Rodney Ellis
Rodney Glenn Ellis is an American politician who has served on the Harris County Commissioners Court Precinct 1 since 2017. He is a member of the Democratic Party.
Ellis was elected to represent the Texas' 13th state senate district in the Texas Senate on February 13, 1990, and sworn into office on February 27, 1990. The district contains portions of Harris County, including downtown Houston, and Fort Bend County. In his 26-year tenure, Ellis passed 700 pieces of legislation. Ellis sat on the Senate State Affairs, Transportation, and Business & Commerce Committees. In previous sessions, Ellis chaired the Senate Finance, Jurisprudence, Government Organization, Intergovernmental Relations, and Open Government Committees.
On June 25, 2016, Ellis won the Democratic Party's nomination for Harris County Commissioners Court Precinct 1. He was elected county commissioner on November 8, 2016 and sworn into office on January 1, 2017.
Early life and education
Ellis, from the Sunnyside neighborhood in Houston, is one of three children of Elijha and Oliver Teresa Ellis. His father worked as a yard man and his mother a maid. Both parents worked as health care assistants. In the summers, Ellis served as his father's assistant.Ellis attended B.H. Grimes Elementary and Carter G. Woodson Middle School before graduating from Evan E. Worthing High School, where he was president of the student council. He enrolled at Xavier University in Louisiana but returned to Texas to attend Texas Southern University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science. Ellis earned his Masters in Public Affairs from the University of Texas Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and then a J.D. degree from the University of Texas School of Law.
While in Austin, Ellis got experience in Texas government, working as an aide to Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby and as Law Clerk to Chief Justice John C. Phillips on the Third Court of Appeals. Ellis also served as legal counsel to Texas Railroad Commissioner Buddy Temple before moving to Washington, DC to become chief of staff for U.S. Representative Mickey Leland.
It was through Congressman Leland that Ellis first met his future wife Licia. They were married in 1997. Their family includes four children: Nicole, Maria, Leland, and Alena.
City Council record
In 1983, at age 29, Ellis was elected to the Houston City Council, where he served three terms representing District D. While on Council, Ellis worked on efforts to tear down abandoned buildings that had attracted criminals and the drug trade. He worked to secure more funds to raze these dangerous buildings, and drove a front-loader to help clean up drug-ridden Houston neighborhoods. To combat rising drug crime, Ellis pushed to increase funding for anti-drug efforts in the city, but also called for greater community oversight of the Houston Police Department through a citizen's review board.Ellis worked to increase funding to expand low-income housing projects across Houston, preserve Allen Parkway Village, and strengthen policies for the city's use of federal funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to ensure a greater percentage is devoted to low and moderate-income Texans. Ellis also worked to seize abandoned properties and sell on the market to raise funds for housing and other vital needs.
Ellis served as chair of the Economic Redevelopment Committee, where he advocated policies to spur economic development in Houston. He called for the creation of a new think tank and the city Department of Commerce to coordinate and streamline city economic development policies, worked to save city and taxpayer investments in projects such as the Palm Center and Mercado del Sol shopping center, and pushed to expand low-interest loans to small businesses.
Ellis pushed to rename Houston Intercontinental Airport after Mickey Leland, following his death on an anti-hunger mission to Ethiopia. Controversy ensued after comments were made about the effort by a fellow council member. In the end, the newest terminal at the airport was named in honor of Leland.
In the battle against apartheid in South Africa, Ellis helped convince the University of Houston to become the first university in the south to divest from companies doing business in South Africa. He also helped defeat efforts to merge the University of Houston–Downtown with Texas Southern University, protecting the historically black college's history and mission as a stand-alone institution.
