Tarrant County lawmaker tapped to be Texas House’s chief budget writer

AUSTIN — Scandal-plagued Speaker Dennis Bonnen on Friday chose Tarrant County GOP Rep. Giovanni Capriglione as the House’s top budget writer.

With top state offices dominated by Houston Republicans, business and education leaders from North Texas were expected to cheer Bonnen’s selection of Capriglione as chairman of the influential House Appropriations Committee. That’s true even though the four-term Southlake lawmaker only may hold the post for 12 months. A pitched battle this fall for party control of the House will produce a new speaker next January.

Capriglione, 46, is the first House member from North Texas to head the Appropriations Committee since former Waxahachie GOP Rep. Jim Pitts retired after the 2013 session.

“His experience as a small business owner — coupled with his expertise on complex budgetary matters — have made him both highly regarded among colleagues and uniquely qualified to lead the committee,” Bonnen, a veteran lawmaker from Angleton in suburban Houston, said of Capriglione in a written statement.

Bonnen, whom most colleagues believe lied to them about a secret huddle with a conservative activist last summer, was forced in late October to announce that he’ll give up the seat he’s held since the 1990s. He will leave the Legislature with a legacy of brief, spectacular achievement followed by a stunning defacement of his reputation after an audio recording showed that he didn’t intend to heed his own lectures to members about not opposing one another’s reelection bids. He targeted 10 fellow Republicans, and he spoke of several Democrats in highly derogatory terms.

On Friday, the outgoing speaker said that under Capriglione, “I am confident that the Appropriations Committee will continue to budget in a manner that meets the diverse priorities of Texans while solidifying our standing as the best state in the nation to live and do business.”

Capriglione was not part of Bonnen’s inner circle. For several weeks, his selection as Appropriations Committee chief was delayed, reportedly as members of the circle clashed.

Considered an expert on finance and cybersecurity, Capriglione owns and is president of Texas Adventure Capital LLC. It provides business services to investment fund managers and business owners.

Pitts was the House’s chief budget writer for four sessions — one under former Speaker Tom Craddick of Midland and three under former Speaker Joe Straus of San Antonio. Former Houston-area GOP Rep. John Zerwas held the powerful post for the past two sessions. But over the summer, Zerwas quit to become chancellor of the University of Texas system’s health science centers.

Over the past quarter-century or so, Pitts’ four sessions was matched by the four in which Zerwas and two other Republicans from the greater Houston area ran the committee.

West Texas though, once was dominant, especially before Democrats yielded control of the House in 2002. Since the early 1990s, three West Texans — two of them Democrats, one a Republican — served seven different sessions as the chamber’s top budget-shaper.

In 2013, Capriglione entered the House as a tea party insurgent. The previous year, he knocked off establishment Republican Rep. Vicki Truitt of Keller, a Straus ally, in the GOP primary.

Straus quickly assigned ever-greater duties to Capriglione, who soon became reviled by staunchly conservative activists such as Austin consultant Luke Macias as a traitor to their faction of the Texas GOP.

In the past three sessions, Capriglione became a high-impact player. For all three, he served on the Appropriations Committee. In the last two, he was a subcommittee chairman — first of the Subcommittee on State Infrastructure, Resiliency, and Investment, and then of the Subcommittee on Budget Transparency and Reform.

Capriglione authored bills designed to nudge the state comptroller to earn higher returns on huge pools of cash sitting unused in the state treasury, creating a gold bullion depository, and improving state contracting and tightening cybersecurity measures. Previously, he worked for computer engineering companies.

He majored in physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and holds a master’s of business administration from Santa Clara University in California.

In October, he was one of the 43 House Republicans whom Bonnen praised by name as he succumbed to pressure, four months after he and top lieutenant Rep. Dustin Burrows made the head-slapping miscalculation that they could meet with and turn Empower Texans chief Michael Quinn Sullivan from a foe to an ally. It misfired when Sullivan went public, alleging that they’d offered to give his group House media credentials in return for political help.

Bonnen initially denied that he did so. But then Sullivan disclosed he’d secretly recorded the hourlong huddle in the speaker’s Capitol office and began playing it for others.

In his resignation announcement, Bonnen thanked Capriglione and the others for “the respectful and thoughtful way” in which they nudged him to step aside for the good of the chamber and himself. By implication, the speaker was conveying his fury with about 40 other House Republicans. It’s unclear whether they or Democrats — or even Team Bonnen survivors — would protect Capriglione as Appropriations Committee chief in the 2021 session.

The post is a plum appointment and may be up for grabs as candidates for speaker jockey with one another after the November general election.