CM Letitia Plummer
Houston City Council Member Letitia Plummer might be entering the race for Harris County judge, according to a copy of a now-deleted document posted by the Spring Branch Democrats Club that was shared with the Houston Chronicle.
The Spring Branch Democrats Club posted a copy of a document on Friday that featured a logo that reads, “Dr. Letitia Plummer Democrat for Harris County Judge,” and a caption with the document reads, “Another candidate for County Judge.” Another line of text on the shared post read “Campaign Announcement Day: July 8.”
Plummer has not filed for the seat, according to Harris County campaign finance records.
Pati Limón de Rodríguez, president of the Spring Branch Democrats, told the Chronicle that she didn’t have a comment, and said she needed to check in with their elections support committee chair about how the post came to be. The club’s elections support chair David Galvin declined to comment.
Any announcement from Plummer could trigger a state law that prohibits an office holder from announcing a campaign for a position while actively holding another. The law forces the candidate to resign their current position if the announcement is made more than a year and 30 days before the election.
This means Plummer’s seat as at-large 4 City Council member could potentially be open as a result of the Spring Branch Democrats’ post.
But Plummer, when reached Friday for comment, said that since she did not make the announcement herself, her position on Houston City Council was safe and the law had not been triggered.
Plummer said the document was “inadvertently sent out” from someone on her campaign who no longer works for her. She did not confirm whether she was running for county judge, but said she is “strongly considering it.”
City Attorney Arturo Michel did not immediately return a request for comment on the resign-to-run law and how it would work in Plummer’s situation.
If CM Plummer does in fact announce her candidacy, then she would join Annise Parker in the primary. I will say, here’s the law that defines what it means to become a “candidate”, among other things. Here’s the constitutional provision that mandates resign to run for, among others, city officials with terms of office of three years or longer; here’s the constitutional provision about that. (This Texas Municipal League Q&A helped guide me to these places.) I think it’s clear from a reading of the law that CM Plummer has not done anything to make her a “candidate” yet, and as such she is safe where she is. But if this document is an accurate reflection of her intent, that will not be true in a few weeks. We will find out on or around July 8.
If she is running and she does resign, then there would be a special election to fill the vacancy in At Large #4. That would be in November, at the same time as the CD18 election. Mayor Whitmire gets to call that one, and there would be adequate time to call it before the filing deadline in late August. Not a whole lot of time for potential candidates to raise money and fire up a campaign, but we’ll cross that bridge when and if we get to it.
I did get an image of the document with the announcement – you can see it here. For what it’s worth, when I mentioned that I had heard of another prominent person who was supposedly thinking about running for Judge in the Dem primary, it wasn’t CM Plummer’s name that had reached me. So there may yet already be more out there. I have no idea how much money CM Plummer has on hand right now because as far as I can tell, she hasn’t filed any reports since she was re-elected in 2023. If she doesn’t announce her candidacy until July 8, she won’t have a county finance report for June. I sure hope she finally files a city report in June, regardless of what her intentions are for 2026.