What's Your Point? Overtime | Oct. 18, 2026

Welcome to Watchpoint Overtime, where we continue our discussion of state, national, local, even global events and issues of import in a more freewheeling fashion. And we get a chance to really stretch our legs on some of the topics that we introduced in our first hour. We broke news, I think, this morning, talking about the loss of how much, Bill? One hundred and thirty? One hundred and thirteen. One hundred and thirteen million dollars. even in 2026 that's not chump change that's a lot of cash how did we lose it and is there folks who should be held accountable for losing it so the the flood reimbursement money program because the federal government is just wickedly complex there's all these different buckets of money and so there was one particular fund of money that we didn't have any projects for the 113 million and so Buckingham had been after the county to propose projects that filled that bucket that had been allocated to us and they never did it back during the Tina Peters they never provided those projects you know in a meeting in i think it was in june uh rodney called out and said why haven't we gotten those up here it was kind of one of the last straws i think that broke the back on getting her out of there and so when when Sackett came in he goes well the deadline which had been extended by years there's no way i can put together projects and get them built within a year so what he proposed was let me use that money to fund projects that are already funded with other funds and i'll take the funds from there that have a longer deadline and i'll move those to other projects and buckingham wrote back immediately and said look you don't even have a list of those projects for me. There's other counties that need this money. I'm not going to take a chance on losing this money for Texas on y'all coming up with something that you haven't been able to come up with in years. When we say years, we're talking nine years. Harvey was nine years ago. And this is the fault of Hidalgo, Rodney Ellis, and Adrian Garcia for firing the professionals that were running Harris County Flood Control so they could put in their own candidates their own regime get all their buddies jobs over there that is the reason that this flood control project is in such a mess because they made the political decision to replace the professionals with a bunch of their lackeys so what's your reaction to Adrian pulling this off the agenda prior to a midterm election i have no idea but and the history in this too is that And these are HUD dollars that when Buckingham was elected and her staff, she has really good staff, very good staff. And they had a good working relationship with the mayor. And there was all that money that was going to be clawed back until they sat down and John worked with the staff and they figured out how they could do, replace the housing, a better program, and they worked through it. in working with the county that kind of action never never happened and these HUD dollars actually it's not it's it's not the land commissioner Don saying no it's HUD saying no because we've been holding these dollars and there's other places that they're needed whatever and so if they can't get organized it's it's them saying no and it's her passing along the message and they've been warned they knew i think it's the form of government over there the mayor gets things organized over there you had no leadership and look they all live in silos their precincts that's all they look out for not the whole of the county but Tina Peterson and because we cover this for a living including this guy Tina Peterson was Adrian Garcia's uh candidate it and he was the he was the last one who agreed she had to go reluctantly uh do you think that has anything to do with his decision to push this off didn't want to get any of it on him before people start uh casting ballots i mean if anything i would probably say it's probably to not have that conversation just the broader conversation before the election just because none of them want to be up 12 but i think i mean but here's the thing they all voted for her increase to give her what $400,000 it was before they fired her, they all voted for that, so I mean like and they they all like you said they're in these silos in their precincts but these projects are all in their precincts, they should be bird dogging them so why did they not, like, I I do think this is flood control's fault under under Peterson but at the end of the day you have these commissioners whose projects they hear about them every time they go out there in these communities why are you not on top of it better more so than to find out at commissioner's court table that day that she presented and said we're behind on all these projects and they were all like shocked and like we need to get a dashboard up we need to do this we need this you should have been on top of that well before this I mean this is hurricane Harvey funds and I think the politics started well before that was when judge Evan put that election on in August because he didn't want to be on the ballot with that same bond and they didn't want you know the republicans have to get that's and I was opposed to that too because I didn't want a mid-summer election that no one really knew much about and we didn't get the projects I think until like four or five weeks before but that's that's old history at this point it is old but we're going to talk about the politics of it that's when the politics of it started can I go back and just I want to make sure we understand how this came to light okay because I think it's really important so um this was a series a couple of letters that were