With early voting starting Monday, Ector County Judge Debi Hays and her opponent Dustin Fawcett have been busy campaigning and trying to answer questions voters may have as to their qualifications and track records.
Dustin Fawcett
Fawcett, 30, thinks of his youth as a positive.
“What I would say is in my youthfulness, I have energy and a passion for the community,” Fawcett said. “I have been somebody who has stood up and fought for the Permian Basin. I have fought for the Permian Basin for the past five years. I’ve fought against TxDOT and their so-called energy experts.”
Experience
Fawcett studied political science at Millsaps College before dropping out his senior year and going to work at Delta Fuel where he managed a fleet of over a dozen drivers for a little over a year. He worked on Rep. Brooks Landgraf’s campaign and then spent 15 months working as his legislative aid in the Texas House of Representatives. After that he spent a little over three years as vice president of the Midland-Odessa Transportation Alliance before leaving to become the regional director of the Better Business Bureau.
The BBB doesn’t allow employees to run for public office, so he took a job as the manager of MCH’s ProCare Clinic in May 2021.
Although his detractors say he doesn’t have management experience, Fawcett begs to differ.
In addition to managing the fleet at Delta Fuel, he’s in management now, he said.
”I’m in a management role right now. Currently, I have 12 employees in my clinic, and I have four doctors. One’s a family medicine doctor practitioner, one’s endocrinologist. One’s a vascular surgeon and then one’s an electrophysiologist. So I manage those four doctors as well as our front staff, in our, in our nursing staff, which is a combination of medical assistants and nurses and all of that,” Fawcett said.
He’s responsible for managing schedules and he makes sure “that our clinic staff is going through the right workflows and procedures..and then also to ensure that the patients have a strong visit and they feel comfortable in the hospital, especially nowadays with you know, everybody’s concerns.”
The clinic and the fuel company taught him a great deal, he said.
“How many people do you know have had 600 employees under them and have handled a 60, now $80 million budget? Very few people prior to getting in government have that, but I call on those two experiences. You learn what are people’s strengths and and you cater to their strengths. And you don’t focus on the weaknesses, you utilize their strengths because what some people’s weaknesses are could be other people’s strengths,” Fawcett said.
Communication
Having good communication skills is a critical skill for a successful county judge and Fawcett believes he has them and his opponent doesn’t. If elected, he intends to have weekly department head meetings so he can learn the ins and outs of their jobs and remain on top of things. He’s already met with several key county employees, he said.
”I like knowing how the sausage is made. A lot of people like the final product. They like to enjoy the sausage but they don’t know how the sausage is made and I bring that up also because I make my own sausage with my family, venison sausage. We make 400 pounds a year, it’s an old family tradition in the Hill Country. How the sausage is made is important,” Fawcett said.
During the last election, Fawcett said he went to the public test of the ballots of the county’s voting machines.
”I saw exactly how these machines work from the very beginning to the end, how the ballot machines work, and then how the tally machines work and all the different redundancies, the securities that go into it, and that’s important to know exactly how government works,” Fawcett said. “I’ve also made trips to the district clerk’s office and to the county clerk’s office, was able to ask not only the actual clerks, but their employees. What they thought were some of their successes, and what works. And then also some things that they that you know, what can we work on to be better into the future?”
To his way of thinking, it’s not just about management, though. It’s about being a team player, Fawcett said.
”I played football for 16 seasons and played football in college and so that’s something I go to a lot is, you know, you have to be on a football team. You have to work as a team in order to succeed and there has to be communication. There can’t be finger pointing,” Fawcett said. “If you’re not on the same page and communicating, then you’re gonna have a failure as a team. You could have a tremendous success as an offense, you could put up 40,48 points. But if your defense doesn’t do well, and they score 52, then you lose. And so all facets have to be on the same page, in the same mission.”
Fawcett said communication has to extend outside the county, too. The county judge needs to be in constant contact with state level officials and the city powers that be.
“In the Texas Constitution it states that the county judge is the head of emergency management and I think that role was abdicated during COVID,” Fawcett said. “I think that a lot of it was downplaying of what actually was happening. And I think that it was not taken as seriously as it needed to have been and also there wasn’t as much research into what was taking place as what needed to have been. I think you could tell that the education and specifically of my opponent on the issues was entirely at a level that is not up to the standard that Ector County residents deserved. I think that we saw with the first day of the interview at UTPB, how big of a struggle that was. When they pressed for any information, she had none.”
He already has a relationship with many of the people he would deal with as county judge, Fawcett said.
