Q&A: Meet the candidates in the race for Texas House District 89 seat

The whole write-up on this one amounts to a single sentence: Candy Noble is running again, and Angie Carraway wants her seat. That's it. No positions, no record, no sense of what either of them actually wants to do in Austin. If you're a voter in Collin County trying to figure out who to pull the lever for, this "Q&A" tells you nothing you couldn't get off a yard sign.

That's a shame, because House District 89 isn't some throwaway seat. It's the kind of fast-growing suburban district north of Dallas where the next round of property tax fights, school curriculum battles and water and infrastructure fights for a booming population actually get decided. Noble has been in that seat through several sessions of exactly those fights. Whether Carraway thinks Austin has gotten it right or wrong on any of it is apparently not worth asking.

We'd rather see local papers spend less time on horse-race framing and more on what state legislators actually vote on, because that's where the real governing happens. Congress gets the cable hits, but a state rep casts votes on your school board's funding formula and your property appraisal cap. Texans deserve better than a coin-flip summary dressed up as a candidate profile.

Until the paper does the actual reporting, here's our shorthand: an incumbent with a voting record worth scrutinizing against a challenger nobody's told us anything about. Voters in HD-89 shouldn't have to go digging through campaign filings just to find out what's on the ballot. Local journalism used to mean doing that digging for people..