Arlington Chamber of Commerce, Arlington TX

Government Relations Council

April 3 Primary Requires Redistricting Map Agreement by End of Day

The Texas political primary schedule could get blown up today, barring some very unlikely moves by the two major political parties. The panel of federal judges in San Antonio that is charged with drawing interim maps indicated that the April 3 primary date can’t be met if they don’t receive agreed-upon maps for Congress, the Texas House and Texas Senate by the close of business today.

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Commissioner Emphasizes Transportation Issues

While there wasn’t a specific focus to the transportation discussion, it’s been an issue in Arlington for a long time and eventually, almost every local elected official concludes that congestion inhibits access to education, jobs and stifles economic growth. A person without a car or access to a car can’t get to work, school, the grocery store or the doctor’s office, and all of those destinations are important to a community’s health.

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Texas Electoral Maps Sent Back to the Drawing Board

The prospects of Texas holding party primary elections in April faded to almost nothing after the US Supreme Court threw out legislative and congressional district maps ordered by a federal court panel in San Antonio, but did not indicate which lines should be used.

Federal judges in San Antonio have called a conference to talk about the situation February 1, while the Supreme Court seems to be waiting on a decision by a circuit court in Washington, D. C. to rule on a dispute between the state of Texas and the U.S. Justice Department about the validity of the lines approved in May by the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature.

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Insurance & Water Issues

Texas Senators suggested last week if state regulators or statewide elected officials didn’t step up to address the high cost of insurance and the lack of preparation for future water needs, that legislators might need to step in and take over those issues.

The Senate Business and Commerce Committee’s interim hearing was focused primarily on drought conditions and their impact on the demand for electricity, along with the ability, in a drought, to generate electricity. But senators also asked heard testimony from Eleanor Kitzman, Texas’ insurance commissioner, who was appointed to the position in August.

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UTA President defends research spending

The role of research at the University of Texas at Arlington will only gain in importance despite ongoing criticism of dollars spent on research at Texas universities by a number of influential, conservative policy groups. UT Arlington President James D. Spaniolo told the Chamber of Commerce’s Government Relations Council last week that the pressure on research spending has receded somewhat over the summer, and that research is integral to the growth of the university.

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Regional Transit Options Back on the Table

Despite a complex set of obstacles and a history that isn’t encouraging, regional transportation officials last week began work on another effort to get local consensus and support from state lawmakers to implement, and pay for, a rail system that ties the North Texas region together.

A committee of the Regional Transportation Council began by looking at the history of unsuccessful legislative efforts in the last eight years, and also acknowledged the equity problem that makes it difficult for communities such as Arlington, without a rail or transit provider, to join an existing agency.

Since starting a transit system within one city is prohibitively expensive, joining another provider would make the most sense, except that the other cities paying into those providers, such as Dallas Area Rapid Transit or the T in Fort Worth, have been paying sales tax into those systems for as long as 30 years.

Committee chairman Jungus Jordan, a Fort Worth City Council member, acknowledged that the equity question needs to be addressed to keep the region united in whatever authority it seeks form Texas legislators when they reconvene in 2013.

In 2009, regional authorities proposed a list of funding options – such as an increased local-option sales tax, increases in vehicle registration fees – that would aid in building and operating rail in areas outside the DART, T and Denton County Transportation Authority (DCTA) systems. That measure asked legislators to let voters in various regions of Texas vote on what, if any, fees and taxes they were willing to impose on themselves to pay for a rail system. That bill passed the state Senate but was not considered by the Texas House, the continuation of a pattern seen in previous sessions.

Getting North Texas ready for the population increases projected requires continuing to push for funding for transit options, said Michael Morris, Transportation Director at the North Central Texas Council of Governments.
“Are we focused on a region of 10 million people or are we still looking out the back windshield of the car at a region of four million,” Morris asked.

Outside the broad, statewide funding discussions, officials reviewed a plan that would connect passengers from western Tarrant County to Dallas Fort Worth Airport and beyond, possibly to an end point in Carrollton that would tie into the DART and DCTA systems. The route would be along an existing Cotton Belt rail line, but Morris pointed out that up to 60 percent of the line currently runs through cities that are not part of DART or the T. You can see the map here.

Policy Presentation on Demographics to CLC Board

The Arlington Chamber of Commerce Center for Public Policy gave a presentation the to CLC Board on Tuesday, December 6, 2011.  Texas is growing and with changing demographics, the state’s policies will need to adjust in order to ensure Texas continues to lead in job growth, education and development.  To read the full presentation, click here. 

Steve Murdock’s Demographic Presentation

Click here to read Steve Murdock’s presentation on Population Change in Texas and the Dallas‐Fort Worth Area: Implications for Education, the Labor Force and Economic Development.

