Watch October 14, 2011 | Texas Highway Patrol Museum: Fundraising Questions on PBS. See more from Texas Week.
Many thanks to Rick Casey, Bruce Kates, and the staff at KLRN’s Texas Week for having me on their show to talk about the Texas Highway Patrol Museum and its little-known purpose as a telemarketing operation.
The Texas Highway Patrol Museum sits on a prime piece of property near downtown San Antonio, across the street from Rosario’s Café y Cantina. Business is booming at Rosario’s, but not so much at the museum. It usually looks empty every time I drive by or hang out in King William. I’ve been kind of curious what their deal is.
After I wrote about delays and conflicts at the Briscoe Western Art Museum last month, Express-News police reporter Michelle Mondo suggested I take a look at the highway patrol museum. It sounded interesting.
A quick Google search showed that others had asked similar questions about the museum over the years and discovered red flags. Amy Davis, a TV reporter who used to work in San Antonio and now works in Houston, investigated the museum in April 2008 and produced this in-depth report. Davis found that the museum was actually a telemarketing operation, and she interviewed a former employee who said the group spent little money on troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety. The KSAT Defenders produced a similar report later that year.
More recently, Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast blogged about a phone call he received from a telemarketer who said he worked for the “Texas Highway Patrol.” Henson asked if he meant DPS — and the caller said yes. It’s a big no-no to falsely claim to be affiliated with a law enforcement agency.
What does DPS, the government agency that employs state troopers, think about the museum? Not much. The agency’s website has a general warning about giving money to telemarketers — but it also has a web page that focuses on the highway patrol museum in San Antonio. DPS criticizes the exhibits, puts “museum” in quotes and warns the public not to give it money.
All this adds up to a good story that people need to know about.
The museum is a nonprofit organization, so its tax records are open to the public. Guidestar offers free access to the three most recent years of tax returns for most nonprofit organizations. The Express-News has an account with Guidestar that gives us access to even more tax returns, which offers a treasure trove of historical information about charities.
Database Editor Kelly Guckian logged into Guidestar and got me copies of everything available for the Texas Highway Patrol Museum and a related entity, the Texas Highway Patrol Association. The two organizations share the same board members, and both were founded by Lane Denton, a former state representative from Waco who was found guilty of stealing money from a different law enforcement charity.
The museum is the telemarketing arm of the partnership. It employed more than 380 people in 2009, most of whom worked at call centers in El Paso, Austin and Houston. The association provides benefits to state troopers.
A brochure states the group gives the “finest benefits possible” to troopers. But looking at a five-year span of tax returns showed that while benefits were indeed paid to troopers and their families, they were only a fraction of the total revenues raked in by the museum’s telemarketers.
I typed all the financial information into a spreadsheet. Here are the numbers:
Donors gave nearly $12 million to the museum, but the association gave only $65,300 to DPS troopers and their families. That’s half a penny for every dollar raised.
Yet when telemarketers call potential donors, they often refer to recently killed troopers by name, pull heart-strings, and lead people to believe that most of their money is actually going to help the people who need it. That happened to the friend of David Slaton, a trooper who died last year in a car accident. The telemarketing call hit her hard.
My story about the museum ran Sunday and many outraged readers responded that they had received telemarketing calls from this organization and others.
What do people with the museum have to say about all this? The employees I spoke with were friendly, and the director of marketing who oversees the telemarketing operation basically described it as a necessary evil. There’s overhead, he said, but without the telemarketing calls, no money would be coming in at all.
But there are more effective ways to help peace officers. Slaton’s friend told me she was impressed by the 100 Club of Houston, which does not raise money through telemarketers. It relies on membership donations, and according to its tax returns, it gave about $1 million in survivor benefits last year.
Rick Hartley, executive director of the 100 Club, said the group has no plans whatsoever to try telemarketing.
It’s not worth the blow to their credibility.
Here’s what I’m looking at to get updates on where, exactly, wildfires are currently burning in Texas and how big they are.
The information for this map comes from the Texas Forest Service and uses Google Maps, so you can zoom in on your area. Wunderground offers a similar map, with estimated smoke plumes based on wind direction.
