The Texan Podcast - Interview: Sen. Paul Bettencourt on Property Tax Deal, Negotiation Process, Harris County Elections Office

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Want to support reporting on Texas politics that doesn’t include the spin? Subscribe at https://thetexan.news/subscribe/  Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) joined The Texan’s senior reporter Brad Johnson to discuss the passage of the property tax relief compromise agreed to by the Texas House and Senate last week. Bettencourt served as a chief negotiator for the Senate during the tense standoff between Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, House Speaker Dade Phelan, and Gov. Greg Abbott. “It’s quite frankly a joy to be able to be involved in a process that gives $18 billion of tax relief back to the citizens of Texas,” said Bettencourt. During the interview, Bettencourt discussed the details of the plan, how the final deal evolved from the start of the legislative session in January, and the process of negotiating with the House. Bettencourt also talked about his criticisms of the Harris County election administrator and efforts to provide more oversight and accountability in elections. “If you don’t have an election process that people have faith in, you’ve got nothing,” said Bettencourt. “Harris County, while it isn’t too big to fail, it’s too big to ignore.” Enjoy this content? Be sure to subscribe for similar interviews and The Texan’s Weekly Roundup — a podcast released every Friday that brings you the latest news in Texas politics.

Hello everyone, this is Brad Johnson, senior reporter here at the Texan. Today I sat down with Senator Paul Bettencourt, Republican out of Houston, and Senate's chief architect of the property tax plan. We discussed what's in the bill, the negotiations with the House, and how they unfolded, and we also touched on some Harris County issues as well. Listen in, it's a great discussion, and we hope you enjoy. Senator Paul Bettencourt, welcome. You are, well, not just off the Senate floor, but almost just off the Senate floor after passing the property tax relief deal.

How's it feel to finally have it almost done? Oh, it's quite frankly quite a joy to be able to be involved in a process that gives $18 billion of tax relief back to the citizens of Texas. As I said on the floor, I started thinking about it, and this is the largest cut in the state's history. But more importantly, because of the size of Texas and the economy, there was actually a national headline, I thought it was in the Epoch Times, that said, this state is actually doing an $18 billion tax cut. And then it was, it's the state of Texas. And that's really cool. Yeah, so it's a big package. Can you walk us through the different provisions? Obviously, there are many different components of this, but... Right. Well, let's start off with the main issue that most people will see and understand is that there's an increase of the homestead exemption up from

$40,000 to a whopping $100,000. Now, what that means is all 5.72 million homeowners in the state will get an exemption if they approve it at the polls on the 7th of November. And if they do, it's already on their tax bills because that's how the bill is written. And that's a big part of the savings that the homeowners are going to get because the average savings from if the bill didn't pass, Brad, and we've had these discussions, you know, we think it's about $1,373 per year. So this is eye-popping, four-digit, off-the-chart stuff that you just, you know, rarely, if ever, get a chance to ever participate in, much less actually be part of delivering it. Now, the other big part of this, and I've always referred to this as the Texas two-step of a homestead exemption

and a big compression reduction of tax rates, that the tax rates are coming down roughly 21.68 pennies. What that means is about a 23.8% reduction in the M&O tax rate, the maintenance and operations tax rate, for every taxpayer in the state. Which is the largest component of property tax bills. That's right, which it always is because it's, and especially when we're using what's called the maximum compressed rate, MCR. There's really... What does that mean? Well, that's the maximum compressed rate is being able to push down the floor of the tax compression calculations in the school finance. The bills that we passed in 2019, landmark bills, Senate Bill 2, House Bill 3,

that turned back the rollback rates. How fast could government grow? How fast could local collections grow from revenue? And that was great, but it kind of is the ceiling in school finance. What we're working on is the floor. So we're putting over $7 billion into that floor reduction. We're going to get $5.3 billion from the prior 2019 and another $5.3 billion on homestead exemption. So this compression plus homestead exemption, I kid, I call it the Texas two-step because people understand that. And that combination is what gives us off the charts, you know, $1,373 per year savings.

