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“Yes, it costs to have good, aggressive journalism. But it costs even more when you don’t.”
— Leonard Pitts

This quote flitted across my mind as I listened to the brief back-and-fourth between WilCo commissioners Cynthia Long and Terry Cook last Friday.

The two were discussing whether or not some of the federal CARES Act money that landed in the county’s lap last week should be spent buying newspaper ads. After all, as Cook pointed out, newspapers have been beat up as badly by this pandemic as any other small county business and we depend upon them to help us get information out.

Long was dismissive. She said folks could get the word about the county’s new WilCo Forward grant program by other means like social media and, hopefully, Chamber websites (our website had the story Friday afternoon).

“Don’t take it personally, newspaper people, but I don’t think we need to pay for a print advertisement,” she said. “Hopefully they’ll do a story on it.”

Of course we will. That’s what we do.

It’s difficult to tell if Long intended any real snark with her comment. I’m trying to give her the benefit of the doubt.

As you likely noticed, our industry had its struggles before this global pandemic. Things have gotten rapidly worse since mid-March.

But, we’ll keep reporting because that’s what we do.

We can’t just close up and wait for the pandemic to sweep by. We are at a point in our history when our community’s need for accurate, local information is critical. We know you consume our stories because our web traffic has nearly doubled in the last six weeks, engagement on our social media posts has never been higher and our membership list grows by the day (thanks, guys!). But, we’re doing it with one hand tied behind our back and one leg shackled to a concrete slab.

But that’s what we do.

Researchers for recent report at Duke University were startled to learn that, while newspapers represent only 25 % of local news outlets, they produce more original local content than all other media outlets combined. Online newsrooms, TV, radio … social media. None of them produce the kind or amount of critical content as a local newspaper.

The study found that, though outnumbered three to one, newspapers cranked out 60% of all those useful stories in circulation, with none of the other newsrooms producing more than 15%.

You, and those researchers, may have been surprised. I wasn’t. It’s what we do.

We’ve had a lot of experience with what happens when a local newspaper folds in this country. More than 1,700 newspapers have shuttered in the last decade or so, and every study shows that it winds up costing taxpayers in real dollars.

You don’t have to look very far to find a local example. Hutto hasn’t had a newspaper regularly report on its activities for at least three years. Oh, sure … that monthly thing has one of its young reporters monitor online meetings from time to time, and our Big Bad Sibling in Austin shows up when council members throw chairs at each other … which happens rather frequently in Hutto, these days. But, no one with any real background with Hutto’s government has darkened the doors of City Hall since the Hutto News folded in early 2017.

And, it shows. I don’t have the room to detail all of the shenanigans, nor is my remembery up to the task of detailing how much money the city has lost since then but it’s in the millions. Many, many millions.

They had to lay off 30 or so employees before Hutto even felt the effects of the pandemic. What city does that in the middle of a budget year?

Hutto is probably an egregious example of what happens when the watchdog can’t afford to keep watch but the studies show time and again that, absent a local newspaper, taxes go up more than necessary, spending is less restrained and overall corruption rises.

Just knowing a newspaper reporter is sitting in the chambers (or, these days, logged on from a kitchen table) keeps elected official honest. Well, for certain values of honest.

So, yes ma’am, Commissioner. We’ll do a story on it, whether you throw us a bone or not.

It’s what we do.

WARNING: Graphic language ahead (Mom, don’t read this one).
NOTE: Resorting to profanity often weakens an argument. Agreed but, I channeled Lewis Black while writing this. It was … satisfying,

Late last week, a person close to me posted one of those memes that compares Covid-19 to the seasonal flu. You’ve probably seen it. Here. I’ll show you.

I don’t normally engage with this kind of post. I’m not a social media troll and it does no good. Further, I don’t like it when someone barges into my timeline with MAGA-inspired propaganda so I avoid posting my own agitprop on their’s.

Just scroll on by.

But, in addition to the false equivalency, you will notice this post called out “the media” for scaring people about Covid-19. That pissed me off so, I posted this in gentle response: “Covid-19 has killed at least 65,000 in six weeks. If you aren’t worried, you aren’t paying attention.”

I’da left it at that but I got a response that, among other things (including his own worries, to be fair), implored us to get things opened up because, “… the shut down is going to cause worse problems than the virus.”

