We have a very important race here in Harris County, in the Primary runoff election coming up May 24th. This is for Harris County Judge.
I went to hear the two runoff candidates Tuesday night—along
with about 200 close friends and allies who also have a stake in this decision.
It was hosted by Towne Lake Republicans, and held at the Weekley Community
Center. I’m hoping to see video soon, but for today I’m relying on my audio
recording and notes.
Why is this race so important? What does a county judge do?
Good question. At a candidate forum, moderator Rep. Mike Schofield spelled out
the job description. He said,
We don't call it County Judge intentionally to deceive you. Originally—and
in the small counties to this day—the County Judge actually hears cases. The
last vestige of that in Harris County went away about ten years ago, when we
got rid of the County Judge's jurisdiction over hearing liquor license cases.
So now our County Judge is basically the county executive. The Commissioners Court,
over which the judge presides, is responsible for the following: adopting a budget
for the county, setting tax rates, calling for bond elections, building and
maintaining county infrastructure such as roads and bridges, and overseeing
county courthouse jails, libraries, parks, and the Harris County flood control
district.
Then he asked the two candidates to tell us what makes them qualified to preside over Commissioners Court.
 |
| Alexandra del Moral Mealer (left) and Vidal Martinez, getting ready for opening remarks, at Harris County Judge Republican candidate forum March 29, 2022 |
We have two very qualified people. Compared to Lina Hidalgo, who holds the position now, almost anyone off the street would have more experience. So it’s a blessing to have choices so far above the low bar she has set.
I made my decision well ahead of the March 1st Primary,
and this forum only solidified my choice.
But I believe I’m choosing the better candidate; I’m not choosing
between a good and bad option here.
So the short version is, in the Primary I voted for
Alexandra del Moral Mealer (I’ll call her Alex Mealer from here on for brevity),
and I will do so again in the runoff. The other runoff candidate is Vidal
Martinez, and he’ll get good coverage here as well.
I first heard them both speak in November, at a forum we
held at Cypress Texas Tea Party (sorry, videos no longer available). We heard from Alex Mealer again, as our main speaker, in March (video
here). And we have scheduled to hear from Vidal Martinez on April 23rd.
Back in November we had five of the seven County Judge candidates that day. Vidal Martinez went first. I was taking notes and thinking, Wow! He has a lot of really relevant experience. He’s older, but he does seem ready to run a large organization—and Harris County is one of the largest jurisdictions in the country, bigger than many states.
 |
| Rep. Mike Schofield moderated at the candidate forum, March 29, 2022 |
On Tuesday night, Martinez quantified it this way:
Harris County is a big town. 1700 square miles. 4.7 million
people in here. If we were a state, we would be larger—number 22—larger than
Louisiana. We're larger than the state of Rhode Island.
I think he may mean our population is larger than Louisiana,
and our size is bigger than Rhode Island. Actually, I think we’re comparable to
New Jersey in size. He added,
It's two real centers of the population. We have 2.1 million
inside the donut with the city, which is predominantly liberal. And we have 2.5
outside of that that is predominantly conservative.
He noted that we had 44 years of conservative governance,
with County Judges John Lindsay, Robert Eckels, and Ed Emmett. Until 2018, when
Lina Hidalgo came in and tried to wipe out good governance entirely. More on
her later, if there’s time.
As I was saying, Martinez seemed qualified.
But… There’s a
problem that struck me in November, and was the issue that brought the most
sparks at Tuesday night’s forum as well. But I’d like to cover the qualifications
of both of the candidates first.
Vidal Martinez
He has been working here for 47 years—since 1975. (I’m
estimating that makes him 72.)
·
He has been a federal prosecutor in Houston.
·
He has been Chairman of the State Bar of Texas.
·
He has been on the Methodist Hospital board—the number
1 hospital in the state for many years.
·
He has been the Houston Port Commissioner.
·
He chaired the Transportation Committee of the
Greater Houston Partnership, working for funding of the I-45 expansion (Hidalgo
rejected the funding and sued instead; we need to reverse that).
·
He has served on the University of Houston
Board.
·
There’s a more complete list of experience on
his website.
He summed up what the county is in charge of as three
things: “public safety, public health, and transportation, which is really
emergency management.” So he showed how his resume fills all of those
categories. Really, his resume is stellar.
Alex Mealer
Alex Mealer is much younger. She’s 37, married, and has a
couple of small children. Her Facebook page still looks like a regular mom
enjoying her family. But packed in her relative youth she has a lot of good
experience. As she says, “Not all experience is good experience.” But what she’s
done is relevant for this job.
·
She graduated from West Point and began her
military career right after 9/11.
·
She joined the Army bomb squad, which is full-time
emergency management.
·
In her 20s, she was tasked with getting a bomb
squad unit ready to deploy to Afghanistan; Army standard is one year, but she
did it in four months.