Now that savings is a reduction from what tax bills would be without it, right? Right, from would be, right. You know, and this is a hypothetical, but you have to have some benchmark. Right. But the good news is the homestead exemption is approximately $681 of that, almost half. And that means that tells you why the homestead exemption was important to pass. And then for seniors and disabled homeowners, they have an extra $10,000 already in place. They do, already in place. But the reason why they get a little extra money in the calculation is that we had an election in May with two of my prior bills from the special session of 21. They're called Prop 1 and 2.

One of them raised the homestead exemption from 25 to 40. But Prop 1 was little unknown that was basically allowed over 65s to take their freeze, break it, and lower it. As values go up, rates come down, so their freeze breaks and lowers. So with that coming online this year for the first time, 2023, we take advantage of all that, catch up on the fact that the legislation wasn't written quickly. It was written too quickly at the end of that special session. So we had $171 makeup for them. So they get almost $1,489 on average on the second year of this plan because of the makeup and the incredible homestead exemption and their extra $10,000 exemption. Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but as I understand it,

it's fixing kind of a loophole in law in the Constitution that treats over 65 and disabled homeowners as a separate class. And that's why they hadn't yet benefited from what you guys passed already. Right. Because, see, to forgive taxes, that's really what an exemption is. You're forgiving tax. You have to pass it. Now, what we did this time was actually pass language that said, if we ever raise it in the future, because maybe the legislature will index the exemption. Who knows what the future is. You don't have to go back and do this again with another vote. So all of that compressed into that portion of the bill basically gives those eye-popping homestead exemption savings. And as Senator Zofferini said when we first started this process, this is going to be readily apparent to everybody when they see their tax bill. And with this extra money that came from

the appropriators, Bonin and Huffman, on both sides of the up to $18 billion, you can't possibly miss it. Yeah. And now those two will be effective, the compression of the homestead for this tax year, correct? Now, on the other side, the appraisal reforms you guys have as part of this, those will become effective starting next year. Is, correct? Now, on the other side, the appraisal reforms you guys have as part of this, those will become effective starting next year. Is that correct? Right. Well, let's break them apart. The circuit breaker, the 20% increase limit on all non-homestead real property, and that means commercial, second homes, rent homes, et cetera, valued $5 million or less, will have that 20% circuit breaker on their value increases. Just like there's a 10% limit on homesteads,

there's going to be a 20% limit on the rest of the real property. Now, when you say circuit breaker, effectively it's an appraisal cap. Now, right? Well, no, not really because the reason why we chose that name is because it's temporary. Sure. It's a pilot program for three years. It's a pilot program, and we wanted to differentiate that because the other Homestead appraisal cap actually went into law now 26 years ago. And that's a permanent feature.

Do you foresee that getting renewed come three years from now? Well, this was a request from the House, okay, from House Speaker Phelan, to get at least three years well this was a request from the house okay from how speaker feeling to get at least three years worth of data and the reason why is that the appraisal districts are studied 50 of them are studied every year on their ratio studies and he wanted at least to have one full set of data so we can look at that now it does include all real property which does include minerals in the ground in situ, but not anything above ground, which is, you know, all business personal property, which is substantial, okay, you know, in businesses. So that's a new, and that's a novel, a new program. And quite frankly, I think it's a novel program in the entire country

because of the $5 million limit and the 20%. Well, it's a test run on what the House wanted originally, right? And a whole appraisal cap at 5%. Right. The theory was, right, to have a, you know, great, you could study it. And I want to credit Lieutenant Governor Patrick and Speaker Phelan for, after the Senate passed the last big set of bills that we had, about two, it seems like forever, but it was only like two weeks ago, that they agreed to meet and that their meeting started off this period of intense cooperation on that. And I want to also give a shout-out to my negotiating partner, Chairman Will Metcalf out of Conroe.

