Comptroller’s math still doesn’t add up
People do and say things in the fog of campaign season that they might not otherwise. Think Howard Dean’s scream. Rick Perry’s “oops.” Glenn Hegar’s math.
What’s that? You’re not familiar with the last one? Well maybe that’s because Hegar never ran for president. He’s just the Texas comptroller, the state’s accountant. But we assumed that once he’d taken one for the Republican team by using his office to accuse Harris County of “defunding the police” a few months before the high-stakes November election, it was a momentary lapse in judgment and come January, he’d be back to his normal pragmatic self. Nope.
Recently, Hegar renewed his accusation against the county, and with such spirit that some of us thought, surely, he must have discovered a new revelation, startling new evidence that would make his claim credible. Or at least different. Nope. In the fall, Hegar had based his allegation largely on the fact that some Harris County precinct constable’s offices, which aren’t even chiefly responsible for fighting violent crime, had lost access to unspent funds that they were no longer able to roll over to the next year due to a policy change that affected most every county department in 2021.
Some constables said they used those otherwise unspent rollover funds on everything from new patrol cars to salaries. “All that’s been taken away from us,” Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman said at the time.
As the November election drew nearer, the issue became more and more heated, complicated by a recent state law that went into effect in January 2022 and that requires Texas’ biggest counties to get voter approval to reduce public safety budgets.
Hegar joined his fellow Republican constables’ crusade when he sent a letter to the county detailing the constables’ complaints and threatening to block the county’s proposed budget from going forward. We called him on his bad math at the time.
Two Republican commissioners torpedoed the court’s proposed budget and tax rate by repeatedly boycotting the vote.
By November, the Democrats had held onto the court but lost the budget battle, forced to accept a no-new-revenue tax rate. Still, it seemed things had resolved. And even Hegar’s office, when challenged in court, seemed to back off the claim that Harris County had violated the law.
Now, the Harris County budget is in jeopardy again. Hegar has sent another letter, accusing the county of defunding law enforcement and threatening action.
The comptroller couldn’t add in August and apparently he still can’t.
Hegar seems to have moved on from the rollover funds. In letters sent last week, Hegar wrote that while he could investigate changes in annual budgets, rollover funds were beyond his “legislative authority.”
He has found a new hair to split: the purported loss of funding to Precinct 5 Constable Ted Heap’s budget. At issue here is that several months after the county did away with rollover funds, it also switched up the start of its fiscal year, leaving it with a one-time shortened fiscal year, running from March through September of last year. That meant that to make his case, Hegar had to annualize a budget that only actually covered seven months.
But how do you take seven months and get to 12?
By Hegar’s math, Heap lost more than $2 million from the would-be 12-month version of the short fiscal year budget. By the county’s math, the budget stayed flat. The difference is in how they got to the annual figure for the shorter fiscal year. Hegar found a monthly amount and then multiplied it by 12, according to a statement from the county. The county went by pay periods.
“You create a budget based on how many times you need to pay people,” County Administrator David Berry says.
No matter. Hegar is threatening to block tax collection and keep the county stuck at its no-new-revenue tax rate if the county doesn’t resolve the issue. The county, meanwhile, says it is prepared to fight this in court.
Now, we’re not accountants but, to us, this adds up to nothing more than yet another attempt to undermine local authority. The state law at the heart of this matter is an effort to wrest control from elected leaders who know their communities best and to capitalize on defunding paranoia.
And it is paranoia. Law enforcement funding has consistently inched upward in Harris County and public safety budgets would’ve been even higher had the Democrat-led commissioners court been able to pass its proposed 2023 budget.
Despite the loss of rollover funds, the county has emphasized that it remains responsive to law enforcement’s needs.
In the 2023 budget, for example, the county allocated nearly $2.2 million for Precinct 5’s fleet costs and nearly $300,000 for bullet proof vests and Tasers.
“It makes sense for the state to impose uniform accounting budget practices,” said Michael Granof, accounting professor emeritus at the University of Texas and an expert in government finance.
In Harris County, the state’s attack on local control isn’t just political. It seems to have gotten personal, and desperate, coinciding with a separate collective Republican effort to challenge the results of November’s local elections.
In the end, where will all this posturing, creative math and hair-splitting rationalization get us? Not anywhere closer to our goal of living in a safer community. Sometimes we like to imagine what it would be like to live in a state where politicians who profess to care about the police and public safety and fighting crime actually walked the walk.
And then we wake up. And it’s still Texas. And it’s still Groundhog Day all over again.
Unfounded claims of ‘defunding the police’ return.