Truth in Advertising: The Run-Off

Commissioner Stout & Judy Gutierrez dancing
at a Democratic Party function last week.

Early voting for the Primary Run-Off Election started today and the run-off mailers have been dropping steadily the last few weeks. 

I love the run-off mailers because that is when the candidates typically start flinging mierda at each other. 

Because of redistricting, I now live in Precinct 2 instead of Precinct 3 for the County Commissioner's Court. 

That race features a run-off between incumbent Democratic County Commissioner David Stout and challenger Judy Gutierrez, who was a long-time staffer at the city. 

I'm writing this post because of a mailer I got this weekend and I reached out to Gutierrez for some answers but she never responded. 

Her latest mailer applied the long-time Eddie Holguin assertion that people are being taxed out of their homes. 

The mailer also made some very specific promises that sound really great - but have some pretty serious implications that I wanted to get some details from her on. I gave her a couple of days to get back to me but she hasn't, so I'll have to write this post without answers to my questions. 

Before I go further, here are the three things that she included on the mailer that I questioned:

After everyone getting their valuations recently, Gutierrez is striking while the iron is hot on this issue. Can't fault her on that - its a pretty easy strategic call to make. 

But as I said earlier, I have questions. 

First, she says she's calling for property tax relief for taxpayers. Okay, well what does that look like? One would reasonably assume she means lowering property taxes. So this is the question I have for all the policy makers at the local level whenever they talk about lowering taxes - what services are you going to cut in order to do so?

You see its really easy for people to say I'm against tax increases or vote for me because I'll lower your taxes. Super easy and popular thing to say. 

But the important thing to taxpayers is - HOW are you going to do that?

The only way you can lower taxes is to decrease what you are spending money on.

This is the part where voters and the media have to start asking the substantive questions. What services will be cut? So county residents need to get answers about what the Gutierrez plan looks like. Less money for roads? I don't know how many county residents thing the county spends too much money on roads. Parks? Having spoken with a lot of county residents who complain about not having enough parks and green spaces, it seems like cutting parks would be a tall order. 

The biggest expense for county government is salaries and safety. So does she plan a pay cut for county workers? Or does she want to eliminate positions? Security is the sheriff's office. I don't know any county residents that thinks there are enough patrol offices in the community. But she's heavily endorsed by the Sheriff's Officer's Association so there is a zero percent chance she'll make cuts to that department. 

So where do these cuts come from that she's advocating for. 

The second thing she talks about is a higher tax break for seniors and veterans. Again - a super easy thing to say. 

And popular. 

But again - if you're going to call for those changes, what does your plan look like? How do you make up the revenue shortfall for a change like that? How do you pay for it, or what do you cut in order to make it a zero negative impact on the budget?

Well that is sort of a trick question isn't it? Because this is where the truth in advertising thing comes into play. You see, the county CAN'T increase tax breaks for seniors and veterans. Not alone anyway. Those changes have to come from the State of Texas. 

Normally this is where I would say that the candidate either doesn't know that is how the process works, or they know and they aren't telling the whole truth. 

Normally. 

But Judy knows. She's been a staffer for years. She's 100% aware of the fact that the state would have to make this happen. The County can't do it alone, even if they wanted to.

That brings us to appraisal relief. First of all, what does that even mean? Second, she's implying that the County can actually provide some sort of relief from appraisals. Which is fine - except that they can't. Again, thats a function of the state. The CAD is made up of elected officials from all local taxing entities. No one particular level of government has authority over the CAD - other than the state of Texas. So again, if there were some sort of "appraisal relief" whatever that means, it wouldn't unilaterally come from the County of El Paso. 

Again, it would be a function of the state. 

That would require an elected official to spend a lot of time in Austin trying to get some of this stuff done. That would also mean a lot of travel, something she's been critical of the incumbent about. Which is a fair criticism of the incumbent. He does spend a lot of time traveling. He didn't get the nickname of Ambassador Stout by accident. 

Gutierrez has been telling voters she's going to stay in El Paso if elected - which is great, but two of the three promises on the mailer require a lot of interface with state leaders to accomplish. Almost none of which live and work in El Paso. 

The bottom line is that this was a last mailer before the start of early voting so truth pretty much matter to candidates at this point. They are just trying to get a reaction out of voters - that reaction ideally being a vote.