exchanged between Sacket who I want to emphasize this is not his fault he inherited this mess all he did was try to propose a way to get out of the trap which Buckingham said no, I'm not going to go along with that. And I think she clearly should not have. And HUD was saying to her, no. Yeah, I mean, it was just like, we're going to give you another undetermined amount of time to figure out what projects you're going to do after nine years. And she said, no, enough's enough. And the problem is she represents all of Texas, and this money is needed by other counties that had problems. So it was a perfectly rational decision. But these letters were exchanged in October. there was an agenda item discussed the status of this last week and it was mysteriously pulled what Rehak says is that Adrian pulled it out if that's true or not but it came off the agenda so then Bob asked for Harris County Flood Control as an open records request will you produce any documents related to this and they said we don't have any documents and so he calls up to Buckingham's office and said, hey, are there documents? He said, yeah, sure. And they faxed him to it. And so he gets the documents, you know, and looks at them and he puts them up on his website. That's the only way we know about this. If commissioners had gotten away with it, they would have kept this buried until after the election were it not for Bob Rehak, who will all for all times be one of my great heroes. He's the guy that just bird dogged this. And, you know, frankly, us and the media completely dropped the ball on it. Look, you know, Richard Vega over and over in Precinct 2 now has two issues to run on. He's got the biggest tax hike in history and we have, you know, dysfunction junction on the most critical issue we have in this town, which is flood mitigation. Bob, you pile in here. Well, one thing I wanted to bring up is historically, besides firing the professionals that were running the flood control district, was Lena Hidalgo and her cohorts on Commissioner's Court came out right after that money was approved and said we're not going to use this to get the biggest bang for the buck, to go places where more dollars are being destroyed. She wanted to do a social re-engineering project with that money and use it as like a welfare and a handout. Which took months to develop. Right. Well, you know and so that is where a lot of this went. But I want to say on Commissioner Buckingham her office has a lot of different wide variety of areas of responsibility and she is hitting on all cylinders on every single one of those she's doing a great job i want to go back in history uh before lena even took the oath of office she sent folks out to uh the community there in Kingwood it was the first time i got any inkling that they were going to do you know basically reparation flood control yeah and uh people called me i saw the documents i did a piece on it she wrote a letter to the entire uh texas delegation talking about how i'd mischaracterized what she what she was doing and uh and you know rehacking everybody in retrospect have said it was exactly right you know Zeev and those guys uh were still running the show so they couldn't speak out they were trying to do damage control but you know here we are nine years later it is a complete case study of ineptitude I just want to add you know one of my pet peeves has always been the flooding problem we have in our city in our County and I just explained why earlier but Bill explained it politics as usual nine years for any major flood control projects to be completed is It's insane. It just adds to my frustration. But prior to all of this complexity, average folks that drive to work or their homes are flooded, their cars are flooded or their ditches and property, all of that's destroyed, the trauma that's there. They don't care about all this complexity. They just want you to come and clean up the ditches, come and fix these areas. And the delay is just crazy because also I've been keeping an eye the lawsuits that caused both on the city and the commissioner's court do you remember when one of the Jeb Bush was the guy with the land commissioner they took the money back and then they sued them and then they sued them all of that legal maneuvering delays fixing our streets our ditches our homes our projects there was a lot of legal maneuvering on both sides the city of Houston just lost one of the flood mitigation cases that is what really bothers me because the lawyers and all these are making tons of money while their average homeowner is suffering a shortage of pragmatism yes and execution and you know an overabundance of excuses and you can look at what they say about excuses yeah well but we're going to build a solar farm so it'll solve all our problems you can you can look at the city let's go back i mean you know you it goes back to So when Sylvester got sideways with HUD, because they wouldn't directly give him the money to be in charge of it, it went there. But once Whitmire came in, pragmatically understood how he needed the money, and sat down and worked through all of this with council involved, the money came and the houses were built. That just shows the dysfunction right now over at the county. I promise you what will happen is they'll come out, blame Buckingham. Abby came on a rundown to file some ridiculous lawsuit against the state. They'll lose it, and that'll be what the result is. Look, Buckingham is the steward of that money. And we had, look, reams of corruption issues involving the Turner administration. Hate to speak ill of the dead, but, I mean, you know, it's on the record. and further hand that money over when they're like they're not doing it the right way