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(HOUSTON) — A suspect has been identified after an abandoned newborn was found crying by a dumpster in Houston, police said Wednesday. A person called 911 early Sunday afternoon reporting that they had heard a baby crying near a dumpster at an apartment complex, according to Houston Police Department spokesperson Jodi Silva.

First responders found the infant in the dumpster area, Silva said. Video captured by a bystander showed first responders rescuing the baby from the dumpster and appearing to swaddle him in a blanket. The newborn was transported to a local hospital and is believed to be in good health, Silva said.

Child Protective Services has since taken custody of him, she said. It is unclear how long the infant was by the dumpster.

Police have been investigating the incident, including checking surveillance footage, to identify who placed the newborn there and any potential witnesses, Silva said.

Police have since identified a suspect and “are continuing to work through the investigation,” Silva said.

No additional details on the suspect have been released at this time, including their alleged connection to the incident. The name of the suspect will not be released until charges have been filed, Silva said.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports Vice President Kamala Harris will come to Houston on Thursday in one of her first stops on the campaign trail as the Democratic party’s presumptive nominee for president. The White House confirmed Harris will deliver the keynote speech to the American Federation of Teachers national convention on Thursday, marking her second visit to Texas this month. She spoke in Dallas two weeks ago to the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. The AFT, with 1.8 million members, is among the nation’s largest teachers unions and a powerful bloc of Democratic voters. The announcement of the visit comes a day after AFT delegates voted to endorse Harris for the Democratic nomination for president.

“The educators, bus drivers, nurses, public employees, higher education workers, correctional officers and doctors of the AFT stand with Kamala,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten in a statement accompanying the endorsement. “We are fully committed to this fight: united, mobilized and ready to vote in this year’s election.” Harris is no stranger to Houston. She campaigned frequently in the city in 2019 and late last year took part in a forum on health care and attended a private fundraiser. While Harris already has the AFT support, the White House said the event shows her continued support for workers across America, noting she has spoken before big unions recently, including the SEIU and UNITE HERE, the largest hospitality union in America.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that former Mayor Sylvester Turner said he is seriously considering running for the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s seat in Congress. “I am giving it serious consideration,” Turner told the Chronicle, adding that he would make a final decision soon. Turner told KHOU, which was first to report Turner’s interest, that “only the passing of his friend at this critical junction would cause him to come out of retirement,” according to the station. The former mayor is expected to make a decision in the coming days. Jackson Lee, 74, died Friday after announcing earlier this year she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A lion in Houston politics, Jackson Lee had served the 18th Congressional District since 1995, known for her relentless drive and near ubiquitous appearances at community events in the district.

The Democratic congresswoman had defeated former City Council Member Amanda Edwards in a primary in March and was likely to cruise to reelection in November. Now Democratic Party precinct chairs in the district will select a new candidate for the November ballot. Gov. Greg Abbott could call a special election as well, to fill the rest of the congresswoman’s term through this year, though it is not certain he will do so. State Reps. Jolanda Jones and Jarvis Johnson are among the current elected officials who serve in districts overlapping with the late congresswoman’s district. Johnson announced Tuesday his bid for Jackson Lee’s seat. Bishop James Dixon, a longtime friend of Jackson Lee’s family whose church held a prayer vigil for the late congresswoman before her passing, told the Chronicle on Tuesday that many in his community have encouraged him to run for the seat. He said he is humbled by the possibility of continuing Jackson Lee’s legacy in the district and that he is “thinking about it very seriously and praying about it even more seriously.” Former City Council Member Dwight Boykins, a district resident and friend of the late congresswoman, also confirmed his interest in the race on Tuesday. He said, however, that he does not yet wish to make an official announcement out of respect for Jackson Lee and her family.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — State election directors from across the country, including Texas, voiced serious concerns to a top U.S. Postal Service official Tuesday that the system won’t be able to handle an expected crush of mail-in ballots in the November election.

Steven Carter, manager of election and government programs for the postal service, attempted to reassure the directors at a meeting in Minneapolis that the system’s Office of Inspector General will publish an election mail report next week containing “encouraging” performance numbers for this year so far.

“The data that that we’re seeing showing improvements in the right direction,” Carter told a conference of the National Association of State Election Directors. “And I think the OIG report is especially complimentary of how we’re handling the election now.”

But state election directors stressed to Carter that they’re still worried that too many ballots won’t be delivered in time to be counted in November. They based their fears on past problems and a disruptive consolidation of postal facilities across the country that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has put on hold until after the elections.

