All four of Harris County’s commissioners live high on the hog thanks to campaign cash contributed mostly from employees and leaders of companies that hold no-bid professional contracts to do lucrative work in—you guessed it—Harris County.
A Houston Chronicle investigation, “Pay to Play,” found Harris County commissioners got 79 percent of their campaign cash from donors who received 93 percent of no-bid infrastructure contracts in 2020 to 2021, a process overseen by those very same commissioners. Collectively, that class of contractor donors contributed $5.9 million while four commissioners—two Democrats and two Republicans—gave their firms $310 million worth of work.
Commissioners, of course, have denied that donors’ campaign cash plays a role in those decisions. But Andrew Wheat, research director for corruption watchdog Texans for Public Justice told the Chronicle. “If that’s not a pay-to-play system, what is? Then the term has no meaning at all.”
