Sam Seale, former Jackson County Judge and longtime executive director of the Texas Association of Counties, passed away Feb. 7 after a long struggle with cancer. Raised on a ranch in the cowboy tradition, Seale held all matters Old West in high regard. A glance around his office reveals cattle brands, deer horns and his own photographs of beautiful sunsets and wildflowers. Of the countless books he read, many bore the name Louis L’Amour or some other writer of western yarns.

But in his professional life, Seale was thoroughly modern, building an organization that has saved Texas taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in lowered insurance costs while establishing first-rate education programs to prepare officials to do their jobs and braving the challenges of technology to provide Websites to rural courthouses, among other advances.

“One of the strongest traits in his character was his willingness to take a stand and move forward,” said Jim Allison, general counsel to the County Judges and Commissioners Association of Texas.

“A lot of people recognized that the Texas Association of Counties has greatly improved its services and benefits, but that required the leadership of someone who was willing to take on change and willing to take some risk on new and unknown programs,” Allison said. “As we look back and see what wonderful successes they were, it’s easy to say ‘that was a great idea,’ but at the times they were proposed, they often carried with them the risk of the unknown, the risk of change and the risk of potential failure.

“I think Sam was absolutely the perfect leader for the last 20 years.”

Raised as a Cowboy

Samuel Douglas Seale III was born Sept. 27, 1933 in Floresville but his family soon moved several counties to the east to build a house on Carancahua Bay in Jackson County near Victoria. The 10-acre tract where Seale grew up was an inheritance, part of a 5,000 acre ranch held in the family since 1874. The larger tract had been split into smaller ranches among his grandfather’s six sons.

“Sam’s daddy and his uncles were a breed of their own; they were all ranchers who loved to hunt and tell stories around the campfire,” said Harrison Stafford, who served as county auditor during Seale’s 16 years as Jackson County Judge.

In addition to the 10-acre place on the bay, Sam Seale II inherited a 765-acre section of the larger ranch and young Sam learned the ways of the west by working on the family ranch together with his cousins and uncles.

“He grew up with his uncles and his Daddy and all his cousins working cattle together,” said Hensley Weaver, one of Seale’s cousins. “We all grew up together and lived in a pile right there.”

Ranching was the environment in which Sam Seale was raised and it was a lifestyle he never forgot.

“He was sure enough raised in the cowboy tradition, the Wild West mentality,” recalled Randy Mumme, Seale’s nephew. “He alYoung ways had a real interest in the history
of the Texas coast, the Carancahua community and the founding members of his family.”

Mumme spent many summers on the Seale place growing up and when Seale moved to Austin in 1986, he asked Mumme to take over operation
of the ranch under Sam’s supervision.Over the past two decades, whenever Seale returned to the ranch for rest and relaxation, he and Mumme shared hundreds of hours of talk over strong coffee.

Mumme probably knew what Sam Seale thought of the world as well as anyone.

A Drive for Education

Not much is known about Seale’s public school education other than his reputation as a hard-running tailback for the Palacios Sharks. During his time in high school, the Sharks grew from a club that played six-man ball to a full-fledged 11-player team, Mumme said. Seale was also a sprinter on the track team.

From there, he attended and graduated from Texas A&I University in Kingsville. That was where he met and married his first wife, Peggy Shults. To earn his family’s keep, Seale got a job as an officer with the Kingsville Police Department.

Somewhere along the way, he had developed an interest in learning the law so he moved his family to Austin to enroll at the University of Texas Law School. Once again, he turned to law enforcement to pay the bills by working as a deputy sheriff for longtime Travis County Sheriff T.O. Lang.

Then he moved his family to Washington D.C., where he continued his legal studies at American College of Law while working at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the investigative laboratories on ballistics and forensics.

“He told me that when he was an officer, he would arrest people but didn’t really have anything to do with investigations,” Mumme recalled. “At the FBI, he learned to use their techniques to examine clues to determine how someone died or who the real bad guys were.”

Returning Home

In 1961, Sam D. Seale II died, also of cancer, and Sam Seale III moved home to assume responsibility for the family ranch, which had deteriorated somewhat in the last years of his father’s life. Sam got his chance to ranch in the family tradition.

“When he inherited the ranch, it needed lots of work. As the old man had been getting in poorer health over the years, he got less and less interested in maintaining the ranch,” Mumme said. “The herds were a mess and the barns needed fixing, so Sam took a ranch that needed lots of work and turned it around and made it profitable.” But apparently not profitable enough, according to Weaver, his cousin.

“I think he decided he wasn’t making enough money cowboyin’,” Weaver said. “The rest of us are still cowboyin’ but Sam was smarter than that. He got out and got him a better job.”

Seale decided to run for Jackson County Judge against the incumbent, Larkin Thedford, in a race that Weaver recalled as highly contested. “It was a big, big election and it was close,” he said. “Thedford was a pretty prominent guy in town and was well-liked, but Sam ran and beat him. That says something for Sam’s character in the county, and that people respected him enough to turn out Thedford.”

Seale won, served 16 years and during that time discovered his true calling – pursuing the betterment of Texas county government.

Life as a Judge

During those years and afterward, Weaver saw Seale’s success in working with the wayward youth whose screw-ups led them to the county judge’s bench.
“He helped many a kid. Sam saw a light in many a troubled youngster and he helped them,” he said. “A lot of them went on to successful lives after Sam’s effort with them.”
Another view of Seale’s time as county judge came from his auditor, Stafford.

“Sam was an excellent guy to work with. He always wanted Jackson County to be on the cutting edge,” Stafford said. “For years afterward, whenever I heard about one of the other counties developing a new program or approach to a problem, I’d think, my God, we did that years ago.”

But even as the titular head of county government, Seale did not regard others in the courthouse as less than equal.

“He always treated the independent officials of the courthouse on an equal basis,” Stafford said. “He had a real good feel for people.”

Stafford’s longtime assistant auditor, Caroline Pitzer, agreed.

“One thing I always thought about Sam was that he was very, very democratic. No matter whether you were a janitor or another judge, you got the same attention from him,” she said, citing herself as an example.

“Being a woman in a small town 25 years ago, not many people cared a whole lot about what you thought, but Sam did.”

“He wanted to listen to everybody to get their ideas. He always listened to get the other side of the coin.”

In a form of government where officials are elected for their common sense as much as their life experience, Jackson County was where Seale first showed his belief in the need for education among county officials and their employees, a conviction he later displayed in promoting the development of an extensive continuing education for all county officials.

“He believed very strongly in the education programs and making sure that county employees took advantage of those so that we would be educated and know what was going on out there,” Stafford said. “He always took his entire court to the V.G. Young Institute at Texas A&M.”

In a fortunate coincidence, Seale’s entrance into public life coincided with the movement toward regional cooperation and the development of local councils of government. In 1969, the Legislature created local regional councils across the state with the purpose of coordinating the delivery of public services among multiple county and city governments.

Seale took to the notion with a passion, eventually serving four terms as president of the Golden Crescent Regional Planning Commission, earning the Man of the Year honor in both 1979 and 1984. He was also president of the Texas Association of Regional Councils and served on the board of the National Association of Regional Councils of Government.

Patrick Kennedy was a staff member at the Golden Crescent organization when Sam “became my mentor,” Kennedy said. “He had a vision and saw the bigger picture.”

When the executive director job opened, Seale lined up the votes for Kennedy to take over the job and then backed him in his decision- making.

“Sam put you in a position where you were going to be successful,” recalled Kennedy, now in charge of economic development for the City of Yoakum. “I didn’t ever feel someone was looking over my shoulder. He had the confidence in me to let me do my job.”

Working with other levels of government came easily for Seale, Kennedy said.

“It’s amazing what he did with our region, when the group was relatively young,” he said. “He wasn’t intimidated by the City of Victoria, which was far and away the largest government in the region.

He could hold his own in terms of getting people to see the greater good by working together.”

It was during this period of Seale’s life that two crucial changes occurred. In 1980, his wife Peggy died of cancer. The following year, he was attending a Texas Association of Regional Councils meeting in Austin when he met Sylvia Aldrete of Helotes, who was also attending a continuing education class at the same hotel, the old Sheraton Crest on Town Lake.

“I was an insurance representative and Sam asked me about providing health coverage to the county. Later, I found out we didn’t offer coverage to public entities,” Sylvia Seale recalled. A year later, they married.

“I didn’t get the coverage, but I got the judge,” she said.

Seale’s leadership skills were recognized by his fellow county officials in the region and across the state, who elected him to serve as president of both the South Texas Judges and Commissioners Association and the statewide County Judges and Commissioners Association of Texas.

In the role as president of the statewide group, Seale revealed his commitment to success in 1983. By then, Jim Allison was in his second year as the hired lobbyist for the judges and commissioners and he worked closely with Seale on an issue that threatened to devastate the budgets of many smaller counties, health care for poor people.

“Many people across the state had worked for two years on legislation to improve indigent health care and our bill died at midnight on a tie vote in the House,” Allison recounted. “Sam reluctantly climbed into his vehicle and drove back to his ranch in Jackson County. About an hour later, then-governor Mark White called a special session for 9 a.m. the next morning to deal with indigent care. I called Sylvia and when Sam got there, she told him what I’d said and he turned around and he was back here for an 8 a.m. planning session.”

That day, a new law was passed to limit the counties’ liability and to create a program to provide medical care for the indigent.

“I learned right then that when Sam Seale made a commitment, he would follow through regardless of the personal sacrifice required. That type of character remained his trademark throughout all the years that I knew him,” Allison said. “You never had to question where Sam would be on an issue. Once he told you where he stood, he would be there no matter what effort was required.”

That experience explaining county issues to the Legislature would come in handy when his life’s fortunes suddenly turned.

Defeat and New Opportunities

In 1986, the man Seale had defeated 16 years earlier, Larkin Thedford,came back and challenged him for the county judgeship and won. Seale took a lesson from the defeat – for many years afterward, he would shock newly elected officials by explaining to them that “the reason you won wasn’t necessarily because the voters liked you so much, they just wanted to throw out the other guy.”

But by then, Seale had established his reputation as a county leader among members of the Texas Legislature so TAC’s then-executive director, Sam Clonts, snatched him from the ranks of the unemployed and immediately hired him as Legislative Director, less than two months before lawmakers gathered in January, 1987.

Just a few weeks earlier, Clonts had hired a legislative assistant, Ken King, who is now executive director of the Oklahoma Association of Counties.

Sam and Ken were thrown in the pot together.

“He kind of got a baptism under fire. By November, planning for the session was well underway with figuring out what we were supporting or opposing and getting bills drafted and filed,” said King, who had worked previously as a staff aide at the capitol. “I think it was a bit of on-the-job learning for him; both of us kind of learned quite a bit together that session.”
Seale’s natural tendency to treat other officials as peers paid off in his new job.

“It served him well in transition in the early days at TAC,” he said. “He understood that you had to work together on things.”

Seale taught King the value of unity.

“We discovered that if you go in with a united voice for county government, it’s a lot more powerful medicine than just judges and commissioners or auditors or clerks. I still use that lesson today” in Oklahoma, King said. “The fundamental lesson is that if you go over there and you’re not united, the Legislature will either ignore you or vote against you.”

“Sam embraced that pretty quickly. He found that you had a lot more strength if you’re united.”

The former county judge’s wealth of hands-on county government experience also paid off.

“His common sense grasp of the issues meant that he could distill a pretty complex issue down to a simple explanation about how a bill would affect the county,” King said. “It was a unique talent that I don’t think anyone else on the staff had.”

Taking Over

The following year, Clonts decided to retire as executive director and after interviewing several candidates, the board agreed that Sam Seale was the leader of the future.
“Sam Clonts took a lot of pride in getting the organization up and running, but it seemed he was ready to retire once he understood that Sam Seale was prepared to step in,” King said. “Clonts provided Seale a good mentorship.”

The board of directors was also ready for a new direction, especially in dealing with the TAC Workers’ Comp program. Until 1974, local governments had not been required to provide the coverage and when the law changed, many counties had trouble finding affordable coverage. In response, TAC created the Workers’ Compensation
Self-Insurance Fund as a way for counties to share their risk to reduce their costs. TAC had few employees at the time, so the program was built by relying primarily on contractors to provide the actual service delivery.

By 1986, TAC was offering not only Workers’ Comp but also coverages for county employee health benefits as well as unemployment compensation. There was only one problem – in its haste to bail counties out of their financial dilemmas, TAC had failed to conduct actuarial studies to determine its potential future obligations. With a little run of bad luck, the organization could have gone many millions of dollars in the hole – Seale may have seen it as similar to running a ranch without a fence.

At the insistence of then-TAC President and Dallas County Treasurer Bill Melton, TAC underwent its first strategic planning process and agreed on three major goals:

• Moving its offices out of lease space in favor of a permanent home (accomplished when TAC purchased a 2-story building at 1204 San Antonio in Austin and again in 2004 when it constructed an 8-story building at 1210 San Antonio);
• Establishing a presence in courthouses throughout the state so that TAC employees could provide services firsthand (which led to the hiring of field services representatives who were specialists in risk management, loss control and law enforcement); and
• Gaining control of the insurance pool operations by reining in TAC’s use of private contractors for insurance operations and legal counsel.