Monica Evans, executive director of the District of Columbia Board of Elections, recounted how she never received her mail ballot for her own June primary. She ended up voting in person.

“We had, at last count, over 80 ballots that were timely mailed as early as May for our June 4 primary election,” Evans said, noting that her office could have accepted them as late as June 14, but they still arrived too late. “We followed up and we just kept getting, ‘We don’t know what happened. We don’t know what happened.’”

While former President Donald Trump has complained without foundation that fraudulent mailed ballots cost him a second term in 2020, mail-in voting has become a key component of each party’s strategy to maximize the turnout of their voters in 2024. Now Republicans, sometimes including Trump, see it as necessary for an election that is likely to be decided by razor-thin margins in a handful of swing states. Republicans once were at least as likely as Democrats to vote by mail, but Trump changed the dynamics in 2020 when he began to argue against it months before voting began.

Bryan Caskey, the elections director for Kansas who’s also the association’s incoming president, asked Carter to consider a hypothetical jurisdiction that has a 95% on-time rate for mail deliveries, which he said is better than what almost all states are getting.

“That still means that in the state that sends out 100,000 ballots, that’s 5,000 pissed-off, angry voters that are mad about the mail service,” Caskey said, adding, “Actual elections are being determined by these delays, and I just want to make sure that you’re hearing why we’re so upset.”

“It’s totally understandable,” Carter said. “The frustration is understandable.”

The association’s current president, Mandy Vigil, the elections director for New Mexico, said in an interview afterward that she appreciated that the service was at least willing to engage with the state officials, but that she’s concerned that there isn’t enough time before the general election.

“I think that we are at a place where we really need them to pay attention,” Vigil said. “You know, we’ve been voicing our concerns since last November. But we just aren’t seeing the changes as we’re working through our primary elections. And when it comes to November, like, we need to see a difference.”

Nineteen senators wrote to DeJoy last month asking the postmaster general about the service’s policies and plans to prepare for the 2024 election cycle. They pointed out how the first regional consolidation, in Virginia last year, led to delivery delays that led some local election officials there to direct residents to bypass the mail and place their primary election ballots in designated drop boxes. They noted that Virginia’s on-time delivery rate fell below 72% for fiscal 2024, or over 15% below the national average.

Other consolidations have been blamed for degraded service in Oregon, Virginia, Texas and Missouri. The consolidation has also created concern among lawmakers in Utah, where state law requires that ballots be mailed from within Utah, but the postal service now processes mail from some counties in Nevada after moving some operations from Provo to Las Vegas. The entire Minnesota and North Dakota congressional delegations wrote to DeLoy last month after an inspector general’s audit documented nearly 131,000 missing or delayed pieces of mail at six post offices over the course of just two days.

DeJoy paused the cost-cutting consolidations until January 2025 in the wake of bipartisan criticism, but lawmakers want a commitment that the resumption won’t lead to further delivery delays.

HOUSTON (AP) — The Rev. John Parks was taking his first sabbatical in 40 years of ministry when he got a call from his church’s accountant with some bad news.

Church Mutual, the church’s insurance company, had dropped them.

“This does not make sense,” Parks, the pastor of Ashford Community Church in Houston, recalls thinking at the time. “We’ve never filed a claim.”

Five months and 13 insurance companies later, the church finally found replacement coverage for $80,000 per year, up from the $23,000 they had been paying.

“It’s been an adventure,” said the 69-year-old Parks from his home in Houston, where the power was out after Hurricane Beryl. “That’s putting it politely.”

Parks and his congregation are not alone. An ongoing wave of disasters — Gulf Coast hurricanes, wildfires in California, severe thunderstorms and flooding in the Midwest — along with skyrocketing construction costs post-COVID have left the insurance industry reeling.

As a result, companies such as Church Mutual, GuideOne and Brotherhood Mutual, which specialize in insuring churches, have seen their reserves shrink. That’s led them to drop churches they consider high risk in order to cut their losses.

Hundreds of United Methodist churches in the Rio Texas Annual Conference learned they’d lost property insurance in November last year, leaving church officials scrambling. More than six months later, some churches have found new insurance, often at a steep increase. Others still have none, said Kevin Reed, president of the conference board of trustees.

Reed said the conference had about a month’s notice that its property insurance policy, which local congregations could buy into, was being canceled. That wasn’t enough time to find new coverage before the policy expired. It also left local churches on their own.

“We have not found a good solution,” said Reed. “It continues to be a significant problem for our churches.”

