Blanket Boondoggle
Happy Thanksgiving, Harris County Taxpayers! Swallow this turkey! Millions are being spent on travel without you getting to know why. We call it a BLANKET BOONDOGGLE. All these county commissioners who have recently claimed “transparency” are simply lying to you.
Blanket Boondoggle
“Take a blanket made for two, now a boy and girl. That’s a game for me and you, now let’s give it a whirl.”
In the ’60s, Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon brought us Beach Blanket Bingo.
That’s a good kind of blanket.
“But then there is the kind of blanket that is used to hide something—sort of like a blanket boondoggle,” Wayne Dolcefino told the camera.
And it’s time to pull the blanket off.
“Now they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so what does this one tell us?”
There’s my buddy, Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, all smiles with New York City’s socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Rodney’s choice of political friends is not surprising… but it is not why we started looking closer into the travel records of Mr. Ellis and all his friends on Commissioners Court.
“We are all stewards of taxpayer dollars. I believe that when we are using public funds, we must be completely transparent and open with the public,” Commissioner Briones said.
We agree.
“Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo wants commissioners to approve thousands of dollars for her travel expenses, and she’s also been pushing to keep taxpayers from knowing exactly where she’s going.”
Remember when Judge Lina Hidalgo wanted to go to Paris, thought she was so important she needed to take security too? Because it was international travel, she needed to get the permission of Commissioners Court, and it didn’t go so well.
“So, motion to approve international travel to Paris, France, for two staff members from the County Judge’s office for $11,650 from June 8th to the 15th, 2025.”
“Second.”
“We have a motion and a second. All in favor?”
“No.”
“Any opposed?”
“No.”
“Motion fails, 3-2.”
“For international travel, there’s little too little to be gleaned from that type of travel. And I certainly don’t want to open it any more than it is for staff delegations which can make things exponentially more expensive. And I’m not supportive of anything that makes the process less transparent,” Adrian Garcia said.
“The current travel policy should be scrapped and replaced with some accountability, because right now millions in travel expenses are going out the door without any public scrutiny,” Dolcefino told the camera.
I remember when every trip had to be approved. That was before the swollen county government days.
Instead, now commissioners approve blanket requests for travel—
$25,000,
$50,000,
$100,000,
even more, all at the same time.
The video images are still searing—hundreds of unarmed, peaceful protestors beaten with batons and tear-gassed as they marched to Montgomery, Alabama, for voting rights decades ago.
In March, the 60th anniversary of that Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, was remembered.
Look, there’s Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, just a couple of rows behind Maxine Waters and Al Sharpton.
And you know who paid for the trip? You did.
Seven hundred dollars for airfare and hotel.
“No one questions that Bloody Sunday was a horrible injustice, and I don’t spite Rodney Ellis for wanting to go to commemorate the anniversary. But why are Harris County taxpayers paying for it?” Dolcefino told the camera.
In July, Ellis posted on Facebook about the Justice Journey as it bussed through Houston on its way to New Orleans,
a protest against ICE enforcement.
Rodney didn’t get on that bus here; instead, he flew to New Orleans, allegedly for the “Airport Minority Advisory Council.”
Harris County doesn’t run the airport.
A lawsuit by the Attorney General accuses Ellis and other commissioners of misusing money for illegal immigrant legal defense.
Why are taxpayers dishing out 800 bucks for his plane ticket?
Besides, this guy doesn’t need to use tax money for political travel.
His campaign war chest is more than 7 million dollars, fueled by contractors who get county business.
In the first half of 2025, Ellis collected donations of more than 800 thousand dollars.
Way too often, Ellis is making taxpayers pick up the tab for trips that appear to be of a political nature.
Over the next year, Rodney Ellis has already been approved to spend 150 thousand dollars for his department’s travel.
But he’s second to Precinct 4 Commissioner Leslie Briones, who has 200 thousand authorized for the coming year—money that has no accountability attached to it, because there is no public discussion of the trips, no review of whether the trip was really necessary. And it’s time to make that the standard.
“We go to places like College Station for our continuing education. We go to places like Austin for licensing of our people to apply insecticides and other things. So it’s directly county-related,” Tom Ramsey said.
Ramsey votes against any out-of-state blanket requests for county departments, but he is not voting against requests made by other commissioners.
“I could start getting involved in everybody’s business and everybody’s precinct, but then they’d get involved in all my business,” Tom Ramsey said.
Ellis is a big wig in the National Association of Counties (“NACo”).
He’s also active in the National Organization of Black County Officials, called “NOBCO.”
That explains some of the trips, although the value to Harris County taxpayers is suspect.
But when we looked at Precinct 1’s airfare and hotel bills, we couldn’t determine the business purpose for 21 trips between April 30, 2024, and August 1, 2025.
So we dared to ask the commissioners for an explanation.
Ellis did not provide details—kind of like “nun-ya business.”
He gave no justification at all for 2 of the trips.
The other 19 were justified simply by a copy of the Precinct One blanket travel authorizations, with no other explanation.
Nine trips to Austin, five trips to D.C., trips to New Orleans, L.A., Atlanta, New York City, and Chicago—and no explanation why we needed to spend our tax money on that.
That’s not transparent, and exactly why the county needs to do away with blanket travel requests.
“Blanket agreements—the accountability—they’re very difficult to deal with,” Tom Ramsey said.
One of Commissioner Ellis’s trips to Austin lines up with his social media post about his sponsorship of a legislative aide program at the state capitol.
Great. He is a former senator, and if he wants to sponsor programs like that, go for it.
But I don’t want to pay for it.
Another travel expense for a hotel in Washington, D.C., lines up with his social media post about grooming college juniors for careers in public policy.
Go for it, but I don’t want to pay for it.
A county-paid trip to Chicago was for a National Bar Association convention.
Yeah, Ellis is a lawyer, but how does going to that convention benefit Harris County taxpayers?
And those photos with Mamdani are from August, and the good news: we could find no evidence that Harris County taxpayers paid a dime for the trip. I’m glad.
“I’m wanting to speak with Mr. Ellis. Can you ask him to come over and chat with me?” Andrea Palacio said.
“We’re about to start a meeting at 9 o’clock, so I need to share. But when there’s a break, he might have time to chat,” Erica Lee said.
We’ve asked repeatedly to talk to Commissioner Ellis, and you know by now that he ignores us—he really likes me.
But commissioners should ditch this blanket policy and start justifying all these trips in public. Departments should do it too, because right now it seems to be a free-for-all.
“Well, when you look at the ability to go after the fact and document what’s done, I think at the end of the day, it’s not happening,” Tom Ramsey said.
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