Cole Hefner in Tyler, Texas, on Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018. (Chelsea Purgahn/Tyler Morning Telegraph)

Rep. Cole Hefner, a Republican, is seeking his second term in the District 5 seat of the Texas House of Representatives.

Hefner, 37, lives in Mount Pleasant. He is the owner of Hefner Group Insurance. He and his wife have seven kids.

Hefner said his priorities for the 2019 legislative session include property tax relief, election security and getting government out of the way of businesses. He supported the sanctuary cities bill and the failed bill related to which bathrooms transgender students can use. 

“When I say true property tax relief, I mean measures that will actually decrease property taxes, not only control the growth of property taxes or the increase, but to actually see them decrease somehow, and there’s different ideas to do that,” Hefner said.

“There’s a lot of folks that have looked at consumption taxes,” he said. “They’ve looked at taking part of the state’s growth, you know, and capping state growth at population plus inflation and then using the excess growth over that and applying that to the tax burden.”

Hefner said he likes the idea of raising the sales tax because sales taxes are paid when a person buys items. He said it is a fair way to tax because people may spend less when they are having financial problems so that means they don’t pay as much of the tax during that time period.

“You can’t just raise sales tax 1 or 2 percent,” Hefner said. “You’ve got to be careful, too, that you don’t get your sales tax so high that your border town’s going out to another state to buy their stuff, so there’s different challenges that come with a consumption tax.”

The Texas Senate passed a bill during the 2017 session that would reduce the rollback rate — or the amount a municipality can raise its tax rate without triggering a rollback petition and election — to 4 percent. That’s half of the current rollback rate of 8 percent. During his re-election campaign, Gov. Greg Abbott has proposed a rollback rate of 2.5 percent.

“I do believe in local control,” Hefner said. “I was a county commissioner for four years. But I do believe that the cities and counties were created by the state, and so sometimes the state needs to step in when property owners are being abused in some way or the other.”

As an example, Hefner pointed to an older bill that did not pass that would have reduced the rollback rate to 5 percent. He said municipalities in East Texas largely would not have been affected by that rate because they were not raising property tax revenue by more than 5 percent.

On school vouchers, sometimes called school choice programs, Hefner said he does not plan to introduce any bills. He said he wants to be careful not to hurt public schools and that he would not do anything to hurt private schooling or home schooling.

Hefner said he needs to see what some of the bills will look like in the 2019 session before deciding on them. He said one idea that may make sense would be in allowing school choice for children with special needs. However, he said he would be very cautious about a voucher bill.

“I want to be careful that I don’t do anything that harms our public schools because 95 percent of our kids are educated there, and it’s always going to be that way,” Hefner said. “That’s what works for most people, and there’s a reason it works. It’s worked well. And our schools are doing a good job, so I would be very cautious of a voucher.”

Hefner said he supports Texas’ voter photo ID law and tight security for mail-in ballots. He pointed to a report from the conservative Heritage Foundation showing that there had been 15 election security issues in Texas since 2013. He said he is not sure he would support an online voter registration system because he wants to make sure people are who they say they are when they register to vote.

Hefner said he supported the sanctuary cities bill, SB 4, that passed in 2017. The bill punishes local law enforcement if they do not cooperate with requests from federal immigration officials to turn over immigrants in their custody for possible deportation, according to The Texas Tribune. He said he did not know if he would support a bill that required municipalities to ask about immigration status when a person engages in routine municipal services, like paying a water bill.

He said he would support a bill requiring schoolchildren to use the bathroom that corresponds to their biological sex and not their gender identity. He said the so-called “bathroom bill” came in response to guidance from the Obama administration on transgender students. He said the bill did not derail other legislation during the 2017 special session.

Hefner is endorsed by Texas Right to Life, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, Grassroots America-We the People, Conservative Republicans of Texas, Young Conservatives of Texas, Concerned Women for America and Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar.

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