You need to get past the first couple of paragraphs, but overall a decent piece.
Lina Hidalgo
Even in defeat, Beto O’Rourke did a big favor to fellow Democrats all over Texas. A couple hundred thousand young people who might otherwise have skipped the election turned out to vote for the charismatic young liberal, and when they did, they also voted for his party down the ballot. The Republicans still won the statewide races, but the margins were the narrowest they’ve been in decades, and in local races, there were a number of upsets by Democrats.
Perhaps the biggest surprise — or accident, as far as local conservatives are concerned — was in the race for the top administrator of Texas’s largest county, the one that surrounds Houston. The winner, Lina Hidalgo, was the most millennial candidate ever, a 27-year-old perma-student who relied on her parents’ financial support to launch her campaign. Her only jobs so far have been the short-term gigs she’s worked amid her schooling.
It’s safe to say she wasn’t chosen for her qualifications. Eighty-seven percent of her votes came from straight-ticket ballots. Now she’ll be overseeing a county of 5 million people — the third-largest in the U.S., larger than 26 states — along with a $5 billion budget and a payroll of nearly 17,000 people. (Only a few local hospitals and grocery stores employ more people, including Walmart, which has 34,000 Houston-area workers.) On top of that, Harris County has a vulnerable population of more than half a million undocumented immigrants, and surrounds a city that’s made entirely of concrete, as though it’s designed to encourage the maximum possible damage from floods — of which there have been two apocalyptic ones in the last decade.
Sometimes during the campaign, it didn’t look like she was even trying all that hard to win. A common refrain in news coverage was that she’d never attended a meeting of Harris County’s commissioners court, the governmental body she’d be overseeing, which is sort of like a city council. In one debate she couldn’t name the city auditor.
But the truth is that Hidalgo is more formidable than her short résumé suggests. To anyone paying closer attention, it was clear that she and the incumbent had fundamentally different ideas about what the administrative position should be. She thought, and still thinks, that there’s a way of transforming it from a mostly managerial role — someone who fills potholes, balances the budget, and cleans up after floods — to one that mobilizes the county’s resources to improve public health, expand public transportation, reform the jails, and reduce global warming.
“Any issue you choose, it’s easy to say, ‘We can’t do anything — that’s not the county’s deal,’ she said in a phone interview last week. “But fundamentally, it’s about priorities. Budgets are about priorities and they’re about values.” When she gets into the details, she’s persuasive — maybe because the transition has given her a chance to study the system up close. On criminal justice, she points out, the county has spent somewhere north of $6 million in the past year fighting a judge’s order to reform its bail system. On health, she cited an independent 2015 report that suggested the county could improve its services by coordinating better among its hospitals, clinics, schools, and public-health department. And on transit, she argued, the county can manage development in a way that discourages sprawl, and can divert some of its money for trains.
Just out of curiosity, can you name the county auditor? (County, not city – that’s an error in the article.) I’ve got the answer at the end of this post.
I feel like people haven’t really wrapped their minds around the ways in which things are likely to change, not just due to Hidalgo’s election but due to the new Democratic majority on Commissioners Court. The Court has always operated in a very clubby you-do-your-thing-and-I’ll-do-mine way, with Republicans having either a 3-2 or 4-1 majority most of the time. The late El Franco Lee, who was one of those Democrats for a thirty year period, did a lot of things for Precinct 1 in his time but was nobody’s idea of an agitator for change at the county level. It’s not just Lina, it’s Lina plus Rodney plus Adrian that will have a chance to shake things up and question things we have been doing for years, if not forever. Some of that is going to generate a ton of friction. As someone once said, elections have consequences.
By the way, later in the article Hidalgo responds to the complaint about her not having attended a Court meeting. She notes she watched them online, then makes the very good but often overlooked point that Court meetings are held during the work day for most people, and in general are not very welcoming to public input. That’s one of those things that I figure will be changed, and it will be welcome. Business is not going to be as ususal.
By the way, the county auditor is someone named Michael Post. Go ahead and do a Google News search for “harris county auditor” or “michael post harris county”, or a Chron archive search for either, I’ll wait. Maybe the reason Lina Hidalgo didn’t know the name Michael Post off the top of her head is because the man and his office have basically been invisible? Just a thought.
How does Hidalgo think the County can manage development when it has no power to do that? There is a lot of potential here for disaster if she doesn’t focus on what Counties roles are under Texas law, and she will get crushed by the State level Republicans if they see an opportunity to make a high profile Democrat look bad.
El Franco Lee like most/all black-democrats on city council are just place holders.
Even the ones from city council districts B, K and D are too lazy to put ideas on a website.
When women had a majority on houston city council from 2001-2003 they were also too lazy to implement paid maternity leave for city employees.
It’s doubtful we’ll see any real initiative, ideas or policies from Lina Hidalgo. She had a stanford and harvard degree and coudn’t bother to any property tax reform ideas on her website.
Adrian Garcia’s mayoral campaign was a joke, he had no solutions for working families.
on a side note: rodney ellis, lina hidalgo and adrian garcia have blocked me on twitter.
Too bad we can’t block you on this forum. You’ve turned into one of those annoying auto bot reader comments on news sites I see often, promising $$$’s for stuffing envelopes fours hours/day. Same ole sh**, just a different day. I’m semi convinced you’re the four hundred pound man child with a laptop living in your parents basement POTUS warned me about.
I’m not sure what was more funny.
Pretending to be stupid at deugro or watching the 4th largest city pretend not to know who i was.
I am glad that Lina Hidalgo got elected because I voted for her. Lina is very capable and probably the most intelligent person to hold that office in my lifetime (a long one at that). She will make us all proud and do a great job.
She’s must be so smart that she forgot to use her two ivy league degrees to put ideas on her website after a year of campaigning.
She’s like Amanda Edwards 2.0
young, soft on the eyes, pretty wardrobe, but too lazy to write any real ideas