Milder campaign boosted by education groups

Former Rockwall City Council Member Scott Milder is a long shot to win the Republican primary for lieutenant governor as he faces Dan Patrick, a powerful incumbent with a massive fundraising advantage.

Milder’s best chance might be to capitalize on his alliance with teachers and education groups outraged by Patrick’s first term in statewide office, when the lieutenant governor delayed efforts to rewrite the school finance formula, shot down a measure to boost public school funding and unsuccessfully pushed for a voucher-like system of letting parents use taxpayer funds for private school tuition.

“I don’t need a lot of money because I think I’ve got a lot of votes,” Milder said. “I think there are a lot of people around the state who are inclined to vote for the other guy, and the other guy is me.”

Aside from being the other guy, Milder has special appeal to education groups because he has worked with school districts as a public relations consultant and founded a nonprofit group

that aims to counter narratives about the education system’s failures.

Troy Reynolds, who heads Texans for Public Education, said his 21,000-member group is all in for Milder.

“If they want to sit down at a table and really start talking about the problems of education and how to fix those problems, Dan Patrick has proven for 12 years that he won’t do that. Scott Milder will,” Reynolds said.

Education groups’ support of Milder, however, has led Patrick’s allies to accuse them of using school district resources for partisan purposes. Taxpayer money can be spent on encouraging people to vote, but it cannot aid specific campaigns or parties.

Attorney General Ken Paxton recently sent cease-and-desist letters to the Lewisville, Brazosport and Holliday school districts, saying they had improperly used public resources for political purposes and citing social media posts from school officials, including a pro-Milder tweet from the Brazosport superintendent. The districts have denied wrongdoing.

In response to a request from state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, Paxton also held that a resolution circulated by the group Texas Educators Vote and adopted by more than 100 school districts might constitute illegal electioneering. The resolution includes a pledge to create a “culture of voting,” but it does not mention any candidates or parties. The group does not endorse candidates.

“It seems to threaten some people that a large group of people might educate themselves and vote, which I find troubling for the future of democracy,” said Laura Yeager, the group’s founder.

Yeager, a parent and activist who had worked for a grassroots group on standardized testing, said she started the get-out-thevote campaign after realizing that, in the low-turnout 2014 Republican primary runoff for lieutenant governor, only about 490,000 Texans voted for Patrick, who took 65 percent of the vote and unseated David Dewhurst. Around that time, Texas public schools had about 656,000 employees, meaning they could dramatically influence state politics if they became more engaged.

Patrick’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The winner of the March 6 primary will face the winner of the Democratic primary between Mike Collier and Michael Cooper.

Bathrooms again

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Northwest Austin, Milder majored in journalism at the University of North Texas and, after a brief stint in newspapers, worked in public relations for two Texas school districts, Mesquite and Galena Park.

He is now a senior associate at the architecture firm Stantec, which specializes in construction at colleges and schools and hired him in 1998.

In 2004, he and his wife founded the group Friends of Public Schools, which sought to spread good news about Texas schools in the face of long-running criticism on the education system.

Nine years later, he ran for Rockwall City Council, winning an open seat without opposition.

A year before the so-called bathroom bill — a Patrick priority that would have prohibited transgender Texans from using the restrooms of their choice — rocked the Texas Capitol during the 2017 legislative session, Milder became the face of the opposition to a local version of the proposal that roiled Rockwall.

In a letter to The Dallas Morning News, Milder wrote in May 2016 that while he was “not sympathetic to the transgender agenda,” he opposed the measure because businesses had objected to it.

“One factor influenced my position more than any other,” he wrote. “We want to be a business-friendly city, where retail, commercial, and industrial businesses can operate with limited local governmental intrusion.”

After the ordinance’s defeat, supporters of the bill targeted Milder, and he lost re-election in the spring of 2016, he said.

A year later, he announced he would challenge Patrick, pitching himself as a “rational Republican” in contrast to Patrick’s more conservative brand of politics.

“He is so far off the deep end on the fringe of what he calls Republican conservatism that he’s no longer really conservative,” Milder said. “He’s trying to take away local control. He’s alienated the business leaders.”

Education issues

On education, Milder said his top priority would be to increase the state’s share of school funding, which has been steadily decreasing since Republicans took over the Capitol two decades ago.

“Local property taxpayers have been picking up the slack, and they don’t understand that. It’s a complicated issue,” he said. “We need to reverse the trend of declining state funding and increasing local funding.”

In the 1980s, the state provided more than half of the non-federal funds that went into the school finance system. This year, it is projected to cover only 38 percent.

Asked about how to pay for the increased state contribution, Milder said he would look for savings within the state budget rather than new revenue sources.

“I’m not in favor of any tax increases. What I am in favor of is taking a good, hard honest look at our statewide budget,” he said.

He declined to take a position on some other hot-button education issues, including what to do with the so-called Robin Hood system of “recapturing” revenue from such property-rich districts as Austin and redistributing it to others with weaker property tax bases.

“There’s been a lot of studies done on our school funding formulas in Texas. There’s been many, many solutions and Band-Aids proposed,” he said. “Recapture and Robin Hood have been essential to help property-poor districts, but it’s hurt our other districts, so I don’t know that it’s fair for a district like Austin ISD to pay 25 or 30 percent of its entire revenue back to the state.”

The Austin district this year will pay $658 million to recapture, the largest payment of any district in the state.