Need cash? Slap a magnet sign on your truck and say you’re a roofer. Forget the roof. This is Texas

By Dave Lieber, The Dallas Morning News

What happens after a monster storm? Storm chasers show up from who knows where and charm desperate homeowners in need of a new roof out of that first insurance check. Then it’s goodbye forever.

Texas is the only storm-prone state along the Gulf Coast that doesn’t make storm-chasing roofers touch a stitch of paperwork. This is embarrassing for Texas, and especially the governor and our Legislature, both of whom could easily fix this longstanding problem. Their inaction allows crimes to flourish.

Unlike hair cutters and plumbers and tow truck companies, no roofers’ license is required. No certification is demanded. There’s not even a state-sponsored website that offers a list of names, addresses and phone numbers of known honest, reliable roofers.

This type of theft happens every day of the year in Texas, and now there’s at least one guy saying enough is enough.

State Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, has introduced Senate Bill 1481, which calls for a registration system for roofing companies who do post-storm work. For a minimal fee, these storm chasers would get listed on a state website.

The senator says, “You hand somebody $10,000, and you’re not able to look up whether or not they’re registered in the state and have a contact number.”

It’s notable that he mentions $10,000 because I spoke this week with Joe Dickens of Arlington, who gave his roofing company that amount. Then the roofers said goodbye forever. No roof for him.

“He took the money and ran off, OK?” Dickens says of former House of Tomorrow roofing company owner Jorge Garcia.

Dickens is still bitter about being a victim in a huge scheme involving more than 100 homeowners in Dallas, Arlington and Forth Worth. Victims lost a total of $500,000 in lost insurance claims.

For both Dickens and for me this matter is highly personal. We both discovered that storm-chasing roofers often behave as if they are members of a crime syndicate. In fact, my roofing experience changed my life.

The first roofer I hired after a hailstorm 15 years ago got confused and roofed the house behind me instead of mine. He tried to make my shocked neighbor pay anyway.

The second roofer I hired fixed my roof, but then declared bankruptcy, leaving almost a hundred other customers roofless. He was convicted of theft and served prison time.

After that experience, I studied what went wrong and what I could do to prevent it. This is why I created a consumer rights movement called Watchdog Nation that shows us how to protect ourselves. I was my own test case, and that’s how that experience changed my life.

Ever since, I’ve watched storm-chasers pulling off their cons and nothing is done. This is considered normal in Texas, and it was reflected in an eye-opening video posted the other day by the Texas Department of Insurance. The video, called “Winter storm webinar,” is available on YouTube. It was supposed to be a primer on how to handle insurance claims like busted water pipes caused by the February storms.

But something surprising happened in this video. Members of the public hijacked the discussion away from burst pipes to pleas for advice on how to find honest roofers.

The hashtags for the video are #insurance #storm #disaster. But they should be changed to #roofers #scams #disaster. Here are the public’s questions, and the insurance department’s answers.

Do contractors have to be licensed in Texas? (No.)

Is there a way to see if a contractor has been involved in fraud? (Nothing official.)

Is it OK to ask to see their driver’s license? (Brilliant idea.)

Is there a place I can get information about my contractor for my piece of mind? (Check search engines to background the roofer.)

Is there a directory we can use to find good contractors? (Again, nothing official.)

How can we stop unsolicited phone calls and roofers coming to my door? (The calls are illegal, and little can be done. For door-knockers, TDI says ask to see their solicitor’s permit. If they don’t have one, call the cops.)

How can I do a criminal background check on a contractor and his staff? (Try a for-pay website.)

You can see from these questions what concerns the public. All of this could be solved with Sen. Johnson’s Senate Bill 1481, and its companion in House Bill 2777.

The bills require re-roofers (those repairing existing roofs) to register their company’s name with contact information. Any bad behavior would be reported. Violators could face a $500 civil penalty.

But the same lawmaker who killed the roofers bill in 2019 has told the state’s roofers association that he vows to do it again.

Rep. Ramon Romero Jr., D-Fort Worth, stomped on the bill two years ago like it was a snake that tried to bite him.

