Ector County judge candidate Dustin Fawcett says someone is conducting a whisper campaign to scuttle his candidacy and he hopes that someone is not Judge Debi Hays or her supporters.
Fawcett said Wednesday morning that he has been asked about allegations that he would only serve two years of his four-year term as judge and then would run against State Rep. Brooks Landgraf and that he wants to give a substantial part of the county’s rural sales tax revenues to Medical Center Hospital and the City of Odessa.
Denying those allegations, Fawcett said, “Another false rumor is that I’m running at the behest of a special interest group that promised they would help me get into office.
“I worked on Brooks’ first campaign in 2014. I was his legislative assistant in 2017 and was his regional director in Odessa. We spent countless hours driving back and forth to Austin and we’re very good friends. I reached out to him when I first heard this rumor and we both laughed about it.”
Hays said Wednesday afternoon that she has nothing to do with the rumors and she hoped for clean campaigns in all the primary races because the main thing Odessa and Ector County needs is unity.
Fawcett, 30, was vice president of the Midland-Odessa Transportation Alliance from 2018 till last May and he is now manager of MCH’s ProCare Clinic. Hays is finishing her first term and the voters will decide between the two in the March 1 Republican primary. There is no Democrat in the race.
“I was certainly not recruited by a special interest group or anyone else,” Fawcett said. “My decision to run comes from the work I did in Austin and my work with MOTRAN.”
Asked what he thought the source of the rumors was, Fawcett said, “Somebody who wants to mislead the voters about my intentions.
“I hope they’re not coming from my opponent. I have worked with her over the past several years and she knows why I’m running against her. I’ve seen that the solutions for our problems will not come from Austin or Washington. They’re going to come at the local level through teamwork with our fellow entities and fellow elected officials and that’s something we have not had with her leadership in our county.”
Fawcett has previously said that Hays does not get along with many of the other elected officials in the city and the county and that the fallout from that hurts everyone in Ector County.
Rather than tap the rural sales tax to help the hospital, Fawcett said, he would have voted to grant MCH President-CEO Russell Tippin’s request for $7 million from the $16.1 million that the county got this year from the federal American Rescue Plan Act – an appropriation the U.S. Treasury Department has promised to repeat in 2022.
“I’ve heard that I plan to give over the county sales tax to the city and the hospital,” he said. “That one is extremely false. Any time an entity votes for a tax on themselves to solve issues such as infrastructure, law enforcement and the environment, that makes a big statement in a county like Ector County.
“My intent would be to give money to the hospital not out of the sales tax but out of the American Rescue Plan Act. I have an issue with the commissioners court’s voting to hire a third party to tell them how best to spend those dollars rather than the community deciding how those federal dollars are allocated.
“The city gave the hospital $3 million that will be reimbursed 100 percent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. So essentially the citizens of Ector County are receiving a free $3 million that’s going to health care in our community.”
Fawcett also blamed Hays for Tippin’s inability to state his case more fully than he did in his initial court appearance Aug. 11. “She didn’t allow Russell to give the presentation he had requested,” the candidate said.
“Russell emailed Judge Hays several times and she alone neglected to allow him to be on the agenda.”
Hays said Wednesday afternoon that the questions Fawcett raised “are news to me.
“I don’t know where those statements came from, but they didn’t come from me,” she said. “My hope is that we will show integrity and have a very clean race, not only in my race but in all the races in the county. We do not need division. We need unity.”
She also said the court voted 5-0 to use the American Rescue Act money “where it is most beneficial to all the taxpayers, but there are many strings attached.”
Fawcett is correct that the county voted to hire an outside agency and declined to give any money to the hospitals, which have been on the frontlines in the fight against COVID and also financially hit by the pandemic.
Fawcett is also correct that Tippin asked to be on a county agenda to make the case for MCH receiving funds and was not allowed on an agenda and that the county essentially had nothing to lose by helping the hospitals as they would have been reimbursed any money spent to shore up local healthcare.
Hays said the county did not want to spend it inappropriately and “put a burden on the taxpayers by having to turn around and pay that money back to the federal government.”
Many cities and counties that received the funding, including the City of Odessa and Midland, did give money to help local hospitals devastated by the pandemic.
Hays says she has known Fawcett for many years. “…I don’t have any hard feelings about him wanting to run for county judge because I feel like anyone who wants to put their name on the ballot and run should be respected because it is a big choice to serve the people.”
She also said her decisions during her term were business driven and not emotionally driven.
