Three trying for Williamson County attorney seat
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 11:23 p.m. Sunday, May 13, 2012
Published: 9:26 p.m. Sunday, May 13, 2012
Whoever wins the Williamson County attorney’s race faces the challenge of repairing a fractured relationship with the county Commissioners Court. All three of the Republican primary candidates Dee Hobbs, Jeff Maurice and Rick Kennon have said they can create an amicable working relationship with the commissioners, unlike current County Attorney Jana Duty.
Hobbs, the chief of the criminal division for the Williamson County attorney’s office, said that most of what the county attorney’s office handles are criminal misdemeanor cases, child protective cases and juvenile cases, and that he wants to keep improving the way the county handles those.
“I understand how all the parts of the county attorney’s office work, and this is truly where my passion lies,” he said.
The county attorney’s office is already moving cases faster since switching from paper files to electronic files in 69 percent of its criminal and juvenile cases, Hobbs said. The office is “looking at getting child protective services paperless by January 2013, which will help us with growth over the long haul,” he said.
Kennon, a family law attorney, and Maurice, a civil law attorney, both said they would like the county attorney’s office to focus on handling more of the county’s civil contracts — which it did before Duty’s clashes with commissioners intensified. In the fall of 2010, the Commissioners Court hired its own attorney after deciding not to use an attorney from the county attorney’s office for negotiating and drafting contracts, attending executive sessions and handling public information requests.
“That person reports to the county judge and the commissioners, is not an elected official and not accountable to the voters the way the county attorney’s office is,” Maurice said.
Maurice said that Williamson County government has grown into a “big business” that he can help to handle because as a lawyer for Dell Inc. he helped acquire, develop and build Dell’s Round Rock campus. He lost a race against County Commissioner Ron Morrison as a Democrat in 2010 and now practices law privately in Hutto.
Kennon takes issue with the county “spending thousands of dollars in outside legal fees when we have civil attorneys in the county attorney’s office who should be able to handle those.”
He said he is a “pretty good fit” for the county attorney job because he has criminal and civil experience as well as extensive trial experience from his former jobs as an assistant Travis County attorney and as a lawyer in the attorney general’s office.
Hobbs was the top fundraiser in the campaign with $32,759 in contributions, according to the latest campaign finance reports filed at the end of April. Maurice had raised $10,500, and Kennon had raised $3,200, according to their finance reports.
The biggest contribution to Hobbs, according to his latest campaign report, was $5,000 from retired County Court-at-Law Judge Don Higginbotham.
Maurice said he never would have accepted a contribution from Higginboth-am “given the very unfortunate experience with a troubling sexual harassment lawsuit filed against Judge Higginbotham and the ensuing $375,000 taxpayer-funded settlement.”
The county spent the money to settle a suit filed by two court employees who claimed Higginbotham had sexually harassed them.
Hobbs said he saw nothing wrong with accepting a contribution that Higginbotham had left over from past campaigns. “As far as dealing with Judge Higginboth-am — the man did a good job in the courtroom, and the other aspects had to do with outside the court.”
Hobbs said Maurice lacked experience in criminal law and mental health cases, which the county attorney’s office handles. Maurice said he had criminal law training in law school.
“Dee Hobbs doesn’t have Fortune 500 management experience like I do,” Maurice said.
Contact Claire Osborn 
at 246-7400