In the recent annals of the Texas Legislature, there are four names worth knowing.
Greg Abbott, the governor.
Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor.
Dustin Burrows, the speaker of the House.
And then there is Paul Bettencourt.
You may not know Bettencourt, the Houston Republican. But he has grown into the position of one of the most powerful senators in state history.
I make that audacious claim because of his work on property tax legislation — work that affects every property owner in the state.
Pre-Bettencourt, I always showed how to lower your property tax by going to a property appraisal hearing to protest your assigned market value.
Turns out there’s another way.
Get Bettencourt to do it.
And that’s what happened.
Property tax cuts
Two years ago, he led the fight to enact property tax reforms by pushing through tax cuts worth $22.7 billion. At the time, he boasted that this might be the largest tax cut by any government in world history. He may be right.
He wasn’t done. He returned to the 2025 Legislature for part two. He led the fight to cut another $10 billion in property taxes.
The numbers tell the story. In 2023, voters approved his plan to increase the homestead exemption from $40,000 to $100,000.
This year, he pushed through an increase in the exemption from $100,000 to $140,000 on school taxes. If approved by voters in November, this should cut taxes for nearly six million Texans eligible for the exemption on their primary residence.
The news is even better for two million Texans who are over-65 or disabled. They would get an additional $60,000 worth of cuts in taxable value. That raises their discount to $140,000 plus $60,000 for an astounding total of $200,000.
This should lower most tax bills an estimated $450 — or more.
Nice work.
75 bills offered
Bettencourt was a sponsor this year of 75 bills, he told me. Most have become law. That’s a batting average most lawmakers can only dream about.
But he used his earned leverage in other ways, too.
Texas lottery scandal
He jumped into the Texas Lottery debacle. Memory refresh: A global betting syndicate bought 25 million Lotto Texas tickets for $1 each before a 2023 drawing to win $95 million. That purchase represented about 90% of all tickets sold.
With 9-to-1 odds like that, the bettors stood a good chance of winning. The massive purchase happened over a mere three days. The betting appears to be in violation of lottery rules.
The syndicate won the $95 million jackpot, or about $58 million after taxes. The Texas Rangers have been ordered to investigate.
Bettencourt asked lottery director Ryan Mindell at a public budget hearing if criminals were using the Texas lottery to launder dirty money.
Mindell refused to answer.
“You know,” Bettencourt said, “I haven’t gotten mad this whole session, but I’m about to.”
He said, “Money laundering is the problem. We can’t gloss over this. We can’t look the other way.” He added, “Normal consumers don’t go and buy $25 million in $1 tickets. ... You’re not recognizing the obvious. I’m going to ask again. Is the lottery involved in money laundering?”
After a pause, Mindell said “I can’t answer that question.”
Bettencourt, his voice rising, demanded to know “what type of leadership he is showing this committee if he won’t answer a simple question like that?”
Uncharacteristically, he pounded on his desk and said, “I do not ever want an agency head ever to come into this building again and have to use neutron weapons ... to get an obvious question answered.”
Not long after that, Mindell resigned. The lottery commission was disbanded, and the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation will take over oversight of the lottery.
Not all celebratory
There was an incident during the recent session that didn’t go so well for Bettencourt.
He called it “my singular worst moment” of the 2025 Legislature.
At the request of the Texas Attorney General’s office, he introduced a couple of bills that could potentially make open records rulings more efficient.
The problem is that many local governments use a tactic to stall information requesters. They file automatic delays by submitting open records requests to the AG’s office. The AG issues rulings about whether certain information can be withheld or not.
Let’s say I’m doing a story about a police incident. I file a records request, but the city involved denies the entire request and sends it to the AG’s office.
In the end, I might get all of the information I seek or some of it or none of it.
Meanwhile, weeks or even months can go by without a definitive answer. For me, I need the information I request right away. But that hardly ever happens, and it goes against the spirit of the Texas Public Information Act.
Bettencourt offered solutions, but he got burned, his singular worst moment.
Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, studied the bills and wrote a commentary that appeared in several newspapers (but not this one). She called Bettencourt’s bills “troubling” and painted a portrait of Bettencourt as someone seeking to stifle open records requests.
Bettencourt insists he was trying to do the opposite — make it easier to get the records, not harder.
How? By punishing governments that make what he calls “bad faith requests” designed to stall. If they do that, the government could face financial penalties and be forced to attend open government training.
If his bills passed (they didn’t), local governments could decide on their own within 10 days what information they want to release.
Shannon told me Bettencourt’s proposal would give local governments too much power to determine what information to release.
His bills, she said, “would flip the Public Information Act upside down. Right now, we’ve got a neutral third party, the attorney general’s office, calling it as they see it.”
Bettencourt insists his proposals were “not against the people. It’s against the people who aren’t giving the information. We’re trying to help people get the information faster.”
He called this “a disaster” that made him look anti-open records when, he said, the opposite is true.
Shannon doesn’t buy it, saying, “Governments don’t just get to automatically withhold information that they don’t want to be released.”
Sadly, it feels like that happens most of the time.