·
She not only diffused bombs herself (proving
calm under pressure); she worked with senior leadership to allocate scarce
resources in real time with imperfect information.
·
She was promoted to lead a unit in Iraq: 600
people, 40 locations, to restore a broken unit. This required convincing people
to follow her—waiving their home time after a deployment to redeploy with her.
·
After military, she and husband settled in
Houston, and she began work in oil & gas—which is where she got her
financial expertise and understanding of working with the oil & gas feast-or-famine
cycle. This expertise includes knowing:
o What
is the appropriate leverage?
o How
do you raise capital?
o How
do you use your resources efficiently?
She summarizes the County Judge job as having two key
functions: “Can you lead a large bureaucracy, and manage a large budget?” She
has done both—and both under challenging conditions. With what is maybe the best
soundbite for her campaign, she says,
“If I can diffuse a bomb, I can handle the pressures of this
job.”
Both candidates have the relevant education, which neither
mentioned on Tuesday. Martinez has a law degree, obviously. Mealer has a JD/MBA
from Harvard. Mealer's website is here.
Improvement Plans
Both of them would probably do similar things for the County—all
a 180-degree turn from the current direction. Both of them seem to have a good
grasp on the situation. Martinez has long experience. Mealer has done her homework.
She’s been gathering the data—and noting that Hidalgo keeps taking down data
that might make her look bad, so things are likely worse than they appear. So
transparency will be a high priority in the next county administration.
Here are a couple of examples of discussions to come in the
general election.
We got funding related to flood control in the wake of Hurricane
Harvey. It was to be distributed according to need—where floods happen. Hidalgo
has decided to distribute—illegally—according to oppression status. That means,
if you’re in an area she can call oppressed because of your skin color, or
maybe your economic status, she prioritizes the funds there—and leaves the people
who have actually suffered the flooding unserved. Considering how many people
all over the county suffered from flooding, some woke nonsense is not going to
go over well in November.
And there’s that other thing she’s done—making a bad-faith
deal concerning bail bonds. As a result, even the pro-criminal District Attorney
Kim Ogg is saying enough is enough; we’ve got to stop letting violent offenders—who
are already out on bond when they commit new crimes—back onto the streets. Hidalgo
has scuttled funding for law enforcement and sent those funds to whatever are
her pet social projects. Note: social projects are not on the list of
responsibilities for the County Judge. As a result, it’s hard to hire law
enforcement. And we’ve suddenly got the distinction of being the murder capital
of the nation—taking that dubious honor away from Chicago.
Martinez mentions some close-to-home examples in his opening
remarks:
We now have a little girl getting shot and killed at FM 529
and Fry Road by a stray bullet in a carjacking. Then another carjacking two
days later in the same area. Then a vicious attack on a lady at HEB parking lot
at Tuckerton and Fry Road. This crime wave has to be taken seriously. I know
how to stop it. I know how to stop this nonsense. Keep criminals in jail. Stop
the decarceration.
Restore funding to law enforcement, and make this community safe for all of you
again.
Those are steps Mealer will take as well. And she has ten
law enforcement groups endorsing her.
I believe them both on many of the things on our to-do list
for the County Judge. Their strength on these things is going to show up well
against Hidalgo’s feckless cronyism in a general election. The disastrous
results of this County Judge are not in some faraway place; they show up in our
faces every day. Even Democrats want safe streets and controlled floods in
their own neighborhoods.
The Sticking Point
Now for what has been a sticking point for me. Back in
November, during the Q&A, someone asked Vidal Martinez about his donations
to Lina Hidalgo. This was during her first year, early in her administration,
not during a campaign. He explained that he was trying to be supportive, and had
been hopeful she would be better. It turned out she was a disappointment.
Really? Because some of us knew from day one that she was a
27-year-old twit, just out of school, with no work experience, and a whole lot
of tyrannist philosophy that she was determined to foist on us. Some of us don’t
give money to our paid elected officials at all; our taxes do the paying. And
we certainly don’t give it for them to use in future campaigns when they are
that undeserving.
On Tuesday when he tried to defend those donations, Martinez
said,
With Lina Hidalgo—Yes. Every businessman downtown, and every
business leader—we had a 27-year-old without a driver's license driving the
family car. We were worried about that. We wanted to have access to her. We
didn't know until after a donation—and, by the way, any donation to her [Hidalgo]
by these businessmen, including her [Mealer’s] supporters that are
replete with business, with donations to Lina Hidalgo—we didn't know until
about six months later. This is donations that came in after Ed Emmett lost; it
wasn’t during the election. She’s a sitting officer. There’s a whale of
difference in leadership. You haven’t held any of those folks [previous county
leadership] here. But anyway, there’s a whale of a difference in leadership
in this county, when you have to deal with Democrats that are in positions of
power. And she disappointed us. She disappointed everyone in that 2019 year….
She turned out to be the wrong person.
