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Speaker Burrows Taps Moderation, Experience In Senior Staff

Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows on Wednesday picked longtime political moderates for his first batch of senior staff positions in his office as he aims to lead a divided chamber with support from Republicans and Democrats.

A coalition of 49 Democrats and 36 Republicans elected the Lubbock Republican as House speaker on Tuesday over Mansfield Republican Rep. David Cook, who had secured the endorsement of the Texas Republican Party in the race for pledging not to appoint any Democrats to chair House committees.

Burrows’s announcement could signal his willingness to govern the House with moderation and bipartisan support in the future, which would be a marked change for him. Last session, Burrows was the 41st-most conservative House member out of 84 members, just one spot below Rep. Cook, according to a Rice University analysis.

Chief of Staff

Longtime Lubbock Republican lawmaker Robert Duncan will serve as Burrows’s chief of staff. He served in the Legislature for 22 years, first in the House representing Lubbock in District 28 from 1992 to 1996, and then in the Senate from 1996 to 2014.

In Duncan’s last term in office, he was the second-most moderate Republican senator of those who had served two or three terms, according to a Rice University analysis by political science professor Mark Jones.  Jones also concluded that even in 2013, the political gulf between Republicans and Democrats in the Senate was significantly wider than the gap between each party’s most partisan member and its most moderate member. Even as the most moderate Republican, Duncan had nearly no policy overlap with the most moderate Democrat serving in the Senate at the time.

After his exit from elective office, Duncan became the fourth chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, serving from 2014 to 2018. Duncan is a Texas Tech alumnus, earning both his bachelor’s degree and his law degree there. Duncan resigned abruptly there after a vote on funding for a veterinary school, but tensions had been mounting with the university’s governing board for at least two years.

Duncan also was a law partner at Lubbock law firm Crenshaw Dupree & Milam LLP for more than 25 years and still offers counsel to the firm, according to the firm’s website.

Senior Advisor

Also joining Burrows will be Tracy King, a longtime moderate Democrat who chaired the House Natural Resources Committee last session and the Agriculture and Livestock Committee before that. He will serve as a senior advisor to Burrows “with an emphasis on member relations,” according to Burrows’s announcement.

King served as the state representative for Uvalde from 1994 until 2024, holding the seat even as it became increasingly Republican in recent years. It was the only Democratic Texas House district that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott won in 2022, the Texas Tribune reported.

Accordingly, King was the third-most moderate Democrat in the House last session, according to the aforementioned 2023 Rice University analysis. (The most moderate Democrat was Laredo Rep. Richard Peña Raymond, followed by Edinburg Rep. Terry Canales.)

“King brings over 30 years’ worth of legislative relationships, strategy and policy experience to the role,” Burrows’s office wrote in the announcement.

Deputy Chief of Staff

Zak Covar will take over as Burrows’s deputy chief of staff, bringing with him “a rich background in environmental policy and government relations,” Wednesday’s announcement states, especially his tenure working for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Covar served as the commission’s executive director from 2012 to 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile, then served as its commissioner from 2014 to 2015 after being appointed by Gov. Rick Perry.

In October, Covar was named President and CEO of the Texas Aggregates & Concrete Association, a trade association for the aggregate, concrete and cement industry.

Covar “has previously served” as a chief of staff in the Texas House and was a policy advisor in the Office of the Governor, according to Wednesday’s announcement, though it does not describe under whom he served.

Director of Speaker’s Office

Paige Holzheauser, who is Burrows’s current chief of staff, will be the new director of his speaker’s office. (She went by Paige Higerd as recently as the last session, according to the House directory.)

Holzheauser has been working in the Texas House since 2015 and has been working for Burrows since 2019, according to the release. She also served as the committee clerk for the House Committee on Calendars for Corpus Christi Republican Rep. Todd Hunter and as the clerk for the House Committee on Ways and Means.

Communications Director

Cait Wittman will be replacing Matt Crow as Burrows’s communications director.

Wittman previously served as the communications director for former House speaker Dade Phelan, a Beaumont Republican and ally of Burrows, according to her LinkedIn profile. She has been a communication director under various House speakers since 2019, according to Burrows’ announcement.

Before that, she was the vice president of Texas government relations at the national consulting and advocacy firm McGuireWoods Consulting from 2016 to 2018.

Wittman also served as Gov. Greg Abbott’s deputy press secretary from 2015 to 2016, and was a  spokesman for his campaign starting in 2012.  

District Affairs Coordinator

Displaced as Burrows’s communications director, Matt Crow instead will be serving as his new district affairs coordinator. Crow has worked with Burrows since he was elected in 2015, according to the release, as a district director as well as a communications director. (He lives in Lubbock.)

Crow also has extensive political experience. He worked in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and worked for Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour and for Texas Congressman Randy Neugebauer.

More to come

“The value, knowledge and decades of combined experience that this team brings will be fundamental to not only the success of our office, but the entire Texas House,” Burrows wrote in a prepared statement Wednesday. “I am deeply appreciative to each of these individuals for their commitment to our mission and readiness to serve. With this team at the helm, the Speaker’s office is hitting the ground running and looks forward to working closely with all the members of the House to address the most pressing needs of Texans in the 89th legislative session.”

“Additional senior staff announcements will be made in the coming days,” the announcement concluded.

Sam Stockbridge
Sam Stockbridge
Sam Stockbridge is an award-winning reporter covering politics and the legislature. When he isn’t wonking out at the Capitol, you can find him birding or cycling around Austin.

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