Texas Senate record
Budget & economy
In 1997, Ellis authored legislation to create the Texas Capital Access Fund that provided up to $140 million in private lending to small businesses and nonprofit organizations. The program was designed to help small businesses that do not qualify for conventional financing to access the capital they need through a public-private partnership.In 1999, Ellis introduced and passed a $506 million tax relief package that created a three-day sales tax holiday, eliminated the sales tax on over-the-counter medicines, and cut business taxes. The tax holiday was designed to give Texans a tax break on items such as back-to-school clothing and supplies. In 2021, the Texas Comptroller’s Office estimated shoppers would save an estimated $107.3 million in state and local sales tax during the sales tax holiday.
As the chair of the Senate Committee on Finance in 2001, Ellis authored the $113.8 billion budget bill. The population of Texas had grown 25 percent in the prior 10 years and the pressure of that continued growth was reflected in a budget that raised funding $11.8 billion, or 11.6 percent over the previous biennium. As chair of the Finance Committee, Ellis managed, in spite of the tight budget, to fund four priority items: a major Medicaid expansion, state employee pay raises, teacher health insurance, and financial aid for college students."
The Texas Green Jobs Act of 2009, authored by Ellis, was amended onto House Bill 1935, establishing the first statewide green jobs program in Texas. The program set up a framework for training workers for skills in the clean energy economy.
Civil rights
In 1993, Ellis introduced the Motor Voter program to allow citizens to register to vote when they renew their driver's licenses. To further increase participation in the democratic process, Ellis introduced legislation to implement the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 in Texas in 1995 in order to bring Texas up to federal standards by requiring government agencies to afford citizens a chance to register to vote each time they seek state services through government agencies.In 2001, Ellis authored and passed the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Act, legislation to clarify and strengthen the state's hate crimes statute by defining a hate crime as one that has been proven in court to have been motivated by "the race, religion, color, disability, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry" of the victim. The Act bears the name of James Byrd, Jr., an African American who was targeted and murdered in one of the most brutal hate crimes of the post-Civil Rights Era. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed into law a federal hate crimes bill also bearing Byrd's name.
In 2007, Ellis introduced and passed the Stop the Genocide Act, requiring state pension funds to divest from companies doing business in Sudan. Over the four years prior to the bill's introduction, the Sudanese government and its allied organizations had killed more than 400,000 people and displaced more than 2.5 million in Sudan's Darfur region.
Ellis helped pass the Free Flow of Information Act in 2009 to protect journalists from being forced to testify or disclose confidential sources. The law aimed to balance the public's right to know the truth from an independent press and the state's ability to uphold justice.
In 2009, Ellis introduced and passed legislation creating the Holocaust and Genocide Commission, a volunteer commission that serves as a conduit of information to public schools, private schools, and organizations regarding the Holocaust and acts of genocide.
Health care
In 1993, Ellis authored and passed legislation requiring private nonprofit hospitals to provide a certain amount of charity care to uninsured patients.In 2001, under Ellis' leadership as Chairman of the Texas Senate Committee on Finance, the legislature increased funding for health and human services by $5.1 billion. The budget simplified Medicaid eligibility by eliminating face-to-face interviews and allowed families to apply through the mail or over the telephone. The budget also allocated $197 million to increase reimbursement rates for doctors, dentists, and hospitals; provided $63 million to maintain current services at Mental Health & Mental Retardation state schools, hospitals, and community centers; provided $1.025 billion for the Children's Health Insurance Program; and allocated $104 million to improve care in state schools and nursing homes.
In 2011, Ellis amended the Texas Department of Insurance sunset legislation to include a provision that will increase access to individual health insurance plans in order to expand the availability of coverage to children under 19.
In 2011, Ellis sponsored legislation that ensures a voice for advocates and individuals infected with HIV in the state's HIV Medication Advisory Committee.
Criminal justice
Since his tenure in the Texas Senate, Ellis has been one of the nation’s leaders in criminal justice reform, including an overhaul of the state's indigent defense system, identifying and studying the factors that contribute to wrongful convictions, and increasing compensation for the wrongfully imprisoned.On a national level, Ellis was chairman of the Innocence Project in New York for 14 years. The nonprofit organization works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone. In 2016, the Innocence Project honored Ellis and others for their contributions to the organization.
