Sometimes you post even though you don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, if only because you have more of them than the average voter.
With early voting upon us, I wanted to try to come to grips with the Williamson County Precinct 1 Commissioner’s race, where Lee Ann Seitsinger is challenging incumbent Lisa Birkman. The Seitsinger camp has a run a very active race, walking neighborhood and putting up a lot of signs, and have done several direct mailers, which suggests a fairly serious commitment to the race on their part.
And Seitsinger is certainly talking the conservative talk. On Friday, I sent three questions off to the Seitsinger campaign, and received a reply back yesterday. Questions in italics, answers in bold.
1. Do you support or oppose the EPA’s attempts to designate several Williamson County salamanders as endangered species?
Opposed. In fact, I’m opposed to the very existence of the EPA. The federal government has no business being involved in our local decisions.
2. Do you support or oppose attempts to make allow automatic payroll deductions for the Williamson County Employees Association?
Opposed. Employees should have to make the conscious decision every month to contribute. Otherwise the potential for abuse is great. It’s a bit like the withholding tax with the IRS. If we had to write a check quarterly to the IRS instead of having it automatically deducted from our paychecks, people would be marching in the streets and we’d finally get real IRS reform.
3. I’m having a hard time finding information out about you online. Can you point to evidence of your involvement in Republican politics prior to this election cycle?
I have not been involved in politics prior. I’ve been serving in the U.S. Navy and running a small business while raising a son. I’m just a conservative citizen who has watched our county debt grow to the point that we are the third most indebt county in all of Texas. My neighbors came to me and asked me to run, and so I did.
All solid, conservative answers. But for all of that, some things just don’t seem to add up.
For instances, her biggest blog supporters (and Birkman’s biggest detractors) seem to be Williamson County public employee representatives at http://blog.wilcoea.org/ and http://wilcowatchdog.org/. Those are constituencies that usually campaign and vote Democratic, and their biggest beef seems to be that Birkman has held the line on spending and not given them the raises they want.
Holly Hansen, who usually follows these things far more closely than I do, is not impressed with Seitsinger and is backing Birkman. Birkman has also been endorsed by House District 52 Rep. Larry Gonzalez, who’s a pretty good guy. By contrast, Seitsinger’s endorsements seem pretty heavy on public employee groups.
There also seems to be significant overlap between Seitsinger supporters and those supporting Jana Duty’s District Attorney run against John Bradley, another race I don’t have a firm grasp on (though I do know that Rick Perry has endorsed Bradley, which counts for something, even if I’m not taking Perry’s advice in the Senate race).
I poked around Seitsinger’s supporters, and found many Republicans (including a few vocal Ron Paul supporters), a number of realtors (her day job), a few Democrats, and a number of public employees groups.
For all those reasons I’m leaning toward Birkman. I wish I could come up with a more definitive judgment, but Google has a distinct paucity of information about Seitsinger.
I get the feeling this is going to be a very close race.
Tags: Austin, Lee Ann Seitsinger, Lisa Birkman, Republicans, Texas, Williamson County
Here are some explanations as to why somethings don’t add up based on the information you listed.
Birkman is a bully and leads by intimidation (this is not well known outside of the political circles). She hold jobs over the heads of the people that work for the county who don’t support her. They are tired of stressing about their jobs based on their political preferences, which is a right in this country. They haven’t been given raises (as you pointed out) and these people put their lives in harms way daily to keep us safe. To be fair, I see no evidence where Seitsinger has promised them raises. That speaks volumes.
There are overlaps everywhere in politics, so this statement doesn’t hold much weight in my opinion. As for the realtor support, most people want one of their kind in office. If you have nothing in common, why would anyone support you?
Here are some important issues in my book:
#1 debt, debt, debt. They keep touting that it is like a mortgage, but does that mean we don’t get another “house” for 30 more years? Or are we simply going to stack them on one another? They also are proud of a AAA bond rating. The way to get more credit is to max out your cards. Our bond debt ratio is at or above 50%. WOW. Way to go court.
#2 The current commissioners court has failed at their primary responsibility, road maintenace. The budget for road maintenance appears to be way out of whack. They talk of repairing hike and bike trails with concrete while the entire Oak Brook neighborhood was repaved with the horrible chip seal, which has been in place for less than a year and is already breaking up. They claim that asphault was too expensive, but how do the numbers work if they have to replace it every two years?
#2 Career politicians are the end of this country as we know it. They get in office, make buddies with other career politicians and special intrest groups, and cut deals that benefit themselves to help them stay in office (why Birkman is supported by the career politicians). They make government overly complex and then claim that ordinary citizens can’t perform the job. Hogwash. Our forefathers intended for the government to be run by everyday citizens to avoid abuse of power. I agree 100% with Seitsinger on this. Keep the govt out of our lives as much as possible.
#3 Additionally, career politicians add to the taxes because we have to pay their retirement. In Birkman’s case, if she starts her 3rd term, we’ll owe her $55k per year for the rest of her life. YUCK! This is only for performing what is said to be a 2-3 day per week job for 8 years plus a day. REALLY? If anyone deserves retirement after such a short term, our military members should be at the front of that line…if not the only ones in it. Thank you Seitsinger for sacrificing and putting yourself in harms way by serving in our Navy! To think that Birkman gets retirement after this cushy air-conditioned office desk job after basically what adds up to a total of about 4 years of work sickens me to the core.
Thank you for the opportunity to respond!
Respectfully,
Wilco Pct 1 Resident
[…] County Commissioner Precinct 1: Incumbent Lisa Birkman, for reasons outlined here. Holly Hansen also provides compelling arguments why you should favor Birkman over Seitsinger here, […]