Choose a Direction

Bastrop County Republican Party is at a crossroads in this primary election, and it is time for you, the voter, to choose a direction.  This is the third and final segment on the local party issues at play in this primary election.  Part 1 (linked here) focused on how our party Chairman’s policies have damaged the party.  Part 2 (linked here) focused on how Mr. Loucks has participated in that damage, and stands to take those policies into county government if elected County Judge.  This final segment focuses on the precinct chairman races and how they might influence party direction in the term to come.

Our local party is an organization whose voting members are the Chairman, elected county wide, and precinct chairmen elected from each voting precinct in the county, collectively called the executive committee.  These elections are determined in the primary election every two years (if contested).  That executive committee of potentially 22 members is the decision-making board of our local Republican party.  The Chairman presides over the executive committee’s deliberations, and its majority votes are binding on the organization.

A record number of seven precinct chairman positions are contested this election.  In my view, at play is whether Chairman Raley’s policies will be strengthened or weakened depending on how those votes go.  Here are the contested races that I view as connected:

County Judge	Paul Pape	Don Loucks
County Chairman	Dianna Greenwood	Jeanne Raley
Precinct Chair 1002	Cliff Sparks	Derek Van Gilder
Precinct Chair 1003	Carl Rees	Carol Spencer
Precinct Chair 1004	Jarrett Namken	James Richard
Precinct Chair 2005	Michael Campbell	James Raley
Precinct Chair 2006	Cade Hurta	Sandra Stokes
Precinct Chair 3014	Ana Zuniga	Kaye Leidy
Precinct Chair 3016	Marc Mulkey	Mike Gepner

Concerning the precinct chairmen candidates who, I believe, would weaken Chairman Raley’s damaging policies:

• Cliff Sparks, Jarrett Namken, and Marc Mulkey are incumbent precinct chairs who have been casting consistent votes to keep the party executive-committee lead rather than Chairman lead, to re-open an office, to resume monthly meetings, to contract with the county for the primary election, and they supported the party fundraiser, etc.
• Carl Rees was recruited by Deborah Leyland, former precinct chairman for 1003, anticipating an open seat when Don Loucks ran for County Judge thus vacating his position.
• Michael Campbell, Cade Hurta and Ana Zuniga are members of Bastrop County Young Republicans, who helped at the party fundraiser, and were recruited by Jarrett Namken.

Concerning the precinct chairman candidates who, I believe, would strengthen Chairman Raley’s damaging policies:

• Sandra Stokes and Kaye Leidy are incumbent precinct chairmen who have sided with the Chairman and Don Loucks on almost every vote.  They are unoffended at the Chairman’s noncompliance with majority votes of the executive committee.  They did not help with or participate in the party’s fundraiser.  Sandra has participated in attacks on the Bastrop County Young Republicans.  Kaye Leidy currently serves as our party’s Vice Chairman.
• Derek Van Gilder needs no introduction to most.  He was apparently the Chairman’s choice for the party’s general counsel before the executive committee removed that position from the bylaws.  He apparently supported the Chairman’s bylaws to centralize power in the Chairman.  Derek has participated in attacks on the Bastrop County Young Republicans.
• James Raley is husband to Chairman Raley.  He ran two years ago for this position and was defeated by Greg Greer.  In the interest of full disclosure, when I suggested two years ago that James, by virtue of marriage, would be supportive of Chairman Raley, she argued with me on that point.  But she didn’t convince me.
• Carol Spencer was our Chairman’s first pick for Vice Chairman.  Due to a busy schedule away, she was unable to participate in meetings and eventually resigned.  She is co-founder with Chairman Raley of the controversial “Bastrop County Republican Club” to which the Chairman diverted her fundraising attention (but which is not affiliated with the party, and its function has never been explained to the executive committee).  She also serves as president of the Lost Pines Republican Women, of which Chairman Raley is or was Vice President.  Carol’s husband hosted a nice meet and greet for the benefit of Don Loucks.  Carol has served as party web master at the Chairman’s request.  She resigned that position, but has refused to turn over the party’s web site to the party’s Public Relations Committee as directed by the executive committee stating she will follow only Chairman Raley’s direction (But she is also aware that Chairman Raley is not in compliance with the executive committee’s direction to turn over the web site and other media accounts).  Carol informs me she is neutral as to Chairman and running strictly in her own name.  Her close affiliation with the Chairman and Mr. Loucks however give me doubt.
• James Richard and Mike Gepner are both friends of Don Loucks, and I assume were recruited by him.  When Marc Mulkey was elected to fill a vacancy on the executive committee, Mr. Loucks nominated Mike Gepner for the same office and spoke of their close personal friendship.  They also served together on one of our ESD boards.  Mike Gepner’s property displays both a Jeanne Raley and a Don Loucks sign.  James Richard is a member of the John Birch Society, and Mr. Loucks serves as the head of the local chapter of that organization.  Mr. Richard attended Mr. Loucks’ benefit.