For road conditions, the Texas Department of Transportation offers a “Highway Condition Reporting System” map, which shows closures and other problems on the state’s highways. Google maps also has a traffic feature that shows conditions and closures.
Other suggestions? Fire away. The Texas Extension Disaster Education Network offers more links, including a Google Earth feature that lets you download an up-to-date KML map file. Very nice.
Hand it to Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson — his feud with the Texas Attorney General and the San Antonio Express-News is, at the very least, exposing a flaw in the state’s open-records law.
Adkisson doesn’t want to release private e-mails in which he discussed public business. The attorney general’s office told him he has to release the e-mails. However, there’s an important caveat: Adkisson is the one who’s responsible for identifying the e-mails that pertain to the public’s business.
Adkisson. The guy who doesn’t want to give up any e-mails. He’s the one who’s supposed to go through his Hotmail account or whatever and turn over copies of e-mails that can be deleted with a mouse click.
In related news, a public interest group, the Corrupt Regime of Associated Politicians (C.R.A.P.) announced today that they’ll be conducting all business on Yahoo! e-mail accounts.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Constitution of the Mexican Mafia in Texas
Express-News Reporter Guillermo Contreras is covering a federal trial involving the Mexican Mafia, and he wrote about a fascinating court exhibit: The constitution of the Mexican Mafia in Texas.
This document was posted on mySA.com today, and it’s all about setting a strong social structure for the gang:
There are few words that actually describe the criminal activities of the Mexican Mafia. Here they are:
“We shall deal in drugs, contract killings, prostitution, large scale robbery, gambling, weapons, and in everything imaginable.”
View Texas Stories in a larger map
I was working on my clips page over the holidays and thought it’d be cool to make a new Google map of my past stories. Each dot on the map is a dateline for an article. I was a little amazed by the variety of far-flung locales I’ve visited in this big state. And I’m not even done plugging in every story.
You always hear about how lame newspapers are. But over the past 12 years, the Express-News paid me to drive to these places and tell unique stories about unique people. How cool is that?
Two years ago, on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, my colleagues Karisa King and Scott Stroud wrote a story that went beyond the platitudes of politicians and pundits. Karisa and Scott checked to see if Texas was actually safer after receiving more than a billion dollars in Homeland Security grant money:
Texas has spent more than $1.4 billion in homeland security money on an effort that was supposed to make people safer, but the program has devolved into a massive spending spree undertaken with inadequate planning, coordination or accountability.
The problem is apparently persisting in California, where a new nonprofit organization of investigative reporters called California Watch reviewed stacks of state audits that tracked how grant money has been spent:
Under the state’s open-records laws, California Watch found scores of instances of wasteful spending, purchasing violations, error-prone accounting and shoddy oversight at agencies across the state during the years immediately following 9/11.
California Watch, a new unit started by the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, examined thousands of pages of documents from 160 monitoring reports written by state homeland security officials who visited cities and counties across California to inspect equipment and grant records for compliance with federal guidelines.
California Watch is the latest nonprofit group geared towards investigative journalism. Similar nonprofit models, such as Texas Watchdog and the Texas Tribune, are attempting to fill the vacuum left by gutted newsrooms across the country.
Investigating whether public officials are actually doing a good job keeping people safe is important work — no matter who’s doing it.
Today’s front page of the San Antonio Express-News was dominated by stories that all relied on public records:
These stories are a shining example of the value of public records — they help reporters, bloggers and the public discover new information.
Scott Huddleston’s story reveals how some caretakers of the Alamo are splitting from the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the nonprofit organization that oversees the historic mission:
Tensions within the group running the Alamo have fueled an unprecedented schism, casting uncertainty on the future of the Shrine of Texas Liberty.
Two members of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas are forming their own nonprofit to benefit the Alamo, despite the DRT’s objections.
“I think the split has been a long time coming,” said Erin Bowman, the San Antonian leading the effort.
Conflicts within the DRT, which has run the state’s top tourist attraction since 1905, are frequent. But some say in-fighting among the Daughters is the worst it’s been in years, amid the pressure of raising a record $60 million for the state-owned Alamo in a down economy.
Texas Insurance Commissioner Mike Geeslin praised one of our stories about thrill ride injuries and criticized another in this letter to the editor published today.