Yeah. So before we get to the negotiations, I want to hear about how those went down. Well, we have more. But wait, there's more. There's more appraisal side reform that you guys are putting in here. Establishing three elected positions in appraisal review boards that are in counties, I believe, population 75,000 or above, correct? Right. Why is that important? Why'd that make it in? Well, Senator Hancock reminded me that we had actually discussed that in SB2 back in

2019, because there's always a question of how do you get citizen involvement in the appraisal, I mean the governance of the appraisal districts. And the problem is when you look at electing chief appraisers, not a great record nationally, but electing ARB members, well, there's 190 of them in Travis County, and that would make the ballot a little lengthy. So I've had this idea about saying, okay, great, let's take three citizens, get them on the board, and have them

elected in a nonpartisan election in May of this coming year, and then they'll be re-elected, or new people will be in November of 2026. So they'll get two and a half years in. But the key thing is let's have them involved in picking the citizen ARB panels. Very critical thing. Some boards used to do this 20 years ago. I actually was on a board that actually did this. And the one thing you want is you've got to have appraisal review board members that listen with ease to what the taxpayers are saying. And I think that the best people to see that are the citizens that could appoint them. And so I think this is a really big reform. Now, there's a lot of people out there, you know, quite frankly, nervous about

this. But I'm never nervous about electing people to governing bodies because I think the more citizen input, the more real voter input you've got, the better off you are. And quite frankly, it's high time. We haven't had any citizen representation on these county boards of county appraisal district boards since the VVTO Act, and that's 45 years ago. Okay. So it's time for that. What was the reason for setting the line at 75,000? Well, you have to look at, you know, Texas is a huge state. You go from Harris County with the size of the 26th largest state of the union to Loving County, where there's all of 2062

registered voters. Okay. So it would seem to be nonsensical to be electing three people to the appraisal review board in Loving County. SB2 and HB3 had cutoffs at $30,000 for the rollback rates, $125,000 cutoffs for like taxpayer liaisons. So this is kind of a mid-range number. Okay. Now, the negotiations over this, this deal was, of course, announced early Monday morning. Lieutenant Governor Patrick said today— Were you surprised? I was. Yeah, I was surprised.

I knew something would be coming soon, but I did not think it would be coming that quickly. But Lieutenant Governor Patrick said on the floor it went down at the very last minute. It sounded like Sunday evening. They kind of put the bow on it. Walk us through how those negotiations went, how they developed, what changed, what didn't. Well, the negotiation climate was set by the two heads of the chambers agreeing to meet after the last press conference the senators had and inviting the House to join us in the discussion. And it was very positive tone. They had an individual meeting what seems to be a lifetime ago.

I think it's 10 days ago now. That's right. Because I've lost the 10 days to miss my knowledge. And the speaker said, we're going to have a new voice in these discussions. And that's Representative Metcalf. Okay. Up until that point, who was doing the negotiating? Well, it had been, I mean, almost all of the House leadership effectively at one time or another. Okay. You know, everybody that's on the bill pattern over in the House and, you know, the appropriations. Chairman Meyer.

Chairman Meyer. Okay. You know, Pro Tem, Guerin, you know, calendar chair Burroughs. I mean, you name it. Okay. Been a lot of folks in these negotiations over time. So a representative, Chairman Metcalf and I started, you know, immediately, you know, having, you know, conversations and we've known each other for a period of time and we have kind

of direct negotiation style so it matches up because we'll say here's what we can do what we can't do etc but it uh there these while these are big issues okay and there are options like i look at cad governance as a perfect example you know there are some people that really want to elect the appraisal review board members. OK, those people that really want to elect the chief appraiser. OK. So when you have this type of discussion, you have to just be open because, you know, because that was a request from the House. They wanted to do something about governance and appraisal review board reform. And so I pitched it, and it was – and Chairman Metcalf, you know, thought through it, and then we were collaborative on it. Because, look, when you elect people, do you elect them nonpartisan

or do you elect them partisan? Well, a really important point here is that you want the appraisal district to be nonpartisan, okay? And plus, if you did partisan elections, it just delays when they can get there. They couldn't get there until 2025. We wanted them there in 2024. And so you have a lot of good discussions about it because this is nothing that legislatures don't do, okay?

