Story and photos by Steve Nash – Special Contributor to BrownwoodNews.com

Larry Traweek and Brandon Byars, candidates for Precinct 4 county commissioner, spoke at a mini-forum Friday hosted by the Brown County Republican Women’s Club, held at the Brownwood Country Club.

Traweek and Byars face each other in the May 26 Brown County Republican Party runoff election. Early voting is May 18-22.

The candidates answered questions read by club president Suellen Dammann, including:

Question: It doesn’t look like our county is cash poor. But I understand that we need to keep reserves and everything. So tell me, how do you decide when to spend reserves or when to finance when you buy something?

Traweek: You still reserve when you have an emergency. You still reserve sometimes when you’re having growing pains.

We just bought a building for growing pains, but that’s when you still reserve. We’ve still got enough reserve for the few months that were required.

And then at the end of five years, through Kenneth Hiller and John Deere and all of them, you can turn it back in or buy it then.

***

Question: According to the auditor’s report, Precinct 4 fund has cash on hand of over $15,000 and a CD worth over $900,000. Can you tell us what the long-term plan for the fund’s CD is? Well, as you know, I’ve got Shamrock Shores and shambles out there from water improvement and also fiber optics.

Traweek: That’s going to take a lot of money. You know, when I took office, you could pave a mile of road for $50,000 or less. Now it takes over $100,000 to pave that road, you know, if you start from scratch.

We’ve saved to do some bigger projects. That’s the reason we have that much money in our accounts. Because my budget is $600,000. You have to save up a little here and there.

That’s been accumulating for a long time. Plus, we’ve got some more money from grants.

***

Question: If you’re elected Precinct 4 commissioner, how will you decide when to spend reserves or when to finance?

Byars: Spending the reserves — Larry mentioned about Shamrock Shores area. Of course, it’s no secret that was one of the first things that I decided, one of the reasons I started to run.

I think first thing to be able to spend those reserves would be to go looking at grant stuff to fix all that stuff. And I know Larry has mentioned many times that we’re going to go fix the roads out there after the water contractor gets done. But I’ve done a lot of USDA contracts.

I’m actually a government contractor, and I’ve read all those things. And every USDA contract I’ve ever seen has a clause in there that says if you screw it up, you fix it. And so whoever the contractor is out there is supposed to fix that stuff, that money shouldn’t come out of our reserves.

That should be coming from the contractor. They should be making them fix that stuff as they go along. That’s usually in the contract.

And as far as spending those reserve monies, if you can couple, instead of spending $100,000 on going to fix something, if you see a project that needs to be done.

***

Question: We’re really blessed to have a lot of our county roads paved. How are non-asphalt roads prioritized to be paved, or are they?

Traweek: They’re not. We can’t afford it. A truckload of asphalt, and it’s fixing to get worse, is $3,500 a load now. And with the oil going up, we can’t afford anymore. With the tax, with the budget that we get, we can’t even keep the roads up. Back when they were paved, they pulled the bar ditches up, and they paved.

We’re paying for it now in repairs, and we can’t afford to repave all of them. So the base roads, as long as I’m there, are going to stay base roads.

***

Question: How important will paving be to you?

Byars: I learned a long time ago when I started building transmissions that you can fix it two ways.

You can fix the effect or you can fix the cause. And the cause of not having paved roads is not having the money. So the only way to fix that not having the money issue is to either raise taxes or go find the money somewhere else.

And instead of taking the money that we have to fix and repair the roads, if we took that money and used it as a matching fund for a grant that’s in the millions, then you have the money to go pave a road that’s not paved or fix a road that needs to be fixed or whatever. I mean, all the funds that we get from the state, most grant funds to pay are from the Federal Highway Administration. That’s federal money.

The money that comes in that we get is allowance like from the CTIA funds or the road and bridge funds that they send us through the oil and gas tax, gas tax is what it is. That money can be used as a matching fund for federal grant money. And you can turn $100,000 into a million dollars if it’s a 10% match.