Population Changes in Texas Pose Challenges

Population changes in Arlington and Texas will challenge educational achievement over the next three decades, with serious implications for economic growth. At state Rep. Diane Patrick’s fifth annual Education Summit, Dr. Steven Murdock, former state demographer presented a compelling case for increasing educational achievement and increasing incomes among the state’s rapidly growing Hispanic population.

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UPDATE: Election Day Tomorrow - Chamber leaders urge support for propositions 2 and 3.

The leadership of the Arlington Chamber of Commerce urges members to vote in the November 8 constitutional amendment election and to support propositions 2 and 3. Election Day is Tuesday, November 8th.

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State’s Sales Tax Revenue up 9.4% According to State Comptroller

Last week, the state comptroller’s office gave the House Committee on Ways and Means some good economic news. 

This year, the sales tax revenue is up 9.4% from last year.  The North Texas region played a role in this resurgence with events like the Super Bowl, NBA Finals and the Texas Rangers.

Apart from the entertainment industry, the oil and gas industry saw a 70% increase in sales tax due in large part to production in our region, as well as, West and South Texas.

In other good news, the state’s Economic Stabilization Fund (known as the “Rainy Day Fund”) will have an estimated $7 billion by the time the legislature reconvenes in January of 2013 – up from the current level of $5 billion.

“Margins” Tax revenue is currently at $3.9 billion for 2011, with $2.68 billion going straight to the state’s general revenue fund and the remainder going to the Property Tax Relief Fund.  Due to the legislature raising the business revenue threshold to $1 million, 40,000 additional businesses were exempt.

To Read the Full Report, click here.

State’s Chief Revenue Estimator Predicts Slow Growth

With Governor Rick Perry’s presidential campaign focusing more than usual national attention on Texas and its economic performance, Perry supporters are no doubt playing down comments from the Texas Comptroller’s office that next year’s economic growth is expected to be “flattish.”

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Summary of 82nd Legislative Session by Issue

A final summary of all issues on the Chamber’s agenda for the 82nd Legislative Session, and a few that came up along the way, can be found here.

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Arlington Receives $2.7 Million from the Major Events Trust Fund

Last week the state’s Major Events Trust Fund notified the City of Arlington that it will reimburse the city for investments and costs related to the Super Bowl to the tune of $2.7 million.

The City of Arlington made substantial infrastructure improvements to accommodate the influx of media and football fans, which in turn, enhances the city long after the football masses have gone home.

All of this is made possible due to the Major Events Trust Fund, which is operated by the state comptroller’s office.  The Major Events Trust Fund is designed to allow cities to lure major events to a region in order to generate revenue. In return, the state will reimburse a city for costs incurred if the revenue gained exceeds costs.  It’s a win/win for the State of Texas and the City of Arlington.  For more information, click here.

In addition, this past legislative session, Arlington Senator Chris Harris authored and passed a bill that expands the scope of the Major Events Trust Fund to include the Academy of Country Music Awards and the national conventions of both the Republican and Democratic parties, which the City of Arlington hopes to attract. Arlington State Representative Diane Patrick sponsored Harris’ bill in the House.  You can read the bill here.