United Methodist churches in Iowa have also lost insurance, according to the Iowa Annual Conference, in the aftermath of severe weather in the area. The Rev. Ron Carlson, treasurer of the Iowa conference, said that both small rural churches and larger churches have been affected. Carlson said the conference reminded churches earlier this year to be proactive in checking on their insurance and not waiting for a renewal offer.

The UMC’s Book of Discipline requires churches to carry insurance for the full replacement cost of their buildings as well as liability insurance. For some churches, said Carlson, that’s just not possible. He said the conference is trying to sort out what happens to those churches.

For struggling churches dealing with declining membership and giving, he said, rising insurance may be the last straw.

“There have been some that have said we can’t do this anymore,” he said.

For churches that lost their insurance, finding replacement coverage is difficult. That’s in part because churches are a niche market that’s difficult to insure and full of risk, say experts. They are open to the public, work with everyone from infants to senior citizens, sometimes house social service programs, are run by volunteers and often have large and expensive buildings.

Churches also operate with little oversight, said Charles Cutler, president of ChurchWest Insurance Services, which works with about 4,000 churches and other Christian ministries.

“Because of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state, ministries are largely unregulated,” said Cutler. “And unregulated businesses are difficult to underwrite.”

The church insurance market, like the insurance industry overall, has been hit with a perfect storm in recent years. Supply chain shortages for construction materials that began during the pandemic have driven up the cost of rebuilding after a disaster. When the cost of rebuilding goes up, so does the size of claims, said Cutler. That led insurance companies to raise their rates in order to cover those claims.

Then a series of natural disasters hit the industry hard — including hurricanes, wildfires and what are known as “severe convective storms” — thunderstorms with extreme rain and wind that caused billions in damage last year, according to the Insurance Journal. Claims from those disasters have stressed the reserves that insurance companies use to pay claims.

AM Best, a credit rating agency that specializes in the insurance industry, cited weather and cost from legal claims as reasons for placing Church Mutual under review this past spring. AM Best also downgraded the rating of Brotherhood Mutual, another major church insurer, while a third church insurer, GuideOne, was taken off review after Bain Capital invested $200 million in the company.

In a statement on its website, Church Mutual said it hopes the company’s outlook will improve.

“Church Mutual has been proactively addressing these challenges to better manage the risks throughout its book of business, nationwide,” the company said. “The company’s leadership team is confident these measures will have a significant, positive impact on profitability in 2024 and beyond.”

Pam Rushing, the chief underwriting officer for Church Mutual, said that the company is still renewing policies and accepting new business in every state. However, the company no longer offers property coverage in Louisiana. Church Mutual did not give details of how many policies have been canceled.

“We do not take nonrenewal decisions lightly and it represents a small percentage of our overall portfolio,” Rushing said in an email. “For us to remain financially strong, viable and best able to serve our mission, we need to mitigate the severe impact catastrophic weather has had – and will continue to have – on our bottom line and our ability to serve customers nationwide.”

Brad Hedberg, executive vice president of The Rockwood Co., a Chicago-based agency, said church insurers are facing pressure from the reinsurers — large companies such as Lloyd’s of London that provide insurance to insurance companies so catastrophic claims don’t overwhelm them. Those companies are looking to reduce their exposure to certain types of claims— meaning church insurers can’t offer as much coverage as they did in the past.

Hedberg, who works with churches and other ministries, said he spends a lot of time helping clients keep the insurance they already have and reduce their risk of filing claims. That means making sure churches have policies in place for everything from abuse prevention to who gets to drive the church van, as well as being proactive with building maintenance and safety projects. It also means being strategic in when to file a claim — and when to pay for a loss out of pocket. Churches should only tap their insurance for large losses — not small claims, he added.

“If small claims get filed, your coverage could be nonrenewed or your premium could go through the roof,” he said. “The market is just that bad.”

Once a church loses coverage, it may face higher prices for years. That’s likely the case for Bethany Covenant Church in Berlin, Connecticut, said Greg Pihl, who chairs the church’s finance committee.

The church had been paying $12,500 for insurance and had made a claim for flooding damage due to a faulty sprinkler. Pihl said the church learned this past spring that its insurance had been canceled. Now Bethany will pay about $73,000 for less coverage, said Pihl.

That made for a difficult conversation at a church business meeting and midyear changes to the church’s budget. The church was able to tap some reserves to cover the increased premium this year. But it’ll likely be paying higher rates for the next three to five years, said Pihl. And those reserves, meant to pay for things like a new roof, still have to be built back up.

