All eyes on Ed

As expected, transportation consultant and former state representative Ed Emmett took over as Harris County judge yesterday, replacing outgoing judge Robert Eckels. Emmett won the post on a 4-1 vote of the county Commssioners Court: The only "no" vote came from Commissioner Sylvia Garcia, who said she was voting against Emmett because she preferred to appoint someone who wouldn't seek to be elected to the office next year. Garcia later changed her vote to make the appointment unanimous.

With the transfer of power done, everyone's looking ahead to Nov. 6, 2008, the date of the election to see who will complete the last two years of the term to which Eckels was elected last year. Emmett said he plans to run in the election, and though he'll have the advantage of incumbency, county Republican leaders wonder if that will be enough: At a county GOP Executive Committee meeting Monday, they chastised Eckels for supporting Emmett over a better-known elected county official like District Clerk Charles Bacarisse or Tax Assessor-Collector Paul Bettencourt. "Don't dump our party in the grease," state Sen. Dan Patrick told Eckels at the meeting. "Don't leave us with someone no one knows." (Emmett served in the state House from 1979 to 1987, after which he was an interstate commerce commissioner and head of the National Industrial Transportation League, jobs that kept him in political circles, but not in the public eye in Harris County.)

Patrick has also criticized Eckels for leaving office just months after being elected to another term, meaning the county commissioners, not voters, picked his replacement. Yesterday, Patrick filed a bill in the Senate that would require elections to be held more quickly after county officials resign or die — as the law stands now, elections aren't held for those vacancies until the next general election date (in the case of the Harris County judge position, that's more than a year and a half away). "If the will of the voters is supplanted by the will of an elected official, then we should allow the voters to make their voice heard as soon as practical," Patrick said.