it's getting siphoned off uh so it's been demonstrated and we had a pandemic right you know let's face it let me give you a concrete example that i've been dealing with for 20 years concrete tangible example in front of Barnett Stadium is a huge ditch and there's two pipes right next to it they're always clogged up the grass is growing trees are growing constantly for the past 20 years and I've been looking at this problem and I wrote a letter to the city council members to HISD of course no response but this has been going on for 20 years that area would flood if you don't clean out those ditches and dig them out in the two streams and they said well HISD this belongs to them city belongs to them the county belongs to them and they all don't want to do the work this overlapping of jurisdictions send me the map I want to know who's who cleans this ditch I still have not gotten a response. And when that ditch floods, it floods Barnett Stadium, it floods the stadium and the neighborhoods, the apartments, the home. It's just simple maintenance. But this bureaucracy is what's the juggernaut of fixing just common sense problems in our neighborhood. That's because leadership matters. Absolutely. The city has it. Absolutely. The county does not. Definitely. It's a deal of political will. Just go down there and fix it. Go ahead, Bill. So Bill mentioned the open records issue where they requested those documents and the agency said, we don't have anything like that. They go somewhere else and they're freely served up. We've got a similar thing going on up in Polk County right now where our county judge who's been defeated in the primary and there's no Democrat candidate in the general election. So there's a new county judge coming in. people had to file a lawsuit to ask for a temporary restraining order to keep the county judge from allegedly shredding records that aren't supposed to be shredded and then we've got the whole debacle of the incomplete courthouse renovation there's millions of dollars over budget so they're going to have a dedication ceremony for this thing that's still probably six months away from being completed but they're wasting taxpayer money clearing off the rubble piles so they can have 150 chairs put out so that the outgoing county judge can put her name on the plaque look i mean charles charles unearthing and shining a big old honking spotlight on the the failure of the appraisal district to do a fundamental job which is to say you qualify for this exemption and you don't and you know just do your damn job we'll get off your ass i agree we've got other things we could do right well okay bill made an important point on battleground texas and it's a sad point but uh the age of debates is over we're going to go through an entire midterm cycle in the state of texas without statewide opponents jumping on the debate stage and you know bill never shied away he always saw it as an opportunity to display his policy expertise and to argue in the public square. Ken Paxton, whose whole team tried to, and I pointed this out, tried to frame Tallarico as a hyper-progressive sissy boy, wouldn't step up on the debate stage and defend all the policies that the Republican Party stands for and his performance as Attorney General. Was that a critical mistake, you think, when Or did people just look him in the eye and say he would hand you your head in a handbasket? I think the debate between Paxton and Tallarico would probably have been a disaster in many directions. But right now, I think candidates have gotten more towards social media soundbites than they're willing to stand up and do a debate. We also see the governor is not going to do a debate in that race with Hinojosa. So I think you're seeing a shift in how these elections are going to be run and how they're going to get their message out. It takes away a lot, unfortunately, because the voters need to get an unfiltered look at what these candidates will say and what they will do. And, you know, Tallarico was brilliant in taking it to Fox News and say, I'll do the debate on Fox News with Brett Baier, I think it was. and and uh you know paxton had to pass on that so it it's it's a sad state of where we're going i think in terms of you know access to candidates i'm surprised how readily people believe stuff that they see in ads and in social media and stuff um we were had some friends over and some ads were coming up and i forget which candidate it was about but it was you know some terrible thing about one of the candidates and there was a lady says i just can't believe he does that i said well how do you know that's true i said because you saw it on tv do you have any idea if it's actually true well i mean i assume if they put it up there it must be true and i wonder if you know we've especially i think old people that go back to walter cronkite and all that i think we're inclined to believe journalists we're inclined to believe things that show up on tv and i just wonder if that's going to wear off at some point in time are people going to kind of sort of ignoring i mean look i get my big stack of mailers and everything and they immediately go and recycle i don't even look through them i just throw them in the trash and i just wonder if at some point in time the voters are going to start ignoring all that which is going to force people back into some more traditional debates and public appearances and those kinds of things let's hope it doesn't happen before i retire it's keeping me employed the ads it's a little self-serving but well but you could run ads where you really address the issue as opposed to saying you know uh you know he's for girls and boys sports or these you know these you know issues that