Cindy Siegel - Harris County GOP Chair Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Six plenty two our time here in Houston's morning News.
All right, we all know who Lena Hildago is, so
the things that she does are not a surprise to
me or to you or to our next guest, who's
there's County GOP chair Cindy Segal. But it sure is
ripe that somehow there's no money for at least in
her mind, no money for Deputy Racis, although thanks to

(00:23):
the rest of the Commissioner's Court, the deputies will be
getting their wage parody. But there's plenty of money five
million dollars in fact, to lobby the state. Cindy Siegel,
the Harris County GOP chair, joins us. You know, I
don't know about you, but I think one of the
things that we could do to immediately improve politics in
the state of Texas is just to ban all lobbying

(00:43):
in Austin. Could we consider doing that?

Speaker 2 (00:47):
I wish we would, Jimmy. I mean, actually, it's been
a priority for many years with the Republican Party state
as well as Here's County Republican Party and our Republican
elected officials, but we just can't seem to get it done.
You know, our governments pay millions and millions of dollars

(01:11):
to lobbyists to go lobby for things that are not
necessarily you know, in favor of the taxpayer or the voters. Uh.
And we see that particularly with Harris County and Lena Hidalgo.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah, what kind of things does Alena hill Doggo send
lobbies to do. What are the things that Harris County
is asking for?

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Well, you name it. They have all their little pet projects.
You know, they've been opposed to bail re form. You know,
they don't like the fact that the state keeps trying
to shut down them raising our tax rate arbitrarily. You know,

(01:55):
you can look at the last session that they had
and when we were fighting to get the elections after
that horrible election cycle in twenty twenty two when they
didn't have paper ballots, we fought really hard to return
the elections to the county clerk versus a bureaucrat election administrator.

(02:19):
They use lobbyists for that, and you know, quite frankly, Jimmy,
it's hard to tell what they're spending their money with
lobbyists for. They're not transparent. There's no accountability. You can't
Commissioner Ramsey can't anything get the information.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Yeah, it's pretty bad, isn't it when you're serving on
the Commissioner's court and you still can't get access to
the basic information you need to do your job. They're
spending somewhere in the neighborhood of five million dollars in
all this, and you brought up transparency. My thought is
that probably what they're spending the money on is to
try to prevent things like transparency from happening. They don't

(02:59):
want us to know what there's spending the rest of
their money on, No.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
They don't. They they want to be able to cover
up their little pet you know, their pet projects. You know,
it's it's all about these social programs. It's not about
the basic function of Harris County government, and that's the
safety of our citizens. It's safety, health and welfare and

(03:28):
safety should be first. And the fact that you know,
Lena didn't want to pay the commissioner or pay the
constables of pay raise just says it all. And she
has the audacity and we've all heard her say it like, oh,
she really was for the deputy. She said that the
last election cycle when she ran that she was supporting

(03:51):
law and order, and you know, I was raised to
believe and told you know your actions speak lives out
of them words, and the voters need to remember it.
November twenty, twenty.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
Sixth Amen to that, Cindy Siegel. Thank you as always
appreciate it. Harris County GOP Chair, Cindy Siegel, It's six
twenty six