MANY OF YOU FOUND this jumbo postcard (shown above) in your mailbox last week. Some of you probably glanced at it, a few of you may have read it, but I’d bet a pretty good percentage of you were completely fooled into thinking that Rep. Ken King was somehow involved in sending it, and may even have endorsed its message to “Stop Taxpayer Funded Lobbying!”

You may not have even noticed the return address on that card—the one that shows it was really sent by Americans For Prosperity. Who is that and why do they want us to call Rep. Ken King?

Well, Americans for Prosperity is a Koch Industries-financed super PAC that thinks they can fool Texas citizens— and particularly citizens in the Texas Panhandle—into believing that they care more about saving your local tax dollars than the city and county and school and hospital officials that you elect do.

It’s a pretty outlandish proposition, when it comes right down to it. Why I’d wager that you could pick up a phone and text or call any one of your public officials today and tell them what you think about how your tax dollars are spent. Better yet, you could march right into their offices or businesses, or attend one of the public meetings they hold, and tell them eyeball-to-eyeball how you’d like to see your tax dollars spent—or not spent.

Even better still, you could attend one of the budget planning meetings they have this time of year and find out how they are planning to spend your tax dollars or save your tax dollars, what services they are hoping to fund and what they can’t, what roads they are hoping to pave, and why it might not be yours.

You can find out how many teachers they’re hiring, and how many they can’t afford to replace, and what that’s going to do to the size of your kid’s classroom next year. You can go to the next city council meeting and see what they’re plan

You can go to the next city council meeting and see what they’re planning to do about the sewer lines that are crumbling under our streets or the water mains that keep breaking, and what it might cost if they start replacing them.

But if you think Americans for Prosperity cares about even one of those issues that follows you home every day, I promise you are wrong. And if you believe State Representative Ken King wants Austin to tell your school board or county commissioners what to do with your tax dollars, you are dead wrong.

Ken King used to serve on your school board, and it’s not very likely he’s forgotten how many times he he and his fellow board members fought to keep the state from taking our tax dollars and spending them somewhere else.

When I saw that card in my daily pile of mail, I snapped a photo of it, and immediately texted it to Representative King. “Wanna talk about this?” I asked.

He did, and in no uncertain terms. This is what my state representative—and yours—had to say. “In no way, shape, or form, do I support stopping my counties, cities, schools and hospitals from making their voices heard,” Representative King said. “This is a horrible idea that I fought against last session, and I intend to do so this session as well.”

“This bill would eliminate all associations that represent cities, counties, schools and hospitals,” he continued. “The bill is aimed at large cities that spend millions on independent lobbyists for special interests, but as always, the unintended consequences can be worse than the original problem.”

And what might those unintended consequences be?

“If those associations are eliminated,” Rep. King said, “then local taxes will be used to send our locally-elected officials to Austin for the whole session in order to keep up with what’s going on.”

House District 88, which King represents, encompasses 17 counties and 57 school districts. “Can you imagine the cost of sending 17 judges and 57 superintendents to Austin every week for 140 days to make sure the city representatives and the senate aren’t pushing bills like this that are hurtful to the rural areas of the state!?”

“This is a horrible waste of resources,” King said. “The real fight down here is rural versus urban, and without some extra eyes monitoring the thousands of bills filed, the task of stopping bad things from happening to our part of Texas becomes a lot more difficult.”

Rep. Ken King knows the deck is often loaded against small, rural counties like ours, whose local officials have to drive the better part of a day just to get to Austin and talk to a state official. He knows because he has had to do it.

He probably knows, too, that Americans for Prosperity doesn’t really care about Hemphill County taxpayers and how their tax dollars are spent. They just really don’t want us—or those who represent us—getting in their way when they are trying to influence this state’s elected officials and get their own agenda items and priorities passed into law.

They really must think we’re stupid. We really need to let them know that we’re not. We need a few good advocates speaking for us in Austin— just to remind them of that.