Star-Telegram endorsement: Sprawling Fort Worth City Council District 11
Voters in Fort Worth City Council District 11 have a clear choice of a candidate who knows how to get things done in government.
Incumbent Jeanette Martinez was the first representative for the district, an amalgamation of varied neighborhoods pieced together in the last round of council redistricting. She has earned a second term.
Martinez, a Rosemont resident who turns 42 before Election Day, is best positioned to help the district catch up on basic needs, especially street improvements, sidewalks and other essential infrastructure. But she also understands that council members must consider priorities for the city as a whole and work well as a team to ensure they are met.
She works as executive administrator for County Commissioner Roderick Miles, after years in the same position for his predecessor, Roy Charles Brooks. While that creates the potential for conflict of interest, as Martinez acknowledged in our interview with the candidates, it also gives her knowledge of government processes and connections that her rivals cannot match.
Martinez said she wants to ensure District 11 gets its share of the city's next bond package, slated for voter consideration in 2026. She noted the importance of keeping the focus on infrastructure needs and less on amenities that, while important to city life, can wait while basic needs are addressed.
Her status as a county employee is fodder for opponent Christopher Johnson, a 57-year-old Polytechnic Heights resident. Johnson raised it in our interview; Martinez said she seeks city legal advice for when to recuse herself from any issues.
Johnson, who owns a cosmetics line and formerly had a salon, touted himself as the only candidate with extensive business experience.
The third candidate, Hilda Cuzco, a 77-year-old Central Meadowbrook resident, is running as a representative of the Socialist Workers Party. She works as a packer in a bakery plant.
The district's neighborhoods include Echo Heights, Meadowbrook, Riverside, Rosemont and Worth Heights.
If no candidate wins an outright majority, the top two vote-getters will participate in a runoff election. The winner earns a two-year term. Early voting starts April 22 and ends April 29. Election Day is May 3.
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The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Congressional Republicans love to talk about the deficit and federal spending, particularly when Democrats are in power. Before he became House speaker, Mike Johnson argued in his 2018 statement titled '7 Core Principles of Conservatism' that America was facing 'an unprecedented debt and spending crisis.' In Johnson's view, Congress had 'a moral and constitutional duty' to bring expenditure under control. In 2023, before he became the Senate majority leader, John Thune inveighed against 'reckless, out-of-control government spending' and argued that if spending reform is a priority for the GOP alone, then there is 'something seriously wrong with the Democrat Party.' They had a point. Aside from the brief period from 1998 to 2001, the federal government has run deficits for more than 50 years. 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And the ultimate enforcer of tax-cutting orthodoxy, Grover Norquist, recently compared any Republicans willing to consider tax increases to a 'little cancer cell in the party.' Trump himself has tried to have it both ways, toying with the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy to cater to his populist base without actually doing anything to forestall his tax-cut extensions. His gesture toward putting America on a sounder financial footing is to argue that his tariffs can play an important role in replacing income-tax revenues. The Congressional Budget Office has calculated that, under certain configurations, tariffs could raise significant additional revenues over the next decade. But all credible projections suggest that tariffs will be unable to compensate for the lost income tax. They are also a highly regressive form of taxation that may spark retaliation by other countries, result in higher inflation, and reduce both economic growth and the tax revenues that flow from it. [Read: Republicans still can't say no to Trump] Republicans who are serious about the deficit have several options. The most obvious one would be to close the gap between the tax revenues owed to the government and what it actually collects. The IRS estimates that in 2022, about 13 percent of taxes, totaling $606 billion, owed to the federal government under our existing tax code were not paid. Many analyses of federal tax policy and enforcement—including some by conservative scholars—have argued for beefing up the IRS, with a focus on high-net-worth individuals and households. Few investment opportunities yield a higher rate of return than IRS audits on upper-income filers, yet the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have moved in the other direction and sought to cut the agency's staff and funding. Other steps Republicans could take would aim to end tax breaks for the über-rich. Sunsetting the 2017 bill's higher estate-tax deductions, which now stand at $14 million for individuals and $28 million for married couples, would bring in an estimated $201 billion over the next 10 years. The state and local tax (better known as SALT) deduction changes in the proposed bill are extremely regressive, with much of the benefit flowing to upper-income households; they are another loophole that could be closed. Republicans could also raise revenue specifically for transportation infrastructure by increasing road-user fees and gas or mileage taxes. (The gasoline tax has been frozen at 18.4 cents a gallon for more than 30 years.) None of the above will be easy, or even possible, to achieve in this Congress. The Republican Party has come a long way from the days when Ronald Reagan raised taxes four times after his 1981 tax cuts led to higher projected deficits. The official posture of fiscal rectitude continues, but the GOP's $10 trillion secret—the amount that tax cuts have contributed to the national debt—is that, if forced to choose, many on the anti-tax right would prefer bigger deficits to higher taxes. The United States no longer has that luxury. The government's interest payments have become larger than its defense expenditures, debt-rating agencies are downgrading the U.S., bond traders are demanding higher yields on U.S. treasuries, and risks to the dollar as the world's reserve currency are piling up. To redeploy Thune's phrase, something is 'seriously wrong' with a party that worries about running deficits yet refuses to consider any sustainable way to pay for them—and instead slashes services to its rural and working-class constituents. Rigid principle must give way to pragmatism: Any genuine deficit-reduction conversation needs to include not just spending cuts but higher revenues. Article originally published at The Atlantic
