Richart the choice
Attorney wants to see increased enrollment, more performance audits in HCC District 1.
Houston Community College District 2 trustee Dave Wilson announced in August he was quitting
his seat in order to focus full time on running to represent District 1. Trouble is, he said he had moved from District 2 to District 1 seven months before, in January — and was only just then getting around to vacating an office he appeared to be no longer eligible to keep. He called Texas residency rules “vague” but there’s nothing vague about keeping a job representing a district you no longer even live in.
Now that he’s running to fill a different seat on the same board, we do not encourage anyone to vote for him.
Fortunately, the majority Hispanic District 1 on the northeast side has a really good candidate running against Wilson, and we heartily endorse her for the job.
She is attorney Monica Flores Richart, 45, who has an undergraduate degree in public policy from Princeton University and a law degree from Columbia University. She worked for U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson, the Democrat who in 2006 won the heavily Republican district vacated by Tom DeLay. He got swept out of office in a Republican wave in 2008.
Wilson, 71, has prided himself on being a constant thorn in the side of HCC management, which he views as mostly inept and careless with taxpayers’ money.
Richart said she would push for performance audits as a more professional way of evaluating management — and one less certain to create distracting conflict. She also wants a big campaign to increase enrollment.
“We’ve got to get more students in those seats,”’ she said, and proposes more coordination with HISD on a variety of projects to increase enrollment, including expansion of the early college program.
Also running for the District 1 seat is Dakota John Stormer, 24, who has a chemical engineering degree from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in energy policy and climate from Johns Hopkins University.
We didn’t get to meet with him, but he told us in a statement he wants “to help improve HCC’s innovation and entrepreneurship offerings in underserved communities and to encourage more entrepreneurial programs within traditional classes.”
Richart is smart, has good ideas and strikes us as someone who can accomplish positive change in a professional way.
We endorse her for District 1 on the HCC board of trustees.