And I think that this last 10 days has been what's right about legislatures, both chambers working together. And I'm pretty optimistic that maybe this will be what we do from here on out. Done it right once, no reason not to continue a good trend. Yeah. Well, you mentioned the last 10 days of, call it the era of good feelings, but well before that. That's a historical reference for those folks that don't know it, okay?

Go Google it and look it up right now. It happened right after the initial part of the founding of the United States. Yeah, it was, I think, Martin Van Buren's tenure? No, it was before then. Before then? They had less good feelings by then. Oh, that's right. But this is Madison, Monroe, okay, you know, those guys, that period of time.

But there was really no one political party to go at. So, but before that, we had seen months of, you know, butting heads between the two chambers and especially the lieutenant governor and speaker. How did it go from so bad to getting something done? Well, you can feign hitting the reset button like Hillary Clinton did, or you can actually hit a reset button. And they hit a reset button. Okay. Well, that should bode well for future sessions, special sessions. You know, I can't speak for them, but I think it certainly bode well for this discussion. And I think that's important because there's a lot of good ideas in both chambers.

You just have to be willing to sit down and talk about it. Yeah. And, you know, after all this, you know, bluster over the last few months and then this 10-day window, you know, we're kind of back where we started, where the Senate got the homestead exemption it wanted. The House got the quasi-appraisal cap that it wanted. A.K.A. circuit breaker. Circuit breaker, yes. An appraisal cap that's temporary. Right. That's it. That's why it's called circuit breaker. Did you foresee it ending up almost back where it started? Well, actually, when you look at it, it actually ended up better than it started. Okay. And let me explain why, because it's a really important point. We, you know, I was tasked with, you know, like it is a lifetime ago, like six months ago,

take $15 billion and get me the best plan, the biggest buck for, bank for taxpayers that you can get. So we spent an exhausting six weeks looking at all these options, okay, and others that we haven't even talked about. Now that came on the, and we had the same type of elements, the tax rate compression, the homestead exemption, etc., and we had franchise tax. Well, we brought franchise back to this at the end. So, this isn't really an $18 billion plan. It's really effectively, if you're doing non-governmental budgeting, it would be $ 18.3 billion because that's what the franchise tax uh exemption doubling costs and that's uninsignificant because that's 67 000 businesses that are off the uh franchise tax roll so that got brought back plus we had a lot of conversation in the hearings about what the no new revenue forms did, how long it took.

And so we're saving people money. So that came back. Now, that was in the early versions of the bill. No reason to go through everything. It's just, you know, even my memory banks are full of all those, you know, of everything. And then when we pop out two weeks ago, we had some other good ideas that were in the bill that could come back in the future, which is lowering the rollback rate, the collection limit, or the teacher pay bonus. Okay. And those were in the bill.

But the money in the bill is fungible because everything you do, whether it's circuit breaker, okay, it's going to cost you money. So what was going to be the rollback, the collection limit reduction, that money went to the 20% circuit breaker. So you just have to move that money around till you get the final package. And so part of that is just being able to have a good negotiation over 10 days. So the Groundhog Day experience for me is more of the fact that we passed this bill and passed this bill and passed this bill and passed this bill. But I'm pretty sure, I can't say, you know, that the quote, the old line, the opera is over yet until the singer sings, but we're getting awfully close. Yeah. You mentioned the total dollar amount. It's like $13, $15 billion in new relief. There's that

$5.3 that's already in the budget that passed for continued compression. 12.7 plus another 300 per year on franchise. Gotcha. Okay. So why was that the number selected for the amount of money from the surplus we're going to put towards property tax relief? Was there any discussion of adding more or? Well, actually what's happened, more has been added pretty much consistently in this process. Because you start off with 15, then I think the House got to 17.6 first. Then I think the Senate got to 18. And the Senate got to 18 to use money for the collection limit for schools to try to drop that collection limit. And then we stayed at 18 to use that money for the 20% circuit breaker.

And so it's seen steadily that the package grow over time. So now what you see is you've got the biggest component, the plurality of the money is actually the new compression. And it's the most expensive because when you're hitting on what's called the maximum compress rate, you're really hitting on the floor and pushing it down. The older compression, as you would call it, you know, I call it the SCP compression from House Bill 3, is really the ceiling. But we're really pushing all of this down at once. And compression is functionally the state using its money to buy down local property tax rates for schools specifically, right?

