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Susan Combs Announces Plans To Leave Office In 2014

State of Texas

It will be 20 years since Texas Comptroller Susan Combs stepped into a state-elected office and at one point she had also been positioning herself for the spot of lieutenant governor, so why hang her hat up now?

"Well, my husband and I had been talking over the last several months at dinner time about sort of the next direction we wanted to take," Combs said. "We talked about the fact that I will have served 20 years in elected office by the time I finish this, and he said, 'Do you really want to do another four to eight years, and what would you accomplish?"

Combs said she has accomplished everything she wanted to accomplish - from being the first woman elected as agriculture commissioner to being able to recover almost $1 billion in unclaimed property while serving as state comptroller.

However, Combs said sitting still isn’t something she does well.

"I’m going to try to work on a national level with other states, and my feeling is that we can take some of the strategies and the processes we did here and make them go national," she said.

She already has dates set to meet on her own with state officials from Alaska, Ohio, the Carolinas and Florida.

Looking back, Combs said it wasn't always rosy, pointing to the data breach that affected 3.5 million Texans. The 68-year-old Combs said it was a learning experience. 

As far as her replacement, there are three interested parties so far: Rep. Harvey Hilderbran, R-Kerrville, Sen. Glenn Hegar, R-Katy, and former gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina.

Ryan started his radio career in 2002 working for Austin’s News Radio KLBJ-AM as a show producer for the station's organic gardening shows. This slowly evolved into a role as the morning show producer and later as the group’s executive producer.