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Protesters Steal Thunder from Governor
Who Touts Tax Cuts Without Plan to Pay
Capitol Inside
November 13, 2025
Hundreds of protesters filled the streets of downtown Tyler on Wednesday when Governor Greg Abbott rallied supporters at local craft beer facility with a pitch for the abolishment of local property taxes for public schools despite the lack of a plan to foot the monstrous bill for it.
Abbott sparked cheering, chants and applause inside the ETX Brewery where he kicked off a re-election campaign with property tax reform as the centerpiece. But the demonstrators outside the business stole much of the spotlight while voicing opposition to the Smith County sheriff office's participation in migrant roundups and deportations that the governor has backed wholeheartedly.
The protest at Abbott's first campaign stop had traffic paralyzed in the heart of the East Texas city that's heavily Republican with a population that's almost 50 percent white and 26 percent Hispanic. According to the local television station CBS19, Tyler police issued 10 tickets to drivers in the vicinity of the demonstration for excessive honking to show their support for it.
"I've heard everybody talking about woke," Smith County Democratic Party Chair Hector Garza told the CBS affiliate in Tyler during the protest that brought the flow of cars and trucks there to a crawl. "Oh, woke, woke, woke.
"This is woke," Garza said.
As Abbott wowed the crowd inside the brewery, the raucous ovation at the event was drowned out beyond the business walls where the turnout for the protest appeared to be larger and louder than the governor's audience in a possible sign of what he can expect as he stumps the state during the coming year.
Abbott likened the property tax elimination crusade to the push for private school vouchers that had been a perennial failure for two full decades before GOP lawmakers who'd blocked a bill finally caved to the governor on the issue in a display of fear during the regular session earlier this year.
But Abbott acknowledged in response to a reporter's question that he did not know how the state would offset the loss of funding that the public schools here would expect to lose without property taxes as their lifeblood. The combined take from school taxes on homeowners and businesses was nearly $40 billion in 2023.
"There’s a lot of possible solutions to come up with the resources needed,” Abbott said. “The last four years the budget surplus we’ve had exceeds the amount of cost to eliminate any school district property tax in the state of Texas, so that would be one possible way without raising a single penny more in taxes. The solution should be something we are visible to voters about, as well as members of the Legislature.”
Abbott touted a five-point plan that would make property tax hikes for school districts contingent on voter approval. He also wants to make it easier for voters to cut their own taxes through rollback elections and to force local governments to slash spending in moves that would brings ad valorem taxes down as well.
But the governor's reliance on surplus funds to make the plan feasible appears to have one major inherent problem that Abbott has chosen to ignore up to now. The Republican-controlled Legislature relied on a $40 billion bailout from then-President Joe Biden and the Democrats in Washington D.C. to balance the state budget in 2021 in the midst of a huge deficit stemming from the covid pandemic.
The projected surpluses added up to $57 billion when 2023 and 2025 are combined. That number would shrink to a mere $17 billion in the absence of the stimulus funding in 2021 that every Republican member of Congress voted to kill. Abbott and other GOP leaders have acknowledged the significance of the federal emergency funds four years ago in the state's financing since then.
Donald Trump carried Smith County last fall with almost 72 percent of the vote after scoring 70 percent there in 2016 and 69 percent in 2020 when Biden ousted him from the White House.
more to come ...
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