Right. And specifically, you know, 23.8% on maintenance and operation reduction. Look, this is going to be, when people get their tax bills, I don't care where they live, what they own, whether a homestead or not, what businesses they have, et cetera. This is a whopping reduction. And this goes back to an earlier question.

This is all going to happen this year. The tax bills are going to go out with the lowered rates and with the homestead exemption. With the expectation that this passes in November. Now, and with the expectation that it does pass, I cannot imagine it not passing, because then there would be a lump of coal in everybody's stocking when the assessors would have to send out a higher number. And the last one that passed after 2021 session, what did it pass with? 85%? Well, and the second one passed at 87. There were two. Yeah, right. Now I expect passage rates, I hope passage rates will be this high.

Yeah. With these type of eye-popping numbers for home sales, it may actually break 90. We'll see. And then part of it is that the timing of this, I think, I'm sure you've got a question about renters in there. Do you want me to talk about that? Yeah, go for it. Okay, right. Is that, you know, you look at renters and you have to look at what's happened across the country because people have tried rent control. It always fails, okay, whether it's Lefkoe, San Francisco, you know, whatever, pick a time, New York, whatever, okay. So the timing

of all this is important because right now, for example, commercial property values are down 15% year to year in Travis County. Rents are down by even more. Rents are down by 10% in Houston. And we mentioned this with Sutter Hancock because Tarrant County is even showing a reduction in rents of about 1.8%. Okay. Now, when you pour, and I would put, if there was a bucket here, I would pour this out, okay? And you pour all this water onto what is property taxation, the renters are going to feel it because rents are already going down.

So if costs are going down, that's going to get passed through. If rents are going up like a rocket ship, like they've been the past few years, you could make a case, hey, this is not going to make it to the renters. But a percentage of this is going to make it to the renters because the rents are going down, costs are going down with this, and the market will help get that to renters as well. I've heard one of the biggest costs for people who own rental properties is the property taxes. Is that correct?

Right. Two top things. Property taxes, insurance. Okay, gotcha. Governor Greg Abbott has, in this entire situation, you know, he's occasionally weighed in, especially when we got to special sessions, right? One of the things he called for was putting taxes, Texas, on a path to eliminating property tax, specifically the M&O rate of school districts. Do you think this plan does that? Well, I think it certainly does it because, and let me say this, but it does it incrementally. See, this is the, everybody can get into semantics of these type of discussions, but, you know, I want to look at it from a long term. This bill in its infancy was actually passed as a Senate bill in the 21st special sessions where we had a little bit of

surplus. And the bill pattern will say, okay, take 500 million out, split the rest between the taxpayers and leave the rest in the Treasury. We passed that bill twice. So what this bill now is 18 billion and change, if you count franchise tax forgiveness, out of about $33 plus billion. So that's over half. And the fact that you can buy down and make these changes because these exemptions mean people just don't pay. I mean, there's a misconception about that being bad somehow. No, it's good. But from a tax writer perspective, it's the most powerful thing I do.

People don't pay. They're out. And 67,000 businesses, we're also going to agree with that, not just 5.72 million homeowners when they get out of the franchise tax. So it really is a question of how much money you have over time, okay? And what you do with it. But I've always felt like you should try to get half of that type of surplus back. And we're going to ask the public in this. One of the things is we set up a fund. We're going to ask to bring down some of this excess cash to fund this. But as much as I've written in my earlier days robotics code and Pascal and all this stuff,

it's very difficult to write a program that can foresee everything that happens. Yeah. And so this is tremendous property tax relief now. And the problem we don't know is, and we know things are cooling off primarily because the feds have finally stopped turning the printing press to maximum and, you know, flooding the market with trillions of dollars of tax relief and then expecting the next generation to pay for it. So that's finally cooling the economy down. And, of course, by general consensus, a lot less expectation we're going to have a big nest egg of extra money in the next biennium. But that's okay because every session you have to make these decisions.