For someone as high powered as Martinez is, a $1000 donation
here and there is like a cost of doing business. It’s like my assuming paying
for toll roads is a cost of driving around Houston. Nevertheless, I’m still
bothered by it.
I have more questions I would like to ask him: If it’s a
cost of doing business, and the way things are done, will you expect donations
from people who want access to you in that position? Did you give donations to
the Republican predecessors, to have access to them? Or was giving money to “the
27-year-old without a drivers license driving the family car” your first attempt
at buying access? And how do we know that you would be completely different?
Alex Mealer summed it up as, “if you can’t understand the
difference between donating and pay-to-play,” and asked do “business leaders,
to talk to our elected officials, need to pay?”
Martinez is clearly defensive about the accusation. It
hurts. Because it loses votes from people like me. And he did it in the
interests of business, because he thought he had to. He didn’t think he was
doing anything wrong.
The problem is, he accepted it. He didn’t call out the practice.
We’re in a day of such corruption, we need to know our elected officials stand
against that in every way.
I know a number of respectable people who have known Vidal
Martinez a long time, and feel some loyalty toward him. I accept that. They may
not be wrong. But I haven’t known him long or well, so this thing really bothers
me.
And I see in Alex Mealer a spine of steel. She’s a serious
woman. She’s not warm and fuzzy. I can see that gladhanding is not her favorite
thing to do; solving problems is her thing.
 |
| Me and Alex Mealer at Cypress Texas Tea Party, March 19, 2022 |
Let me address one more thing between the two candidates. Vidal
Martinez has a Latino heritage, and he does speak Spanish. He does not look
Hispanic. He claims that Mealer can’t get the Latino vote. She is, however,
second generation American; her grandfather fought against the Franco regime in
Spain, if I'm remembering right. It was over the issue of speaking Spanish that led to the discussion about
the donations to Hidalgo. Mealer said,
What I would say to all that is, when you start donating to
Democrats such as Lina Hidalgo and Sheila Jackson Lee, you’re speaking in their
language. And what is that language? Divisive identity politics. You do not
grow this party and win by saying, “You do not speak fluent Spanish.” I do not
speak Spanish. But you don’t get to define how I define myself. I’m a second
generation, 50%. And if you look at whose backing me, OSSO, Organization of
Spanish Speaking Officers—they didn’t do that because of my ethnicity. They did
it because they trusted me to enforce law and order. If you need to talk about identity
politics, and want a quota on what you look like, you’re in the wrong party.
All that military background—I think she’s definitely a
fighter.
Calling Out Corruption
We were speaking of calling out corruption, so I’ll mention,
Lina Hidalgo is much worse than simply incompetent. And much worse than simply favoring
all the wrong policies. She’s also all about crony corruption. This month we’ve
had to deal with her personally appointed Election Administrator—a position she
rammed through the Commissioners Court, taking election duties away from the
elected County Clerk’s office, where there was accountability to the people.
She hired a crony, Isabel Longoria, who had zero election experience and failed
abysmally, to the embarrassment of the whole country. The Primary was not her first try; she started with the December 2020 runoff and has been getting worse. Longoria is under a lawsuit from the Harris County
Republican Party for failing to meet contractual agreements to run the Primary Election.
And Longoria has resigned—as of July 1st. The problem there is, we
have a special districts election on May 7th and this runoff
election on May 24th. That’s two more elections for her to screw up
before she stops taking our money while ruining our democratic right to vote. She
says it’s so there will be less disruption, and they can take the needed time
to get a replacement—who at that point will not have the practice of those two
smaller elections before facing the very challenging midterm election in
November.
But that’s not the worst. The same week as the bungled
election, Texas Rangers and the DA’s office served a warrant and searched Hidalgo’s
offices in the investigation into her crony deal last year—a contract that she
was forced to cancel because it stunk so badly, and she got called out by Commissioner
Cagle for it. She chose a political ally, one-person company run out of a room,
to receive an $11 million contract for COVID response. That wasn’t just a bad
decision—less experience at higher cost than the other bids, including the higher scoring UT Health. Hidalgo and her
staff—not her staff only as the media are claiming—were involved in
crafting the language of the bid contract. That’s illegal. And very corrupt.
And now they have the evidence in hand.
State Senator Paul Bettencourt put out a video giving some of the details. And Alex Mealer's campaign did another one. Both are brief and worth watching. What I said about Mealer being willing to fight—yeah, she’s not afraid to draw blood.
%201.png) |
| Lina Hidalgo, screenshot from here |
These things move at a glacially slow pace, unfortunately. Hidalgo
should be under indictment. Will that happen by the November election? We can
only hope.
Better than just wishing is to get out there and vote in the
runoff, and then campaign from May to November, to—as Alex Mealer says—"get
people excited about good governance,” which she has spent the last half year
doing. When it’s something we’re sorely missing, it is something to get
excited about.
No comments:
Post a Comment