Texas’ grid fixer? Mike Collier punches back at GOP during Democratic convention in

AUSTIN — The Democrat who wants to be “the most powerful lawmaker in Texas,” Mike Collier, is running as Mr. Grid Fixer.

While the state Democratic convention that wrapped up in Dallas on Saturday symbolically crowned Beto O’Rourke as its gubernatorial hopeful, Collier, a Kingwood accountant and businessman challenging Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, assigned himself a special role: punching back at GOP state leaders in Austin over the summer’s recent power alerts.

“I’ve worked for three decades in the energy industry,” he said. “From landman to leader in the energy revolution, I know that Texas can either drive the energy transition, or we can be the laggard. Texas must be the leader, and Dan Patrick stands in the way.”

Collier, 61, has been chief financial officer for an oil company, a “Big Four” accounting firm partner who mostly vetted mergers and acquisitions of energy companies and, for the past seven years, a verifier of financial information on renewable energy deals.

In his convention appearances, Collier also signaled his other big thrust. He’s a reformed Republican who’s independent-minded and seeking centrist solutions on matters such as crime and the border. That’s even as he tries to exploit what he describes as grave dismay in rural areas of Texas about Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s ideas about school vouchers, preempting local control over property taxes, and many other issues.

“Just imagine when Dan Patrick is a distant memory of a very bad dream, when the most powerful lawmaker in Texas is someone who builds us up rather than tears us down,” Collier told delegates at the climactic general session on Friday night.

Patrick political strategist Allen Blakemore responded by noting that while the two-term incumbent breezed through his primary in March, Collier was forced to a May runoff — and even then, barely “limped out … winning by less than 50,000 votes.”

“Democrats remain tone deaf to the public as they refuse to secure the border, address crime in our cities and their dogged pursuit of inflationary economic policies,” said Blakemore, adding that Collier will join O’Rourke after the Nov. 8 election as a three-time loser.

Collier, though, cast Patrick as an extremist, even as he lamented a loss of civility.

In a thinly veiled dig at Patrick’s frequent appearances on Fox News, Collier evoked his own semi-rural roots.

“I grew up in Georgetown — back when cattle outnumbered people,” he said. “If your neighbor’s barn caught fire, you put it out. You didn’t ask if they watched CNN or Fox.”

Collier says that this month’s actions by the grid’s operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which repeatedly asked power customers to reduce use amid 100-degree-plus temperatures, proves that Patrick, Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republican leaders failed to remedy shortages laid bare in the devastating Texas freeze 17 months ago.

On Friday, former House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, R-Angleton, insisted Abbott had led the Legislature in “reforms” of the grid.

“There’s been extraordinary success in a short period of time,” Bonnen said. “You’ve had 25 times that you’ve had historic demand on that grid and it has not failed in any way. The lights haven’t gone off.”

On Saturday, Collier responded, “Texans have as much trust in Dennis Bonnen as they do that the Texas GOP fixed the damn grid.”

Instead of a border wall, Collier has said he wants a “laser wall” using ground sensors that would be much cheaper than the wall and fence construction that Abbott and Patrick are leading as part of the $5 billion-plus, two-year “Operation Lone Star” border security initiative.

As in his prior two runs for statewide office — for comptroller in 2014 and lieutenant governor four years ago — Collier is stressing how a property valuation process in which commercial real-estate developers appeal, and set in motion a downward-ratcheting series of revised appraisals, is unfair to homeowners.

“As lieutenant governor, I will close these loopholes so that corporations get back to paying their fair share,” he said. “Dan Patrick’s property tax ripoff — that hurts your bank account and starves your school — stops now!”

While Patrick has called giving low-income parents a taxpayer subsidy for their children’s education “the civil rights issue of our time,” Collier said he firmly opposes school vouchers. He warned that Patrick “already” has said that in next year’s legislative session, he’ll push a “school choice” plan through the Senate.

“He wants to privatize and profitize your public school,” Collier said.

If he’s elected, Collier said he would lead an effort to pass and put before voters a constitutional amendment that would prohibit school vouchers.