GregsOpinion.com

Texas Energy Center has yet to create jobs

$1.6 million awarded from Gov. Rick Perry to the group to create jobs. Not only have they created none, but they haven't even filled one of the jobs they have on their own list of job openings: Director.

Oh, there's more to this ...

Energy Center leaders say the problem is a lack of federal funds and a need to change the business plan to fit the objectives of the jobs-focused Texas Enterprise Fund. A better fit, they said, would have been the emerging technology fund that Perry recently proposed. That fund would emphasize research and development and demand fewer immediate jobs.

"Had that been the original fund announced, we would have fit like a glove," said Herb Appel, an economic development officer in Fort Bend County who is secretary-treasurer for the Energy Center.

Go back and check that blurb if needed ... it couldn't be any funnier. What's the problem with this here Energy Center? Well, we're getting money to create jobs, which wasn't what we wanted to do in the first pace ... they should have given us money to just sit around and do research. Oh, and did I mention that this center is the work of Republican geniuses?

Yes ... Republicans ... those very types you'd expect to say such things as "Government doesn't create jobs, private enterprise creates jobs." Yet here we are in the heart of Sugar Land with a group funded - by Republicans - to create jobs. And go figure ... they suck at it. I mean, if you go 0-fer-10 in baseball or basketball, that's kinda bad. But 0-fer-1.6 mill? ... and you're at negative-one jobs already? That's gotta be some kind of record.

Oh, and did I mention Sugar Land? Yeah, I did. Who's the congressman from there? Oh right ... Tom DeLay. So among the problems confronting this group are that Tom DeLay cannot bring home the bacon for a center (in the parphrased words of the Center spokes-staff) that HE HIMSELF LED THE FIGHT FOR!

One thing, however, the Energy Center has been doing a smashup job of? Shelling out some of that minimalistic fed funds to Friends of Tom DeLay to represent them. God, don't you just hate those lawyers?

In fact, if we go back to some even harder hitting reporting that was done by Houston's other paper (in the post-Tim Fleck era, no less), we get this bit of background:

The city of Sugar Land says the same about its newest engine for economic development, the Texas Energy Center. As Mayor Wallace explains, the center hopes to be to energy what Houston's Texas Medical Center is to health care: a hotbed of entrepreneurs and thinkers who feed off one another and develop real innovation.

The energy center has received significant support from the private sector. Companies such as CenterPoint Energy, ONDEO-Nalco and Champion Technologies have signed on as contributors. But the government has been its biggest proponent.

Last April, energy center organizers asked Governor Rick Perry for $6.1 million. But, as the Houston Business Journal first reported, the appropriations bill Perry signed two months later actually gave the center $31.1 million -- at a time when funding was being slashed across the board. (Perry did not return repeated calls for comment.)

[ed. note - The 31.1 mill doesn't kick in as we learn later. Sloppiness on the Press' part, but it's a free paper, so you get what you pay for. -- GW]

Mayor Wallace credits several local politicians with helping to line up the funding, including DeLay and state Representative Charlie Howard, a Sugar Land Republican. "Tom and I are basically a tag team," Howard explains. "He tries to get money for the state. I try to get it to Fort Bend County."

DeLay was actively involved with the energy center plans. "He's active in anything that goes on in our county," Howard says.

Indeed, energy center backers believe they were close to getting a share of federal money that would dwarf the state's contribution. Currently, energy companies that drill for oil or gas on federal lands must pay royalties into the U.S. Treasury. But a provision of last year's $31 billion energy bill would have returned a portion of those proceeds -- $200 million annually -- to the companies instead.

The cash would allow American-owned gas and oil companies to explore ultra-deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The bill would put the dollars in the hands of a nonprofit consortium, which would then administer it to worthy companies.

The money looked like a perfect revenue stream for the center. After all, Houston is the hub for gulf drilling. Plus, the law required the consortium to be selected within 180 days of the bill's passage -- and, conveniently, the Texas Energy Center had formed just such a consortium in 2002, before potential competitors were even aware of the possibilities.