Most of these people are fine people who would do the party credit if they worked together cooperatively toward a common goal calculated to strengthen the party.  However, this past term has demonstrated that Chairman Raley’s leadership merely puts them all at odds.  If we could recapture the basic concept that we can disagree with grace and majority vote rules, a significant portion of the conflict goes away.

Your executive committee and your Chairman have two very different ideas of how the party should be run.  They have been unable to reconcile that difference among themselves, and our Chairman has rejected the input of mediators.  It therefore falls to the voters to choose a direction.  Whether you agree with my choices and opinions or not, I encourage you to consistently vote in favor of a coherent leadership team.  Pick one entire list or the other.  A divided vote will only maintain a divided party.

Please join me in voting for Paul Pape for County Judge, Dianna Greenwood for County Chairman, and if you live in a precinct with a contested precinct race, the precinct chairman candidate who is consistent with that leadership.

Please take personal responsibility to help your fellow Republicans choose a direction.  Link to this story on your Facebook pages at https://bcrnews.blogspot.com/2018/02/county-judge-considerations.html.  Email it to your Republican friends.

Albert L. Ellison, Founder
Bastrop County Republican News
bcrnews.blogspot.com

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County Judge Considerations

Bastrop County Republican Party is at a crossroads in this primary election.  This is the second part of a three part series discussing the issues at play.  Part 1 (linked here) discussed the policies of our incumbent party Chairman and how I believe they have damaged our party.  In this second part, I will discuss how I see these issues impacting the County Judge race.

Don Loucks seeks a re-match election against County Judge Paul Pape, having been previously defeated 2-1 in the Republican Primary of 2012. The County Judge is the presiding officer of the Commissioners Court and is the chief budgeting officer of the county.  If elected it would put Mr. Loucks in charge of proposing a countywide budget for all county departments, including that of his wife, who currently serves as our District Clerk.

In my view, the County Judge race this election is not about philosophy or issues, it is about leadership and methodology.  While Mr. Loucks attacks Judge Pape incessantly on any decision over which they might disagree, and indeed has been doing so for years, there is also a record of leadership from Mr. Loucks to examine from which you can determine if you want his style of leadership taking over the helm of the Commissioners Court.

Here is the list of issues I have observed in Mr. Loucks that convince me he is not the best candidate for the office, notwithstanding what issues he raises:

