looking at it. It’s something I pushed for. But the city has played this one too close to the vest, as it does with most things. The commissioners continue their arrogant ways of dismissing real and valid citizen and taxpayer concerns. That may be a good way to run a railroad, but railroading this deal isn’t a good way to run a democracy. Ultimately, the taxpayers will pay for the mistakes. Here’s hoping the ride won’t be too expensive.

Nancy Tanner is best choice for Potter County Judge

A month ago, Amarillo’s previous mayor, Debra McCartt, announced she will run for the

Potter County Judge position that Arthur Ware is vacating. Ware, you’ll recall, suffered a stroke and has since struggled with communication and other issues, finally acknowledging last month he is no longer able to fulfill the duties of the office. It’s clear, however, that he didn’t struggle with stabbing people in the back because he fired long-time assistant Nancy Tanner after she announced she would seek election to Ware’s seat. This act of vengeance occurred before Ware publicly announced he would not seek re-election. But when Ware announced he wasn’t going to run again, he endorsed McCartt.

I am not privy to all the machinations on this issue, but I got a letter from Tanner’s campaign Friday that announced her bid for the judgeship. She also held a news conference Friday afternoon. The letter I posted Friday lists prominent area citizens whose views, I know, span the political spectrum. Tanner’s campaign website also lists names.
McCartt told me she was “thinking” about the judge race at the First Friday Art Walk on Aug. 2, so her subsequent announcement was no surprise. McCartt’s formal announcement let loose a blizzard of stories and commentary in the local media. And some of that commentary wasn’t exactly kind to McCartt.

Nor, I believe, did it need to be. While many Amarilloans pride themselves of being positive and courteous — and sometimes see facts and truth to be unkind — electing people to make public policy decisions requires a clear eye and open, thoughtful and analytic mind. So, for what it’s worth, here are the only two reasons why Tanner is the right choice to become county judge: She was court coordinator for 20 years and did Ware’s job since he had his stroke.

And here are the reasons why electing McCartt would be a grievous mistake and an affront to good public policy:

• As mayor, McCartt was a moving force in the current and misguided effort in downtown redevelopment but she never acknowledged she had a conflict of interest. Her husband, real estate developer Joe Bob McCartt, had substantial interest in downtown properties at the time. McCartt might not be the only elected official to suffer an ethical lapse, but she did and that doesn’t speak well of her continuing in public office.

• When David Wallace, of Wallace Bajjali Development Partners, pitched the Amarillo City Commission to become master developer for the downtown redevelopment plan, he dropped names left and right. McCartt was enthralled. She came off like a bumpkin instead of a serous public policy leader. The Amarillo mayor is largely a ceremonial position, so being enthralled by Wallace dropping Margaret Thatcher’s name in and of itself did little proximate harm. But, being Potter County Judge is a substantial position that goes far beyond running a meeting (which McCartt did well). It requires wisdom when handling probates and mental health issues. What might sway McCartt during these very important hearings?

• McCartt’s relationship, both blood and political, would be a first step in making the City Commission and County Commissioners Court an “interlocking directorate,” something that would be a danger to good public policy in Amarillo. She is part of the “good ole boy” network and for Amarillo to move into the 21st Century, it needs new blood and more diversity. Potter County won’t get that with someone so entrenched and well-connected.

• If truth be told, McCartt’s job situation — she’s been hopping a bit — may be as much a driver for seeking a well-paying elected office. The “wanting to serve” is well-worn rhetoric. And that is all it is — rhetoric. The “wanting to serve” mantra is a sterile but helpful step to seeking higher political office, and it’s no secret among the Amarillo political cognoscenti that McCartt wants to be either a state representative of senator or run for Mac Thornberry’s seat in Congress. Since I can’t accept the “wanting to serve” as the real reason for wanting to be judge, I don’t see any other good one for McCartt to be elected.

McCartt is a personable lady. She is always cheerful and optimistic. But she’s no Nancy Tanner.