Ed Emmett

Edward Martin Emmett, known as Ed Emmett (born August 14, 1949),^[1] has been since 2007 the administrative county judge of Harris County, Texas. From 1979 to 1987, he was a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives, first from District 78 from 1979 to 1983 and then newly numbered District 127 from 1983 until 1987.

After a twenty-year hiatus from politics, he was elected as county judge to head the five-member Harris County Commissioners Court, based in Houston. Harris is the largest county by population in Texas.

Background

Emmett graduated in 1967 from Bellaire High School. In 1971, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Rice University in Houston. In 1974, he earned his Master of Public Affairs degree from the University of Texas at Austin.^[1]

Emmett and his wife, Gwendolyn O. Emmett, have four children.^[2]

Political life

In 1978 at the age of twenty-nine, Emmett was elected to the first of his four terms in the state House. That year Bill Clements was elected as the first Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction, having narrowly defeated the Democrat John Luke Hill, a former attorney general and Texas Supreme Court justice. By the time Emmett left the House, Clements returned for his second non-consecutive term as governor when he waged a successful comeback against the man who had defeated him in 1982, then Attorney General Mark White.^[3] Since the late 20th century, conservative white voters have increasingly shifted from the Democratic Party into the Republican Party, supporting more candidates at the local and state as well as presidential level.

During his state legislative tenure, Emmett chaired the House Energy Committee and sat as well on the Transportation Committee. In 1989, U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush nominated Emmett to serve on the Interstate Commerce Commission, an appointment that he held for three years. In 1995, the remaining functions of the ICC were transferred to the Surface Transportation Board. Emmett was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate.^[2]

Emmett was first appointed county judge by the commissioners court in 2007 to fill the nearly full four-year term left by the resignation of his predecessor, Robert Eckels, also a transportation planner and a former member of the state House. In his capacity as county judge, Emmett is also the director of the Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. He is the chairman of the Houston-Galveston Area Transportation Policy Council and the county Juvenile Board.^[2]

In 2008, Emmett defeated fellow Republican Charles Bacarisse, the former Harris County district clerk, in the primary election to complete the last two years of the term that Eckels vacated.^[4] He went on to defeat Democrat David Mincberg in the 2008 general election and won a full term in 2010 by defeating former Houston City Council member Gordon Quan. Emmett ran again in the general election held on November 4, 2014, when he defeated another Democrat, Ahmed Robert Hassan, a real estate and mortgage broker.^[5]

Early in the 2014 campaign, Emmett, who had no intraparty rival, donated $90,000 from his own campaign funds to engineer-turned-lawyer Paul Simpson, who in the primary unseated Jared Woodfill, the 12-year chairman of the Harris County Republican Party. Woodfill carried the backing of former chairman Gary M. Polland, State Senator Dan Patrick, the new lieutenant governor, and Paul Bettencourt, the former Harris County tax assessor-collector and Patrick's successor in the District 7 seat in the state Senate. Emmett, however, claims that Woodfill in 2012 took personal credit for the establishment of "victory centers" when the sites were the work of Emmett and the state Republican party.^[4] Simpson supporters claimed that Woodfill had been lackluster in campaign fundraising and had accented "social issues" as chairman, including a lawsuit against the mayor of Houston, Annise Parker, regarding benefits for same-sex couples working for the city.^[6]

Emmett has been awarded numerous awards in his career, including being named Transportation Person of the Year by Transportation Clubs International in 2005, receiving the Presidential "Call to Service" Award from president George W. Bush in 2008, and receiving the 2009 Distinguished Public Service Award from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.

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