During the public comment period of an April 2022 Kerr County Commission meeting focused on what to do with $10.2 million disbursed to the county by the Biden Administration from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act’s funding for local governments for use on pretty much whatever they needed, within reason, one resident stood up and said “I’m here to ask this court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House.” That resident, per the Texas Tribune, feared strings were attached and that Biden would force their kids to have transition surgeries or whatever.
“We don’t want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” another told the commissioners. “We’d like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”
“As far as where that money sits for the next year or two, my old law partner [Senator] John [Cornhole] tells me that if we send it back it’s going to New Jersey or it’s going to New York or it’s going to… or California. And so I don’t know if I’d rather be the custodian of the money until we decide what we have to do with it rather than giving it back to the government to spend it on values that we in Kerr County don’t agree with,” said Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly at the meeting.
(“Judge” is the title of the top elected official in each Texas county, they do not preside over courts of law – unless they also happen to be a jurist. Kelly’s never served as a jurist. Adding to the confusion, county meetings in Texas are called “commissioner’s courts,” so that first freak was actually using the proper term to address the room when he/she said “this court.”)
They ended up taking it and spending $7 million on some upgrades to the sheriff’s department’s comms systems and the rest on raises for deputies, more county employees, and a new walking path. None of it went to the flash flood warning system that officials like Ingram City Council member Ray Howard have been agitating to get installed for years. The Tribune says it’s not clear whether residents or the commissioners understood at the time they could have applied the funds to a warning system but either way, it never happened then or any of the other multiple opportunities the county had to shell out a relatively paltry $1 million to install the system.
“Well, they were obviously thinking about it because they brought it up 20 times since 2016 and never did anything on it,” Howard said, adding that he never thought to ask his city within Kerr County to install sirens previously because he didn’t realize the need for it. “I’m pretty pissed.”
“Generally everybody’s for doing something until it gets down to the details paying for it,” former state Representative Harvey Hilderbran said. “It’s not like people don’t think about it… I know it’s an issue on their minds and something needs to be done.”
Apropos of everything above, here’s Byron Donalds saying California has a responsibility to elect competent leadership in January after large swaths of Los Angeles got torched during a windstorm – with a death toll about a tenth of that of the number who died in Texas this month: