The race for Texas agriculture commissioner has featured an unusual amount of mudslinging, so Democratic challenger Hank Gilbert’s visit to Waco on Thursday to talk policy seemed like a departure from the slugfest.

Indeed, Gilbert, who’s taking on Republican incumbent Todd Staples, laid out a platform full of policy topics.

But Gilbert’s focus at a press event — centralizing the Texas food safety inspection process — circled back to the campaign’s central avenue of attack.

Hank Gilbert is the Democratic challenger for state Agriculture Commissioner.
Duane A. Laverty/Tribune-Herald

Gilbert has argued that lack of oversight from Staples’ agency was responsible for a salmonella outbreak and resulting deaths in other states that traced back to a Plainview peanut plant.

“With the peanut incident, when it all came out in the wash, you had two or three agencies pointing a finger at each other because two or three different agencies had a part to play in that,” Gilbert said.

“Even though (the Texas Department of Agriculture) was probably the most culpable because of lack of inspections.”

A department inspector visited the plant in 2005, 2006 and 2008 and checked a box stating the plant had a required state health department license, which it never received. He was fired.

Gilbert said that according to Food and Drug Administration rules, a proper inspection of the peanut plant would have required “an inspector on the floor of the plant during the time of processing. Had that happened, the inspector would have seen rat feces, bird feces and dead rodents all over the place and immediately shut that operation down, which would have triggered an investigation into all that corporation’s plants.”

On the website SleazySleazyStaples.com, Gilbert’s campaign included a page referring to the incident with the headline “Blood on his hands?”

A Staples consultant has denounced that comment as false, though Gilbert said he stands by it and that, “truth be known, we don’t know whether that inspector was fired or not.”

Staples campaign spokesman Cody McGregor put out a release in response to Gilbert’s seven-city policy tour, touting Staples’ support and firing right back at Gilbert.

“Todd Staples has been endorsed for re-election by every major agriculture group in Texas, and that speaks for itself,” McGregor said.

He also plugged a Staples campaign site, GuiltyGuiltyGilbert.com, that highlights a misdemeanor charge Gilbert faced in 2001 and tax liens leveled against him by the Internal Revenue Service.

Gilbert has said his dispute with the IRS occurred after his family’s carpet-cleaning and mold-remediation business switched accountants, which led to a tax mistake.

He has told the Houston Chronicle he has hired an attorney to settle the dispute.

mshapiro@wacotrib.com

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