As a county commissioner, he continued to carry the torch for indigent defendants by increasing Harris County Public Defenders Office’s budget and leading Commissioners Court to approving misdemeanor bail reform..
For his work on criminal justice reforms, Ellis was named "Texan of the Year" by the Dallas Morning News on December 26, 2015, along with Senator John Whitmire and Representative Ruth McClendon. The Dallas Morning News wrote that "the measures championed this year — and in previous legislative sessions — have targeted every major facet of flawed criminal justice, from prosecutors' reliance on junk science and flawed eyewitness testimony, to holding overzealous prosecutors accountable and improving public-defender funding so indigents can't be railroaded into prison."
In 2001, Ellis authored and passed the Texas Fair Defense Act to overhaul the state's indigent defense system by focusing on four critical issues: timely appointment of counsel, method of counsel appointment by the courts, reporting of information about indigent representation services, and minimum standards for counsel. The legislation required all criminal courts in Texas to adopt formal procedures for providing appointed lawyers to indigent defendants.
The Texas Fair Defense Act also created a new state indigent defense commission, the Task Force on Indigent Defense, to oversee the implementation of the Texas Fair Defense Act and administer a new state program for awarding indigent defense grants to counties.
In 2009, Ellis sponsored and passed legislation to establish the Tim Cole Advisory Panel to identify and study the factors that contribute to wrongful convictions. The panel was named in honor of Tim Cole, a young man who died in prison after being wrongfully convicted of rape.
The Tim Cole Advisory Panel's work led Ellis in 2011 to author a package of legislation to reform and improve the reliability of the Texas criminal justice system. Those improvements included eyewitness identification reforms to address the leading cause of proven wrongful convictions, and legislation to ensure that DNA evidence can and will be tested—if available—to prove someone's innocence.
In 2009, Ellis authored and passed legislation to create the Office of Capital Writs, the state's first statewide public defender office, to manage death penalty appeals. Texas has the highest number of executions since 1979 - over four times the next state with the second highest number. Texas also has a high number of wrongful convictions relative to other states. The Office of Capital Writs is "entrusted with advocating on behalf of indigent individuals sentenced to death in Texas. The office works within the judicial system to safeguard the Constitutional rights of the individual through high quality legal representation."
Ellis has "led legislative efforts to increase compensation for the wrongfully imprisoned." In 2001, Ellis authored and passed legislation that increased the amount of compensation, increased the statute of limitations for claiming compensation, and allowed convicted persons found to be innocent to seek relief and compensation from the courts, rather than by pardon. In 2011, Ellis sponsored and passed comprehensive exoneree compensation reform legislation, which provided health care to the wrongfully convicted, established standards for attorney's fees in compensation claims, and helped exonerees to receive compensation.
In 2013, Ellis authored and passed the "Michael Morton Act," legislation creating a uniform, statutory open file criminal discovery policy in Texas. With the bill's passage, Texas law now explicitly states that every prosecutor has a duty to disclose documents or information that could raise questions about a defendant's guilt or lead to a lighter sentence if there is a conviction. Prior to the bill's passage, Texas' criminal discovery laws had not changed since they were initially adopted in 1965. The bill was named after Michael Morton, who was wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and subsequently spent almost 25 years in prison before being exonerated by DNA evidence.
In 2015, Ellis sponsored and passed legislation creating the Tim Cole Exoneration Review Commission. The Commission brings together criminal justice experts to review proven wrongful convictions, identify the main causes of those convictions, and recommend more reliable practices to improve public safety and prevent such tragedies from reoccurring in the future. The Commission is named after Tim Cole, a Texas Tech University student who was wrongfully convicted of a crime he did not commit. Cole died in prison in 1999 after 25 years behind bars. He became the state's first and only posthumous exoneration in 2009, and Governor Rick Perry later pardoned Cole in 2010.