Perry dominates legislative session

A final evaluation of the legislative session always depends on perspective. But one thing is clear from both a policy perspective and a political one: Rick Perry won.
The things he wanted to pass, with one glaring exception, will become law if they haven’t already. The things he didn’t want to on his desk are dead.
For the constituency that has been the governor’s primary concern – the most conservative members of the Republican Party – this session was a good one. Many of their initiatives were declared emergencies for the sake of expediting legislation. They were not emergencies in terms of addressing or avoiding a crisis.
As a result, abortions will be harder and more cumbersome to get in Texas, and access to Planned Parenthood’s non-abortion services related to family planning have been all but eliminated for poor families.
Texans will need a picture of themselves when they vote in November, a notion favored by Republicans and Democrats, but one that might prohibit a small number of non-driving voters – the poor and elderly—from casting a vote. Public-sector acquisition of private property will be more difficult and more expensive – driving up the cost of government – as a result of new eminent domain laws.
These are mentioned first only because that’s where Perry put them, ahead of a $27 billion budget shortfall, ahead of a transportation system falling further behind its ability to meet Texans’ needs, ahead of a spending and revenue structure that needs serious attention, ahead of growing enrollment in public and higher education and ahead of growing demand for medical services from the state’s poorest citizens.
Those who did not benefit from this session would be employees of public and higher education institutions, some of whom will lose their jobs. Students at those institutions will be in more crowded classrooms, with teachers who have less administrative support. Classes in some subjects won’t be offered at all.
The state’s two-year budget was balanced wholly buy cutting an already lean spending program, resulting in substantial reductions in funding to public and higher education institutions and a reduction Medicaid services. The budget does not pay for growth in the state’s institutions, leaving the cost of 160,000 new public school students to be borne over the next two years by local school districts, many of which have already laid people off.
For state legislators who ultimately supported the budget – which is an all-Republican group, though not every Republican – the next phase of this discussion is to deflect responsibility for layoffs in local communities. The talking points, rehearsed during the regular legislative session, will be that local schools are bloated, overspending bureaucracies and the 5-10 percent cuts the state imposed should not have an impact on instruction. There are no doubt school districts that match that description; but there are plenty that don’t. The spending reductions don’t just cut fat, they cut bone.
In Arlington, the cuts constitute a $35 million reduction in state support over the next two years. The district has cut deeply into support staff but did not touch the instructional group. There is a legitimate fear, given the Legislature’s performance this time around, that in 2013 the school finance picture will not be significantly improved. At that point, a tax increase or a reduction in teaching positions – or some combination of both – may be the only choice left.
Legislators have noted that many districts have reserve funds, and now they should use them. Dipping into that balance was already contemplated in Arlington before the state added a $35 million shortfall to the district’s budget. Those reserves run out if you keep using them.
And the comment is ironic, if not hypocritical, since the House and Senate both refused to allow consideration of taking money from the state’s Economic Stabilization Fund – the rainy day fund – to balance the budget. Legislators are all for a local district using their reserves, but the state isn’t allowed to use its reserve fund for what it’s there for.
In some ways, Arlington came out better this session than many other communities. State Representative Diane Patrick and Senator Chris Harris passed a bill allowing the state’s major events trust fund to reimburse local communities for the costs of political conventions, specific equine-related events and the Academy of Country Music Awards. Arlington sought the fund’s expansion for conventions and the ACM awards; the horse show came as part of the deal. The bill allows the city to more aggressively pursue those events, with an eye on Cowboys Stadium as the venue. The Major Events Fund reimbursed Arlington more than $2 million for its costs associated with the Super Bowl.
Patrick passed a major amendment to school finance legislation that essentially resets the standards when the Legislature returns in 2013. The school-finance plan that was passed to make the budget cuts effective could have extended into future years, to the detriment of local districts, but Patrick’s amendment smoothed out the cuts so they were more uniform over the next two years, and then it wipes out the plan and returns to formulas that the state chose not to fund this time around.
The school-finance issue remains a front-burner question, one this legislature did not have the interest or the will to resolve. But even in an improving economy, the system that generates state money for schools is projected to come up short again two years from now. This is not a secret, and it was known when 82nd Legislative session kicked in January 11, 2011. The business tax that is the principle source of money does not generate enough to cover the cost of schools. It never has. It was a problem when the session started. It remains a problem now that the session is over.
Most of the hard questions that affect the state’s ability to accommodate a growing population with even a minimal level of public services were ignored this time around. School finance is high on that list, maybe the first thing, but it isn’t the only thing.
Texas will begin the next session in a hole because the full cost of a two-year Medicaid program was not funded in the state budget. If the full 24 months of expenses were included, the budget would not have balanced. In addition, a payment of almost $3 billion to public schools will be delayed from August of 2013 to September of 2013, moving the expense into the next budget year, and consequently starting out that budget with $2.8 billion hole in expenses on top of the next two years’ needs.
Texas funding for transportation has reached the end of the line unless a new revenue source is found or current revenue sources are augmented. The 2012-2013 budget uses the last of the available authorization for transportation bonds. That means no money for new road construction, and not much for maintenance on the highway system, once those funds are used. Even though the injection of $3 billion is welcome, it comes at a future cost of paying off those bonds, further depleting the state’s ability to accommodate growth and maintenance needs. While many legislators acknowledged that something like increasing the gasoline tax is necessary, whether they have the will to act on that knowledge is an open question.
Texas continues to delay putting money into the development of water projects to accommodate a growing population. Water is a forgotten issue as long as sprinklers still work when they’re turned on and something comes out when the kitchen faucet is opened. No one focuses on the years of planning necessary to develop new reservoirs, and Texans are loathe to implement restrictions. A day of reckoning will hit very hard, and be accompanied by a lot of finger pointing. It wouldn’t hurt for legislators to time talking about the need to preserve this precious resource, and develop more of it, instead of using face time with audiences to bash Washington.
Texas is spending less and less money on higher education at a time when the state is also saying it wants to beef up research at state universities. As an example, only 17 percent of the costs at UT Arlington are now covered by state resources, leaving one UTA executive to comment that it is less a state institution than a state-“assisted” institution. Like the public schools, enrollment in colleges and universities keeps growing. This year, in order to avoid a tax increase, student loan funds were cut. Institutions have raised tuition in response to state cuts, but that, too produces a backlash. That backlash, in turn, has created a controversy that will play out over the interim about college spending and the division of that spending between classroom instruction and research.
Texas did not fully pay for health-care costs. The state pays a portion of costs for Medicaid, which is primarily for poor children, the disabled and the elderly, including nursing home care. The federal government pays the rest. Budget writers have acknowledged that they did not put the full amount they expect to spend into the budget. They will most likely tap the rainy day fund—suddenly not sacrosanct any more – in 2013 to make up the shortfall.
Texas wants out from under the federal government’s thumb on health care, passing a bill to create a “compact” with other states and asking for a waiver from Medicaid law to form an alternate system. That alternate system is supported by some liberal groups, but the state budget is predicated on the state getting the waiver, and the odds of that are no more than 50-50 at best. Failure to get the waiver will create another opportunity for conservatives to bash Washington, but it won’t solve the Medicaid shortfall. And, while asking for more flexibility in administering health-care dollars, the state cut support to medical schools that exist to put more doctors into the system. Even if there is money to provide care, the state’s funding decisions may mean there aren’t enough people to deliver that care.
This was a session with a lot of noise, a session where social conservatives accomplished almost everything they wanted except for defunding university gay and lesbian groups and allowing adults to carry handguns on college campuses. It’s now permissible to stick your hand in a hole in a river or lake to catch a fish, which is important to some people. The official state domino game is 42, and you can still send text messages while driving.
If you want assurances that your business will have an educated workforce, or that customers, employees and suppliers can navigate increasingly congested roads to get to you, you aren’t quite so lucky.

