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September 19th, 2018:

Interview with Meghan Scoggins

Meghan Scoggins

We move out to the west end of Fort Bend County, where the population is booming. HD28 covers this part of the county, and the number of votes cast in Presidential years here has increased by more than fifty percent since 2008. Democrat Meghan Scoggins is the first candidate of any party to run against six-term incumbent Rep. John Zerwas since 2010. Scoggins currently works in the non-profit space, having previously worked in legal services and with NASA on the International Space Station. She’s also been an advocate for consumer protection, having been a victim of identity theft, and for disability rights. Here’s what we talked about:

You can see all of my interviews for state offices so far as well as other information about the candidates on my 2018 Legislative Election page.

Flores defeats Gallego

I don’t even know what to say. This is a filthy result, one that can’t be repaired until 2020. I don’t know what happened, but it was a race we should not have lost. I don’t think one ugly loss invalidates everything else that’s been going on, but it sure is a turd in the punch bowl, and the reaction to it is going to be brutal. Now Dems are going to have to flip a Republican-held Senate seat just to stay even. Just terrible.

UPDATE: Something that occurred to me after I went to bed was that it was unusual for this runoff to be held on a Tuesday, as runoffs are almost always on Saturdays. The effect of having this on a Tuesday is that there were no weekend days for voting – early voting for this was Monday to Friday last week. It’s still a disgrace that Gallego lost, but if you wanted to engineer an election for low turnout, this is how you would do it.

Property tax revenue up, school funding down

Welcome to Texas.

An early projection has Texas decreasing state funding to public education, and largely using local taxes to fill the gap.

In its preliminary budget request ahead of next year’s legislative session, the Texas Education Agency projected a drop in the state’s general revenue for public education by more than $3.5 billion over the next couple of years, in part because the revenue from local property taxes is expected to skyrocket. General revenue only makes up part of the state’s education funding.

Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath confirmed this projection in front of a state budget panel Wednesday morning as he laid out the state agency’s budget request through 2021.

The Foundation School Program, the main way of distributing state funds to Texas public schools, includes both state general revenue and local property tax revenue. Local property values are expected to grow by about 6.8 percent each year, and existing statute requires the state to use that money first before factoring in state funding.

Just a reminder, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are lots of things that could be done differently, but they all require legislative action, not to mention state leadership. There is one thing we can all do to facilitate this kind of necessary change, and that’s to vote for candidates who want to make that happen. Start with Mike Collier, who has plenty of ideas for how to fix this mess, but don’t stop there. We have a years-long record to tell us what we’re going to get if we have the same old same old in government next year. Vote to do something different or quit complaining when you don’t get it. The Chron editorial board has more.