Pihl said that before the church’s policy was canceled, he expected rates to go up, perhaps by 10% or 20%. But that proved overly optimistic.

“It’s just a terrible market,” he said.

Nathan Creitz, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Bay Shore, New York, a congregation of about 100 people on Long Island, said that in the past, getting insurance hadn’t been a worry. The total annual cost for all the church’s insurance — the church building, a parsonage, liability — was less than $4,000.

“We got lucky,” he said. “We were grandfathered into some really low rates.”

Things changed last summer after Calvary’s insurance carrier dropped the church, deciding not to renew the policy. With the help of a broker, the church found new insurance for about $14,000. Since most of the costs of running a church, such as paying staff and keeping the lights on, are already fixed, that meant cutting programs. The church also had to put off capital improvements to the building, which ironically are the kinds of things that would make them easier to insure.

“It’s not ideal but that’s what happened,” Creitz said.

For Ashford Community Church in Houston, finding the funds to cover the increased insurance has also been a challenge, especially post-COVID, when church attendance and giving are down.

Higher insurance costs also mean less money for ministry at the church, which Parks described as a mission-focused congregation.

The church’s 40,000-square-foot facility is currently home to about a dozen congregations, through a partnership called Kingdom City Houston. Parks said he came to the church about a decade ago after hopes of starting a church overseas fell apart. At the time, the church was struggling and was using only a quarter of the space in its building.

Today about 1,200 people worship every weekend in the building — which holds multiple services in its three sanctuaries. Parks said worshippers come from more than 60 countries. The churches each have their pastors but share some back-office staff.

The idea is to show that Christians from different backgrounds can still be united. “We can walk side by side, even if we don’t always see eye to eye,” he said.

Parks said Ashford’s building has been largely untouched by recent storms. After Hurricane Harvey caused massive flooding in 2017, the church hosted volunteers from around the country who helped residents recover.

“It was a good time of serving the community,” he said.

AUSTIN (AP) – In 1989, Bo Pilgrim, an East Texas chicken plant magnate, strolled the floor of the Texas Senate and dispensed $10,000 checks to nine members in an effort to stop a worker’s compensation bill from passing.

The scandal, dubbed “Chickengate,” was shocking but legal.

But the chicken man’s brazenness — what he called campaign contributions, many Texans saw as bribes — ruffled enough feathers to usher in a rare era of good government reforms.

Lawmakers would soon pass laws prohibiting themselves from accepting donations inside the Capitol and creating the Texas Ethics Commission, an independent body with investigative power, that would enforce the state’s campaign finance laws.

Three decades following its inception, the commission is toothless. Compliance of Texas’ ethics laws is largely voluntary. That’s because the agency relies on the Texas attorney general to enforce payment of fines for violations.

And under Ken Paxton, who himself owed $11,000 in ethics fines until recently, that has rarely happened.

A review by The Texas Tribune found that the number of politicians, lobbyists and political action committees that owe fines for breaking state campaign finance laws has exploded in recent years.

The Texas Ethics Commission issues the penalties for violations of state campaign finance laws, most often when entities fail to file required reports detailing their fundraising, spending or personal financial holdings. Those penalties could also be for infractions like spending campaign dollars on improper expenditures, failing to register as a lobbyist or using government resources to campaign.

Fines are the primary enforcement mechanism to ensure political actors follow the law. But when the fines go unpaid, the responsibility for forcing delinquent individuals and groups to pay up falls on the attorney general’s office, which can take them to court.

Since Paxton took office in 2015, the ethics commission has referred 2,500 unpaid fines to the attorney general for enforcement, the Tribune found. During that time, Paxton’s office has filed just 175 enforcement lawsuits, or 7% of the cases referred to it. Most occurred early in his tenure. After filing none in 2020 and 2021, the attorney general’s office brought 18 cases in 2022, 25 last year and just one so far in the first six months of 2024.

As enforcement has lagged, the number of delinquent candidates and elected officials has soared. In 2019, 327 filers owed $1.3 million in fines. Through June, 750 filers owed $3.6 million.

That trend is alarming in a state with few regulations in its political system, said Anthony Gutierrez of open government advocacy group Common Cause.

“Candidates are supposed to be telling Texans who they’re taking money from, what they’re spending money on,” Gutierrez said. “If any of that information is not being disclosed, it’s a big deal. It could be being kept secret for a reason.”

