The Dirty Dozen: 12 Ways Harris County Makes It Hard to Track Your Tax Dollars
7/23/25 – Ever wonder how someone could lose track of billions of tax dollars? It takes a lot of effort. But Harris County’s current Democratic leadership has proven adept at the task. Here are some of tricks of their trade.
1. Moving money around
That makes it more difficult to trace. Put Toll Road money into Flood Control. Put Flood Control money into Engineering. Then move it back again. And again. Establish a Flood Resilience Trust to supplement flood-bond funds. Then dissolve it. Never provide a full accounting. Whew. Even the county administrator couldn’t explain it clearly. Maybe that was the point.
2. Changing department heads and group managers
Replace professional hires with political hires. In Flood Control, Engineering, IT, Community Services. And 16 other departments. Then gut the management structure three or four levels beneath them. Lose institutional knowledge, project momentum and oversight capabilities.
3. Making the new department heads accountable to a new department
The County Administrator’s Office, for instance. It has had three heads in four years (David Berry, Diana Ramirez and Jesse Dickerman) and is searching for a fourth to replace Dickerman whose title is Interim Administrator. All within four years.
4. Replacing experienced professionals with political hires
Force remaining experienced professionals to do the work of the political hires…without a pay increase. One veteran professional, who needs to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, told me, they’re “doing their best to drive off remaining staff, and not even bothering to find replacements. I am pretty sure it is well past the tipping point and the county is one disaster away from dysfunctional.”
5. Appealing routine Public Information Requests to the Texas Attorney General
Then if the AG upholds the request, charge thousands of dollars to email (months later) a PDF that was already sitting on someone’s computer.
6. Not updating websites
That makes it easier for Rodney Ellis to claim “Kingwood is getting all the money.” Parts of the HCFCD district website haven’t been updated for five years. See below.
7. Removing lists of Active Projects from your web site
That might enable people to quickly verify whether “Kingwood is getting all the money.” Make people dig for the information and pay for it instead.
8. Publishing spending updates annually that used to be monthly
The frequency of Flood Bond Updates has fallen off radically. That makes it difficult to track projects in near real time.
9. Hiring Consultants for $2 million to do the work of staff you lost
On the 7/10/25 commissioners court agenda, Item 250 was a contract extension with Berkeley Research Group, LLC for $1,995,000. The primary deliverable in this word salad seems to be a dashboard to help make projects’ status more visible. Of course, this could delay disclosure for additional months…as outsiders try to figure out what insiders can’t.
10. Not totaling columns of spreadsheets that stretch for dozens of pages
And don’t put headers on any pages past the first, either. Make people scroll back and forth until their eyeballs bleed or they give up. And make them perform complicated import/export procedures to total up columns that stretch to almost 40 pages.
11. Continually changing the way you allocate money to projects
At first it was on the basis of flood damage. But people could understand that. So, it changed. Over and over and over again. Until now, damage, flood risk and flood intensity have nothing to do with the formula for allocating flood bond money.
12. Not even telling people where bond money will go in the first place
Unlike the 2018 Flood Bond, Garcia’s 2022 $1.2 billion Bait-and-Switch Bond didn’t even tell people where money would be spent. Three years later, we still don’t know. So, no one can check on them.
Shortly before the vote on Garcia’s bond, commissioners agreed to give each precinct an equal share. That lasted until the day after the election. We’re still waiting to see where money is going. The County Engineer admits to spending $131 million in the last three years, but has published NO detail on what that money bought.
Is the current uproar over the flood bond an effort to deflect attention from more tax dollars that have gone MIA? We just don’t know.
Any one of these practices might be overlooked were it not for the presence of the others. But taken together, they feel like a concerted effort to “escape and evade” detection and accountability.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 7/23/25
2835 Days since Hurricane Harvey
The thoughts expressed in this post represent opinions on matters of public concern and safety. They are protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution and the Anti-SLAPP Statute of the Great State of Texas.
