Critics take control of education board
Within an hour and 37 minutes of his first meeting as a trustee on the Harris County Department of Education’s board of trustees, Josh Flynn had a new role: President.
The former Harris County Republican Party treasurer and local accountant, who ran on a platform of bringing more transparency and accountability to Texas’ last remaining county education department, won the votes of three other trustees at the Jan. 16 meeting.
Minutes later, Flynn joined those same three in firing the department’s lobbying firm, a move that raised concerns among other trustees and Superintendent James Colbert Jr. that a lack of advocates in Austin could leave them with little recourse if lawmakers target the agency during the 2019 legislative session. Flynn did not return messages for comment.
Together, the votes signal a new majority on the seven-member board, one that Trustee Don Sumners said will provide a chance to lift the hood on HCDE’s departments and to make the agency more accountable to taxpayers. All four have questioned or criticized the department or some of its actions in the past, and one has filed motions to study closing the agency.
“We’ll probably go through the whole department one division at a time and do some evaluation,” Sumners said. “We really haven’t been able to get to the nuts and bolts very easily, and I think now that we have more interested participation, we’ll be able to realize this department for efficiency. We haven’t been able to do that before.”
Others, however, worry that actions like some of those taken at the Jan. 16 meeting could do irreparable harm to the state’s last remaining county department of education.
“I’m concerned, I’m definitely concerned,” said Trustee Danny Norris, a Texas Southern University law professor who also joined the board on January. “I think the vote to cancel our contract with (our lobbyists) specifically worried me a good bit, because we usually have a few bills to shut us down each session. This session, I’m the most worried.”
Resources for districts
Since its founding in 1889, the Harris County Department of Education has operated unlike traditional independent school districts, instead providing resources to 25 school districts that have borders inside Harris County.
One of its main functions is operating a purchasing co-op, which allows districts to buy supplies at cheaper prices. It also employs special education therapists who help local school districts, operates 15 federallyfunded Head Start early childhood education programs, oversees four specialty schools, and provides adult education courses at 65 locations.
After voters in Dallas County voted to dissolve that county’s department of education last November, a vote sparked by concerns over how that department handled transportation issues and its tax dollars, HCDE now stands as the last countywide department of its kind in Texas.
The local agency also has been a sore spot for some conservative state and local lawmakers for several years, who say the agency is an unnecessary expense shouldered by local taxpayers and duplicates services already performed by independent school districts and the Texas Education Agency’s Region 4 Educational Services Center. While the department has among the lowest property tax rates in the county — someone with a $250,000 home and a standard 20 percent homestead exemption would pay about $10.38 annually to the agency — critics have said those dollars support a needless bureaucracy.
In the past several state legislative sessions, Republican lawmakers have filed bills to abolish the agency, prevent it from collecting local tax dollars, study the idea of closing the department and put it before a sunset review committee.
Similar proposals have been proposed by HCDE trustees themselves in recent years, namely local lawyer and intermittent Trustee Michael Wolfe.
Wolfe made motions to put the department in front of a state sunset review committee and to eliminate the department’s Head Start early childhood programs in 2017, programs he said cost too much for the department and could be done more effectively by community groups or school districts. He formally was condemned by other trustees in 2008 for his conduct and championed a policy to spend $53,886 naming an HCDE building after his mother. Wolfe did not return messages left by the Chronicle.
It was Wolfe who made the motion to name Flynn as HCDE’s board president at the Jan. 16 meeting, and it was trustees Wolfe, Sumners and George Moore who requested an agenda item and ultimately voted with Flynn to cancel the department’s $220,000 contract with the HillCo Partners lobbying firm.
“We don’t need the contract, and using taxpayer money for lobbyists is against the Republican party platform of Texas, besides the fact that it’s just wrong,” Wolfe said at the meeting.
Flynn agreed but said those concerns are not necessarily a partisan issue.
“It’s just the fact that we’re spending money for a lobbyist with taxpayer dollars to lobby against the taxpayer,” Flynn said.
HCDE Superintendent James Colbert Jr. shifted in his chair during the comments.
“Without lobbyists, which there are a number of lobbyists, it makes it extremely difficult for us to defend the Harris County Department of Ed,” he said. “It makes it difficult for myself to be in Austin as often as I will need to be in Austin, and it certainly compromises the existence of this department.”
The lobbyist issue
Trustee Eric Dick, a longtime Republican, noted at the meeting that other school districts, political parties and government entities also hire lobbyists. About a week after the vote, he said any government agency that is able to generate more than 70 percent of its budget from sources other than local tax dollars should be a model of good governance that conservatives should want to protect and other government agencies should look to for inspiration. About 28 percent of HCDE’s roughly $117 million budget in 2017-2018 came from property taxes, with the rest coming from state and federal grants, fees paid by local school districts and its cooperative purchasing program.
“You have an organization that actually runs at a profit, that’s actually in the black, that turns one dollar into five dollars. What should happen is ISDs should replicate and try to do something similar. So should the city of Houston,” Dick said. “I think worst thing that you could do is take something that works and cut it up.”
Sumners, however, said improvements and efficiencies still could be found with more careful board scrutiny.
“I think we have a good accountability majority now, so things are going to change for the better,” he said.