Romero would not talk to The Watchdog this week. But in 2019 when I profiled his stomping, he told me one reason he objected was because the bill’s author was not a contractor. “It really needs to be a contractor,” he said. (Did I mention Romero is a contractor?)

Truth is anybody can introduce a bill. But thanks to Romero, two years ago, the bill lost a 99-33 House vote. Since then, more Texans have been ripped off. I blame him.

Sarah Burns, who runs the Roofing Contractors Association of Texas, told me, Romero has “already made it abundantly clear that he intends to do the same in this session.”

Before talking to me, Burns said she was on the phone with a San Antonio homeowner.

“They hired the cheap guy,” she said, “and now they’ve got a $40,000 metal roof, and it leaks all over the place. They’re going to have to move out.”

If you’re wondering why this registry is such a problem, it plays into the notion, pushed hard by Gov. Greg Abbott and others, that we shouldn’t do anything that hurts business. And how about consumers? Meh.

“I understand we like Texas,” Burns says. “The reason we’re here is because we don’t want government in our business. But, unfortunately, this is a situation with no recourse for consumers.”

Johnson says his bill has a chance this year because the October 2019 Dallas tornado drew added attention to the crime spree. His bill awaits a hearing in the Senate Business & Commerce Committee. (Want to help? Call chairman Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, and say “Let’s move on SB 1481.” His office is 512-463-0109.)

The similar House Bill 2777 could use your help, too. It’s stuck in the House Business & Industry Committee, where chairman Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, released a statement to The Watchdog, saying: “In terms of this specific measure, I have not reviewed it, but I support efforts to reform the roofing industry to better protect consumers.” (Want to help? Promote HB 2777 for a hearing. Turner’s office is: 512-463-0574.)

Remember our victim, Dickens? Other victims were not as fortunate as the Arlington homeowner who lost $10,000. NBC5 did a report on his plight. That changed everything.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he says. “After that, a roofing company contacted me. There was a good Samaritan. He donated my roof. Who that individual was I have no idea, but I would love to sit down, shake his hand and have a cup of coffee with him.”

What an embarrassment. It takes an unknown angel to make up for what the Texas Legislature won’t do for its own people.

Texas Adoptees Are Fighting for the Right to Access Their Own Birth Certificates

Fed up with DNA tests and expensive investigators, some adult adoptees are asking the state to unseal their original birth records.

By Kristin Finan, Texas Monthly

Shawna Hodgson was adopted as an infant in the seventies and, she says, “raised in a great family” in Houston. But despite her happy childhood, she always had an underlying need to know more about her birth family. When Hodgson became an adult, she decided to request a copy of her original birth certificate, something she had always assumed she was entitled to receive, from the Texas Department of State Health Services’ vital statistics office. Her request was immediately denied.

“I didn’t know that my original birth certificate was sealed. I just kind of assumed they would hand that information over to me when I was [of age],” says Hodgson. “So imagine my surprise when I marched in there like, ‘I’m ready for my file,’ and they were like, ‘No, no, no. You don’t have the right to that.’” 

Birth certificates are a hot-button issue for Texas-born adoptees, some of whom have spent decades trying to change a state law that makes getting the records a Kafkaesque challenge. Many adult adoptees say that by restricting the ability to obtain their own records, the state denies them the opportunity to access potentially life-saving information about their medical and family histories. 

Under current Texas law, a child’s original birth certificate is sealed when he or she is adopted and the adoptive parents are sent a supplementary birth certificate that lists them as the child’s parents. Adoptees who do not know their birth parents’ names must petition for access in court in the county that granted the adoption and must show what the law calls, without defining the term, “good cause.” 

Hodgson, who did not know her birth parents’ names, went to court twice, and both times she was denied. A judge in Harris County even told her she needed her adoptive parents’ permission, despite the fact that she was 38 years old. She ultimately spent five years conducting her own search, during which she says she spent more than $15,000 on everything from DNA testing to private investigators. After all the arduous effort, Hodgson says, “When I met my birth family, it was like a photo that was blurry came into view.” The search fired her up so much that she became an advocate for other adoptees, and is now a spokeswoman for the Texas Adoptee Rights Coalition. (I met Hodgson during my search for original birth certificates for my two adopted children.)

