Lamar County Libertarian Party

08/28/2026

The Libertarian Party of Texas has unanimously adopted a resolution condemning Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) including systems such as Flock Safety and other forms of warrantless mass surveillance.

08/26/2026

The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles. - Jeff Cooper

08/25/2026

Paris PD taking a queue from Flock and turning off comments.

08/25/2026

LPTexas is drawing a line on mass surveillance. Its SLEC unanimously passed a resolution condemning automated license plate readers (such as Flock) and warrantless tracking at every level of Texas government, calling for statutory bans, mandatory deletion of non-target data, and an end to surveillance vendor contracts.

https://www.lptexas.org/resolution_surveillance_automated_lpr

08/19/2026

Someone may want to let the Democrats know that their candidate is still funding Flock...

Haven't heard anything from the Republican candidate, but based on how much the other Republicans were defending it, we can only assume he will too.

08/17/2026

Even if Lamar County adopted the full voter-approval tax rate, it would have raised only about another $1.1 million. This budget spends nearly $14 million more than it expects to receive in new revenue. So this isn't a problem that can simply be solved by raising taxes — it's a spending problem.

Lamar County’s proposed 2026–2027 budget deserves a much closer look.

Across all budgeted funds, the county expects to bring in about $29.2 million in new revenue while budgeting roughly $43 million in expenditures.

That difference doesn’t disappear — it comes out of money the county has already accumulated.

Under the proposal, total fund balances are projected to fall from approximately $19.9 million to just $6 million in a single year — a drawdown of nearly $14 million.

The General Fund alone is projected to drop from $13.8 million to $4.1 million, a reduction of about 70%.

Using reserves for one-time needs can sometimes make sense. But spending them down this aggressively raises some very important questions:

Is this sustainable? What happens the following year? And will taxpayers be asked to pay higher taxes to rebuild those reserves once they're gone?

Before approving a budget that draws down nearly $14 million in county fund balances, taxpayers deserve a clear explanation of exactly where that money is going and why this level of spending is necessary.

08/14/2026

It is for your own good, they said.