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Lucio Vasquez / Houston Public Media
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo fields questions on March 22, 2022 after unsealed court documents alleged that staff members in her office steered an $11 million contract for a COVID-19 outreach project to a preferred vendor.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said she wasn’t permitted to bring security detail on her recent trade mission to Paris, which was funded with money from her campaign after county commissioners declined to pay for it with taxpayer dollars. She said safety should be a priority in the county’s budget.
“I think safety and security is not something that we should be playing politics with,” Hidalgo said.
Hidalgo made the comments Wednesday on Houston Matters, when she also spoke about the county’s ballooning budget deficit, lingering issues in the Harris County Jail and departmental cuts to offset deputy pay raises. She also was asked about whether she plans to run for reelection next year, saying she has not yet made a decision.
Hidalgo said her recent trade mission to Paris increased economic development for the county and created connections after she met with French officials and business leaders.
The trip was a point of contention between Hidalgo and county commissioners as she requested to use county funds to back the mission. Commissioners rejected a funding provision during a meeting earlier this year, and Hidalgo said she paid for the $23,000 trip with her personal campaign funds.
Hidalgo met with officials from MEDEF, the largest employer federation in France. Representatives of the network will attend Houston’s next CERAWeek, an annual global energy conference. Harris County officials also met with BPI France, the largest development bank in France, which will also bring some companies to Houston next year, according to Hidalgo.
“We were trying to pitch our region as what it is,” she said. “As a place that is growing, that is young, that is the center for the med-tech industry, for aerospace, of course NASA, the port, the energy sector.”
Hidalgo said the Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office didn’t give her a green light to bring security detail, backed by her own campaign dollars, on the mission — blaming the issue on politicization within the county. The fire marshal’s office declined to comment because it regarded security matters.
Budget cuts for deputy raises
Hidalgo said the county is preparing for a nearly $300 million budget deficit, about $30 million more than the county first projected after approving pay raises for Harris County Sheriff’s Office and constable’s office deputies.
In May, the pressure was on for commissioners to take up immediate discussions about clearing a path to pay parity for deputies after the Houston City Council authorized a five-year, $832 million contract for the city’s police officers.
Following the May 22 approval by county commissioners, Hidalgo called the pay parity vote unprecedented. Some commissioners, including fellow Democrat Rodney Ellis, said the pay increase would exacerbate the county’s financial problems. Commissioners will be charged during the upcoming budget season with slashing what they called non-essential services to find the money to back the raises.
“So right now we’re looking at cutting 10% of every department, which would mean cutting all library programs, all of the programs that reduce recidivism among youth, of course homelessness,” Hidalgo said Wednesday. “I mean, we don’t have a whole lot of fat to trim.”
She said she was more interested in potentially asking voters to approve a tax rate increase to offset the raises.
Harris County Jail population
Hidalgo said she has directed county staffers to bring outsourced jail inmates back to Texas as the Harris County Jail sees a dip in its population, returning to pre-pandemic numbers, she said.
It comes months after officials said the county would pay more than $54 million this year to outsource more than 1,200 inmates to other jails, including privately-owned facilities in Louisiana and Mississippi with little oversight.
She said deaths inside of the Harris County Jail, including three that happened within a 48-hour span last month, continue to happen and shouldn’t be normalized.
“Obviously when you have a large population, and we’ve hovered around 10,000 people in the jail, there are going to be people who are sick, and there are going to be people who are going to die but I can’t pretend like these are all deaths that couldn’t have been prevented,” Hidalgo said.
The deaths sparked calls for transparency from family members of 35-year-old Ronald Pate, who died June 23 after suffering a sudden medical emergency inside of the jail, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.
The county has worked to address its repeated failure to come into compliance with the state’s minimum jail standards by hiring additional detention officers. During a press briefing last week, Hidalgo said the county has carved out a pathway for detention officers to become patrol officers in order to attract more people to the field.
The problem, she said, is there are just too many people in the jail.
“We found, for example, part of the high population was problematic systems for restoring competency for people that were deemed incompetent to stand trial, so we’ve changed that,” Hidalgo said last week. “We have a new (district attorney) now that is not going to accept charges that ultimately don’t lead to convictions or even indictments, which used to happen with the previous DA.”
RELATED: Harris County DA: 300-plus diverted to mental health programs this year after arrests for low-level offenses
From 2023 through 2024, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards issued 149 notices of noncompliance and referred the Harris County Jail to the Texas Attorney General’s Office earlier this year after repeated violations. Last week, a representative of the Texas Jail Project called on the AG’s office to file an injunction against the Harris County Jail as requested by the state commission in its last two quarterly meetings.
“We’re doing everything we can given the complexity of it,” Hidalgo said.
The county judge also said she worries that stronger immigration crackdowns could deincentivize people in Harris County to continue reporting crimes. She mentioned a recent Houston Chronicle report about police calling ICE agents on a woman who reported domestic violence.
She said the county would lose crucial funding for county services, including domestic violence programs, if it didn’t permit ICE officials to enter the Harris County Jail.
‘A couple more weeks’ for election announcement
On Wednesday, Hidalgo again declined to say if she plans to seek reelection for the county judge’s seat next year. She said it will take her several more weeks to announce her decision on whether or not to seek a third term.
“It is coming soon,” she said. “I don’t like to keep the community guessing. I want to make sure that I am totally confident and all in on my decision.”
RELATED: Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo to announce reelection intentions in ‘coming weeks’
The 34-year-old Democrat, first elected in 2018 and then reelected in 2022, declined to answer questions about her plans to run for a third term in 2026 during a press briefing last Thursday. The county judge has been mum about the 2026 election as a growing number of candidates have announced their plans to seek Hidalgo’s seat — including former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, a Democrat.
Republican Aliza Dutt, the mayor of Piney Point Village — a west Harris County community with just over 3,000 residents — also announced her bid for the county judge’s position last month.
Recent campaign finance reports show Hidalgo has the smallest amount of funds in her campaign among her political counterparts on Harris County Commissioners Court — about $41,000 compared to some county commissioners’ millions.
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