Houston Chronicle Editorial Board recommends Alexandra Mealer, not Lina Hidalgo, for Harris County Judge – Houston Chronicle

Hidalgo would do well to follow her own advice.

We have always appreciated the dynamic mix of wonkishness and progressive optimism of Harris County’s first Latina judge. She’s an inspiration to many and, if given the choice, we’d rather live in Hidalgo’s vision of Harris County, where government is inclusive, transparent and ethical, policy isn’t tainted by politics, the air is cleaner, the streets are safer, more children can attend pre-K, and climate change is treated with the urgency it deserves.

But vision isn’t always reality.

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On some of these issues, Hidalgo has made good on her promises, including fairness in distributing Harvey funding on a “worst-first” basis and investments in badly needed air monitors in polluted neighborhoods and early childhood education. She put the lives of residents first during the pandemic, standing up to bullying state leaders to implement mask requirements and other COVID-19 protocols. She handled disasters imperfectly but with poise and a clear head, calling Winter Storm Uri for what it was — “a Category 5 hurricane” — long before state leaders acknowledged its potential magnitude. She counts among her bipartisan accomplishments working with Land Commissioner George P. Bush to secure $750 million in Harvey funding after an initial snub.

“I didn’t sign up to be a wartime county judge,” Hidalgo told us. “But I’ve dealt with flood, fire, pandemic, winter storm, now monkeypox. I’m very proud of the way I’ve steered the county through that.”

More: See all our endorsements in the Texas voter guide

In other areas, Hidalgo has disappointed. The woman who campaigned on high ethical standards had three staffers indicted for allegedly steering an $11 million contract toward a Democratic operative. Hidalgo says the indictments are meritless and politically motivated but some evidence is compelling and one of the indicted staffers still sits behind her at Commissioners Court meetings. She has supported hiring unqualified Democrats for key positions, including the elections administrator, Isabel Longoria, who botched the primaries with delays and 10,000 uncounted mail-in ballots — mostly belonging to Democrats. To her credit, Hidalgo promptly called for Longoria’s resignation but why was someone so lacking in election experience ever trusted with the newly created, high-stakes position?

Our gravest concerns, though, involve Hidalgo’s failure to respond with urgency to Harris County’s crime wave. In a county where more than two-thirds of likely voters list public safety as the most important issue in this race, it weighed heavily on our decision.

Even for those of us whose neighborhoods aren’t aglow in flashing police lights, the seemingly infinite ticker tape of suspect mug shots on the 10 o’clock news has us looking over our shoulders and praying that the next road rage incident won’t target our families.

While Harris County is far from the most dangerous place in the country, as Republican hyperbole would have it, it has seen a surge in violent crime and particularly in homicides, which totaled 632 last year. The county jail is in crisis, overflowing with more than 10,000 inmates, with frequent spasms of violence, reported deaths, rapes and other assaults leaving inmates and jail staff alike fearing for their lives.

Mercifully, violent crime is currently declining and even at its peak, criminologists ranked Houston’s murder rate in the middle of the pack among major cities. Last year’s rate in unincorporated Harris County stayed flat at about 5 killings per 100,000 people.

Statistics, of course, mean little to those such as Paul Castro, a middle school principal who was thrust into the spotlight and into the role of criminal justice watchdog after his son David, a 17-year-old National Merit Scholar and Altuve devotee, was gunned down by a repeat violent offender during a road rage incident on their way home from an Astros game.

Castro, who calls himself a “cast-in-the-wool Democrat,” says he made the tough decision to split his ticket this year, voting against Republicans on the state level and against Hidalgo locally, largely due to her insufficient action on crime.

“We need solutions, not platitudes right now. I don’t see Hidalgo working with the community to resolve that problem,” Castro told the editorial board this week. “I don’t think she’s a bad person. I just don’t think she deserves to be a leader in this position in 2022.”

He says Mealer invited him for coffee before the primary and she seemed earnest but his decision to endorse her came only recently, when Hidalgo and her staff failed to follow-up as promised after an in-person meeting more than a month ago.

“People took notes, wrote things down in their fancy notebooks, but no one ever followed up. Not an email, not a phone call. Nothing,” he said. “I think part of it is they don’t have an answer.”

We concur with Castro’s biggest criticism of Hidalgo’s record on crime: she hasn’t prioritized clearing the courthouse backlog dating back to Harvey, which is the single biggest threat to public safety because it delays trials — and justice — sometimes for years in thousands of cases, including those involving repeat violent offenders, who often remain free while their cases slog through the system. Even strong cases become harder to prosecute as evidence ages and memories fade.