Special Session Comes to an End

Observers of Texas politics like to joke that nowhere is more dangerous than Austin when the state Legislature is in session. While Austin was certainly ground zero in 2011, the danger zone ended up encompassing the whole state.

Now that legislators have limped out of town, angry at each other and their leaders, we can relax a little and sort out what happened.

A more comprehensive review of the session will be posted next week. For now, it’s enough to say that legislators completed the bills they needed to pass to get a balanced budget – a constitutional requirement, by the way, not some extraordinary accomplishment that is unique to this session – did a lot of things that a narrow slice of the voting public pushed them to do and left almost every major issue that was pending in January pretty much unaddressed.

In the phrase often-used by Steve Ogden, the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and one of the few true statesmen left in the state capitol, they “kicked the can down the road.”

In the early evening last Tuesday, the House voted 80-57 to pass Senate Bill 1, which contained accounting tricks, delayed payments, tax-speedups and one new tax item, all adding up to a package that would allow Comptroller Susan Combs to certify the state budget. It took 29 of the allotted 30 days in the special session to get it done.

And even then, SB1 had to be pulled from a ditch Tuesday afternoon after about 30 percent of House Republicans joined all Democrats in voting against the conference committee report – the unamendable final version of the bill – effectively killing it and raising the specter of another special session.

Reasons for voting “no” were varied, with some members venting their anger at the Senate because senators had earlier passed their final version of bills and closed up shop, leaving the House in a take-it-or-leave-it posture regarding the fiscal issues, immigration issues and the session’s last hot-button issue, “groping” by security officers at airports.

After a Republican caucus Tuesday to figure out what was going on, 16 members switched their votes, providing the 80 votes necessary to get SB1 across the finish line and on to Governor Rick Perry’s desk for a signature.

A handful of Republicans maintained their votes against the bill, many having previously objected to it because of the way it cut funding to their school districts. That outcome, however, had been a foregone conclusion since January 11, when legislators faced a $27 billion budget shortfall and a prohibition on using available state reserves to close the gap to avoid layoffs in school districts around the state. It just took some members a while to realize that the consequence of the overwhelming anti-tax, anti-fee, anti-government rhetoric was the real loss of real jobs back home.

The total cut to schools was $4.2 billion, about half of the $8 billion that started the session. The gap was closed – if you can call it closing the gap – by writing into law that the final payment to schools in the 2012-2013 budget would be delayed for 10 days, effectively pushing the spending into the next budget year. A few other tricks and the discovery of an extra $1 billion in revenue by Combs late in the session kept the school cuts from being worse.

Republicans, in charge the whole session with an overwhelming majority in the House and almost as much of a margin in the Senate, argued that not raising taxes – balancing the budget entirely with cuts – was preferable to making school districts whole. As all legislators do when they cut budgets in a way that costs people jobs, curbs programs and reduces services, they basically said schools complained too much and they could live with the outcome. The implication that all school districts are inefficient, big-spending bureaucracies was present in every debate – and there were many – about the effect of the cuts in the House and the Senate.

