Border security?

Diversion of DPS troopers is shortchanging public safety in other parts of the state.

Remember those campaign commercials that blanketed television airwaves a couple of years ago showing fear-mongering politicians scowling across the Rio Grande, trying to look tough as they vowed to “secure the border”?

Grab your wallet. Those guys are now running the show in Austin, and they’re spending your money like spring-breakers on a border-town drinking binge.

The Texas Department of Public Safety, which is already running the nation’s largest state program to patrol the Mexican border, wants yet another whopping hike in its bloated budget for border security. With about $750 million already allocated for this program during the next two-year period, the DPS wants almost $300 million more to hire 250 more troopers, install 5,000 more cameras, upgrade cybersecurity and counterterrorism initiatives and replace 1,240 vehicles, four airplanes and two helicopters. If you’ve lost count, that’ll boost the two-year tab for this DPS budget bonanza to more than $1 billion.

Never mind the crucial fact that state troopers aren’t empowered to enforce federal immigration laws. They’re still talking about spending a billion dollars to flood the border with even more cops who can’t bust illegal immigrants for being illegal immigrants.

Just think about that number. As Mike Ward in the Chronicle’s Austin bureau pointed out (“DPS requests a nearly $300 million budget increase for border security,” Page A1, Aug. 30), $1 billion is about what Texas spends on all its psychiatric hospitals. That’s roughly what it costs to feed free lunches to two-thirds of our state’s public school students.

Instead, the DPS proposes to send more personnel to an area where there are already so many state troopers, local citizens are rolling their eyes and joking about how hotel owners are hitting the jackpot on the taxpayers’ dime. Drivers along highways approaching the border report seeing DPS cars parked a mile apart on the roadside. On some streets in Rio Grande City, a local newspaper editor reports seeing troopers sitting in their cars just a block apart.

This saturation deployment of DPS troopers even has some local law enforcement authorities in border counties complaining it’s a waste of money. That alone speaks volumes. Meanwhile, the diversion of troopers to the border is shortchanging public safety in other parts of the state. At a House Appropriations Committee hearing in July, Col. Steve McGraw, the director of the DPS, conceded that other areas of Texas are being left with inadequate protection because the state’s elected leaders are demanding more badges and guns on the border.

Here’s the problem with those politicians who promised to “secure the border.” They haven’t defined what that means, so they’ve opened a bottomless pit into which they’re shoveling more and more of our tax dollars without a clearly prescribed goal. And like any bureaucracy, DPS officials pressured by lawmakers to put more resources on the border will keep on asking for more and more money until somebody tells them enough is enough.

What we have here is the exact opposite of the conservative principles espoused by those politicians whose campaign commercials showed them scowling across the Rio Grande. This is big spending on bigger government. And so far, we haven’t seen any proof the investment is paying off.

Texas lawmakers should reject this billion dollar boondoggle. South Texas doesn’t need a DPS car parked on every street corner.