Adoptees have long said these restrictions violate their civil and human rights. But as a result of increasing awareness of the topic, recent laws granting unrestricted birth certificate access in nine other states including New York and Colorado, and a newly introduced bill in the Texas Legislature that’s more streamlined than bills in previous sessions and has bipartisan support, many advocates are hopeful that this will be the session when things change. 

The new bill was introduced in the Senate by Democrat Nathan Johnson, and in the House by Representative Cody Harris, a Republican who represents an East Texas district that includes Palestine and Corsicana and who is an adoptive dad himself. 

Harris said his experience of adopting his daughter Chloe, now seven, out of foster care and “just seeing how guarded and limited the information is from an adoptive parent’s perspective” greatly informed his decision to sponsor the bill.

“I believe everyone should be able to know where they came from and gain access to that information. It covers everything from knowing your own family medical history about things you might be predisposed towards to diseases that you could take a preventative approach to if you only had the information,” Harris says.

If passed, the bill would allow any adult adoptee to receive a copy of his or her original birth certificate without a court order as long as the adoptee was born in Texas, was previously issued a supplementary certificate, and is now eighteen years old. Unlike previous versions, this simpler bill does not include the option for birth parents to fill out a form saying whether they’d like to be contacted by the adopted person or provide him or her with family medical history.

Because of the size of Texas’s population, changing the law here could affect 800,000 Texas-born adoptees, says Tim Monti-Wohlpart, an advocate who worked on the similar New York bill that passed in 2019. “A lot of eyes are on Texas right now,” he says, adding that, if passed, the Texas bill could help inspire similar legislation in other states.

While thirty years of advocacy within the Texas Legislature have left lawmakers well-informed on the topic, advocates’ inability to get the law changed up to this point can be attributed in large part to the decades-old culture of secrecy surrounding adoption. Whether it was promises made by adoption agencies to unmarried birth mothers who wanted privacy or politicians seeking to protect adoptive parents from intrusion from birth families, adoptees argue that the laws have rarely been about them or their own needs. 

The Gladney Center for Adoption, a national agency based in Texas that has completed 36,000 adoptions since 1887—the majority of which took place in Texas—is among the organizations now voicing support for adult adoptee access. Mark Melson, CEO, president, and Gladney parent, said via email that one of the main requests that the Gladney Center for Adoption’s post-adoption team receives is access to birth records by adopted adults. 

But not everyone agrees that all adult adoptees should be able to access their original birth certificates, including Texas senator Donna Campbell, an adoptive mother herself. Campbell said that because 90 percent of adoptions that occur today are open, respect should be paid to the birth mothers who choose closed adoption. 

“It is rare for a woman to choose a closed adoption—meaning she desires no contact with the child. … She does not do this lightly or without justification,” Campbell said via email. “I am an adoptive mom who understands the unintentional consequences of this bill. We are in no position of trying to undo her decision. This is not the proper role of government.”

Instead, Campbell offers up the state’s Central Adoption Registry, in which adoptees, birth parents, and biological siblings of adult adoptees can register themselves in hopes of locating family members without going through the court system. The mutual-consent adoption registry, she says, “allows both consenting parties to come together on their own accord.”

Adoptees in search of biological family members can also turn to DNA tests like 23andMe and AncestryDNA—a process that advocates say can become emotionally loaded. “As greater access to DNA records exists today, we are seeing more ‘accidental’ reunions by family members who are not ready or prepared to meet,” Melson said, adding that Gladney believes it’s preferable for adult adoptees to gain information through birth records rather than through a genetic relative. For many adoptees, learning about family history from a birth certificate allows them greater control over how to use that information, and can be less stressful than sourcing information from unsuspecting members of their birth family. After all, sliding into the Facebook messages of a potential second cousin who may or may not be able to connect you with your birth parents is quite different from learning their names directly from an official state document.