are that are intended to be wedge issues i mean you could get on actually talk about what do we need to do about property taxes what do you do about flood control you could run those kind of ads i I mean, that's the kind of ads I ran in 2015. Bill has predicted two congressional breakthroughs for Republicans. They're not going to get to five. We saw something develop in South Texas where the Republican muckety-mucks yanked $3 million they had earmarked for Tano Tijerina against Henry Cuellar. Henry Cuellar, the Democrat that the president pardoned for corruption. And now he's built a lead so big, which is basically Laredo, is the big city down there, that the Republicans put up the white flag and said, we can't win that one. We're pulling our cash out and spending it elsewhere. Any thoughts there, Sergio? No, no. I think, I mean, you're going to see some historical numbers down there in the Valley. The campaign is intense. I get a lot of signals from down there. the Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, El Paso. I mean, it's almost like it's a three-team effort down there as opposed to one candidate. You have Talarico, Gina, Bobby Polito. All of them are on stage at the same time. And that signals that, you know, we're here, we need you, we're coming for you, we want to help you. So that is almost a three-pronged effort. So I think it's going to create just an incredible turnout down there. You don't see a lot of Trump flags, Trump paraphernalia down there, as opposed to four years ago, two years ago. It is amazing. Next time you talk to Leslie, remind her that Talarico is not doble R. It's kind of disingenuous to pronounce it that way in order to try to attract Latino voters. It's not spelled that way. It's not pronounced that way. You know, if they were to add a prominent African-American on the ticket, that may help, because when you have someone from your community reflective in the campaign trail, it signals to the other community members, hey, we're with you, we're like you. And I don't see that. Bob gets to sit in with National Breitbart, and there's an issue as the president's lame duck status will become evident after the midterm, that there will be a looming battle between MAGA conservatives and non-MAGA conservatives, whether the party should look more like the party of Ronald Reagan or continue down the trail that Donald Trump has has you know led the party down well you're going to see a big split I think in the Republicans after the midterms people are already lining up either in the DeSantis camp or in the J.D. Vance camp as to who they think the next nominee is going to be I don't know if it'll be either one of those guys but it's going to be a very crowded field I'd like to back up just a second if I could And I don't defend Democratic congressmen very often, but I think Henry Cuellar was the target of lawfare in that, in that he was one of the few Democrats that spoke up about the reality of our border during the Biden border crisis. And he was targeted for that. And I think Trump recognized that and gave him the pardon because of that. Being from Laredo and having some inside information, there was some money. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if everybody's going like, why was he targeted? It's like, you know, thank you, Lord. It could be many reasons that he's going to win by double digits against a popular county judge down there who crossed over to join the Republican team. Yeah. You know, I also look at what I think is a squandered opportunity with Latinos. You know, you had a landscape shift in twenty twenty four. What could they have done on the Republican side to set in cement what was an extraordinary thing, turning the whole border red and that it has swung back? We had Massey Villarreal on here saying he went down there and there are our businessmen who can't get folks to show up on sites and get contracts and projects done because people are scared of the migra. And let me just add on that point, just if you don't mind, Bob, your survey, when you did the debate, the two issues that most likely will influence the vote was affordability and immigration. That is the second and most important things for voters at this time, as you're saying. Yeah, well, on the survey, the Fox 26 survey, you know, you had that survey and I and I saw that said, oh, my God, immigration is a very important issue. and as a result you know what's happening in our city in our county our state and nation folks are pissed off they're upset they're going to come out and vote because of the aggressive ice tactics you know we've you know the recent running over of mr parras who was an a guy that i mean you look at the video um i don't know what the deal with ice agent they don't have camcorders they need a little small flock camera because they got the license plate wrong they were looking for a guy who's been dead for nine years i mean and then they run over this guy i mean this this this resonates with the community and folks are lift you know this is a really important issue in the latino community i have looked at at the eye stats here and they have they have and everybody needs to understand they have removed some really bad people the problem was was was the net was just way too big yeah and and the ramp up was was too rapid in my opinion this is all my opinion to where the force that they put together was not as as as trained and vetted uh as sufficiently as i think was required to do the mission and so there were there were lots of things that i can remember bill telling me look at that you see and it was it was one of the first instances of ICE executing an arrest and dragging a grandmother down the street in massachusetts