Abbott should OK Harris County’s request for special election
Harris County commissioners voted 5-0 Tuesday to ask Gov. Greg Abbott for permission to hold a special election on Aug. 25.
If the governor allows it, voters will be asked to approve borrowing up to $2.5 billion to tackle critical flood-control projects. The specific projects have yet to be determined, and the bond referendum itself could be placed on the ballot in November. Some Harris County voters would argue that it should be, perhaps. It’s been a hectic election year already in Texas, and it’s not intuitively obvious why this question should be asked in isolation from all the other questions Harris County voters will be asked to weigh in on during this year’s general election.
Still, I hope that Abbott will give Harris County permission to proceed with the special election. There’s actually no good reason to deny the county’s request, all things considered.
But there was also no good reason for the governor to ask the Texas State Guard to monitor the military training exercise known as Jade Helm in 2015 — and his decision to do so looks even sillier three years down the road.
According to former CIA Director Michael Hayden, the controversy itself was amplified by Russian bots after being ginned up by fringe media figures like Alex Jones of InfoWars.
“The Russians and the altright created a crisis,” Hayden said last week in an interview with the San Antonio ExpressNews.
Beyond that, the governor has some misgivings about local control, as we know.
He also may see some political risk in this situation. If Harris County voters support a $2.5 billion bond referendum, property taxes will go up a bit
to cover the cost of the issue.
If that happens as a result of a special election, the governor could, in theory, be accused of having helped bring about such a grim scenario.
The hit, however, would work out to a whopping $5 for the average single-family homeowner in the first year after the issue. That’s a marginal increase in property taxes — one that might well be offset by a reduction in flood insurance premiums, since the purpose of the bond issue is to fund some of the projects that are considered critical to flood control.
More to the point, a modest increase in property taxes is not the worst thing that most Harris County homeowners have endured since Aug 25, 2017, the day Hurricane Harvey made landfall as a Category 4 storm. Realistically, in fact, Harris County homeowners should be prepared to pay higher property taxes in exchange for the various investments in infrastructure that are critical to the long-term security and sustainability of the region they call home.
Some of those investments should be made sooner rather than later — and they could be, if statewide leaders had prioritized the issue.
The construction of a third reservoir, for example, would cost the county about $500 million. That’s a lot of money, but it’s not even 5 percent of the funds currently languishing in the Texas Economic Stabilization Fund — the “rainy day fund,” as it’s commonly called.
Other critical floodcontrol projects could be tackled as soon as the county can come up with the matching funds required to release federal funds that have already been authorized for disaster relief and recovery.
And the question at hand, of whether to approve the bond issue, is one that Harris County voters are qualified to decide for themselves.
In fact, they’re authorized to do so. If Abbott declines Harris County’s request for permission to hold a special election, the commissioners will probably decide to put the issue to the people in November.
But I can understand why Harris County Judge Ed Emmett concluded that a special election in August would be preferable.
Harris County has a notoriously long ballot, and this year it will include competitive statewide general elections.
A special election in August, by contrast, would be dedicated to a stand-alone question about the bond issue. Turnout would be relatively low, presumably. But the voters who weigh in, for or against the proposition, would be a particular subset of voters — those who have made a considered and deliberate decision about an issue that affects them directly and is ultimately not ideological.
So Abbott may be thinking about this through a political lens, as he has been known to do. But in retrospect, we know that Harvey was a greater threat to public safety than Jade Helm. And, in any case, the Texans who live in Harris County aren’t worried about a federal government takeover. They’re worried about the storms to come, some of which may hit the Gulf Coast soon.