And it just is a question of how much do you have and what are your sources and use of funds. But it's a tremendous statement. And I think that Epoch Times article actually woke me up this morning to just how big this is. It is a large amount of money. Right. I mean, and one state's doing it. Right.

Texas. In a future biennium where we don't have such a record large surplus, is this replicable? Is what the state is passing this session replicable? Well, I mean, yeah, can you replicate this? Yeah, we believe that we can, the term we use is sustainability. Okay. And we think we can sustain it, but it's important for the public to make that vote because then the priority is the Homestead Exemption is then part of the Constitution. And that means that has, in my mind, has to be honored.

Look, you know, if you went into a general recession, AKA the 19, you know, 29, 30s, okay. Yeah. You're going to have to make decisions about what your priorities are. But the good news is the homestead exemption will be approved by the public. Also the pilot program will have had its three years. The fund is going to be there, okay, in perpetuity. And I believe it's a great, great step forward on all of this. And I always view this as the glass is always fuller than it is emptier. And I don't know how to bind future legislators. You can't by law anyway. You just have to take it, you know, literally by any budget, by any budget. I think we've beaten the property tax dead horse enough. Well, it's a live horse. It's running. It's going to have millions of happy taxpayers.

Okay. To quote a line from Ghostbusters, Mayor, you saved the lives of millions. Hopefully there's no giant state-puffed marshmallow man to mess up the good work. Let's talk a bit about Harris County. There's a suit against the state, I think over a bill of yours or something you passed with eliminating the elections administrator. Give me your thoughts on that whole situation. Okay, well, first off, there's a, because of long-term problems in election management that really date back to 2020, there has been a need to have election reform in the nation's third largest county. Now, we looked at this, and for at least as myself as the primary bill author, to make sure that,

okay, what was occurring? Was it occurring in the other major counties that have election administrators? So we filed the bill in a million population or higher, and we got responses back from everybody else except one county. Guess which county didn't respond? Harris County. You got it. Bingo. All right. And so once we got the responses back and found that they weren't having anywhere near the same type of problems, Harris County, and my house sponsor, you know, passed it, Briscoe Cain passed it over in the house after, of course, we got it out of the Senate. We got it out of the Senate on a bipartisan vote because it was very obvious that there were real problems, okay, in Harris County, even though we

surveyed everywhere else. And look, and by real problems in other places, well, let's see. In Wichita Falls, Texas, there was a single-family residence that had 576 registered voters, of which 178 had voted. And I actually wrote a letter after I passed a bill two years ago to that county clerk that said, here's the new law, here's your problem, please fix this. So we've got to fix. And the fix says, let's go back to how elections used to work in Harris County. Because I was a tax assessor, I was a voter registrar,

I had a great county clerk, his name was Beverly Kaufman. The elections were run far better. And they were run better when, quite honestly, when Democrat elected officials ran them. But when they went to these appointed officials, the wheels really fell off. The first election administrator did so bad. The primaries were nearly a train wreck. In fact, election judges of both parties went down to Commissioner Scorps, screamed their heads off, and she had to resign. Then they picked a new election administrator. Unfortunately, Harris County has a theory that you don't need to do background checks on who you hire, which I don't know what wokeism that comes from, but it's stupid.

And if you had checked his background, you would have found that he had two blown elections as the Washington, D.C. election administrator in 12 and 14 to the point where an activist said, it's like voting in a third world country in D.C. Think about that for the politics. Then he went to the elections commission, was laid off, and then showed up here. Now, I don't cast any dispersion on the person individually, but the track record wasn't strong. And then we have now demonstrated evidence that dozens of polls ran out of paper, had machines. They knew about it. They did nothing until 3 p.m. in the afternoon. Now, there are now a record number of election contests in Harris County. In one case, 17. In one case alone. 17 different elections being contested.

