There has been a lot of criticism, much of it justified, directed at Comptroller Susan Combs, and some observers would say that it is too much for her to move up to higher office.

What her critics may not realize, however, is that the comptroller’s office has become something of an exalted position in state government. This is in large part due to the abilities of the people who have occupied the office since the green eyeshades days that ended when Bob Bullock arrived in the seventies. Bullock moved up to lieutenant governor and was succeeded by John Sharp. By that time Texas was a Republican state, but Sharp still came oh-so-close to defeating Rick Perry for lieutenant governor in 1998. Carole Strayhorn followed Sharp’s path, challenging Perry as an independent candidate in 2006, but she found herself enmeshed in a four-way race that gave Perry an opening to win with only 39% of the vote.

Now it seems that Combs has set her sights on lieutenant governor in 2014, and a recent UT/Texas Tribune poll showed her with a slight lead over state senator Dan Patrick. Something about the office of comptroller suggests reliability and a steady hand on the adding machine, whether that is, in reality, fact or fancy. Bullock understood this. He changed the image of the comptroller into the chief fiscal officer of the state, and the office still benefits from that visibility. Some of this aura is going to rub off on Combs. A lot of folks are writing her off due to her high-profile problems in office (the data breach, Formula 1), but she has time to repair the damage.

Tagged: Bob Bullock, susan combs

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

Once upon a time, not so long ago, in a faraway land called Pennsylvania, a woman named Sarah Palin brought 200 protest cookies to school for children at the Plumstead Christian School – because she had read a report – mistaken as it turns out – that the state was going to ban such sweets from public school parties.

Sarah mocked the policy as a “nanny state run amok.” She was there to fight for the freedom of sweet treats. “Who should be making the decisions on what you eat … in school, choices: Should it be government or should it be the parents?” Sarah asked her crowd. “It should be the parents.”

Oh, no, said I, if this is true, then Texas has three of the biggest nannies in the land: Susan Combs, Todd Staples and Rick Perry. And the Legislature has been nannying up a storm as of late, seeking to impose government dictates on its citizens for their own good.

Let’s start at the beginning, when government was wise, children were wonderful and we all wanted what was best for our future generations.
(more…)

Tagged: abortion, dan patrick, nanny state, rainy day fund, rick perry, sarah palin, susan combs

From Bloomberg:

Texas’s reserve fund may climb to 28 percent more than officially forecast by 2013 as energy prices rally, a gain that might help the second-most populous state avoid some spending cuts, a key senator said.

The fund, fed by energy taxes and forecast by the state comptroller to reach $9.4 billion by the end of August 2013, may gain much more by then, Senate Finance Committee chairman Steve Ogden, a Bryan Republican, said yesterday.

“That fund could easily rise to $12 billion,” Ogden said at a committee hearing. He based his estimate on revenue increases from taxes on oil and natural-gas production in the state as energy prices climb….

* * * *

I reported something similar earlier this month (See “Oil’s Well that Ends Well,” posted April 14.)  Sales tax receipts are up over the previous year, and the rig count is up by 26% to 30%, depending upon which reporting service you prefer. The sales tax numbers are particularly encouraging: (more…)

Tagged: rainy day fund, rick perry, Steve Ogden, susan combs

A statement from Talmadge Heflin (who else?) at the Texas Public Policy Foundation:

“The first draft of the 2010-11 Texas state budget reinforces the message from Comptroller Susan Combs’ revenue estimate last week. The Texas Legislature needs to get to work on pruning the next state budget back within the available revenue.

“The legislature needs to be mindful of the hard lesson it learned in 2001, when it spent the entire accumulated surplus of the 1990s at once and dug itself a $10 billion hole in 2003. The way for the legislature to avoid setting the same trap for itself is to continue to show fiscal restraint.”

This is nonsense. It is not worthy of TPPF, but it is what happens when you hire a hard-core ideologue. The reason why Texas found itself in a $10 billion hole in 2003 was a combination of a nationwide recession and the 9/11 aftershocks referred to in the following analysis by the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve. Excerpts follow:

The high-tech and dot-com busts sent the country into recession in 2001, but Texas felt the impact longer than many areas, partly because of its large number of high-tech jobs. The 9/11 aftershocks that hurt the travel industry added to the tech crunch, prolonging Texas’ recession through June 2003.

[This time period covers the entire biennium leading up to the adoption of the budget for 2004-2005.]

Overall, the Texas service sector weathered the storm, recording an annual employment decline only in 2001, when 67,100 jobs were lost Texas’ goods-producing sector lost over 188,000 jobs during the downturn, more than a quarter of them in high-tech manufacturing.

Hardest hit was the information sector, with its high percentage of telecommunications service positions. Texas telecom firms shed slightly more than 29,000 jobs during the downturn. Productivity growth has since returned to this industry, yet new jobs remain elusive. Professional and business services also saw jobs decline considerably. Computer systems design, an industry that includes such companies as Plano-based EDS, lost about 18,000 jobs during the recession, accounting for almost 30 percent of the category’s decline.

The trade, transportation and utilities industry was hurt by the post-9/11 drop in demand for air travel. Texas airline transportation employment fell by 12,200 during the downturn and continued to edge down through 2005, rebounding slightly in 2006. Other segments of trade, transportation and utilities, such as retail and wholesale trade, contracted during the downturn as consumer demand weakened across the U.S.

Once the Texas recovery began in mid-2003, employment growth swung back quickly in services while jobs continued to fall in goods-producing industries. In late 2004, however, goods joined services on an upward track, helping fuel the state’s robust economic growth of the past few years.

Does anyone out there other than Talmadge Heflin really believe that an increase in state spending created the 2003 budget crisis, as opposed to a major recession? The budget was a drop; the recession the ocean.

Tagged: revenue estimate, state budget, susan combs, talmadge heflin, texas public policy foundation

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