To address the final point, Seale was given the latitude to grow TAC – the board of directors told him it was time for TAC to move beyond its “infancy” and become a “real association” with its own in-house employees to do the key work such as claims processing and claims adjusting – no longer should counties have to deal with TAC’s consultants or contractors who knew less about county government than a typical official on his or her first day in office. Not only did this decision cut out the “middlemen,” it allowed TAC to offer services that were custom-tailored for county government, a mark of the organization to this day.

Seale took on the job with gusto – the organization grew from six employees in January 1987 to 30 employees two years later. When Seale was recently honored on the 20th anniversary of his joining TAC, it was noted that the organization had grown to 130 staff members, without increasing the taxpayer dues paid by county governments.

“I can remember the six of us sitting around wondering whether the pool would go bankrupt and we’d all be out of a job,” King said. “The pool really blossomed when we brought in-house the functions of loss control and risk management, which are areas where counties are unique in how they can address those functions.”

Subsequently, Seale oversaw the development of two other insurance operations, the TAC County Government Risk Management Pool and TAC Property& Casualty Self Insurance Fund.

But for Seale and the county officials who led the organization, the point of being an association of counties was not solely to provide insurance coverage for the benefit of a lighter tax burden. License fees that the pools pay for the use of TAC’s name are used to invest in county government itself – through its officials.

In addition to the traditional state association function of government relations, TAC developed an extensive education program to invest county officials with skills and knowledge that help them accomplish their jobs. As he had believed back in Jackson County, Seale knew that well-educated officials were most capable of serving the taxpayers well.

“One of the basic ideals that Sam had was that people are your best investment, that people are always worth it,” said Mumme, his nephew. “He said that was true at TAC and that was true in the courthouse.”

Part of the education effort are practical ways to reduce insurance claims – providing an array of programs to improve job-specific work skills, from human relations training to aid officials in managing employees to helping jail administrators understand how to control violence and inmate abuse in their facilities. Other programs focus on improving service delivery and the quality of leadership: investment of county funds, training non-lawyer judges and leadership skills for those who are active in county affiliate associations.
Nationally, Seale was well respected among his peers at other county government associations.

Jerry Griffin, executive director of Association County Commissioners of Georgia, was a good friend of Seale who became the head of the Georgia group at about the same time Seale took over in Texas. “As a former elected official, Sam taught me some things about his perspective and as someone with prior association experience, I helped him on that side,” Griffin said.

Larry Naake, executive director of the National Association of Counties, said Seale was not the longest serving state association staff chief but was regarded as the “dean” of the group. “He was always seen as the one with the most experience because of his tenure as a county official.

“We regarded him as a mentor as well as someone we all looked up to. We had high regard for his good political sense,” Naake said. “We always looked to Sam for his insights on what is best for county government.”

In the legislative arena, Seale was particularly proud of the way county officials from throughout the courthouse – as well as urban and rural counties – joined with city governments to defend local governments’ fiscal capacity against attempts by some lawmakers to cap revenue or appraisal growth. In 2004, he invited officials representing all county offices to meet with the leaders of the Texas Municipal League and the Texas Conference of Urban Counties in Marble Falls for the purpose of forming a united approach regarding
caps. The group adopted a compact of common goals for local governments.

“Putting together that dinner and reception the first night was what created the unity among local governments that followed,” said Frank Sturzl, executive director of the Texas Municipal League. “Even though we’d had our differences in years past, we developed a strong partnership in the last three years and I’m very grateful for that. Sam was a real champion of local government.”

Seale’s longtime assistant executive director, Karen Norris, noted that Seale had overcome cancer back in the late 1980s but that it recurred about three years ago, almost simultaneously with the eruption of the proposals for fiscal caps on counties.

“He was nothing less that aghast at the potential irrevocable harm he felt would be done to counties by the cap proposals,” Norris said. “He seemed to view the cancer as a minor inconvenience to be tolerated until it gave up.”

She said that in the last few months of his life, Seale insisted that TAC carry on the fight to preserve local control in fiscal decision-making and ignore his circumstances.

“It was not in his nature to easily step aside for others to shoulder his burdens. He was at his desk by at least 6 a.m. every morning until the last two weeks of his life,” she said. “Our last conversation was not of him and the crisis of his health but of TAC and the work he planned for later in the month - the next board meeting, the upcoming conference
and his concern about recent legislation introduced on caps.”