Don’t fuckin’ tell me about business. Some of my best friends run brick-and-mortar businesses here in Taylor and elsewhere. They are meeting this with all the creativity and perseverance they possess but some of them won’t come out the other side.

My major contract is with a newspaper. A NEWSPAPER. Most small suburban newspapers were on rocky ground before this but, in late March, advertising simply … evaporated. Most newspapers have furloughed staff or cut their hours. We are no different. We went from three FTEs in the newsroom to one. I’ve gone without pay since the first of April.

I absolutely get the “economy” argument.

This kind of post frustrates me because it downplays the danger and, along the way, blames my chosen profession for fear mongering. Fuck that. I’m tired of that narrative. It paints every journalist and reporter with the same brush and is patently untrue, especially at the local level. If the press seems a bit hysterical, it’s because of the dearth of concrete information — and the conflicting nature of the information we do get.

Another person close to me suggests that the infection and fatality numbers are inflated, that doctors and public health officials have ascribed Covid-19 as the cause of death for all sorts of unrelated things.

That pisses me the fuck off, too. Look, I’m a 63-year old lung cancer survivor with COPD. My COPD isn’t debilitating or anything. In fact, I seldom notice it unless I over-exert or my doctor brings it up. But, I ask you: if I catch this shit then die (which, given the above, it as likely as not) what killed me? The COPD or the coronavirus?

I’ve been on my own kind of front line reporting this shit. (I’m safe because I do it all from home.) I SEE how state and county officials in Texas play fast and loose with the numbers.

We don’t know the fucking infection rate because we haven’t fucking tested enough! If anything, this shit is under reported, not inflated. I suspect Texas officials like it that way.

Community spread is a very real and dangerous thing. Nursing homes (and even worse, meat packing plants) are perfect incubators for this virus. If this shit gets loose in rural America, this is where it will originate.

Here’s a sample: we learned last week that a nursing home in Round Rock was a hotspot where 50 people tested positive. Aside from the impact on those people, not that big a deal, right? 200-bed nursing home, a quarter of the population tests positive. Sad, but not too surprising and at least it’s all contained, right?

Well, 18 of those positive tests were to staff … who go home every day. Go shopping. Maybe stop at a convenience store or pick up curb-side on the way home. All but one of those people were asymptomatic when they were tested. They didn’t know they were infected. So … how many others did those people infect? How many did the people they infected did it spread to? We don’t know and we don’t really have the resources to find out. Not in WilCo.

Now, drop that scenario in someplace like Cameron, Texas … there’s a similar nursing home there. Most small towns have something like that. But there is no hospital in Cameron, only one clinic (no doctors) and a barely-existent public health infrastructure (I know … I lived there for 15 years). At least Cameron’s close to Temple but … how much havoc could that hotspot wreck in a small town before someone discovers it?

If you are working safely and being responsible, good on you. TOO MANY PEOPLE FUCKING AREN’T! One of our reporters went out to see how “opening weekend” was going and he said he was stunned by how few people kept any kind of social distance or wore masks. Social media posts that downplay how serious this is simply enable this behavior. You might even say they are criminally negligent.

Don’t even get me going on the shining, whiny examples of white (usually male) privilege that are the armed “open it up” protests storming the country. That shit’s fucking asinine. On so many fucking levels.

I absolutely understand the desire to “open it up.” I haven’t seen my grandkids in six weeks. I need a hair cut. The company I work for is rapidly going broke but newspapers can’t just … stop. Not now.

So please … just … stop.

(Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.)

A couple of weeks ago, Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell announced that he had found a source for Covid-19 test kits and bought 1,000 of them. At the same time, he said the county would get 500 more test kits each and every day going forward.

I write this on a Sunday morning about two weeks later and, by my count, and assuming his forecast was accurate, and that the county takes deliveries only on weekdays, that means that the WilCo health department should now have something like 5,500 test kits on hand.

What is the county doing with those test kits?

I ask that, not to put the Judge on the spot (though if it does, so be it) but to point out that we won’t get out of this lock down or whatever you want to call it with out aggressive and systematic public testing.

That’s what the experts say. The experts say that, until we have a better grasp of the true infection rate, we won’t have enough information to know if our decisions to relax the steps we’ve taken are safe or even advisable.

It’s also what our readers say. Each time we post the most recent count of positive tests and recoveries in WilCo, people note that we aren’t really testing so these numbers are meaningless.