and crowds you know screaming and yelling he said that's going to be on tv and that's going to hurt them and and you know you know i respect Homan and i and that was the point which Holman should have stepped in or been put in and say, like, let's let's clean this up fast. And, you know, you talk to these guys, you've been a a a vocal and articulate advocate for the good things that the mission is accomplishing. And you've had to defend the things that we have all criticized. so uh you know i don't know in retrospect if you if you, if they call Bob Price in and said uh what do we do wrong and and how can we fix this so let me back up a step um you're gonna you answer my question i will okay so the i did an article this week breaking the news that we completed this fiscal year with a historic low number of border crossings being apprehended at the border uh i think it was like i don't know i don't know what the actual numbers was but it was six 95 percent 96 percent down from 2023 fiscal year 2023 during the peak of the Biden border crisis and so the border is virtually closed at this point uh there has been a single illegal alien released by Border Patrol into the United States for the past 17 months that that's amazing And so when we had the millions and millions and millions of people that flooded into this country, many of them on foreign terrorist lists, many of them have violent criminal histories, they weren't even vetted at the border. They were just literally given a parking ticket and said, show up if you feel like it to court. None of them did. 90% of them didn't. And so there was a big push to fix that. Stop the bleeding. people coming across the border and then fix the problem which was all of this massive invasion of people that led to part of this affordability crisis and driving up the price of housing especially low-income housing all of those things had to be fixed and so yes they did ramp that up very quickly because they had they felt like they had a very short window a two-year period to get in there and accomplish the mission of getting those people back out of the country, particularly the ones that were public safety risk. And 60 to 70 percent of the ones who were arrested have violent criminal histories, not just immigration violations, but actual convictions for crimes. I want to see those stats eventually, you know, because that's a big number. And, you know, I think what really Lorenzo Salgado was the guy, the guy who's been here for 25 years and the guy who has kept his nose clean, been an asset to the community, you know, parented two very, very, I think, great by their actions. great kids who are contributing to American society in a great way, and had, according to Foster and others, had very, very limited path to try to gain legal status because of the duopoly and the exploitation of the immigration issue by both parties for at least the last 26 years uh maybe all the way back to the Reagan uh the last time we did reform in 1987 yeah 87 that's that's that's just political malpractice governmental malpractice not to adjust this he had no chance i talked to Vince Foster and those guys they said there was no path for him other than going back and making a million dollars and then buying buying you know a pizza franchise here then he can come back in legally that's not that's not all look it's the way they go about it it's the continual that they they they don't have they don't put their sirens on they never have their body cameras on you know it always ends up with what you got to run somebody over the sidewalk to get them it's the way they police which is like a bunch of bounty hunters that aren't accountable to anybody in any way and they've been admonished for it and it'll get better but it doesn't because this is they've been told go do it however you need to do it just get it done and that's the part that is just disgusting to everybody about this whole process is the lack of even treating other human beings like human beings hold on because i want to respond to that because i think that you know we have to acknowledge that ICE got a lot of bad people out of the country but we are specialists at at public perception and it only takes one critical incident it's more than one now to taint the work of a hundred great operations and you know you're a smart guy you know uh you wouldn't be here and it's not regionally specific this is across the united states the stories bill do you remember that conversation and i'll let that conversation about the massachusetts arrest oh yeah i saw that i said this is this is going to be a defining political issue um look the regular police make thousands of arrests every day nobody gets shot nobody gets their face crammed into the hat no they're not cramming a you know an elderly grandmother's face into the asphalt i mean you know you can conduct yourself abbott was the one that actually says you know we can't enforce the law without shooting people and those people our cops don't they they they had a mission two years and they had leadership that said just get it done just get it done and you know it was messy it was I'll let Bob talk first It's giving the Bob defense a bad name. I mean, the professionals that are doing their job, it gives them a bad name that they've got these untrained, unqualified people out there doing the job and running it for everybody else With no accountability Let's go Bob, then Sid So I watched that video of the guy getting hit by the ICE vehicle and it's ugly It's hard to see. It's hard to watch. And did they need to do it? I don't know. I wasn't there. I hope an investigation will determine what actually happened there. But cops do that all the time. But it doesn't