• Party Policies - Mr. Loucks served on our party’s executive committee this last term, and supported Chairman Raley’s policies for our party.  That includes centralizing power in the chairman and away from the executive committee, closing the Republican office in a Presidential election, discontinuing monthly meetings of the party, failing to support our candidates, curbing of party communications, refusal to fundraise for the party, resisting re-opening the Republican office, resisting hiring the county to assist with our primary, and even seeding public doubt as to whether the county elections department was legally hired.  In so doing, he has supported the Chairman’s noncompliance with party bylaws, Robert’s Rules of Order, and majority votes of the executive committee.  It appears asserting control is more important than actually working to benefit the party.  For this reason alone, he should be demoted, not promoted, in my opinion.
• Candidate Support – Chairman Raley made Mr. Loucks chairman of the party’s candidate support committee.  While Mr. Loucks trumpets project management as being a forte, he failed to convene his committee to conceptualize or offer any candidate support to our nominees in the 2016 Presidential election.  Our voters' guide, already prepared for the primary, was ignored and not distributed.  Local data services to the nominees from our local party disappeared.  With no office, no regular meetings, and no special party events, local nominee sign distribution was not supported centrally at all.  Our pictorial directory of candidates, with its Vote Republican message, which we have been publishing in the paper for years, didn’t happen.  After the Presidential election, he then convened his committee to conceptualize support projects for candidates in the primary election of 2018.  Projects were considered, timelines proposed – then nothing else happened.  He did not have his committee follow through on a single idea.  He is a self-described adrenaline junkie.  He appears more interested in stirring controversies than tending to the mundane business at hand.
• Fundraising – He and Chairman Raley both refused to participate in the party’s Boots & BBQ fundraiser last Fall.  The event was initiated by one of our state-level Republican representatives.  She expressed to the executive committee her personal disappointment that some of our members, including Chairman Raley and Mr. Loucks, had refused to participate.  Mr. Loucks responded that her “interference” was duly noted.  In other words, he resented her aid to help the party raise money.
• Breach of Decorum – In executive committee debates, Mr. Loucks breached decorum in almost every meeting.  Robert’s Rules of Order characterize calling your fellow committee members names, impugning their motives, and questioning past decisions of the committee as all breaches of decorum.  Mr. Loucks regularly employs all three in debate.  Chairman Raley, who as chairman is charged with keeping decorum, refused to hold him in line.  Consequently, with a steady diet of such rhetoric, relationships were greatly strained.
• Hardball Politics – Mr. Loucks employs hardball politics.  I’ve seen that play out in these ways:
  • Intolerance of Disagreement – In my view, you advocate respectfully for your position, and allow votes to decide issues.  Mr. Loucks does not tolerate those who disagree with him, and with him, a personal fight is never over.  When he served as County Commissioner he would use his web site to attack viciously members of the public who disagreed with his stances. He has used his newspaper column similarly.  Long is the list of current officeholders and county employees  I have personally heard him speak against.  If elected, I fear he intends to attempt to clean house based on his list of personal grudges and desire for payback.  Most of Mr. Loucks’ attacks on Judge Pape relate to decisions made by the Commissioners Court, rather than just Judge Pape personally.  That informs me that Judge Pape is just the beginning.
  • Fake Issues – One of Mr. Loucks’ tactics is to propose a good-sounding policy, but laden it with unacceptable baggage.  When his fellow members object to the baggage, he accuses them of not supporting the good-sounding policy so as to try to tear them down in public opinion.  He and Chairman Raley are using this technique against your party’s executive committee over the Blue Santa vote.  Chairman Raley proposed supporting four charities at Christmas time.  Sounds good.  Problem was, one of her proposed charities didn’t exist, she wanted to include her controversial exclusive club in an attempt to legitimize it, and some were concerned that we should focus on one charity, not multiple.  The Chairman and Mr. Loucks proposed a one-size-fits-all resolution that included all the baggage, and the executive committee voted no.   Chairman Raley immediately called for adjournment allowing nothing else to be considered.  Mr. Loucks then posted an edited video (excluding the portion of him shouting at his fellow members) and they have been campaigning stating your committee opposed Blue Santa.  What they don’t tell you is in the next meeting, the executive committee voted to support the Tree of Angels program run by the Sheriff’s Office, and they did.  And what they don’t know is that some individual members who voted no made personal contributions to the Blue Santa programs in the party’s name.
  • Building a Case for Firing – Often Mr. Loucks forms an opinion that someone needs to go based on very personal reasons (i.e., that person might disagree with Mr. Loucks on an issue, support a different candidate in an election than Mr. Loucks did, be a former employee who didn’t work out well in his wife’s department, have a job Mr. Loucks wants, or refuse to attack someone Mr. Loucks wants attacked, etc.).  He will then begin a line of public attacks against that person’s job performance, without disclosing his true motivation.  I’ve watched him initiate attacks on both the Elections Administrator and the Tax Assessor/Collector and their performance, when underlying it, I came to understand that he was actually upset that they had hired employees who hadn’t worked out well in his wife’s office.  He wanted to drive the employees from county employment as well as any department head who had harbored them.
  • Persistent Attacks on the Bastrop County Young Republicans (BCYR) – The BCYR endorsed another candidate against Mr. Loucks’ wife for District Clerk in a primary election.  Our District Clerk took my advice as chairman, and made no public issue of it.  After the election was over, I asked Mr. Loucks to treat BCYR members with a mentoring attitude rather than open hostility.  He rejected my direction and has persistently attacked them since.  He even filed with the county a trade name certificate in their name in an effort to steal their name out from under them.  Based on that certificate, he told me, “I am Bastrop County Young Republicans.”   He followed that with a cease and desist letter threatening them with suit if they continued to use their name.  I believe that when he understood that, as chairman, I was not going to allow him to use the party structure to attack them, that’s when he decided that I as chairman needed to go.   Curiously, he has also filed additional trade name certificates claiming to own the names of “The Bastrop County Republican Party,” “Republican Party of Bastrop County,” and “The Republican Party of Bastrop County.”
• Credibility – The reason that this is not an issues-based race for me, is Mr. Loucks has lost all credibility with me.
  • False Accusations – Mr. Loucks makes false accusations against opponents.  From personal experience he has falsely accused me (and Judge Pape) of rigging an election, failing to attend required training as chairman, and stealing my email list from the party, just to name a few.  Our Chairman, similarly, filed a failed ethics complaint against Judge Pape, and has filed false sworn complaints against fellow executive committee members.  Seeing first hand Mr. Loucks’ distortions, when he accuses others of wrong doing in public, I know his every statement must be carefully vetted before being accepted. 
  • Lying on Request – At the request of Chairman-elect Raley, Mr. Loucks lied to a volunteer working with the Governor Abbott campaign in an effort to get her to disclose a data source.  Unfortunately for Mr. Loucks, he forgot to delete Mrs. Raley’s instructions from the bottom of the email he sent to the volunteer, so he exposed his own lie. The email may be viewed here.
  • Contradictory Issues – In this very race, Mr. Loucks’ signature campaign pledges are contradictory.   He is pledging to cut county spending so that your taxes decrease (not just the tax rate) while also telling the Sheriff’s office (which is the largest department in county government) that they deserve a living wage pay increase.  Based on his past actions, I believe he will make another fake issue of this: I’m guessing he will propose an impossible budget, make his fellow Commissioners vote against it, and then blame them in public so as to get rid of them.  If right, we are merely pawns in a game of control, and the issues are beside the point.