I agree. We don’t know how many people in the county have been tested and, absent that number, we don’t really know much of anything. It’s a question I first posed to county officials on March 15 and I’ve re-upped it each and every time I’ve had the opportunity.

We do know about how many people have been tested in Texas. As of Saturday, that number was 176,239 in a state with a population of about 29.9 million. That’s about 6 people per 1,000 which is the lowest testing rate among the country’s large states. Hell, Oklahoma has a higher rate than that. Oklahoma! Sheesh!

That’s not testing! That’s a … a lick and a promise.

We’ve must have better data (more tests) before we can have a clear idea of when and what to re-open … unless we are willing to risk all of the claimed progress we’ve made this last month. Otherwise, it is a sterling example of waywardness and imbecility.

Some people are willing to roll the dice on that one, of course. They are stamping at the bit to ignore the guidelines the experts set up to slow the spread of the virus because freedom. And liberty. And, guns. And, I dunno, manliness, I guess.

I simply cannot understand why people want to turn a public health crisis into a partisan political battle over individual rights. Taking to the streets because they’re not allowed to infect fellow citizens with a deadly virus is a new kind of crazy. It is evident they consider Dr. Oz to be more of an expert on infectious diseases than Dr. Fauci.

It makes me tired, except when I’m extra-ragey, a condition that consumes far more of my waking, quarantined hours than I care to admit.

So, back to the Covid-19 tests kits.

Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday promised more testing capacity. A lot more capacity. By the end of the month. He’s made that promise before so, I take this statement with a grain or two of salt.

By the time this column hits the news stands in print, WilCo should add another 2,000 test kits to its arsenal but no plans, as yet, to commit those tests to any sort of strategic testing.

I do know that the vast majority of that new capacity will be through private, not state, resources. Unless you have good insurance, it is likely that you or I will pay on the order of $135, or more, to get tested. If we are among those selected for a test.

Unlike the citizens of the great state of Oklahoma where there are 80 drive-through testing sites. Anyone who has symptoms can get tested, without an appointment or a note from your doctor.

And they are free.

Oklahoma. The home of Tiger King. Sheesh!

Do you know what my grandson would love to see for his next birthday? His grandpa, dressed as a firefighter riding on a big old fire truck, delivering his birthday present!

No? I can’t use a fire truck? How about … let’s get a deputy sheriff to drive me to his house! Yeah, that’s the ticket! Let’s do that instead! How crazy would THAT be!?

Sounds pretty crazy, right? And cool. That too! What toddler wouldn’t love that? He’d talk about it for days. Months, even!

But, it’s not something that I, Mr. John Q. Public, could do without intense negotiations, a fist-full of money and, likely, an unusually close personal relationship with a fire chief and, perhaps, a county sheriff.

But that’s exactly what Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell did last week. Well, it is if media reports, a sworn affidavit which accompanied a criminal complaint, and his own tacit admission are to be believed.

There are problems with this. Oh, there are problems.

A few weeks back, Judge Gravell issued a county wide order to stay at home unless your business is essential. He did that in concert with leaders from other counties as a measure to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. He seemed serious about it. He even imposed a fine and jail sentence for those who violate that order: $1,000 and/or six months in jail (note: no one has been fined or sentenced to jail, nor do local law enforcement contemplate making any arrests for violating the order).

In fact, in nearly every single public appearance since, he has preached the necessity of social distancing and urged us to stay at home unless our travel was absolutely necessary. The order says “essential.”

Attending his grandson’s birthday — no matter how briefly, no matter how well protected, no matter how well intended — cannot be considered essential.

I get it. I really do. On the surface of it, it’s not that big a deal. But, the optics are very bad. If we are subject to a stay home order, shouldn’t the public official who issued that order do the same?

If a public official can break quarantine, why can’t we?

In my house, we haven’t seen our grandkids in a month. We haven’t seen many of our friends in about as long. If it weren’t for Face Time, we’d never see ’em. One of our staffers hasn’t seen his wife in about that long. Some of us are more than just a little inconvenienced by the stay-at-home order but we plug along, doing the best we can because we know — or have been convinced — that this is critical.

But, really, there’s worse. In my view, using public resources for this stunt was really … ill advised, to put it gently. Why? Well, conviction of even a misdemeanor count could cost him his job.