Hidalgo didn’t cause the backlog, which was exacerbated by the pandemic. Her title is “judge” but she has no control over courtroom decisions on bail that have made headlines. She certainly isn’t to blame for the provision in the Texas Constitution that guarantees virtually every defendant, even those with violent criminal records, an initial right to bail. This board believes pre-trial detention decisions should be based on a defendant’s risk to the community, not on ability to pay cash bail, but only state lawmakers could initiate that kind of reform — not Hidalgo. As the county’s executive, her power rests in her control of county purse strings.

While Hidalgo and her fellow Democrats point toward investments in visiting judges and funds for the district attorney’s office, it clearly hasn’t been enough to get things moving.

Why not use some of the one-time federal COVID funds to pay overtime, clear clogs in processing forensics, analyzing body-cam footage or bringing in even more visiting judges to handle emergency dockets, perhaps on nights or weekends?

For Castro, Mealer isn’t a perfect choice, either. He wishes she’d oppose open carry and that she’d “do a better job of outlining a positive vision for Harris County.” But in the end, he believes her background in data and analytics will help her get crime under control and most especially, that her heart for victims and their families will guide her budgeting priorities.

For us, this race is a tough one. This editorial board struggled mightily and debated for hours before reaching a decision.

In the Republican primary, we initially backed another candidate, citing Mealer’s lack of experience in governing, but endorsed her in the run-off. We’ve been impressed with her ability to build support, including from nearly every law enforcement organization in the county, and her commitment to what surely seemed a long-shot bid. Mealer says she was asked to leave her job as vice president in investment banking at Wells Fargo Securities if she wanted to make the high-profile run and left in December.

But should voters trust an untested, first-time candidate who may have experience overseeing troops in a theater of war but no experience in the thorny theater of partisan politics?

Mealer’s proposal of hiring 1,000 new law enforcement officers, spread across the sheriff’s office, constables, and county jail, is simplistic at this point. Each would cost $100,000, coming to roughly 5 percent of the county’s $2.2 billion budget. She says she’d fund it by cutting back on overtime, reducing administrative overhead, and yes, by defunding new programs that are well-intended but aren’t essential, such as pre-K investments that serve a relatively few number of kids.

“How do you start a new service when the basics aren’t working?” she told us. “Everything in county government should be ‘how can you help the most people as quickly as possible.’”

The number of new officers comes close to matching previous requests by Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, but, as we’ve written, the numbers are less important than the function they’d serve. Mealer agrees and says once elected, she’d have access to data that would help her determine whether money should go to patrol officers, for instance, or investigators who actually solve crimes. She also acknowledges that positions mean nothing if you don’t offer the competitive pay to fill them.

We asked Mealer about another budgeting headache imposed by state lawmakers: how can the county boost law enforcement funding now, knowing that it can never be decreased due to the Legislature’s ban on “defunding the police?” Add the state-imposed revenue cap to the equation, and you’re at risk of eventually crowding out everything from flood control to the hospital district just to fund police.

“I’ve thought about this a lot,” Mealer says, explaining that if funding is needed in other critical areas, “I don’t have a problem going on the record and saying ‘voters, I’m asking to get taxes raised.’”

For Hidalgo’s part, it’s true that she boasts a proposed budget that would have increased funding for law enforcement. No matter what Republicans in Austin claim, Hidalgo never tried to “defund” police. Her plan would boost law enforcement funding $97 million more than the previous fiscal year, including pay raises for some “frontline deputies” although it falls far short of the DA’s and sheriff’s needs.

Here’s another truth: those increases are in limbo because of the utter dysfunction on Commissioners Court under Hidalgo’s leadership that has led the two Republicans to boycott meetings, preventing a budget from even getting passed.

Yes, the Republicans are playing their own politics as their party desperately tries to reclaim control, but would they have tapped the nuclear option had earnest attempts been made to listen to their concerns and broker compromise?

No doubt, the well was poisoned early on with Democrats’ attempt to ram through a large increase in spending, which prompted the Republicans’ first boycott, and we can’t imagine it helped restore trust and camaraderie when the Democrats attempted to gerrymander one Republican commissioner, Jack Cagle, out of his seat through redistricting.

For someone who says she’s not motivated by partisanship, Hidalgo didn’t even try to deny it was at play, telling us: “I don’t like gerrymandering. I’m not for it. But at some point if one side does it and the other one doesn’t, you’re just a sap and we have to be able to fund our hospital district.”