For Democrats, the whole issue came down to one point: It didn’t have to be this way. Without raising taxes or imposing new fees, they argued, the state had the money to pay for public education without imposing cuts that in some districts will reach 10 percent. The Economic Stabilization Fund – called the rainy day fund in most instances – was established precisely to address shortfalls such as the one legislators faced this year.  They just weren’t allowed to access it because it was more important, apparently, to be seen by outsiders as conservative, budget-cutting policy makers than to pay for the 160,000 new students who will hit public schools in Texas in the next two years.

The irony, of course, is that even Republican lawmakers acknowledge they will tap the rainy day fund when they return in 2013 because the budget they just passed did not provide enough money to cover what they know they will incur for Medicaid expenses. The budget will have about eight months left to go when lawmakers return to Austin in 2013, and one of the things they will do – as they do every session – is a pass a clean-up bill that fixes budget issues in the current budget before time elapses. They will most likely then use the rainy day fund to balance the same budget they did not use it for now.

Not all Republicans were happy with that decision, but Perry and a vocal minority of influential pressure groups pressured, cajoled and threatened representatives every single day to stick with the budget-cuts-only approach to balancing the budget. And Perry stuck to his word, vetoing a bill that would tax out-of-state retailers who sell over the internet if they have a presence in the state. That bill, however, was added back to SB1 and will become law if Perry signs it, providing the only new tax revenue for the state this session.

In the end, late Tuesday, all Republicans from Tarrant County voted for the final passage of the school funding bill and both Democrats voted against it.

The session ended with some good, old-fashioned finger pointing Wednesday, when House sponsors could not come up with 120 votes to suspend rules and pass a bill criminalizing invasive searches by federal Transportation Security Agency officials at the airport. Known as the “groping” bill, it was likely to face immediate nullification by federal courts in any event, and was more of a poke at the federal government than a serious piece of legislation. Speaker Joe Straus at one point referred to it as a publicity stunt, and one Republican House member called it “stupid,” then voted for it. The Senate version of the bill was the only choice left, since senators adjourned on Tuesday, making attempts at a compromise bill impossible and leaving the House with the Senate version or nothing.

Sponsor David Simpson of Longview, the same guy who tried to kill anti-“puppy mill” legislation earlier in the session, accused leaders in both houses of being lukewarm on the bill, but Simpson’s grandstanding – freshman are supposed to be seen and not heard – meant that a lot of seasoned, influential Republican members weren’t all that excited about helping him stay in the spotlight.

The other item left in the dust was Perry’s “sanctuary cities,” bill, a stab at putting him on the map against illegal immigration by putting the spotlight on local law enforcement’s efforts to enforce, or not, federal laws. Perry and others attempted to have the language added to SB1 in the run-up to last Tuesday’s vote, but Senate sponsor Robert Duncan, a Republican lawyer from Lubbock, wouldn’t accept it. Perry immediately issued a news release trashing Duncan, but the Senate Republican Caucus noted that senators were worried that putting sanctuary cities on the final fiscal issues bill would endanger passage of both measures. They also noted, as a parting shot at the House in a session with unusually bad blood between the two chambers, that senators had passed sanctuary cities two weeks earlier, so its failure was really on House members who couldn’t get the legislation back on the floor.

Legislative session careens toward end, major bills still not passed

No doubt this will seem a bit repetitious, but with less than two-and-a-half days to go, the significant issues that kept state legislators in Austin past the end of the regular session on Memorial Day have not yet been resolved.
Legislation attempting to create an alternative to the federal Medicaid program and to set up a system for paying for instructional materials in public schools is pending on the House floor today. Both of those items come in the form of conference committee reports made public over the weekend, and neither is the reason legislators have been kept in Austin by Governor Rick Perry for an extra 30 days.
The bill balancing the state budget, providing school funding formulas and – as amended in the House – dozens of other things, is still in conference with the clock ticking down.

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School District Flexibility Clears Hurdle; Senate Takes Up Congressional Redistricting

With about two thirds of the time now elapsed in the special legislative session, deadlines and process start to become a factor in getting at least the bills passed that must be approved before Texas can have a balanced budget in September.

While nothing got finalized last week, the major fiscal matters legislation—Senate Bill 1 – passed the House with a few dozen amendments and now in the hands of a House-Senate conference committee. Expect a lot of the amendments, many of which were just to give outside groups something else to count on their legislative scorecards, to come off of the House version of SB1 in conference.

And, speaking of scoring points, Governor Rick Perry issued almost two dozen vetoes late Friday, including a bill sought by safety advocates that would have banned texting and sending email while driving. Also caught in the post-session veto sweep was legislation sought by Arlington and other cities extending the period between required elections to ratify the quarter-cent street maintenance sales tax.

