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IMO Bill White and Galveston mayor are nut jobs and even told people to just hunker down. Galveston mayor especially has a lot to answer for. She needs to cover her butt.

I only saw a few interviews with the Galveston mayor last week before Ike came in and the Galveston mayor was saying everybody needed to leave and they were deliberately keeping the shelters closed so that people wouldn't stick around Galveston, so I'd be curious to see the interviews you saw where she told people to stick around and hunker down. Like I said, I only saw a couple and she was pretty blunt that people needed to leave.

As far as Houston - the majority of Houston-area residents didn't need to evacuate - otherwise we would have had 10s or 100s of thousands of people on the roads when Ike hit.

At this point, with the Governor's office saying they screwed up and wouldn't be able to distribute the FEMA supplies like they promised and the cities and counties taking over the distribution, there's plenty of blame to go around, from the Governor's office down to the counties.

While I initially thought the Galveston mayor did a few things right, overall you are correct, she is a nut job and covering her butt and it turns out, she shouldn't even be in charge:

Galveston Daily News

Who's in charge?

By Dolph Tillotson
The Daily News

Published September 17, 2008 A part of the current problems with recovery from the ravages of Hurricane Ike is that the city of Galveston’s part-time, unpaid mayor has virtually all the power in the city.

The person who runs the city every other day, the city manager, is secondary.

That’s backwards, and it gets in the way of effective government in the face of a dangerous community crisis.

The person in charge in an emergency should be the person who has hiring and firing authority over city department heads. That person is Galveston City Manager Steve LeBlanc, and Galveston would be better off with LeBlanc clearly established as the man in charge and serving as spokesman for the city.

The position of mayor of Galveston is a part-time, unpaid position. Ordinarily, that person has little or no direct authority over any city department. He or she may not be familiar with the inner workings of any department, and that person is not the executive to whom most city employees turn for leadership on a daily basis.

As of Wednesday’s stormy city council meeting, Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas narrowly retained emergency powers in Galveston. There was a squabble over the emergency powers issue, and to prevent a vote, one member of the council walked out of the meeting so a quorum would no longer be present. Without a vote, Mayor Thomas remains in charge. It’s unclear why her emergency powers didn’t just expire without renewal by the city council.

That means she makes decisions in the place of city council and, for better or worse, Mayor Thomas is running the city in this emergency.

She has done a number of things well, but she has made some significant mistakes.

Tuesday’s abortive look-and-leave experiment was a disaster, hastily conceived and poorly executed. It was the result of Mayor Thomas’s reaction to outside pressures to let people return home to see their property. Instead of amending the strategy when glitches became obvious, the policy was suddenly rescinded, causing more concern, even anger, among evacuees desperate for information.

Mayor Thomas’s news blackout, announced Monday, seems to have made public anxiety worse, not better. A public relations policy that silences all voices except for Mayor Thomas’s robs readers of the fullest possible picture of what’s going on. That’s not good.

Worried citizens far away do not seem pleased. Judging from hundreds of emails and phone calls, that concern is turning quickly to fury among some.

For now, it would help everything if the mayor and council would, by agreement, allow the mayor’s emergency powers to end and defer to the city manager on key issues of governance.

Galveston needs clear, unquestioned leadership from an executive who knows in detail how the city works and who has hiring-and-firing authority over the employees who must execute policy in the field.

Galveston is experiencing a leadership crisis today, and the city manager, Steve LeBlanc, should be in the lead until the crisis is past.