The chairman of the state Senate committee that oversees Texas’ prison system, angry over what he perceives as fiscal missteps by top brass, called this morning for the agency’s headquarters to be consolidated in Austin.
“It’s time to do things differently,” said Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston. “Maybe when there were no prisons any place other than east and south Texas, Huntsville made sense for the headquarters. But they have offices there and in Austin now, and we should do away with duplication and move it all to Austin.”
Whitmire’s comments came after he blasted prison officials earlier this week for holding a briefing session for the agency’s 30 top officials at Washington-on-the-Brazos State Park, between Austin and Huntsville, just days after most of those officials were in Austin for a meeting of the prison system’s governing board.
And he criticized the agency’s expenditure of more than $1.2 million to maintain a vacant federal Veterans Administration hospital in Marlin, near Waco. Four years ago it was to have been turned into a prison hospital, but that project is on indefinite hold.
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