***

The candidates gave concluding statements

Traweek: We chase grants every day. We’ve got a grant writer that hunts grants every day. These millions of dollars are not out there.

If they were, we would be after them. The state gives us some re-ground asphalt every year. But grants just don’t grow on trees.

Like you said, it’s a matching fund. But we’ve got, in the last 10 years, over $10 million or about $10 million in grants. I got $7.3 in 2015, $7.3 million.

Biggest grant, but FEMA’s not really a grant. It’s a disaster. They give you 75% of the money that you asked for. You pay the 25%, and 25% of $73 million is a lot of money. It was hard to come up with all that.

They are grants, but they don’t grow on trees. Again, infrastructure, the equipment, everything has just gone sky high. You go buy stuff every day, and it’s doubled in price over the last few years. So if you let me, I’m going to do the best I can with what we’ve got to work with. The last 20 years, the court has dropped the tax rate several times.

Brown County is fixing to start growing. It’s already started growing. It’s going to take lots of money to keep everything, the infrastructure, and then feed the needy and all that. It’s expensive. Anybody that promises they won’t raise taxes hasn’t been there.

Byars: Like I said, every problem has a cause, and the cause of our problem is money. Everything, it boils back to money, even in your house and in your own life. The commissioners that are there, they’ve done an exceptional job fixing and doing the stuff they got with the amount of money, which I call an allowance, and that’s not really fair. It is a grant, but it’s what they call a formula grant.

It comes out regardless. You don’t have to apply for it. It’s a formula set up by the state, and that money comes to the county through that formula.

And what I want to look for, and I know it’s out there, and there’s proof in Brown County that it’s out there. There’s a small group of people, about 3,000 people, that have gotten $8.3 million in grants in the last four years, and one of them was a TxDOT grant to build a sidewalk. $8.3 million, and it was the city of Early that got it, and that’s not formula grants.

That is all just competitive grant money, stuff that they applied for, they fought for. So the money’s there. There’s hundreds of different grants that you can get, and a lot of them come with tags and stipulations and stuff.

Most of it’s auditory and procedural and things like that, but as far as fixing the issue that we have, like I said, they’ve done great for what they’ve got, but I think there’s a lot of stuff out there we can get, a lot of grant money out there. I know it’s there because I’ve seen it. I’ve actually dealt with it.

I’ve done it, and just different procedures. And I don’t think that what these guys or even what Larry does is wrong. I think it just can be done different and can be done better.

Just like the city of Early and a lot of other towns, if you just go pull up and see how many dollars worth of grant money all the counties around us have gotten, Brownwood has never gotten a competitive grant. We haven’t applied for any competitive grants. We haven’t applied for community development block grants.

The city of Early has. The city of Brownwood has. The county has not.

The grant writer, he can do it, yes. I’ve worked with some grant writers, and the grant writer doesn’t know that this bridge, that bridge, this bridge needs to be fixed. Somebody’s got to go out there and say, I’ve got 15 bridges that need reflectors or needs to be fixed or whatever that’s going to cost X amount of dollars to retop them.

You’ve got to put all that information down. You’ve got to call contractors, figure out what it’s going to cost. You’ve got to have a dollar amount.

Once you get that dollar amount, you can take it to the grant writer and say, here, this is the grants that I looked up. This is what will fit this. This is how much money we can get from each one of these.

We’ve got this much money to match the funds. Some of them have zero matching. And then you hand all that stuff to him, and he writes it up.

And that’s what the grant writer should be doing. But somebody’s got to take him all that information. Somebody’s got to go out and actually look at it, be looking at it.

Like our equipment, you know, everything’s gone up. We don’t have anybody in Brown County that fixes our county equipment. It all goes somewhere else.

We pay somebody else to do it. And when you pay somebody else to do it, they’re making a profit. So instead of paying someone else their profit, I think we should have somebody or a barn here somewhere in this county.

There’s people here that know how to do it. Our money situation is why stuff doesn’t get fixed and we can’t do anything. You fix why it’s broken, the rest will go in place.