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This is certainly not a major news flash, but in politics, a lot can happen in a month.

It’s been nearly a full month since I ended my tenure as editor of the now-closed Fort Bend Star, a newspaper that served the suburban Houston county for nearly five decades.

In a perhaps strange confluence of events, my last few weeks at the Star involved my coverage of two major court cases, the felony trial of then-County Judge KP George on two counts of money laundering and the trial of former Missouri City police officer Bladimir Viveros for aggravated assault by a public servant in a 2024 on-duty automobile crash that resulted in the deaths of three people. Both trials ended with guilty verdicts.

District Judge Maggie Perez-Jarmamillo set a sentencing date for George on June 16. George is also facing trial on a misdemeanor charge involving his alleged participation in a “fake hate” social media campaign engineered by his former chief of staff, Taral Patel. That trial is set to begin May 10.

Because sentencing has not yet been done, George remained in office. Once sentencing is done, he can appeal his conviction, but Fort Bend County prosecutors said that they would immediately move to have George suspended from office pending the appeal.

At its March 26 meeting, the four other members of Commissioners Court (two Democrats and two Republicans) voted unanimously for senior Commissioner Grady Prestage to serve as presiding officer. George in March had already placed last in a five-person race for the Republican nomination for County Judge in November’s election, making him a lame duck. That race was won handily by businessman and former Sugar Land City Council member Daniel Wong.

Flying under the radar, so to speak, was a civil case filed last year by a Fort Bend resident, Sarah Roberts, who claimed that George, acting as county judge, wrongfully ejected her from the courtroom as she was speaking during the public comments portion of a meeting during the heated redistricting battle that had embroiled the court in controversy for months. Roberts and her attorneys called for George to be removed from office based on First Amendment grounds.

While the case had been reported in the media when it was filed, it had drawn little attention as the court dealt with some initial procedural issues. So it happened that I was one of only two journalists (along with a KHOU videographer) in the courtroom for an April 10 motions hearing. To be frank, I was a little unclear on what the hearing was about. I was a bit surprised to see representatives of the Fort Bend County District Attorney’s Office in the courtroom, since the case wasn’t a criminal matter.

My surprise turned to near-shock when, after attorneys made some brief preliminary arguments, District Judge Jeth Jones of Galveston County (who had been specially appointed to hear the case) in a very low-key manner ruled that he was suspending George from office and appointing Wong, the Republican nominee, to serve as interim County Judge. That was a possibility I hadn’t seen coming.

I scrambled to post the news on social media while trying to figure out the implications of the ruling by talking to the attorneys (I’m fairly certain I was the one to break this major turn of events).

The county moved quickly to install Wong, who told media outlets that he had been surprised by Jones’s appointment. In a standing-room-only event in the Ceremonial Courtroom at the Historic County Courthouse in Richmond, Wong, accompanied by his wife, was sworn in by County Court-at-Law Judge No. 6 Dean Hrback, himself a former Sugar Land mayor.

Immediately following his swearing-in, Wong, a Chinese immigrant to the United States, offered an exuberant address to the packed courtroom audience, in which he said the event marked a “turning point” in Fort Bend governance.

Instead of turning down the appointment and waiting for the November election, Wong said, he “chose the hard road” of accepting the role and moving quickly into the work of being County Judge. “Most people get 60 days to transition into this office. I barely got 60 hours,” he said, a joke that got an appreciative laugh from the audience.

But not everyone was laughing. Immediately after the news of Jones’s appointment of Wong broke, Fort Bend County Democrats and others expressed outrage. Precinct 4 Commissioner Dexter McCoy, one of the two candidates in the May 26 runoff election for the Democratic nomination for County Judge, released a statement saying, “Today a Judge — not the voters or elected members of Commissioners Court — installed a wealthy MAGA-endorsed businessman to lead the 8th largest county in the Texas. This is an overt act of political and election interference designed to give Mr. Wong an unfair advantage in the upcoming election for County Judge in November.”

Rachelle Carter, a Sugar Land municipal judge and McCoy’s opponent in the primary, was a bit more circumspect in her reaction. In a statement released to Houston Public Media, a spokesperson said, “”Judge Rachelle Carter congratulates Mr. Wong on his appointment to serve in Fort Bend County. Public service is an important responsibility, and those who step forward to lead our community should be recognized for their willingness to participate in the democratic process.”

When Wong officially took the reins as presiding officer of Commissioners Court on April 23, he was immediately met by numerous public speakers who echoed McCoy’s remarks about Wong’s appointment. Many of them asserted that Judge Jones, a Republican, had engaged in a “backroom deal” to install Wong to give him an advantage in the November race. Numerous legal experts have told media outlets that Jones acted within his legal authority, although there were other means by which the judge’s seat could have been temporally been filled, including a vote by the split 2-2 Commissioners Court.

For their part, the other Commissioners, both Democrat and Republican, gave Wong a largely civil welcome during the meeting, including a handshake between McCoy and Wong. And Wong thanked each of the public speakers, even giving a broad smile to many of them as they denounced him.

Wong, the lifelong businessman and head of his own engineering firm, exuded a can-do attitude throughout his first meeting. His hard-charging style sometimes got ahead of his relative inexperience, as he sometimes moved ahead of himself in the meeting agenda. (Find the video of the meeting here.)

While it’s a long-held truism that incumbency has a distinct advantage in electoral politics, whether this will hold true for Wong in November (against either McCoy or Carter) is somewhat in the air. As I pointed out in a news analysis in the Fort Bend Star following the March 3 primary election, Fort Bend County has for many years been seen as a “purple” county, meaning it is somewhat evenly split between Republicans and Democrats.

“With turbulence both at home and abroad, as well as the traditional challenges of a ruling party in an off-year election, many political pundits see the 2026 midterms as as potential ‘Blue wave’ election, which could have downstream effects at the local level,” I wrote in that analysis.

I wrote that, of course, shortly after President Trump launched, with Israel, a war against Iran that was meant to have been very short but has proven to be a bit more complicated. Iran’s stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping route for oil, has buffeted energy prices, driving up the inflation that had already existed. On top of the fact that Trump won reelection in 2024 largely on a promise of keeping the United States out of “forever wars” in the Middle East, a strong desire among his core supporters, and his increasingly low poll numbers, the odds of a Democratic win in November seem stronger than ever. As I noted in a previous Star column, these days “all politics is national.”

On Monday, I attended the annual Kinder Institute Luncheon at the Hilton Americas in downtown Houston for the release of the 45th Kinder Houston Area Survey, the long-admired survey of Houston-area residents that was launched in the early 1980s by Rice University Emeritus Professor of Sociology Stephen Klineberg, now retired. In recent years, the survey has included residents of Fort Bend and Montgomery counties.

This year, area residents across the board named the economy as their leading concern. Over the past year, according to the report, Fort Bend and Montgomery respondents showed the single largest year-over-year drop ever recorded in their own confidence in the economic outlook. Harris County respondents showed the second-largest drop, after the oil bust of the 1980s. (Find the full report here).

How all of this bodes for November’s local elections, including that of Fort Bend County Judge, remains to be seen.

Copyright © 2026 Ken Fountain. All rights reserved.