make the national news. Cops use their vehicles to stop fleeing people all the time. And they hit them with the cars or they'll ram their car into another car, causing the car to flip over and injuries happen. You don't run from the cops or bad things are going to happen to you. So that said, the media focuses its attention on that because it has a political agenda to do this. You don't see the other cases where people are getting hit by cars. We had a whole Black Lives Matter thing develop over cops shooting black people. And that got a lot of attention and all those shootings got news because the media was focused on that because they could use it against Trump okay and so it's it you have to look at why you're seeing what you're seeing on the news and whether it's something that is out of the norm or not there have been a lot of ICE shootings but you also have a lot of ICE officers whose lives are put in danger by Democrat officials that go out there and and tell people that these aren't cops that you don't have to stop for them here's the difference they do run their lights and sirens every time that they know they don't yes they do okay and so how do you why do you say they don't they do there's certainly video no because you don't because you don't see and here's the difference when police officers take those kind of actions okay they're not whisk away and hidden from public they have to stay and be accountable and and answer questions about their actions There's a shooting, their gun's taken away, they're put on probation. Exactly, and they're identified. Doesn't the union give them 24 hours before they have to give a statement or something like that? Doesn't the union protect police to give them like 24 hours before they even have to give a statement? Right, but they have to be accountable. And their identities and their home addresses aren't put out for the public to see. But I'm saying, I don't know that they're, so these guys are whisked away, but I think the unions also have protection for cops too, is what I'm saying. But these guys do get fined. And I've never seen them have any. We have the president of Greater Houston, LULAC, here. I've never seen him have life on the top. talking about latinos yeah mostly hold on everybody go ahead no and what i was if i hear correctly you're you're literally blaming the media for showing one side of what's happening of ice just focusing on some bad behavior or some bad few ice officers and not really showing you know the the arrest of a drug dealer in the neighborhood of north side and they're on camera And look, look, we've got this guy. He's the one that's killing everybody here with fentanyl. We don't that the media is biased as opposed to just focusing on that issue or Black Lives Matter issues of killing a young man that's running away. They shoot him 24 times. You know, he was already dead with the first two shots. But anyway, what what my point is, this is that we believe in and and and law enforcement. We believe that we're a nation of laws, but to act with impunity and to not hold folks accountable, that is what the world is seeing. And what's happening right now is the devastating effect of the implementation of ICE policies has such aggressiveness, unmarked cars, no camcorders, no body cam, ski mask. And I talked to a very high ranking law enforcement officer who is retired. he worked for the federal government. I said, what's your take on this? And he's a Republican. He said when he saw the PD, Dr. PD killing, he said that is murder. And this is from a high ranking Republican law enforcement officer that served in the federal government. This is what's happening that the other world, this is what the world is seeing right now. And what's sad, it's happening in our own front yard in the state of Texas, which is a red state. That is what's pissing off a lot of people law enforcement do not use their vehicle to apprehend a running suspect that is policy so we also we also covered extensively the abduction rape and murder of a 12 year old little girl left like refuge by two unvetted criminal immigrants allowed in by the biden administration said go and do what you want to do and who were arrested in new york and released 24 hours later and you know and there's a whole group of people there's a whole group of people who were saying by any means necessary by any means necessary that can't happen again that can't happen to an innocent little girl like that again because of somebody's political policy politically driven policy of opening the floodgates and letting anybody who wants to come in. And so we had a complete pushback. But the issue isn't, I mean, granted, the border's closed. I mean, that's kudos. I mean, that's happened. That's not the issue right now. It almost happened too fast for political benefit. We understood they were going to move people out, but we didn't understand that they were going to do it like this, and that there would be no accountability to to communities and people in communities when they do mess up and they do other officers do the difference is you know our officers are accountable theirs get whisked away and the public and the communities are given no information whatsoever um and and then they're protected and that's not right okay i haven't heard from charles and you know and that that leads to the question how long does it take to investigate the salgado homicide i mean we should have we should have some results and a public briefing on that but it's it's almost as if you try to run out the clock on some of this stuff there's a sense of that charles well and how much did we give the da to investigate we haven't heard anything from them either which they shouldn't