Sharp’s no-nonsense approach helps speed storm recovery
A&M chancellor shows willingness to cut bureaucracy to deliver results
AUSTIN — As a boy he weathered several nasty hurricanes that blew through his hometown on the Texas coast, including Carla and Beulah, but for John Sharp’s family, federal disaster assistance was not an option in the 1960s.
In fact, until recently, he had never had contact with or knew much about the Federal Emergency Management Agency, other than reading about the miscues that brought it notoriety during Hurricane Katrina 12 years ago.
That changed when he got a late-night call from Gov. Greg Abbott’s political guru, Dave Carney, alerting him that the governor would soon call to ask him to become Texas’ new recovery czar.
“Do I get to keep the job I have now?” Sharp said he asked the governor.
Sharp, 67, the $900,000-a-year chancellor of the Texas A&M University System, accepted the challenge.
“What do you say? No, I don’t want to do this?” he asked. “Of course I said yes. I mean, anybody would.”
Anybody, if you’re John Sharp, an affable Texas politician with a ski nose like Bob Hope and a
charming, good-old-boy approach to match, the last Democrat to win state office two decades ago who has since become a go-to for Republican governors to fix complex problems or push through controversial ideas.
Since he signed on three weeks ago to oversee Texas’ recovery from Hurricane Harvey, the worst storm to hit the Texas coast in more than a century, and by most measures the most destructive in U.S. history, Sharp has crisscrossed the storm-blasted areas along the Texas coast.
‘I didn’t ask’
When Abbott announced Sharp’s appointment as the head of the Governor’s Commission to Rebuild Texas on Sept. 6, he said his instructions were simple: “Rebuild Texas ahead of schedule, under budget and with a friendly smile.”
In the weeks since, Sharp has juggled his A&M duties with the recovery, spending hours in briefings and updates and repeatedly touring the state with Abbott, including a Thursday trip to devastated Rockport. He routinely gives out his private cellphone number to local officials with the instruction, “call me if you need anything,” and, perhaps not surprisingly, he has taken calls at all hours ever since.
And as Texas’ cleanup and recovery enters its fourth week, the Sharp-led effort has logged several firsts, officials confirm, including pressing Texas A&M’s network of locally based agriculture extension agents into service for the first time ever to be the local contact for state recovery efforts, instead of hiring a network of expensive consultants to do the same thing.
Seasoned experts who successfully helped the recovery after Katrina and Sandy have also been brought in to assist, several also at no expense to taxpayers. Sharp’s first call after taking his new job was to call Billy Hamilton, a former deputy comptroller known as one of the best organizers in state government.
True to form, the straight-talking, tobaccochewing Sharp offers a salty response when asked how those changes got approved so fast, within days after the state’s recovery got into full swing: “I didn’t ask.”
For a get-it-done, no-BS guy who was once considered an up-and-comer who might run the state as governor someday, before Texas went from blue to red, Sharp said the new job is a perfect fit in some respects, even though he admits he spent the first few days “scared s---less” before he got the operational plan set and going.
“I ain’t running for nothing,” Sharp said, explaining why he feels free to make decisions that will push the recovery ahead quickly, even before they are not fully vetted politically. “It’s a real liberating experience knowing you’re not ever running for anything ever again.”
“Respond immediately, fix the problem, cut red tape,” read one of Sharp’s homespun Rules of the Road that he issued for the recovery effort soon after he came aboard.
“No surprises,” read another.
On a recent morning, as Sharp toured the battered coastal community of Rockport, near where Harvey made landfall Aug. 25 with disastrous 140 mph winds, he said he was struck by the totality of the devastation. With Abbott at his side, Sharp’s rules quickly took effect.
Recalling previous hurricanes and the controversies that turned the recovery ugly, Sharp knew that fast action was the imperative.
“Every time you turned on CNN, the mayor was bitching, the parish sheriff, all those people were bitching — and they just turned the whole tone of everything,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to get to that mayor before he gets so frustrated that he just starts screaming and hollering about it.”
So when local officials on the tour complained that debris removal was an issue, because they had no landfills to hold the trash and couldn’t burn it, Abbott signed a proclamation allowing them to burn the debris.
When a woman tearfully relayed how she had not heard from her father, who had been unable to get to safety from an island before Harvey arrived, state officials dispatched a boat that located him safe and sound.
“You don’t wait around for things to happen. I’m not big on rules,” Sharp said. “The governor has shown a total willingness to cut through red tape.”
Attention to detail
Sharp said he cares little whether someone is upset. What matters to him is that their needs are being properly and quickly addressed.
