Cross your fingers, close your eyes, light the incense, and keep repeating, “We are recession-proof. We are recession-proooof … .”
Sigh. It didn’t work, despite all the happy-by-comparison talk of the last year, about how the Barnett Shale income would slow that deflating feeling, and new companies headquartering here would pump us back up. Hat pin to balloon: Home sales are down, more companies are downsizing or folding than are opening up, and the Barnett Shale has at least temporarily done what all gas and oil booms eventually do. It’s gone bust.
In August 2008 there were 2,300 people in Tarrant County collecting unemployment insurance. At the end of January 2009, that number had jumped to more than 25,000. And according to Limus Walker, a manager for Workforce Solutions of Tarrant County, the number is going to keep going up. “We’re headed for 12,000 layoffs in 2009 if the numbers hold. In all of 2007 we had 3,008.” And those numbers don’t include part-timers, people who do work for hire, or the self-employed who are not eligible for unemployment insurance.
It’s getting bad at the Fort Worth Day Labor Center as well, where human services coordinator Warren Harris has been seeing a much higher proportion of middle-class and professional people than normal. “We have more people coming in for work and less guys going out [on jobs]. It’s a double whammy,” he said.
Over at the Tarrant Area Food Bank, which supplies about 300 pantries and hot-food providers in 13 counties, communications director Andrea Helms said that while the pantries were serving 34,000 households in the region last July, they’re now serving 52,500. Worse, she said the food bank is now regularly seeing people who used to be financial donors coming in and asking for groceries.
Summer Stringer, food stamp outreach coordinator for the food bank, noted that the number of households receiving food stamps has jumped more than 20 percent in the last eight months.
“It’s just unbelievable out there,” said Walker. “And we’re still doing better than most other places around the country.”
Door Closer
Open government lost this week – but perhaps only momentarily, said lawyer Harold Hammett. “My clients will appeal, as they continue their effort to make sure the public is fully and accurately informed of what happens in its name.”
He was speaking of State District Judge Melody Wilkinson‘s ruling that the Tarrant County College board of trustees did not violate the state’s open meetings act last year when it gave the chancellor a three-year contract with a $1 million salary under an agenda item that said only that the board was going to discuss “aspects of the routine evaluation of the chancellor.” The plaintiffs, Hammett clients Larry Meeker and Brian Rutledge, argued that the agenda item was too vaguely worded under the law that calls for “clarity” when decisions of great public import are to be made.
Bob Mhoon, a TCC critic and an expert on the state’s open meetings act, was shocked. “The judge ignored the law’s requirement that it be interpreted ‘in favor of the public‘ whenever possible,” he said.
Wilkinson’s ruling was on Meeker and Rutledge’s request for a summary judgment in their favor – that is, an immediate finding before a judge instead of a jury trial. If they win on appeal, the case will not be remanded to Wilkinson as it might have been under a jury decision. The only appeal left then for whichever side loses will be to the Texas Supreme Court.