Current law requires the sales tax to be approved by voters every four years. Arlington’s tax has successfully been renewed with minimal effort on two occasions. The vetoed bill would have extended the period to eight years, and also allowed sidewalks to be built with the sales-tax revenue. City officials said the additional time would allow better planning, but Perry, ever the taxpayer watchdog, thought voters should have to certify the tax more often than that. The veto probably cost the city about $80,000 over eight years, roughly the cost of an election on the sales tax.

Perry has a habit, exhibited again this time, of vetoing bills he expressed no opinion about during the regular session. Because the regular session is over, and even though a special session is under way, there appears to be no opportunity for legislators to attempt to override any of the vetoes.

A bill that Perry probably won’t veto, one that has been promoted as the school district “flexibility” bill, cleared the House despite a fierce fight put up by Democrats on behalf of teachers’ unions. The bill, Senate Bill 8 by Plano Republican Florence Shapiro, was never able to draw the votes in either the House or the Senate during the regular session. Democrats blocked it in the Senate by refusing to allow it to come up for a vote, and Democrats in the Senate kept sending it back to committee to fix procedural problems.

This time the bill – allowing school districts to deal with the state’s reduction in aid by reducing salaries rather than laying teachers off – made it through the House Thursday despite the objections of every Democrat and a handful of Republicans. It goes to the Senate floor today. SB8 passed the Senate with some amendments, so if Shapiro doesn’t like those amendments then another conference committee will need to be appointed to sort out the differences between chambers.

Congressional redistricting—with amendments form the House – is also on the Senate’s calendar today. Within the next couple of days, the House will decide whether or not to hold a hearing on immigration legislation, the so-called “sanctuary cities” bill. House Sponsor Burt Solomons, aware of how volatile the issue is even though Republicans have the votes to ignore Democratic opposition, has indicated he may skip the hearing, vote the bill out of committee and bring it straight to the floor.

Sanctuary cities passed the House but not the Senate during the regular session. It’s doubtful that any force except the clock running out will keep it from passing this time around, either.

Legislators take their time in wrapping up special session

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School Finance Inches Closer To Passage

For most people, a lot can happen in 16 hours of concentrated work. For the Texas House, well, it’s hard to look at the time spent and at the final product and wonder if it was all worth it.

This legislative update will not be completely timely due to the length of the House’s marathon floor session Thursday and into Friday morning. That session delayed until Friday some measures that were set for Thursday’s calendar, and with a few days off to check out of reality, we will return and update actions mid-week.

Reality is part of what caused the House to spent 16 hours on the floor late last week. The reality in question was the one that showed all of that rhetoric about no taxes, no fees, no use of the rainy day fund – no increased revenue from any source for any reason – actually has consequences to people representatives know and talk to back home.

The bill that didn’t pass during the end-of-regular-session debate two weeks ago was back in the House Thursday. And even though House members passed it during the regular session, with another chance to look at it some members didn’t like what they saw.

In particular, Republic freshman who rode the anti-Obama wave to office in November saw that state funding for their school districts was going to be cut, in some cases substantially, and that the cuts were not evenly distributed because of the school-finance compromise the House and Senate reached two weeks ago.

School finance formulas are impossible to explain without a white board, a pointer, a calculator and an expert. Suffice it to say that what members were confronted with was a bill that made an across the board cut in state school aid for the 2012 school fiscal year, a cut based on an adjustment to existing formulas for the 2013 school year, and a lot of uncertainty about what happens after that. Legislators from rural areas, where schools are often among the largest employers, were unhappy about the distribution of cuts but could not find an alternative because, when it was all done, this year’s bill is a zero-sum game. Make one district better, you make another worse.

Arlington Representative Diane Patrick, a former Arlington school board and state board of education member, and a former education professor at UT Arlington, produced an amendment that would force lawmakers to address the school funding formulas during the interim and (hopefully) prevent this kind of melt-down in the 83rd Legislative Session.

During about hour six of the 10-hour debate on “fiscal matters,” the official technical fix that would allow Comptroller Susan Combs to certify the state budget, Patrick’s amendment to smooth funding cuts over the next two years reached the floor. That amendment also included terminating the current approach after this biennium, which forces legislators to confront school funding issues next session.

Given the partisan and highly controversial nature of many of the 150-plus amendments on the bill – kicking student gay rights groups’ off of college campuses for meetings, more abortion restrictions, tax exemptions no one ever mentioned before— the debate on Patrick’s amendment was passionate but refreshingly grounded in substance. Among other things, Patrick’s amendment revives in part school finance provisions that require the state to “settle up” with districts if their projections for enrollment – and therefore funding – miss the mark. That has usually been the case but the provision requiring the state to eventually “make up” the $4.2 billion that it is shorting districts this time around was not in the original proposal. Budget officials have acknowledged that this year’s budget provides districts no funding for increased enrollment. Educators expect about 80,000 new students in school each of the next two years.

We will get a more detailed explanation of this mechanism next week.