”I think that’s the greatest difference between us. I am willing to work with our city officials, our hospital boards, the Odessa College board and our school district board,” Fawcett said. “I’ve worked with all of them on a lot of things.”
Being aggressive
If elected, Fawcett said he would be an aggressive advocate for the county and he already has a track record showing this to be true.
While at MOTRAN, Fawcett said he proved the Texas Department of Transportation was severely undercutting the number of trucks traveling through the Permian Basin. The number of trucks goes into funding formulas and Fawcett said he began to wonder why there never seemed to be enough money to maintain the roadways in the area.
“People say ‘I don’t know about his leadership skills.’ You should see me in those meetings. Well, you don’t have to. You’re gonna see the funding coming down the road,” Fawcett said.
Fawcett said he was a “critical part” in the discussions about expanding Interstate 20 and Highway 302 as well.
Personal life
Thanks to the internet, people have quickly learned Fawcett was arrested for driving while intoxicated in 2016 and his fianceé, Jennifer Hubert, filed a paternity suit against him in 2019. As for the paternity suit, Fawcett said Hubert was simply trying to protect the best interests of their oldest child as they were living in separate cities at the time and their relationship was uncertain. They now have a second child and plan to marry in May.
As for the DWI, Fawcett said he made a mistake. He entered into a pretrial intervention program and after successfully completing it, the charge was dismissed.
“People say that the Lord works in mysterious ways. I say he works in magnificent ways. Had that mistake not happened I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am now. I own that mistake. I would say that it was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life. Since then, I’ve been sober,” Fawcett said.
Without that mistake, Fawcett said he never would have met Hubert or had his daughters.
”There’s a reason why their middle names are Grace and Faith, because it re-energized my faith. It re-energized my focus on the future and it really made me sit down and contemplate what type of impact I want to have on this world,” Fawcett said.
Fawcett already wears a ring on his left ring finger because, he said, they already approach life as though they are married.
“The reason why we have the May date is because my grandparents were married in May at this very same church in Harper. My great grandparents all attended. Here is a historic church within our family and that was the date that we decided would be a wonderful date,” Fawcett said. “A lot of folks pushed to have us go have a shotgun marriage prior to this election. And they were saying, ‘Well, you’re gonna lose votes.’ Well, that’s OK. And I respect people’s opinions on that. But how much more disingenuous would it be to purely go get married? And something that’s not full of the Holy Spirit?”
Goals
Among his goals, if elected, is to figure out what to do about the county’s aging courthouse. Hays promised to come up with a solution to address the 1930s era building, but has failed to do so, he said.
He’d like to have public discussions about what residents would like to see in a courthouse and where it should be located. There have been some discussions about building a new courthouse by the jail on the south side.
“The first thing is we need to get on the same page with the city and have a discussion,” Fawcett said. “I’ve already had a discussion with current and former city council members who have had the discussion about a municipal plaza, which would be a county and a city joint operation where we could see what type of services we could consolidate for the courthouse. That way taxpayers aren’t paying double. You’re essentially paying for two in one, and it would, you know, in essence, half the cost of something. If you could have the city and the county services operating out of the same buildings. Maybe we operate all of the courts in that same building and save taxpayer dollars.”
Also at the top of his list is getting more funding for the county’s deputies and detention officers. According to Sheriff Mike Griffis, there are 16 open deputy positions within the county and 64 vacant detention officer positions.
“We must be the top paying sheriff’s department in the state. I think that’s a no brainer and I think that it needs to happen. We must support our law enforcement and that is what our head of law enforcement, Sheriff Griffis is telling me is the answer,” Fawcett said. “Now is money always the answer? No. We also need to really broadcast and go recruit. Sheriff Griffis is recruiting at our high school. We absolutely need to continue to do that work with our high school and maybe some work studies programs, some internship type deals, where kids could have a work study and go ride around with an officer and there’s some legality things there that we can work on. And the same thing with Odessa College, you know, with with some of their degree programs in criminal justice and make sure that we’re growing our own here.”
Fawcett said he’d consider taking some of the sales tax money now devoted to the county’s environmental investigations unit and diverting it to the sheriff’s office.
ARPA funds
Last week, the county commissioners approved a contract with a company to vet applicants for the county’s American Rescue Plan Act money and to audit them as they spend the $32 million. It’s a decision Fawcett was adamantly opposed to.
”I think that I agree with the judge that Ector County deserves to have somebody else handling the ARPA funds, but I don’t think it’s a consultant. I think it’s me. And so that’s why I ask folks for my vote because I do think that I have the skill set to do it. I have the knowledge and know how and so we don’t need to be hiring these people. That’s what folks elect people for.”