In one case. And there are four or so others. So this bill was, let's get elections back to how it worked. Get it back to, oh, the Democrat elected officials. I know that's Republicans kind of shocking, but we have to restore faith in people that are going to be accountable to the voters. And then we passed another bill that put in oversight. Again, a bipartisan bill that if there's problems, you can complain to the Secretary of State,

kind of a mini audit bill that President Trump had endorsed, an audit bill that we had in a prior deal, but this is kind of a scaled-down version. So we got those bills passed. Now, leftist progressive response, and that's what it is, because I don't even call it a Democratic Party response anymore, they filed suit. And, you know, because they can't believe that,

I guess their appointed election administrator bombed. Well, I know the election administrator bombed, and I have great faith that between Secretary of State Nelson and the new Attorney General, that's right, that we can, a new Interim Attorney General, that we can win that case. The Harris County is very much a blue county at the moment. And so as you kind of pointed out. A tinge of purple for the first time. Okay. Because in the last election, four Republican judges actually won. Okay. Odds are the person elected to run this position, if it goes through, would be a Democrat.

Sure. Right? And so you, a Republican, are still supportive of that. Well, because look, but they're accountable to the public. Right. And then with Senate Bill 1933, which was my House partner, that was Representative Tom Alderson,

there's oversight with Secretary of State Representative Tom Alderson, there's oversight with Secretary of State. Okay, so if there's more than just the audit that we see. Oh yeah, sure. I mean, if people can complain with five questions that, you know, laid out, anybody that's in the process, precinct chairs, you know, party chairs, candidates, etc., they can complain and say they see a problem. Secretary of State come in and say, hey, do the right thing. And if not, they can complain and say they see a problem secretary of state come in say hey do the right thing and if not they can even initiate hey you're going to lose your job now that's pretty good oversight and because look you've got to have faith in the elections if you don't have this election process that people have faith in you you've got nothing. And Harris County, while isn't too big

to fail, it's too big to ignore because it's the third largest county in America and a huge part of the elector, of the voting population in the state of Texas. Last one for you, back to the legislature. How many special sessions do you have? How many more? Right, that's right. Wait, there's more. Right. Okay, well. Well, we know something's coming on school choice at least. Well, and that seems to be a priority of everyone, but I never speak for the governor because that's up to him to make the call, okay? We obviously, even though I can't talk about it, we do have another major proceeding. The impeachment trial. Right, starting in September.

But I think we've got some work to do on education reform, which I hope includes not just school choice, but virtual education, truancy, special needs, because I carried all of those bills as well as Senator Creighton's main omnibus bills. Would you like the bills that were vetoed during this property tax feud to be added to that? Or you think that should be another special session or wait till next session? What do you think? Well, it's a difficult task to bring back 76 bills because the record in my history of doing special sessions is 18 bills that actually passed. We started with 20, passed 18. You know, it is what it is, Brent. You know, the fact of the matter is, you know, I did express my dissatisfaction with the decision directly, but the governor's

got his powers and he can make his decisions. And the good news here is that I think we've got a plan that both the House and the Senate have really come together on. And the governor said, if they give me a plan, I'll sign it. And he, quite frankly, has changed the call to allow the ad of the franchise tax, which I think was an important ad. So I think we're looking good on this bill, and I hope we're looking good there. After being in session this long and what I know we're doing in the fall, okay, it is possible that at least this is one senator's view that I could use, you know, a little time back in the district. Assuming my wife, you know, will let me come home. You've been here for, what is it, seven months straight now?

Well, Senator Paul Betancourt, thanks for joining us. We'll see how it shakes out. Maybe by the time this goes out, the governor will have signed the property tax deal. It will likely be on his desk by then. I'm very optimistic. And the good news is if all that happens, that means it will be in your tax bill in the fall. And all the voters have to do is go into the voting booth and say aye, not nay, and then good things happen. And I'm honored. It's the first time I've ever been interviewed by you guys on the podcast, okay? Oh, wow. First time for everything. I mean, I finally got past your editor. I mean, it's tough. Heck of a time. It's tough to get into Texas. You just have to come up with a compromise on property taxes. And a record one at that. Right. Well, anyway, really enjoyed it,

Brad. Thank you. Thanks, Senator.