It’s right there in Chapter 87 of the Texas Local Government code … scroll down to 87.031:

“The conviction of a county officer by a petit jury for any felony or misdemeanor involving official misconduct operates as an immediate removal of that officer from office.”

Misuse of public resources — borrowing bunker gear from a fire department and directing a county employee (on county time?) to drive him somewhere not on official county business in the midst of a pandemic — is official misconduct.

I get why he did it, I just cannot fathom why elected officials in this county believe that they can do things the rest of us cannot.

Given the political affiliations of the county officials who would prosecute this (allegedly criminal) violation, it seems unlikely Judge Gravell will face any real consequences for this stunt. That’s my opinion based on six years’ observation of Williamson County and another 25 years experience reporting on county government in Texas.

That said, unless the judge issues a sincere apology for his poor judgement and, perhaps, voluntarily pays the fine for breaking quarantine, the commissioners court should censure him, and use pretty explicit terms. That would not be out of line and would serve the judge a well-deserved plate of humble pie.

If it’s good for us, it should be good for him.

So, how’s your quarantine going?

Me? Well, I usually work from home anyway so the only change to my routine is that my wife is now spending part of her week at home with me. I’m okay; she’s bored. (Note: she’s found some solace in The Tiger King. Thankfully, she watches it without me, though I do get regular reports.)

We don’t have kids at home and are keeping our distance from the grandkids (hello, FaceTime!). I am beginning to regret not getting a haircut as I had intended a couple of weeks ago. And, our usual Friday night get together with friends has transmuted into a Zoom teleconference which, when you think about it, is a very Quarantini thing to do.

We’d better get used to it.

A friend of mine alerted me to a report released this week on research conducted by the Meyers Lab at The University of Texas at Austin (UT). The research models the spread of the coronavirus in Central Texas.

This is the first time I’ve seen a chart like this specific to our region — that would be five county area around Travis County.

The research suggests that, even under the current stay-at-home orders in effect over the area, our health care system will be swamped by mid-July. That may seem like a long way off, and it is. But look at the trajectory of the three projections.

If you aren’t sobered by this, I don’t know what to tell you. But, please stay away from me, my friends and … well, just stay away from everyone. You’re dangerous.

We talked to a shop owner the other day who is distraught about his business. I get that. I’m distraught about our small businesses — my clients’, the one I run independent of any newspaper and the one my wife runs.

Our friend had read through the stay at home orders and could not figure out whether his business was essential or non-essential. We flipped the question: how would you feel if one of your team is a carrier and unknowingly infected someone, especially if that someone had underlying health issues that would complicate the infection.

Taking it one step further, he was reminded that he knows — personally — at least three people who fit that bill. I am one of them. I’m 64, a cancer survivor with COPD. (My lovely wife has pretty much locked me down for the duration, BTW, and my hands are becoming rough and dry from washing, regardless of the gobs of hand lotions I swath over them.)

Back to these projections and to the crux of the problem. There are about 2,000 hospital beds in the region and that’s no where near enough to deal with this pandemic unless we flatten that curve and do it now.

This doesn’t even account for sufficient hospital staff and appropriate safety equipment and the respirators needed. Just hospital beds.

This isn’t fake news. It’s not a joke and it’s not a hoax. No matter what we do, no matter how well we isolate or how often we wash our hands, it’s gonna be a long, hot summer.

But, another thing is certain: if we don’t self-isolate, if we don’t wash our hands and avoid crowds, it’s going to be hell.

Stone is Editor at Large for the Hill Country News. His column, The Ragged Edge, has run in dozens of newspapers across Texas and has won a handful of mildly covetous regional, state and national awards for excellence in commentary.

Took in part of downtown Taylor’s New Years Eve celebration. Wasn’t inspired until I went to the Black Sparrow (hell, I didn’t even have my camera, just my iPhone). These shots seemed best as black and white.

And, with that, I’m all caught up.

For the first time in decades, experts evaluated the rural dams in East WilCo. I took some photos and published the results on the WCID website. Here are my two favorites.

Single image, this time. Sunset behind the new Christmas tree in Heritage Park.

Another catch up post. Murphy Park in Taylor. It was a cold morning and I wasn’t dressed for it.

Playing catch up this morning. Many of my followers saw these on social when they were first posted. Click on an image to see the full size version. Looks like this site will let me post close to the date they were taken.