Logo by Protect and Serve Texas PAC
A new political action committee, Protect and Serve Texas PAC, dropped a mailer on Amarillo voters this week endorsing several establishment candidates for City Council. Here’s a look at who’s behind this new group that is playing a role in Amarillo’s City Council elections.
Protect and Serve Texas PAC’s website names just three members of the group’s advisory board — Donald Baker, Eric Borton, and Jimmy Rodriguez. The three men hail from Austin, Arlington, and San Antonio, respectively. Borton is also the organization’s treasurer.
While the advisory board does little to inform voters as to who is behind the group, the group’s primary bankrollers play a greater role in explaining who is running Protect and Serve PAC.
According to Transparency USA, Protect and Serve PAC’s top contributor has been Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, who has been blasted for his liberal positions and appointments of Democrats to chair powerful Texas House committees. Phelan has contributed $193,901 to the organization. Behind Phelan, the Houston Region Business Coalition has been the second-largest donor, contributing $140,000.
After these two groups, a number of moderate and liberal Republican candidates for various positions throughout Texas have contributed to the organization. In turn, the organization has made expenditures on behalf of many of these candidates, often within a few thousand dollars of the amount the candidate contributed.
For example, the group reported a contribution of $22,500 from District 70 State House candidate Jamee Jolly in November 2017. A month later, in December, the group made an expenditure to Murphy Nasica & Associates in the amount of $21,294 to directly benefit Jolly’s campaign.
In the January campaign finance report filed by the organization, the group also reported a similar transaction following a donation from House District 118 candidate John Lujan, whose campaign donated $28,000 to the PAC after the PAC made an expenditure of $25,576 to benefit Lujan’s campaign.
The PAC’s next campaign finance report will be due on Friday. At this point, none of the four candidates for Amarillo City Council who have been endorsed by the organization — Dean Crump, Don Tipps, Katt Massey, and Les Simpson — have directly contributed to the organization, nor has any donor from Amarillo. However, voters might get a clearer picture as to whether any contributions from Amarillo went to the organization before it made its unexpected endorsements of the four candidates this week.