“Mosquito spraying. We caught a lotta s--over that,” he explained. “The beekeepers were not happy with C-130 aircraft flying over killing mosquitoes, (and) organic farmers … because they can’t call their stuff organic anymore because it’s been sprayed with pesticides.
“I said, ‘Sorry, I’ve got kids trying to go to school and they’ve got mosquitoes stuck up their nose and we’re going to kill them (the mosquitoes).’ ”
If his bluntness may seem unusual when most politicians try to spin a happy face on whatever they do, Sharp is clearly a throwback to another era.
Born and raised in Placedo, a coastal farming town of 200 near Victoria, he grew up the son of an oilfield worker and a schoolteacher. He jokes that has family’s white frame house was “so porous the wind went right through it,” to explain why it never sustained much damage in previous hurricanes.
It also escaped damage from Harvey. Even though his dad sold it 50 years ago, he said he checked in with the current owner — a remark that highlights his attention to detail that has made Sharp legendary, and occasionally reviled, in state government.
After earning a bachelor of arts degree in 1972 from Texas A&M, where he was in the prestigious Corps of Cadets and served as student body president, he went to work for the Legislative Budget Board in Austin. Soon, he earned a master’s degree in public administration at what is now Texas State University in San Marcos.
Returning in 1978 to Victoria, where he ran a real estate firm, Sharp launched his political career by getting elected to the Texas House where he served until 1982, when he was elected to the Texas Senate. In 1986, he was elected to the Texas Railroad Commission, where he helped reform trucking regulations, improve railroad safety and develop new markets for cleanburning natural gas.
In 1990, he was elected comptroller of public accounts to replace the legendary Bob Bullock, who had been elected lieutenant governor. Sharp instituted a series of reforms to make state government more efficient and accountable, despite complaints from entrenched bureaucrats, and implemented a new credit-care system for state benefits as well as a new state lottery — in a process that became a model for other states.
In 1998, he ran as a Democrat to replace Bullock as lieutenant governor but lost to Republican Rick Perry. Another try in 2002 was unsuccessful, when he lost to Republican David Dewhurst.
In 2005, at a time that Sharp’s name was mentioned as a possible candidate for governor, Perry named Sharp to head a special education task force to study reforming the state’s tax system. He dropped his gubernatorial aspirations and went to work on a reform plan that eventually was adopted by the Legislature — in what was considered a win for both Sharp and Perry.
After helping spearhead the passage by voters of a new program for cancerfighting research grants, Sharp in 2008 announced he would be a candidate to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison — a decision he withdrew when he became chancellor.
At A&M he has created occasional waves as he has pushed ahead with the biggest expansion in the A&M System’s history, overseeing enrollment growth from 122,000 to 148,000 and a $5.4 billion construction boom at the flagship campus in College Station.
While Abbott has said Sharp was a natural go-to to oversee Texas’ recovery — because of his long experience in state government and his get-it-done style, Sharp professes that he has no idea why the governor selected him.
Even so, the two had known each other for more than 10 years as neighbors in Austin’s upscale Pemberton Heights neighborhood, just northwest of downtown. “We both had adopted kids. We’re both Catholics,” Sharp said.
‘A very astute choice’
For legislative leaders and outsiders familiar with both Abbott and Sharp, the choice seems natural — a choice that promises to make Sharp one of Texas’ most prominent non-elected officials for the rest of this decade, and perhaps beyond. Sharp estimates the recovery from Harvey will take at least three years.
“It’s a very astute choice for the governor because it takes politics out of the equation: a lifelong Democrat who has no political aspirations and won’t be a political rival,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston. “John Sharp is immensely talented and gets along with conservative Republicans, centrist Republicans and Democrats.”
And if the recovery effort becomes controversial, Abbott can’t be accused of assigning a political hack or crony to handle the showcase program.
So far, with the recovery efforts going smoothly, both remain highly complimentary of each other — with Sharp insisting, in typical fashion, that Abbott has amazed him with his attention to detail.
“I’m telling you, he’s immersed in this,” Sharp said. ”
Abbott aides said the governor’s instructions to Sharp were simple: Advocate for communities, and get things done without delay.
People close to Sharp say he and Abbott have something else in common: Both Texas natives have taken the state’s recovery personally.
Two weeks ago, while Abbott and Sharp toured the Houston area, Ray Kendall, 49, shook hands with both officials and heard their reassurances that recovery assistance would be expedited. He had questions — and doubts.
“Both of them guys listened and (Sharp) had someone get my information and told me to let him know if I didn’t,” the Fort Bend business owner explained. “I got a call back from someone later that afternoon, and they’re helping me get everything lined up.
“He said he knew how to cut through the damn red tape. And sure enough.”
No surprises, as Sharp said.