These leadership characteristics raise the following questions in my mind:

• As County Judge, will control be more important to Mr. Loucks than good policy?
• Will he respect the majority votes of the Commissioner’s Court when he disagrees with the decision, or will he perpetually seek to undermine majority will as he has done with our party’s executive committee?
• As presiding officer, will he enforce proper decorum so that all are respected whether or not they agree with him, or will he be the one most frequently out of line? And if he breaches decorum, how do you fix that?
• Will he lash out publicly against persons with whom he disagrees?
• Will he actually see mundane projects through, or will he perpetually seek the next controversy to supply an adrenaline rush?
• Will he abuse his position to persecute those with whom he disagrees, be they officeholders, county employees, party members, or constituents?
• When someone in county government disagrees with him, will he make them unwelcome wherever they go?
• Will he attempt a purge of county government to build a personal empire?
• Will he lie to accomplish goals?

Mr. Loucks’ past leadership has severely damaged our party.  The contrast between where we were two years ago and where we are today is stark.  There is good reason to believe he will take that leadership style to county government, and do similar, if not greater, damage there.

In contrast, I support Judge Pape because his leadership is entirely different.  He is supportive of the party and policies that make us strong.  He is not attacking our party organization or obstructing its proper function.  He takes stands and makes decisions, as all leaders must, but if you disagree with him you have no fear of retaliation. He is the better candidate because he is a stable leader who puts the good of the county, as he sees it, above other considerations.

Judge Pape also has a consistent tax policy that I personally believe in.  He has been persistently working to reduce the tax rate so that our rate becomes competitive.  He has been doing so at a measured rate to avoid impairing county operations.  As the rate becomes competitive, more business comes, and the tax burden is lightened off of the shoulders of residents.  Today, we are all paying less in taxes than we would have without his efforts.  This is a reasonable plan that balances considerations of both tax reduction and growth-of-services concerns.  (And keep in mind that county taxes are the minor portion of our tax bill – it is school taxes that are killing us.  You can gut county spending, and it will only help so much.)

If you want to see the kind of policies and politics that have distressed our party for the last two years spread into county government, too, then Don Loucks would be your choice. If you don’t want to repeat that history, then join me in re-electing Paul Pape for County Judge and electing Dianna Greenwood for County Chairman in this primary election.

If Mr. Loucks' leadership alarms you as it alarms me, then please take personal responsibility to aid your county.  Link to this story on your Facebook pages at https://bcrnews.blogspot.com/2018/02/county-judge-considerations.html.  Email it to your Republican friends.

The final segment of this series is as follows:

Part 3 - Choose a Direction

Albert L. Ellison, Founder
Bastrop County Republican News
bcrnews.blogspot.com

2018 Primary Election Information Visit http://www.bastropvotes.org/voter-information-2/voter-lookup/#VoterSearch to find your  Election Day polling location and view your sample ballot.  Visit our website for additional voting information.  Share Tweet Forward Copyright © 2018 Bastrop County Elections, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in either while voting in person or while viewing our website, www.bastropvotes.org. Our mailing address is: Bastrop County Elections 804 Pecan Street Bastrop, TX 78602 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list

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