Harris County Commissioner Lesley Briones, Precinct 4, speaks during the opening ceremony for Tejano Center’s new La Tiendita at Bayland Park on Friday, Nov. 22, 2024 in Houston.
Elizabeth Conley/Staff Photographer
Listen to this tale of two eras — and two very different versions of Harris County.
In our current era, we have Democrat Lesley Briones. A Laredo native and Yale-educated lawyer elected in 2022 after defeating Republican incumbent Jack Cagle, she arrived at our screening with a stack of dense, hand-written notes and answered our every question head-on, barely pausing for air across nearly two hours. Polished, prepared and by no means taking this “blue tsunami” election year for granted.
County Commissioner, Precinct 4: Lesley Briones
Lesley Briones ★★★1/2 — The tax hike was frustrating, but voters should still back this Democrat’s vision of a robust and professional county government.
Steve Radack ★★★ — This Republican was a commissioner for decades, but his idea of county government is strikingly outdated and he lacks specifics about what he’d do in office.
In stark contrast stands former Republican Commissioner Steve Radack. Even during his 32 years on the court representing Precinct 3, he seemed like a man from a simpler time of milkshakes at the diner and soap box derbies (we’ll come back to that). Radack earned our frequent endorsements for expanding parks and trails and reforming toll road collections. But sitting across from us this time — splayed out comfortably as he held court — he more than ever transported us to a bygone era.
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Harkening back to the days of Commissioner Everett Agustus “Squatty” Lyons, when construction crews camped in the woods and used mules to haul equipment, Radack is out of sync with the modern, urbanized Harris County of 2026.
Rather than laying out a forward-looking vision, Radack spent much of the time haranguing Briones. He brought no notes. Instead, he fanned out on the table a heap of Precinct 4 mailers to allege that Briones used taxpayer money for campaign promotion. Truth is, nearly every elected official blurs the line between engaging constituents and self-promotion. Glossy fliers with perhaps a few too many glamor shots aren’t enough to convince us she is guilty of profligate spending.
Steve Radack, a candidate running for Harris County Commissioner, speaks during a campaign rally for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, at Glorious Way Church in Houston, Monday, Sept. 21, 2026.
Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle
He also dinged Briones for bureaucratic bloat — a fairer critique, perhaps, given she led Commissioners Court in giving her team’s top earners eyebrow-raising compensation boosts. She argues these staffers are delivering more services for constituents.
For a man with decades of experience in county government, Radack’s arguments might as well have been copied from a Facebook comment page.
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Nonetheless, we do share at least some of Radack’s concerns about Briones and the current Commissioners Court. One big concern above all — higher property taxes.
When we grilled Briones on the budget, the law enforcement raises and the resulting historic property tax increase, she stood by her vote. She rightly noted that Harris County is being squeezed by short-sighted state decisions, including refusing to expand Medicaid and passing a last-minute but widely supported tax exemption that stripped $8 billion off county rolls. She also credited the county with working hard to trim the fat anyway, partnering with the Boston Consulting Group to develop a five-year financial plan, targeting line-by-line cuts and department consolidations while implementing a hiring freeze.
Still, it’s hard to reconcile that painstaking work with the generous, five-year salary boost for law enforcement expected to add $292 million in annual expenses by 2030. Her defense is that there would have been an exodus of trained officers if the county had not matched the recent raises at the Houston Police Department.
The incumbent, at least, was clear-eyed about the tough pill she’s asking residents to swallow by forcing the average homeowner to pay roughly $193 more. She owned the politically risky choice, calling it the “responsible” call relative to Mayor John Whitmire’s shrewd move to kick the higher-taxes can down the road.
Briones, 46, frames her approach as a “both-and” philosophy: nailing the day-to-day basics while future-proofing the county for the next generation. As she put it: “The old administrations, they were kind of governing for the now, and my philosophy is we have to — and maybe this is the mom in me — but we have to be governing for 25, 50, 75 years down the road.”
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That costs money. Frankly, we haven’t seen evidence of widespread waste, or bold countywide investments. Mostly the bigger budget appears to be for paying higher salaries and health care costs. Boring, not woke. Every CEO in Houston is dealing with that type of inflation.
Radack, by contrast, waxed poetic about a county government that was far leaner and simpler. We’d try to give you more of his specific ideas but when we asked for them, he’d go off on another folksy spiel down memory lane.
He does take pride in having slashed Commissioners Court meetings to just 24 a year, and he bragged about getting things done solely through phone calls. Look, we hate meetings too. That method probably worked fine if you had access to his direct line, but Radack, 76, first took office in 1988, when most of Harris County looked like him and was less than half its current size. Not to mention when there weren’t more than 2 million residents in the unincorporated county, relying on commissioners as their key local government.
For decades, Radack’s Republican-majority court prioritized unbridled real-estate development over robust drainage infrastructure. The tragic human and economic toll of the 2016 Tax Day floods, Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and all the other supposedly once-in-500-year events exposed the dangerous consequences of that deferral.
Radack infamously remarked then that some residents “enjoy floods” because they get new cars and home remodels out of the deal. Though he later walked it back to support flood-control tax funding, the comment underscored a deep disconnect from the issues that matter most to Houstonians.
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And now we return to Radack’s aforementioned love of soap box derby. The man still feels the sting of the Houston Chronicle’s coverage 15 years ago of one of his pet projects, the Hockley Derby Park. Championed with grand promises of drawing international crowds, the project’s costs ballooned from a modest few thousand dollars to more than $2 million. Radack boasts that his plan was clever, and that repurposing of excavated dirt for the soap box hill was comparatively cheap. He claims that it’s a lively place today. We checked with the Greater Houston Soap Box Derby nonprofit. The president told us the park still serves only about 50 local families for a handful of annual events.
Steven Stolz prepares to race the Hockley Community Center Hill soap box derby track.
Janice Smith/For the Chronicle
Every county commissioner runs their own fiefdom — kings and queens of their own hills, so to speak. In that sense, Briones and Radack are more alike than different.
While we appreciate Radack’s consistent focus on building amenities for kids over funding “playpens for millionaires,” as he put it, the job of county commissioner demands far more. It requires making tough decisions to benefit the most residents.
Briones is bureaucratic, but bureaucracy done right has its place. When she took office, she recalled, ditch maintenance in Precinct 4 was still tracked in physical journals and paper maps highlighted with markers. She dragged operations into the 21st century with an OpenGov data-keeping system to meticulously track 6.9 million linear feet of drainage ditches — the distance from Houston to Detroit — along with thousands of potholes and road miles.
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And like Radack, she has prioritized parks, but in a more thoughtful way. Her office is working with the Gulfton community to transform Burnett Bayland Park. Using public and private funds, the beautiful “signature park” will be paired with affordable housing to ensure it won’t displace longtime residents. She is also focused on workforce apprenticeship programs, particularly to prepare county residents for the disruptions and realities of artificial intelligence.
It’s true that, in some ways, Briones and her Democratic colleagues have gone too far in their corrections. Since Democrats took control of the court, for example, public meetings have turned into grueling, multi-hour marathons. Yet the solution isn’t to regress to a closed-door, opaque good-ol’-boys’ club.
Harris County faces monumental, compounding challenges: a growing population, an affordability crisis, uncompensated healthcare and recurring flood risks. Briones understands the urgency.
She is building a resilient county for the future — not a romanticized past. We urge voters to re-elect her. (And if you try out the soap box derby, send us a photo.)
Who are you voting for in this race?
Did the editorial board get it right? Let us know.
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Allie L
Houston, TX
10/09/26
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Spring, TX
10/09/26
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