be investigating but it was what two two million i don't know how much two point five 25 million and so it's coming it's coming i just spoke with them oh yeah yeah the results are coming okay well but i mean get ready i think the thing is is that it was the enforcement of it and i don't want to say it started with this but we talked about it on the show it was in i think california when kristi noem was speaking it was like a senator who ran up on her do you guys remember that show oh yeah yeah it's just like idea yeah and then they tackle him and all and then the conversation about like the how it looks i think is when that started changing and how it looks kind of overtook what the actual outcome of what they were doing was which was getting people off the street who shouldn't be on the street not that senator obviously but the the other folks the optics yeah the optics overtook it i still i think it still does and i and you know being in this space i think we all recognize that but i think also being just a a dps guy well the dps or you know um uh what are they called the texas trooper no no the ones actually doing the the removals ice there you can think of it but the ice officers they're not thinking of that in the moment and so i think that's part of the problem is that you know it's it's not supposed to be performative they're supposed to be doing this action they should be having the lights on they should be doing all that but they're not seeing it how the public's going to see it how the how the cameras are going to see it all the people who are recording it and it does look horrible and in many instances and i think that's part of it is horrible it doesn't look it's not it's not a it's not a they're doing a tough task and a tough task is going to look horrible just like right you know and so and i think that would have looked horrible if it'd been covered live by CNN right i think so many things as we're kind of moving forward you get cameras more on on top of everything you're going to see more stuff like that and unfortunately you don't want them to go into it with that mentality but they might have to go into it with that mentality in order to be able to continue to do the things that they feel they need to do to accomplish their job i want to i want to swing back to a topic we uh we we uh hit on pretty hard in the A and B block, but as well as the I block, which is commercial property values in Houston, Texas have fallen because anybody can go look at a major office building downtown and see that leasing is down and that the owners have an argument when they go before the appraisal board to say, look, this is not generating the revenue that it once did and therefore is less valuable bill points out that while the city counts on that revenue heavily the county counts on it even more can you talk about that now about i think it's 85 86 percent of the county's revenue comes from property taxes and there's a couple things going on here um and by the way let me back up just a second we're putting out a paper i think it'll come out this week about state revenues last year. State revenues were up pretty significantly last year, which is encouraging. Sales tax were up significantly. So you've got a bunch of things, different things going on here. But with regard to the property tax roll, first of all, you've got office buildings are a disaster, complete disaster. Somebody was telling me one of the big office buildings in downtown is currently under contract for a third of what its taxable value is. The second thing that goes on is that commercial properties are valued differently than residential properties. On residential properties, we have a lot of comparables. I mean, you know, you can go in a neighborhood and there'll be 10 houses that sold in that neighborhood that year, so you can come up with a pretty good idea of what the real market value is. Commercial properties, let's say like a refinery, well, refineries don't sell very often, and so you don't have comparables. So almost all commercial properties are valued based on the income approach. And so it's pretty easy to walk in with an office building and say we're losing our tail and we want the value to go down. The converse side of that, say a refinery, which is doing a lot better now than it was last year, that takes several years for that to work through the process before you start seeing increased values from that. So we're in this sort of weird place. But I want to just point this out 300 000 people have moved out of Harris County in the last 10 years okay i'm talking about i'm talking about i'm talking you know u.s residents leaving the county to go to someplace else now about Texas A&M did a study of this about two-thirds of those moved to the suburbs like bob did um about a third went further than that extended suburb but the income level of the people moving out well those people were replaced plus more by people moving here from other countries that's how harris county's continue to grow but the income levels of the people that left compared to the income level the people's coming in dramatically different i mean like 3x the income of people going out than the people this is what the A&M study found and so what you have is a shrinking you know tax base because you've got the same number of people but you got lower incomes and right now what you're beginning to see this in rental incomes i mean rentals rentals are down significantly for the last 18 months or so you're beginning to see house prices in my subdivision you know year before last like seven or eight houses sold they all sold for more than i paid for mine in 2022 this last year there's been one sale so far but it's about 10% below