Getting the bill passed this session will come with challenges, as the Legislature is also tackling major issues like the state budget and redistricting, as well as the ongoing impact of COVID-19 and the state’s electricity grid failures during the recent winter storm. Still, thanks to the new bill’s bipartisan support as well as the force of well-known Texas agencies like Gladney, advocates are cautiously optimistic. 

“It’s way past time for people to understand this issue,” Hodgson says. “Can I predict what’s going to happen? No. But I feel optimistic. I have to, because that’s how we keep going.”

This article originally appeared in Texas Monthly at https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/adult-adoptee-birth-cerficiate-legislation/.

Texas needs laws to keep public information, meetings open. Here are a few good ones

By Kelly Shannon, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

With state lawmakers immersed in the COVID-19 pandemic response and Texas’ electricity failures, the public’s access to information must be at the forefront of the Legislature’s actions. Information allows citizens to watch over their government, to speak out and to ask questions.

There’s no better time than this week, Sunshine Week, to emphasize the importance of the people’s right to know.

As the legislative session approaches its midway point, the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas and other open-government proponents are holding a Sunshine Week online discussion March 18, hosted by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin think tank. Fortunately, lawmakers in both political parties are working to enact timely transparency legislation:

Texas Public Information Act compliance. Throughout the pandemic, many government offices have not responded to open-records requests, citing the physical closure of their offices or “skeleton crew” operations with staffers working remotely. House Bill 1416 by Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, and Senate Bill 925 by Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, would define business days under the Public Information Act to ensure timely responses by governments.

Enforcement measures requiring governments to respond to public information requestors, even if no responsive records are found, are spelled out in SB 927 by Zaffirini and HB 3015 by Rep. Ana Hernandez, D-Houston.

Texas Open Meeting Act improvements. Virtual meetings allowed under the law have worked well for many governments during the pandemic, but in some cases, rules for public comment have been unfairly imposed and telephone call-in lines have not been provided to accommodate those without internet access. Zaffirini’s SB 924 and HB 2683 by Rep. Terry Canales, D-Edinburg, would address these concerns.

Nursing home and assisted living pandemic transparency. Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, chair of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, filed SB 882 so that nursing home residents and their loved ones could get the information they need about communicable disease outbreaks, including COVID-19. Zaffirini filed a similar bill, SB 930, as did Rep. Mayes Middleton, R-Wallisville, with HB 3306.

Online contracts. Legislation to require more online posting of government contracts would help citizens better track how tax dollars are spent, during a pandemic or any other time. Capriglione filed HB 2913 and Zaffirini offered SB 929 to achieve this goal.

Dates of birth in public records. Access to a birthdate in a government record promotes accuracy. It can aid citizens vetting a candidate for office; journalists identifying a person in a crime report; or banks, credit report companies and employers relying on public record background checks to conduct business. HB 3535 by Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, and SB 926 by Zaffirini address this important measure.

Other bills, SB 1225 by Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, and HB 3627 by Rep. Chris Paddie, R-Marshall, would clarify the law about “catastrophe notices” that governments can file to briefly suspend responses to information requests during a disaster. This legislation would add specifics to the law to prevent abuse.

Searchable-sortable records. When government information is stored in spreadsheets or other electronic formats, a requestor may need the data in that format for searching, sorting and organizing. HB 1810 by Capriglione; SB 928 by Zaffirini; and SB 729 by Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, would require agencies to provide the information in the requested available electronic format.

Law enforcement transparency. House and Senate members are also working to improve access to police records involving in-custody deaths and to body-camera and dashboard-camera video. This would help to ensure public accountability. Key bills are HB 2383 by Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, and SB 975 by Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas.

This Texas legislative session is an unusual one amid the coronavirus pandemic. But ensuring access to public information is still important, given the stakes of government decisions on the virus and other issues.

Now is a crucial time to protect this basic right.

This article originally appeared in Fort Worth Star-Telegram at https://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/other-voices/article249990744.html.