How else to characterize Susan Combs’ statement today detailing senior staff changes in the comptroller’s office? She so doesn’t get it. The problem in the comptroller’s is lack of competence. So what does she do to fix it? She hires a political operative. His name is David White. Here are his credentials for dealing with the fallout from the release of the personal information of 3.5 million Texans and other serious technology issues at the comptrollers’ office.

1. Served as political director for Rick Perry’s reelection.
2. Worked on various local and statewide campaigns and policy issues.
3. Chief of Staff for State Rep. Wayne Christian.
4. Served as Christian’s lead public policy advisor on several key committees (Regulated Industries, State Affairs, Business and Commerce). I’ll say this for Mr. White. If ever the comptroller should need a revenue estimate for the cost of gender studies at state universities, or for the study of developing a curriculum for a course in the contributions of western civilization, she’s got her man.
5. Served three years as State Chairman of Young Conservatives of Texas concurrent with working for the Legislature.
6. Consultant for the Republican party of Texas.

These aren’t qualifications. These are connections. And you can’t fix a real problem with someone whose only qualification is his political connections.

There is a one-word description for Combs, and it is CLUELESS. Here she is, with her agency and her reputation in ruins and facing gazillion-dollar lawsuits, and she hires … a political consultant. And not just any consultant, but Wayne Christian’s chief of staff. This is classic Combs.
She thinks that substantive problems require political solutions. There is no bottom to this pit of incompetence.

We can all breathe a sigh of relief that the problems at the comptrollers’ office will soon be but a memory. No doubt Mr. White will bring to his job the same analytical powers demonstrated by his previous boss.

Combs doomed herself shortly after taking office, the day that she fired deputy comptroller Billy Hamilton, one of the most competent and respected public servants in the history of the comptrollers’ office. If Combs had a lick of sense, she would have hired Hamilton instead of White and given him total authority to investigate and fix the problems in the office. But she could never do that, because she would have to admit that she should never have fired him. She’d rather be wrong than own up to a mistake. David White couldn’t hold Hamilton’s number two lead pencil.

Tagged: comptroller, david white, susan combs

The first order of business, after the special session ends and the long interim begins, is for the Legislature to do something it doesn’t do very often: exercise oversight. Oh, it calls in state agencies for budget hearings, but what it doesn’t do is address problems unless they are obvious. During the heyday of the Trans-Texas Corridor, they were obvious.

The obvious problem right now is the Comptroller’s office. The Legislature should conduct a formal investigation into Susan Combs’ operation of the office, the state of its technology (which I am told is not very good, though I would be the last one to be able to tell), and the complete story of how the data breach occurred and the personal information of some 3.5 million Texans was erroneously released. Two class-action suits have been filed. Was this incompetence on a grand scale, or simply misfortune? I can’t believe it has been allowed to go unaddressed this long.

Combs seems intent on running for lieutenant governor in 2014. Is she still a viable candidate? You would think that the data breach is so huge and affects so many Texans that her political career ought to be in tatters. Three and a half million people are a lot to have mad at you. But her two likely opponents, land commissioner Jerry Patterson and ag commissioner Todd Staples, do not have the kind of office that lends itself to fundraising, and Combs has raised around $10 million. Susan Combs in an office that has been occupied by the likes of Bullock and Hobby? The poor Senate.

Tagged: comptroller, lieutenant governor, susan combs

This morning comptroller Susan Combs will release her revenue estimate of the money that will be available for the Legislature to spend in the next biennium. Expectations are that the estimate will come in showing little or no revenue growth. The state treasury does have a surplus of more than $11 billion, but more than half of that is in the economic stabilization fund–that’s the Rainy Day Fund to you and me–and can only be spent with the approval of 2/3 of the members of each house.

In the meantime, the state doesn’t have the money to fulfil the promises it made to cut property taxes and fund public schools. And business tax collections are well below initial projections; whether the problem is the projections or the collections is something that the Legislature needs to ask the comptroller.

Another question for Combs to answer is the health of the two big pension funds — the Teacher Retirement System and the Employees Retirement System — given the turmoil in the financial markets. It makes me very nervous that the head of the TRS ran up a $100,000 gambling debt in Vegas before Perry dumped him. People with gambling debts are easy targets for nefarious people with nefarious motives. Legislative leaders should immediately seek an audit of TRS and its investment practices, not only to determine the financial health of the system but also to ascertain whether the retirement system was investing in the kind of risky, exotic instruments that brought down the nation’s financial system. The governor’s office successfully installed a former Perry staffer in a key position at TRS, after a bitter fight on the board, resulting in the resignation of respected senior TRS administrators. I cannot see any good motive for destabilizing the management of a multi-billion-dollar pension fund. With the belated exception of TxDOT and TYC, the Legislature hasn’t flexed its oversight muscles in three sessions. Now’s the time.

Tagged: business tax, comptroller, ERS, rainy day fund, revenue estimate, susan combs, teachers retirement system, TRS