It's nice to know that people are reading the blog. I was approached in a conference room in the Guadalupe County Courthouse this morning by Heather Hollub, the District Attorney-elect for Guadalupe County. As you may recall, a couple of posts ago, I related an article from the Seguin Gazette Enterprise which had to do with the local commissioner's court approving a new lease agreement for the DA's office that involved paying Hollub's husband a nice chunk of rent. Heather Hollub first stated to me how much she loved the blog. Then she mentioned that she intended to post a comment to the blog in order to "clarify" some issues.
Namely, she mentioned that she and her husband were not present in Commissioner's Court for the meeting at which the lease agreement was approved in order to push for the agreement. If my post left the impression that Heather Hollub was personally at the Commissioner's Court meeting, that's only because that's the impression I got from the Seguin Gazette article. A thousand apologies if that, in fact, was not the case. Apparently, the lease agreement was promoting itself at Commissioner's Court and the people who are to benefit from it had nothing to do with its existence.
Incidentally, in my brief encounter with Ms. Hollub, she did not mention that her husband would be turning down the money. Nevertheless, I look forward to the clarifying comments. We can always use some additional traffic here at the blog. In a related matter, check out Guadalupe County Attorney Elizabeth Murray-Kolb's guest column in the Sunday, December 14th edition of the Seguin Gazette Enterprise, in which she spells out her reasons for opposing the deal. *It is easy to comment on this Blog, just simply start typing below.
Cat scratch fever. Looks like there is civil war brewing in the Guadalupe County Courthouse (a.k.a.: The Giant Eyesore with the Tacky Landscaping and Big Concrete Pecan Out Front).
Guadalupe County employs a throwback criminal justice setup known as "bifurcated prosecution", where there are two separate prosecutor's offices -- a District Attorney which prosecutes felonies and a County Attorney which prosecutes misdemeanors. The idea of dividing up responsibility this way is that it keeps a single elected prosecutor from getting too much power over the local criminal justice system.
I am feeling a little bit older and a little more mortal today. I was in court this morning when someone told me that my first boss as a lawyer, Jim Mattox, died overnight at the age of 65.
When I got my law license back in the day, my first job was to serve as an assistant Texas attorney general in the habeas corpus section of the AG's office during the Mattox administration. I cannot claim to have been a close person friend of General Mattox. I was only a lowly newbie appellate lawyer, and I met him maybe half a dozen times while at the AG and had dinner with him once at a campaign function. But I can attest to his having an excellent politician's memory.
A few years ago, while I was sitting in the lobby of the Comal County Jail waiting for visitation with a client, I saw him there trying to bail out one of his ranch hands, who had apparently partied a little too enthusiastically the night before. He saw me, walked over to me, and although he didn't remember my name, he asked me how I was doing and thanked me for working in his office fifteen years previously.
Anyone who was privileged to work in the AG's Office at time remembers it as a place with full of bright, creative lawyers and remembers Jim Mattox as a boss who wasn't afraid to take on big companies or special interests in order to stand up for ordinary people.