Laura Gallier CPA for Houston City Council District C

Reimagining safety to demand city services that actually keep Houston safe.

What I Bring to City Hall

Financial oversight and transparency: Forty years of following the money, demanding transparency, and solving complex financial and budget problems.
Years of listening, organizing, and advocating alongside grassroots movements across Houston to understand real needs and real solutions.
Reimagining safety using data-driven, community-centered approaches that prevent harm before it happens and builds trust citywide.
Resisting the midcycle racial redistricting in 2025

Laura is running for City Council District C to respond to the needs of the city she loves. She’s spent years in the community with grassroots movements for voting rights, criminal justice, right-sized policing, tenants’ rights, unhoused individuals, violence prevention, reimagining foster care, immigrants rights, environment and climate, drainage and disaster resilience, HISD, reallocation of the City and County budget to basic services, dignity and safety for incarcerated individuals and more. She listens to the struggles of the community and advocates alongside them for the solutions they identify.

In connection with her advocacy, Laura brings her CPA lens to City operations through a review of publicly-available financial statements and budget discussions. She asks straighforward questions but gets vague answers. Her CPA vision serves as a bridge between the needs of the community and the budget choices of the City.

Reimagining safety and the City budget: When the safety of the community is at stake, it’s not okay for the City to say “We just don’t have the money,” which we heard over and over during budget meetings. The budget needs to be reallocated to services in accordance with evidence-based community-centered policies that keep us safe from the risks we are most likely to face. This includes: funding for disaster preparedness and flood mitigation; protection for Constitutional rights such as free speech, right of assembly and due process; enforcement of building health codes for renters; infrastructure that slows down drivers and safely allows for all forms of transportation; repairs to ancient water pipes to secure our drinking water; timely pickup of heavy trash, citywide composting of yard and food waste, cleaning up illegal dumping, and methane capture at the landfill;. trees for shade, heat resilience, beauty, ecosystem restoration and carbon capture; dignity for labor; a non-carceral solution to the shortage of affordable housing; transition to solar power and battery storage at the scale of government; first responders trained to de-escalate crises and treat (rather than criminalize) the underlying conditions; language access to all City services. We can’t afford (and don’t want) to use limited City resources to enforce federal immigration laws and to have officers highly trained in the use of lethal force to make non-safety traffic stops to collect past due vehicle registrations or vehicle repairs. Laura has been at City Hall advocating for all this and more for years. She’s running for City Council to continue to listen to the concerns of the community and to reimagine how city government can attend to the needs of the community in ways that actually keep people safe.

I want to know what keeps you up at night and what you’d like the City to do about it. Desde estaba joven, he querido hablar espanol. Si habla despacio y claro, y disculpeme mucho, se puede! Quiero escuchar que les preocupa en su propia lengua. correo: info@lauraforhouston.com.

Your tax dollars are a sacred trust. I’ve spent 40 years listening to clients frustration with paying taxes for services that do not make our lives better or safer. I’ve heard it repeatedly on this campaign trail too. I stand with Houstonians demanding that our tax dollars be used for voter-approved services and infrastructure.

To strengthen democracy Laura has supported democracy in just about every imaginable way: registering voters in jail and at naturalization ceremonies, poll watching and election monitoring, election clerk, blockwalking, phonebanking, relational organizing with Powered By People, collecting signatures, hosting candidate meet-and greets, a delegate to the county Democratic convention representing Obama, protesting, giving public comments to elected officials at all levels of government, advocating against voter suppression in Austin. During the redistricting “hearings” in 2025, when it became clear that the hundreds of people waiting to give comments would not be heard in the 5 hours allotted, Laura showed dozens of them in the lobby how to give online public comments.

Advocacy in Austin with the League of Women Voters 2025

Deep roots in District C. Laura is a native** Houstonian, the third of five generations to call District C home – on both her mother’s and father’s side. Her grandfather, Lon Cowling, owned a business in the old Cody’s building on Montrose. In the early 1970s her father, Dick Cowling, owned a nightclub called The Sanctuary where the Glassell School now stands. Her mother, Martha Gleason, grew up in the Heights with her grandmother Jesse Hutts (a Rice grad) and great-grandmother. Her parents first home together was on Harold in Montrose, her father’s last home was in Parc IV on Montrose, and her first apartment after college was on North Boulevard.

**I should say I was born here. The actual native Houstonians are the Karankawa, Atakapa, Akokisa, Coahueltican peoples and other indigenous nations.