While commissioners bicker, county needs are unmet. Something has to change.

We do have bones to pick with Mealer’s platform. In the primary, she frequently blamed misdemeanor bail reform for the spike in violent crime when every rigorous analysis has shown no evidence of that and even now on the stump, she says she wants to rescind the O’Donnell consent decree that governs misdemeanor bail reform, leading some to fear she wants to bring back Harris County’s old unconstitutional system of jailing low-level offenders simply because they can’t afford bail.

That would be a deal-breaker for us. But Mealer says it’s not the case. She calls poverty jailing “horrible” and told us unequivocally: “People should only be in pre-trial detention if there’s a public safety risk.” She said she favors the federal system, which is based on risk and not money bail — a stance that candidates beholden to the bail/bond industry would never take.

Subsequent conversations with Mealer leave us confident that, while her understanding of the system may be incomplete and in some cases even flawed, her main goals are ones we share: better funding of pretrial services and interventions, accountability for the accused, protect judicial discretion and rely on individualized risk assessments, which factor in such things as violent criminal history and gang affiliations in determining someone’s likeliness to reoffend while on bail.

And while she’d have no direct authority over courtroom decisions, we like her idea to spur productivity and increase the number of trials by making more detailed data on judges’ performance, including if possible attendance records, publicly available.

On the environment, Mealer told us point-blank it’s not a top priority: “Certainly, we want to prosecute polluters but it’s not first and foremost,” she said. And while she’s worked on energy transition in her corporate life, and is a big fan of geothermal energy, her website states: “County is not the appropriate entity to solve Climate Change – let’s fix potholes first.”

These statements are grating in a low-lying coastal community soaking in industrial emissions. If elected, Mealer must realize that caring about the environment is also about public safety and protecting people from premature death. Just ask the Fifth Ward residents living near an old railyard contaminated with cancer-causing dioxin.

While we find Mealer’s dismissiveness of Hidalgo’s investments in early childhood education short-sighted, we can’t argue with her point that the law doesn’t place it under the commissioners court’s purview and this is a time for triage – not extracurriculars.

Is Mealer as “extreme” as Hidalgo painted her in a recent campaign ad attempting to align her with Donald Trump and election-deniers? We don’t think so. In our screening, Mealer clearly stated “I have not seen any evidence of widespread, systemic-scale” voter fraud. Later, she clarified further: “Trump lost. Biden is president.”

Mealer boasts an endorsement from the Log Cabin Republicans, an affiliation that drew attacks during the primary from anti-gay segments of the GOP.

On abortion, Mealer indicated that in the county judge role, her only difference with Hidalgo is that she wouldn’t use taxpayer money to provide transportation for women seeking abortions in other states.

We don’t like that Mealer’s campaign, like Hidalgo’s, has pandered and stretched the truth in campaign ads. But frankly, we can see Mealer governing more like a technocrat, head down in a spreadsheet planning for impending economic turbulence or stocking flood control with qualified drainage engineers.

“Local government is about service,” she says. “It’s not national party politics.”

She envisions her governance style as something close to Hidalgo’s Republican predecessor Ed Emmett: “I don’t think people thought of him as a Republican or Democrat,” she said. “I think they thought of him as county judge.”

In a purple county where she’d be in the minority if Cagle loses to a Democrat, Mealer would have no choice but work across the aisle to get things done. We like that scenario; it’s best for the people she’d serve.

Ultimately, the decision of which candidate is best for Harris County in this moment rests on one question: do we prioritize an inspiring vision for tomorrow over addressing crime and governance issues today?

We found something Paul Castro said instructive: “If I have cancer and I’ve been stabbed and I’m overweight, I’m going to handle those in a certain order,” he said.

He’s right. Some call it triage. Maslow called it a ‘hierarchy of needs.’ Harris County must treat the stab wound: the murders and violent crimes being committed by repeat, violent offenders who are enabled by an underfunded criminal justice system that’s paralyzed by severe backlogs.

For that reason, we encourage Harris County voters to back Mealer in this race. We can only hope that once in office, she’d effectively address crime, tend to basic services and restore civility on the court by governing as a strong local leader, not a partisan. We’d also like to see her expand her vision to something more hopeful, ambitious and worthy of Harris County’s potential.

To accomplish all that, Mealer would do well to take at least one piece of advice from her Democratic adversary: listen.