A charismatic priest and the local diocese hope to save a 120-year-old chapel near the Rio Grande.
THIS WEEK: For Father Roy Snipes, Trump’s border wall is no abstraction. It’s set to steal something dear from him: La Lomita chapel. The chapel is a humble sandstone church that has stood for 120 years just a few hundred yards from the Rio Grande. If Trump has his way, the chapel will soon languish on the wrong side of a 30-foot border wall, or be destroyed entirely. To prevent that, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brownsville, which owns La Lomita, is fighting in court to keep federal agents off the land — but it’s a Hail Mary effort.
For more than two decades, state leaders have repeatedly warned that if more recreational resources weren’t added to accommodate Texas’ growth, the result would be overcrowded parks, deteriorating facilities and a diminished connection between urban Texans and the state’s rural legacy. Lawmakers have responded by making halting, and ultimately inadequate attempts at shoring up TPWD’s rickety finance system.
Will lawmakers rise to the challenge before Texans love their parks to death? Or is Texas’ future one in which those in search of the outdoors are left with two options: Drive several hundred miles to Far West Texas to access big, wild country, or suck it up and deal with the crowds and aging infrastructure at state parks closer by?
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Texas counties stripped thousands of elderly and disabled citizens of their rights — and then forgot about them.
From Patrick Michels' 2016 story: “Guardianship is the state’s last-ditch tool to protect people from neglect or abuse, and although it saves lives, it can be a blunt instrument. More than 53,000 Texans, most of them elderly or intellectually disabled, are under a guardianship today. Some could never make their own decisions; others, in the eyes of a friend or family member, have been making decisions that are dangerously wrong. In either case, the remedy is the same: Their legal rights transfer to a person of the court’s choosing. Proponents credit guardianship for celebrity success stories such as Britney Spears, whose life and career regained stability after her father won the legal authority to step in. But guardianship is in the news much more often for its abuses.”
