By: Jessica Priest
A Democrat is trying to wrest the spotlight from Dan Patrick in the theater that is Texas politics without becoming part of the production.
Mike Collier, 57, of Kingwood, is running for lieutenant governor against Patrick, a Republican who fought during the last legislative session for a bill that would require students to use the bathroom based on their sex at birth.
Collier visited Victoria Tuesday and didn’t talk at all about bathroom bills, but instead public education and property taxes.
On public education, Patrick fought for using public money to send students to private schools, which Collier is against.
On property taxes, Collier said several bad decisions by legislators in the 1990s and early 2000s led to the state’s declining financial health.
He said as lieutenant governor, he would close a loophole that the Texas Legislature created in 1997 that allows the owners of large commercial and industrial properties to sue appraisal districts when their appraisal is higher than that of a comparable property.
He said owners of large commercial and industrial properties and courts interpret the word “comparable” widely and their lawyers easily get appraisal districts to settle the cases simply because they can’t afford the legal fees if they lose.
“And how do you fix that? You just say that it was comparable in regard to age, use and location,” Collier said.
Collier said, if elected, he’d also insulate three entities that have failed to serve as checks on the state and the lieutenant governor: the state’s financial auditor, which the lieutenant governor appoints; performance reviews, which are currently done by the Legislative Budget Board that reports to the lieutenant governor, and the public integrity unit in Travis County, which had its budget slashed under former Gov. Rick Perry.
Collier said he would insulate these entities from political influence by combining them and have the largest certified public accounting firms supply one CPA to serve as a commissioner to oversee them. He said the committee would also have an executive director who must not have held political office and sign a pledge not to seek office in the future.
“All they would have the power to do is bring Texans the truth,” Collier said.
Collier said he’d also bring to a vote as lieutenant governor expanding Medicaid. He thinks one reason community hospitals like the ones in Victoria are suffering is because Texas didn’t expand Medicaid.
“We could then see if senators would go back to their districts and say, ‘I blocked a program that was good for us financially for ideological reasons.’ I think they’ll get shot right out of the saddle. Texans are too smart for that,” he said.
This isn’t Collier’s first bid for office. In 2014, he ran as a Democrat for Comptroller. He lost to Glenn Hegar, a Republican from Katy.
Collier is on a what he calls a “statewide property tax and school funding tour” but said he intends to talk about the lackluster response to Hurricane Harvey more often.
According to his website, he’s making six stops. The next one will be at Oveal Williams Center, 1414 Martin Luther King Drive in Corpus Christi, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Saturday.
The last one will be in Walker County on May 15.
Read more at VictoriaAdvocate.com