Family and personal: Laura is married 18 years to Mike, a partner in a local CPA firm and lives in the Heights. Their blended family and five grandchildren are the joys of their lives. When not campaigning she is a gym rat, beach bum, and board game aficionado. She enjoys singing, reading, tie-dying, and very dark chocolate. She attended The Kinkaid School, Grady Elementary, TH Rogers Junior High and Lee High School (now Wisdom) in HISD. She graduated from HBU (now Houston Christian University) and completed half of a Master of Liberal Studies at Rice (with a 4.0).

Professionally, from 1984 to 2006 she worked for various local CPA firms, and from 2006 to 2024 she ran a successful boutique CPA firm, Laura Gallier CPA PC. She served her profession on a Task Force of the American Institute of CPAs who met with the IRS to advocate for clarification and simplification of tax regulations and on the board of the Planned Giving Council of Houston (now Charitable Gift Planners of Houston).

Programming at the Center for the Healing of Racism

In the community, from 2014 to 2024 she produced and co-facilitated programs at the Center for the Healing of Racism. She was a volunteer Reading Interventionist and Volunteer of the Year for 3 years at Glover Elementary in FBISD. She’s been an active member of Pure Justice since 2018 doing legislative advocacy in Austin, public comments at City Council and Commissioners Court, participatory defense, disaster response, voter registration, GOTV canvassing and CPA-type work. She participated with various grassroots organizations in disaster response in underserved neighborhoods after Allison (2001), Ike (2008), Harvey (2017), Uri winter freeze (2021) Beryl and Derecho (2024). I’m a part of the outside team supporting Jason Renard Walker, an incarcerated journalist; we publish and distribute Jason’s Prison Journal and advocate at all levels of Texas Department of Criminal Justice for his safety, health and dignity. Her kitchen table is a familiar community hub where people from all backgrounds gather for political education, organizing and distributing mutual aid resources, informal art therapy. Starting last January she next-leveled her daily walk by distributing hundreds of Know Your Rights/Family Preparation flyers prepared by Texas Advocates for Justice to workers in places likely to be targeted by ICE y porque hablo espanol, de vez en cuando ayudo organizaciones immigrantes en clases de Conozca Sus Derechos.

A frequent attendee at in-person and livestream meetings of Houston City Council and its committees (primarily Public Safety and Budget/Fiscal Affairs), Harris County Commissioners’ Court, METRO board, and the Texas legislature and its committees, she has given hundreds of public comments. As an organizer, she shared these opportunities with hundreds of other armchair activists who use their writing skills and make phone calls to push back on legislation intending to harm Houstonians, Texans, the environment, our water supply, public education, and Constitutional rights.

She served from 1995-2000 on the Finance Committee of the Houston Area Women’s Center assisting her role model Ellen Cohen establish clear internal controls over the accounting. In 2004 she participated in the March for Women’s Lives in Washington DC. In 2012-2013 she participated in Fort Bend Leadership. In 2017-2018 she participated in the grassroots movement to prevent the takeover of HISD by the State of Texas, including being forcibly removed from Hattie Mae by HPD.

Support for labor: She stood with Unite Here Local 23 in City Council for years and picketed with them in their 2025 strike against Hilton Americas.

In the news: Houston Democracy Project article: Houstonian Laura Gallier Starts Council Discussion on HPD Cooperation with ICE. Houston Defender article: Participatory Defense: Pure Justice and Laura Gallier Support Defendants with Community Power. Houston Public Media article Laura Gallier challenges HPD after recent turnover to ICE. KPFT interview on People of Earth. The Black House Podcast episode. Raising concerns about City of Houston Budget

In allyship She is a frequent guest speaker of women of color on the topic of the Ally Journey at several local gradtuate social work programs and nonprofits. Spoiler alert: everyone can be an ally to someone when the opportunity presents.

SHE PROUDLY AND GRATEFULLY ENDORSES THE 2026 HOUSTON QUEER AGENDA and was moved to be in the room when it was adopted.

Empowering others: Starting in 2022 she began an initiative to organize people, mostly financially-secure white women, who she met in movement spaces or heard say “But what can we do?” In consultation with Black movement leaders she trained dozens of them in crucial aspects of allyship and nudged them deeper into movements where their new sense of empowerment could make a difference. They are now over 150 strong. She’s thrilled that one of member felt emboldened to become a plaintiff in a lawsuit to get the 10 Commandments out of schools. Join the movement! dwlgallier@gmail.com.

Giving public comments at City Council Public Safety Committee Meeting

Grassroots initiatives: Her current project is working with a group of grassroots individuals from many backgrounds and affiliations to try to get commercial-scale solar and battery systems on top of warehouses and large government buildings in Houston. Join the movement! dwlgallier@gmail.com.

Let’s encourage and empower each other to reimagine and manifest city services that meet the needs of the community. Please come to City Hall when budget talks begin this spring to advocate for city services that keep you safe. She’ll see you there.

Do you live in District C? Use the map below to check!