That's no coincidence. "The language in the bill is something we were pushing for, very hard," Wallace concedes. Last August, the center hired Republican lobbyist Barry Williamson to do some of that pushing in Washington.

All this reminds me of, however, is that if I felt the Houston Chronicle was

a) truly a liberal rag
and
b) a Tom DeLay-hating den of iniquity

... wouldn't I expect a little bit of this type of stuff to make the story? Why yes, I think I would. Neither the Dan Patrick crowd, nor the splinter group have offered thoughts on this bit of news as of press time, however. But just to show how on top of things they are, here's a great Owen Courreges take on how the band Green Day are, ya know ... like total idiots and Kevin pointing out the ultimate sin: The Chron is two days behind a Houston blogger on the editorializing about Continental Airlines' purchase of Boeing 7E7s. Sorry guys, but the next time I hear how the new media will drown the dying dinosaur of mainstream media, I'm using those two examples repeatedly. Well ... right after I go on another Nicole Kidman posting spree, maybe.

The funny thing, however, is that there's ample room to crank on the Chron. I mean, aside from the fact that they literally took a pass on bopping DeLay over the head. I could point out that this is another perfect example of the Chron allowing the Associated Press to do their work on local stories that the Chron should know more about. There's the fact that the Dallas Morning News was on this story before the end of the last year and add some far better insight than the AP story the Chron cuts and pastes into their rag:

Two years ago, the Legislature indicated it would appropriate $31.1 million, none of it tied to job creation, for the center. About half would have funded research to develop a fuel-cell industry in Texas. (Fuel cells are tiny devices that harness power from hydrogen.) The rest would have been used to encourage research in other energy technologies.

But that investment disappeared after Mr. Perry announced his enterprise fund, which dedicated $3.6 million for the project. Other companies that promised more jobs, such as Vought Aircraft, received $35 million or more from the enterprise fund.

The center received $1.6 million in February. The rest of its cash ? $1.7 million ? includes $750,000 from local governments in Fort Bend County, near Houston.

...

Mr. Appel predicts the center will still create the 1,500 new jobs it promised. To qualify for an additional $2 million, it must create the first 100 jobs by August 2005.

...

One of the center's projects ? to improve the state's electricity grid ? is dormant. The project recruited experts at Rice and Columbia universities, but it could not obtain about $4 million in state funding it needed for federal matching funds, said Roger N. Anderson, a Columbia University researcher who worked on the project.

Yet, amazingly, the most important thing that the center could possibly be responsible for is the modernizing of the power grid ... and its dormant? Also, the Center has a legal obligation to create 100 new jobs by August or they lose out on funding (federal or state? ... I don't know ... presuming state). I'll put an early card on the table here, and if the elected types who want to run with this from either party will earn kudos regardless of party. Since we've got some time before August, this is doable. Rather than see the center create 100 of the most meaningless jobs known to mankind in order to fulfill their obligation to get back in line at the governmental trough, why not put at least a minimalist check on the process by delaying the requirement of 100 jobs altogether until we see if the energy bill passes (presumably this gives enough funding to really get going on grid research and partially meets my requirement for meaningful research). Sound acceptable? I mean, I'm not a fan of the energy bill, I don't support its passage. But given that the bill is the ideological property of the party in power, it likely will pass. Even if it passes before August, however, its unlikely that the timeline will cooperate such that the newly created jobs will dovetail evenly with the new infusion of cash once Congress and Bush turn on the spigot of truffles to the energy industry. Why not at least try and make the project make sense and operate more or less functionally rather than demand 100 temporary makework careers for a project that is a) already a bust and b) the only chance it has of any success is if DeLay works his porcine magic.

SIDENOTE: Email sent to Ft. Bend State Rep Charlie Howard and State Sen. Kyle Janek to see what either or both can offer in elaboration on the story.