By Gene Locke.
Mr. Locke served as City Attorney for the City of Houston and as Harris County
Commissioner for Precinct 1.
I have served as Houston’s City Attorney, and as a member of Harris County Commissioners Court. Both seats taught me the same lesson: the health of a government reveals itself less in what it decides than in how it decides. By that measure, Items 447 and 448 on the Court’s agenda this week deserve far more scrutiny than they have received.
Item 447 calls an executive session under Section 551.074 of the Texas Government Code to evaluate the County Administrator. Item 448, in open session, would take up revising the powers and duties of her office. Read together, the pairing wraps a personnel dispute inside a structural one, asking the Court to redesign an institution to manage a disagreement with the person who runs it.
The Administrator took office in March. No goals were published, no review period defined, no criteria disclosed. Yet, Thursday’s agenda proposes to restructure her office before that assessment is even convened. Serious organizations assess performance first and restructure second, if warranted.
Now consider the restructuring itself, because I write here as a witness, not merely a
commentator. When I served on Commissioners Court in 2016, appointed by a Republican county judge to a caretaker term, this office did not exist. I sat in the management structure the experts had already condemned: more than 20 departments answering directly to five members, with no one positioned to coordinate the whole. An all-Republican Court had commissioned KPMG in 1997 and been told exactly that. A Democratic-led Court commissioned PFM Consulting Group two decades later and heard the identical prescription. I can attest that both studies described the government I served in, and that the office created in 2021 answered a real and daily failure. Tarrant County, Fort Worth’s home turf and Republican-run for decades, adopted the same model in 1988, and Bexar, Dallas, and El Paso Counties rely on it too.
Against that record stands this week’s proposal, resting on the motion of a single member, supported by no study, audit, or independent recommendation, and carrying no stated basis beyond the fact that Items 447 and 448 appear on the agenda. I remember when the Commissioners Court decided against an effort to dissolve this position in April 2025. That effort found no traction, and nothing evidentiary has changed since. What has changed is that in February 2026, after a nine-month national search drawing more than four hundred applicants, the Court voted five to zero to entrust the office to Erica Lee Carter. Not five months later, the same body is asked to begin narrowing the job it unanimously filled.
Some will point to recent personnel turnover as justification. As a lawyer, I would offer the opposite reading. The county created this office precisely so that difficult administrative decisions, including personnel decisions in troubled departments, would be made by a professional accountable to the whole Court, not left to drift. An administrator who exercises the authority the Court granted is performing the office, not exceeding it. If any member believes a specific decision was wrong, the executive session exists for exactly that conversation. What the exception was never meant to become is the staging ground for dismantling the position itself.
If an office built on two decades of independent study can be carved down by one motion, filed months after a unanimous vote, with no evidence and no criteria published, it was never really an institution — only a courtesy, extended at pleasure and withdrawn at convenience. Every future administrator will understand that faithful service offers no protection against displeasing part of the Court.
The Court has honorable paths available. It can decline both items, or better, defer them pending an independent organizational review, the same discipline the county applied in 1997 and 2019, letting evidence, not agenda placement, decide whether any duty needs revising. I sat in the government the old structure produced, and few who did would vote to go back. Harris County built this institution on evidence. Evidence, and nothing less, should be allowed to touch it.