Patrick’s amendment was the must-pass item of the day, and it took some work for her and Houston Representative Scott Hochberg to persuade the funding formula’s author, Representative Rob Eissler, also of Houston, to accept the bill. Hochberg and Eissler are both on the public education committee – Eissler is chairman – and are among the handful of members who understand public ed finance. Even they disagreed about the meaning of the Patrick amendment. Eissler charged it put the state $1 billion in the hole in two years, and Hochberg, who is sharp-tongued but generally stays within bounds of legislative decorum, simply took the microphone and said, “let me tell you why you’re wrong.”

After fighting it for about 30 minutes, Eissler relented and accepted Patrick’s amendment, which went on the bill without a vote.

Two other education-related items – one definitely a fiscal matter, the other definitely not – were approved but appear unlikely to survive a conference with state senators.

Austin Democrat Donna Howard convinced House members to approve using funding above the current projected balance of the rainy day fund – or anything over $6.5 billion – to offset education cuts as the biennium progresses. It takes two-thirds approval of the whole bill in the House, the Senate and conference committee, to keep that provision in place. It was interesting only in that it showed, despite the outside pressure from conservative advocacy groups, some House Republicans were willing to use the fund to reduce the education shortfall.

The other item was a shot across the bow of senators on testing in public schools. Republican Dan Flynn of Van’s amendment to essentially kill any kind of end-of-year test as a prerequisite for graduation passed with only seven dissenters. His bill went farther than Eissler’s legislation during the regular session to reduce the number and difficulty of tests necessary to pass. Eissler’s bill was never voted on in the Senate because Senator Florence Shapiro, the Senate’s point person on public education matters, long ago dug in on reducing testing requirements. She will most likely fight Flynn’s amendment just as hard, and House members seemed to acknowledge their vote was more symbolic than anything else. For them, it was about not being pushed around by the Senate, but for many business groups, the vote, along with the whole education funding debate, just appears to send a message that the House isn’t all that concerned about providing a minimal amount of money for public education, or whether students leave high school prepared for the work place or college. The Chamber of Commerce opposed Eissler’s bill during the regular session and, had there been enough notice, would have also opposed Flynn’s amendment.

The evening after that – and the afternoon up to that point – was consumed with a grab-bag of everything members could construe as fiscal matters that they hadn’t passed during the regular session. This went from extending the state’s economic development act – something the Chamber has pushed for and seen die about three times this session – to a heated midnight debate disallowing the use of state funds or state facilities for student groups at colleges that promote “non-traditional” values.

Other things that chewed up the day included an effort to institutionalize in the bill Governor Rick Perry’s veto of legislation requiring out-of-state retailers who have affiliates in Texas to pay sales tax – think Amazon. The House and Senate overwhelmingly approved the measure during the regular session – is that a tax increase? – but Perry vetoed it. With the item back in the fiscal matters legislation, the only way Perry can kill it is to kill the whole bill, and invite another special session. Arlington Representative Bill Zedler carried the amendment for Perry but it was roundly defeated.

Other measures to create or expand tax exemptions mostly went down to defeat, but there were a lot of them, which led an exasperated Sylvester Turner, a Houston Democrat who has loudly and continually complained of the school funding reductions in light of the available money in the rainy day fund, to ask Republicans “what kind of fiscal conservatism is this?”

At about 2 a.m., the bill passed 81-62, drawing opposition from all Democrats and a handful of Republicans who, after all the arguing, were still unhappy with what happens to their school districts. It was one of the few major pieces of legislation this year that has not been approved on a straight, party-line vote.

Legislation set for Thursday’s calendar dealing with mandate relief for school districts was punted to Friday. The Arlington Chamber of Commerce asked legislators to support the mandate relief legislation in a letter sent Wednesday from President Wes Jurey.

Public School Finance Focus of Special Session

Week one of what’s now looking like at least a three-week special legislative session produced no surprises and no changes in approach or likely outcomes from the way things appeared going in last Monday.

The session’s reason for existence, public school finance legislation, has already made it back to the state Senate and will likely come out of the House Appropriations Committee today, tomorrow at the latest. These are the “must-pass” bills that contain the state’s payment delays, fee increases (yes, even though conservatives said there would be no fee increase, there are fee increases), changes in distribution of tax collections and financial trickery that gets legislators to a balanced budget.  They also contain the school-finance formulas that show members how a budget with $4.2 billion less for public education than last session will roll out to individual school districts.

Thus far, the numbers in those school formulas haven’t changed. The Arlington school district is still looking at a $35 million hit over the next two years, the biggest chunk of it coming in the 2012 fiscal year. While some Republican House members who represent rural areas are unhappy with the distribution plan, there aren’t many alternatives that reduce the pain and the votes to pass the plan as it exists right now are probably available. The only relief may come from an amendment planned by a Democrat, Representative Scott Hochberg of Houston that would even out the cuts over the next two years instead of allowing a heavier hit in one year than another.

