INGRAM, Texas – Gov. Greg Abbott said the recovery from the Hill Country floods will be the state’s fastest from any storm in a one-on-one interview with KSAT 12 on Saturday.
KSAT reporter Avery Everett sat down with the governor after he presented checks from the Vaqueros del Mar Texas Flood Relief Fund to families impacted.
In our conversation, Abbott said the state is committed to ensuring money is provided to rebuild every primary residence damaged in the Hill Country.
Abbott met with families after presenting the checks to ask what more the state needed to do to help families recover.
The governor also said he does not understand why cities and counties are considering raising property taxes to fund recovery efforts.
Abbott said that the state will ensure there are funds to cover the cost, and said lawmakers are making efforts to prevent future increases after a disaster.
In addition to discussing the recovery effort, Abbott defended Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting, which was one of the first bills passed during the ongoing special session.
The governor said the state’s actions were completely legal and focused on ensuring adequate representation.
Abbott also said he expects an overturning of the injunction of a Texas law requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms.
Read the full exchange between KSAT reporter Avery Everett and Gov. Greg Abbott below:
Q: How is the state working to minimize the red tape that people have to go through to get help?
A: Our goal is to help these people rebuild as quickly as possible.
First, the worst tragedy, of course, is the loss of life. Then there’s the loss of all these homes that people used to live in.
We want to make sure that they’re able to rebuild their home, not next year, but next month. We were here to hand out checks, many of which were $25,000, which doesn’t pay for it all, but it’s a starter check.
The commitment is to make (sure) that every dollar is gonna be provided to rebuild every home of every primary residence of anybody who got damage in this entire region.
That process is going to happen faster in the aftermath of this storm than any storm ever in Texas history.
Q: Some communities are considering using a higher property tax rate to cover expenses after the flood. Is there anything the state can do to step in to avoid citizens having to pay more?
A: I would say with all the resources being provided by the state as well as by charitable organizations, I don’t see any reason for them to raise property taxes.
They haven’t calculated in everything that the state of Texas is providing them.
By the way, in addition to the more than $200 million that the State has already provided in this session, that is about to end, there’s going to be about $300 million more that will be addressing the needs of these communities.
But in addition to that, we are looking to roll back this ability of local jurisdictions from being able to raise property taxes because of a hazardous type of event like this.
We saw it happen in Harris County, where they raised property taxes. We don’t want that to happen to the citizens here who have already suffered already because of these massive floods.
Q: Speaking of the special session, what makes California’s redistricting plan different than the state of Texas?
A: For one, it requires a constitutional amendment, and already an overwhelming majority of Californians have said they don’t want it.
For another, it’s a joke because California’s already heavily gerrymandered. There are hardly any Republican members of Congress there, and so I think that if they were to draw lines any further that eliminated those last few Republican members of Congress, they would be in clear violation of the Constitution, and whatever map they pass would likely be stricken down by a court.
Q: I’ve seen conversations at the national level talking about this redistricting battle, saying that this could set a dangerous precedent for partisan politics in the future. Do you share that concern?
A: It’s all about politics, and that’s what it has been every decade. What Texas is doing happens to be perfectly legal.
There are some states that either prohibit mid-decade redistricting or they require it to be done through a constitutional amendment.
In Texas, we’ve done mid-decade redistricting before, and we’re just doing it again. This time, however, there’s a different reason.
And that’s because there was a court decision last year that said coalition districts were not required. Coalition districts were built into the maps that were drawn in 2021. So, now we have the ability to draw maps without coalition districts.
Also, we saw in the aftermath of the presidential election that the large swaths of the state of Texas that were represented by Democratic members of Congress actually voted Republican in the presidential elections.
We know Republicans are trapped in Democratic congressional districts. We want to free them from that entrapment and allow them to have a member of Congress who truly represents their values.
Q: In San Antonio this past week, a federal judge temporarily blocked a new Texas law that you signed for 11 school districts. It would have required the 10 commandments to be posted in all public school classrooms. What was your reaction to that?
A: I know it’ll be overturned.
I was the attorney general who argued at the United States Supreme Court in defense of the Ten Commandments monument displayed on the Texas Capitol grounds.
We won for a very simple reason, and that’s for the same reason why in the United States Supreme Court, the Ten Commandments are displayed 59 times, and that’s because part of the Ten Commandments is the original law that began in the history of the world.
What we showed in winning the Ten Commandments case is that we are allowed to display to the public everything that’s been a part of shaping what Texas is and the Texas legal system is, and that the Ten Commandments fulfill part of that mission.
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