Can you name the County Surveyor?  Heck, we couldn’t either.  In fact, we figured County Surveyors had gone the way of carrier pigeons and County Hide Inspectors….

In ballot order, the two candidates for this office are Joe Baker and Shane S. Shafer. Neither candidate has a website.  Grrrr.  The incumbent hasn’t bothered to create a departmental website linked to the main county website, either.  In fact, you have to go to the County Clerk’s FAQs to even find the name of the guy and a phone number.  Grrrr.  Grrr.

Once you start googling, you can find a nice head shot and resume at his company website (he’s President & CEO), which has offices in Round Rock, Cedar Park and San Marcos.   He’s got lots of letters of the alphabet strung out after his name, that sort of spell purple, if you’re not picky how you spell it. 

This is an office authorized by the Texas Constitution - which also gives Commissioner’s Court the authority to call an election to abolish it (Article 16, Section 44).  With all the development going on in the county, ya think this should be a full time job?

UPDATE: This is one strange race.  You’ve got two people spending money to run for an office that doesn’t pay anything and doesn’t provide county health or retirement benefits.  Zip. Zero. Nada.  When the county actually needs some surveying work done, it is contracted out to the private sector.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 18th, 2006 at 7:36 pm and is filed under elections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.