what I paid for my house in 2022. You cannot have a mass exodus, especially of high-income earners, out of a jurisdiction without it beginning to affect your economy sooner or later. And that's what's happening right now. And unless Harris County officials and city officials and HISD officials figure out some way to improve the value proposition of living inside the urban core, this is going to continue. I have an idea. All those PFCs, all of those PFCs that are paying no taxes, they should go there first and make sure they're holding to their agreement, which a lot of them aren't. And if they aren't, they ought to make them go ahead and go back on the tax rolls. But I understand that somebody in the legislature, they tried to do it, and they stepped in and said, no, you can't do that. That's the first thing I would fix. They pass laws. There's a bunch of litigation. Those all deals were just completely fraudulent. But let me tell you, here's the interesting thing about it. So I've got a little informal working group that has been looking at this. And right now, you can rent a Class D apartment, one-bedroom apartment in Houston, for under $600 a month. You can't build any kind of affordable housing that you only get $600 a month recovery from. and so what we're kind of increasingly coming to conclusion this is not really a supply problem there's a hundred thousand vacant apartments in the Houston area right now it looks to me like we have a a cohort of people that live in Harris County that makes so little income it doesn't matter what the rent is it doesn't matter how many affordable units they can't afford anything A lot of these are elderly people, widows and widowers who get one Social Security check for maybe $1,200 a month. Well, what can you afford to rent at that? And I think what you're beginning to see is some reestablishment of multigenerational households because of that. So we're going through a very weird time demographically in this area right now. It's going to be interesting. but a lot of the common you know sort of talking point narratives like let's build more affordable housing i don't think that would do anything right now yeah miss lita wants the multi-generational to come back bring the grandkids oh absolutely and i gotta and i gotta ask because i watched last week's uh program uh on this same subject i'm still looking any any update on Charles finding a uh a more affordable yeah so i've been looking until like i kind of set up my neighborhood so like i set up a monitor so i get them pretty regularly i'm probably not going to be moving until mid-december because my lease isn't up until january but it's it's i mean it's amazing seeing some of these you i mean and not even just apartments you're not saying like the three-story townhomes renting for like 2,500 bucks a month which previously they were up you know 35 4,000 and i mean it's you're really seeing a lot of and not in bad area i mean in good areas too and so I was going to talk Bill into buying the house next to me and then put you in it on a rent-to-own basis. It's the only way Charles is ever going to buy. On a rent-to-own basis. We can't even get him. Oh, my gosh. Go ahead, Bob. On this issue of the exodus that's going on, not only is the county implementing policies that are driving people out, the evacuation plans for houston are expanding the freeway system making it easier for people who decide to go out to commute back in when they need to come into work or or come in like i do to visit and do this show um you know the it's three lanes interstate 69 now is three lanes all the way to cleveland and will soon be three lanes all the way to shepherd and through livingston within the next five years or so i think uh it it's making it you know it's driving property values up out there because people are moving to to san jacinto county to liberty county waller waller is exploding yeah amazing brazoria i'm gonna tell you though they were all exploding a few years ago the most recent numbers are not that good in any of those areas i'm just telling you it's it you know the The problem is, for the population to grow, you've got to have more babies. And we don't have more babies. We have a lot of babies. No, you really don't. No, I'm kidding. We're cutting down. To some extent. We need more immigrants. This is kind of reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, you know? I mean, at some point in time, it doesn't matter how much reshuffling you do, you know, the boat's still sinking. Okay, now I'm going to get a little conspiratorial, but not really. It's not going to be a huge leap. So you wonder why in an election year we have three Democrats, you know, Ellis, Boss Hogg, but the other two decide, man, we're going to go back to the well again, creating a 41 percent three-year hike in an election year where two of us are on the ballot one of us lost uh or or trump won my district precinct two we're gonna do it and we have abbott over there screaming about a two-thirds limit for any tax hike did they just say we're gonna get while the getting's good and did they have access to those commercial property rate or commercial property value plunges you know this is all calculated you think any thoughts i don't think they did that deep about it to me it was like we're going to do it because we can do it there's going to be a blue wave so the sort of arrogance of that i don't think they did any deep diving and looking and they certainly don't do a deep dive on anything else It was just, we were sure to win, so we're going to do it. Pretty good overtime. Wait, two things. Hold on, hold on. Our Cougs. Okay. Oh, yeah. And go Texans. They're on right now. All right. See you next week.