For years, the worst offender has been Rep. Ron Reynolds, D-Missouri City. He owes $77,013 dating back to at least 2014. During that period, he’s been referred for enforcement by the ethics commission 20 times for missing deadlines to file campaign finance reports or personal financial statements. The attorney general’s office has sued him six times, seeking $34,500. Despite this, and a criminal conviction for barratry, he has been reelected five times and remains in good standing with the Democratic caucus. He reported maintaining just shy of $64,000 in his campaign account on the last report he did file, in February.

Reynolds did not respond to an interview request.

This year, Democratic Rep. Shawn Thierry, dogged by accusations that she had bankrolled her primary runoff campaign with Republican donors, did not file the campaign finance report due weeks before the May 28 election. The omission deprived voters in her Houston district of timely information about her financial backers while they mulled who to support in a race where her party loyalty was in question.

Thierry, who lost her race, said she missed the deadline because the aide in charge of the filing had a death in their family. When Thierry filed the missing report in July, 56 days late, it revealed that more than half of the $200,000 she raised came from donors or political action committees who traditionally support Republicans.

Thierry said she paid her $500 ethics commission fine, though the commission said she hasn’t.

Paxton himself until June was a delinquent filer whom the TEC has referred to attorney general’s office for enforcement. Unsurprisingly, Paxton’s office had not sought repayment from him.

He owed $11,300 for fines that piled up from filing three late reports. Paxton used his $2.4 million campaign account to pay the fines on June 25, after the Tribune had contacted his office seeking an interview about its process for pursuing delinquent filers on June 12, 14 and 17.

As a matter of policy, the ethics commission only refers cases for collection for fines that reach $1,000. The attorney general’s office strategy for collecting these delinquent fines is unclear. Paxton, First Assistant Brent Webster, Bankruptcy and Collections Division Chief Rachel Obaldo and Assistant Attorney General John Adams did not respond to requests for comment.

Paxton has sparred with the ethics commission in the past. He refused to allow the attorney general’s office to represent the commission in lawsuits filed by the conservative political action committee Empower Texans, which had contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Paxton’s campaign. As a result, the commission spent $1.1 million hiring outside counsel. It ultimately won the case.

Adrian Shelley, of left-leaning consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen, said the lack of enforcement of Texas’ ethics laws makes way for grave consequences for transparency in future elections.

“If I am a candidate for office and I want to conceal who I’m taking political donations from, the message the candidates get right now is there’s really no teeth in the agency,” Shelley said. “There’s really no risk to me in not filing my report before the election… there’s an incentive to game the system”

Of the 25 delinquent filers who owe the largest sums, an average of $29,029, the attorney general’s office has only filed suit against six. The largest fine-ower in this group currently in office and who has not been sued is State Board of Education Member Staci Childs, who owes $23,417. Reached by phone, Childs speculated that she has not ended up in court because she is actively working with the ethics commission to pay down her debt.

Texas has permissive campaign finance laws. It is one of just 11 states where donors can contribute unlimited amounts. They are also not required to disclose their occupations. Candidates and elected officials can spend these contributions on almost anything, including flowers for constituents’ funerals, overseas travel and office décor.

Ethics Commission Chair Randall Erben and Executive Director J.R. Johnson declined to comment. Both referred the Tribune to a self-evaluation report the commission prepared for the Legislature last year, which identified unpaid fines under the “major issues” heading.

The report suggested the Legislature could create non-monetary penalties for delinquent filers and give the ethics commission more enforcement power. Other states, including Missouri and Illinois, bar candidates from running for office until they have paid outstanding fines and are up to date on disclosure reports. The TEC report also noted that the outstanding fines, if collected, would supplement the state’s general fund.

Thirty-seven states have campaign finance regulatory bodies that can levy fines, according to an index created by the Coalition for Integrity. Large states including California, Illinois and New York allow enforcement on delinquent fines without involving their attorneys general — though New York also has a longstanding problem of politicians let off the hook.

The appetite for reform in the Texas Legislature is unknown. Reps. Reggie Smith, R-Sherman, and John Bucy, D-Austin, who are chair and vice chair of the House election committee, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, chair of the Senate state affairs committee.

Gutierrez said allowing the ethics commission to file lawsuits on its own would be “a huge step,” towards restoring accountability to the state’s campaign finance system. Allowing the commission more independence, rather than having to rely on an elected attorney general, would help separate the body from political influence.

“It feels like any system where there’s a politician who’s subject to the laws and is also subject to enforcing the laws is just a flawed system,” Gutierrez said. “The ethics commission, as it exists today, just doesn’t have the powers it needs to enforce the laws on the books.”