Qualifications: What training, experience and characteristics qualify you for this position?
RAINY DAY FUND: How do you think Texas should use its Rainy Day Fund?
EDUCATIONAL SAVINGS ACCOUNTS (ESAS): What oversight measures will you support to ensure that ESAs are funded and administered transparently?
BUDGET MANAGEMENT: How will you ensure budget transparency so taxpayers can easily see how their money is allocated and spent?
PRIORITIES: What do you see as your greatest challenge as Comptroller over the next four years, and how will you address it?
Sarah Eckhardt
Lawyer; Master in Public Affairs; State Senator; Travis County Judge; etc - two decades of experience on and managing professional teams, budgets, tax rates, purchasing and contracts.
The Rainy Day Fund is projected to hit $28B. I would tap the fund immediately to assist low income Texans with health insurance costs in the first year after loss of ACA tax credits. I would also advise the Legislature on the cost avoidance and economic benefits of 1-time Fund investments in water infrastructure, statewide extreme weather communications, and rural public hospital capacity.
I will honestly measure & report the distribution of benefits from the ESA subsidy by family type, educational entity type (public, private, or home school), and region. I will vigorously pursue performance data under the $50M Odyssey contract to administer the program, and seek to rebid or break administration into smaller contracts if Odyssey fails to honestly measure and report.
I will maintain a web-based dashboard providing easy-to-navigate categories of revenue and expenditures with textual and graphic explanations, linked to current and historic reports and analyses on how public funds are and have been invested, who is benefitting most/least today and in the past, and suggestions under discussion for investments to improve the economic outlook for all Texans.
As the 2nd richest state in the world’s richest nation, Texas can afford to meet its obligations to a growing population. The challenges will be honestly estimating the cost of its obligations & bravely pursuing funding to meet them, e.g. the cost of necessary water infrastructure is at least $154B over the next 50 years but the state has pursued funding to meet less than half of this need.
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