School-finance will be a subject of interim studies, though in most cases the state’s regular distribution plan – abandoned this session because of the horrific cost to the state down the road – would be fine with most members. That plan establishes funding at 2006 levels or above, a “hold harmless” approach that tends to favor wealthier districts because it provides more state funding to them than what they would get under formulas approved in 2006 that have not been uniformly applied.

Fundamentally, of course, this is all a problem because there isn’t enough money, or at least not enough that the state is willing to spend. The hope, for some school districts and the hopes of Democratic members in both houses, was that more time might allow reconsideration of using the state’s rainy day fund, which stands at more than $6 billion after a portion was used to balance the current year’s budget, which ends in August. While many Republicans are already on record as celebrating their passage of a balanced budget – by law, they have no choice – they mostly don’t address who took the big hits to get them there. In particular, there is little mention that the $4 billion reduction in school funding is a bigger cost to districts than it first appears because the state budgeted no money – as in zero – for enrollment growth even though schools are expected to see 160,000 additional students in the next two years.

It was all of those things, and probably a few others, that led Fort Worth Senator Wendy Davis to kill the school finance bill on the last day it could pass the Legislature by talking for 79 minutes, passing the midnight deadline for bills to clear the Senate.

Davis has been alternately celebrated and reviled for that decision, which she describes as a matter of conscience. Governor Rick Perry called her a “show horse” and decried the session’s additional cost, though he had already announced he would be calling a special session to address windstorm insurance issues and congressional redistricting. Both of those items have been added to the subject list for the current 30-day session.

It is also fair to mention that a host of initiatives backed by conservatives moved to the front of the legislature’s calendar this session, crowding out and delaying bills related to the one thing members must do every two years: Pass a budget. Were it not for those items, perhaps school finance would not have waited until, literally, the 11th hour on the last day to even be considered by senators. That timing made it vulnerable to a filibuster – a very short one, by historical standards – and responsibility for that falls not on Davis but on state leadership.

Still, it’s doubtful any outcome will be more to Davis’ liking. The school-finance runs are the same as they were a week ago, the congressional redistricting plan is just as much anathema to Democrats as it was when it was released – but never considered – during the regular session and the one item on the conservative checklist that Democrats kept off the floor – a ban on “sanctuary cities,”—could be added to the call by Perry at any time. Most bets are that he will add the legislation once some of the original items in the call are completed.

Legislators are free to file anything they want, and leaders are free to conduct hearings and bring unrelated bills to the floor, they just won’t mean anything except another way to score points with outside interest groups who are preparing their “legislative scorecards” for the session.

Two additional items of interest on education are likely to move, and both are probably acceptable within the broad subject matter of “fiscal matters related to education efficiency.” Legislation that, in effect, lowers graduation requirements, was attached last Friday to a bill funding instructional materials in the House Public Education Committee. During the session, this bill by Public Education Chairman Rob Eissler, passed the House with 125 votes despite an impassioned speech against it by Representative Todd Smith of Euless. Most business groups lined up against the legislation, which never got a hearing on the Senate floor because it’s opposed by Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro of Plano. The instructional materials language will likely require a conference committee to iron it out, and word is Shapiro will do what she can to kill Eissler’s change in testing this time, too.

Mandate relief – allowing districts to change notification dates when terminating teachers, allowing furloughs and/or salary reductions in lieu of layoffs when state funding falls short – are also back. Shapiro has filed Senate bill 8 – all legislation gets new numbers in a special session – and Eissler has broken what was HB 400 into several bills – House Bills 19, 20 and 21 – in hopes of giving districts some flexibility in managing their affairs. If approved, this legislation would not help districts for the upcoming school years, since staffing decisions have already been made.

The addition of the windstorm insurance issue – which affects residents in 14 counties along the Gulf Coast – seems likely to extend this special session into the weekend or early next week. Some of the education issues mentioned above are still controversial – particularly teacher salary reductions – and the conferences on those could take several days.

For purposes of his nascent presidential aspirations, Perry probably wants members out of town sooner rather than later. He doesn’t need the stories about him quashing use of money the state already has in the bank – the rainy day fund – circulating for too long outside Texas. They tend to lose their context and portray him either as a fiscal conservative who will hold the line no matter how much pain it causes, or a crass headline-grabber who punishes school children for his own ambition even when the money was available without raising taxes.

As a wrap-up, keep in mind that the budget did pass before the session ended, so the gross amount of money to be appropriated is fixed and unlikely to change. The bill that Davis killed that brought us to where we are moved money around to balance the budget, something Comptroller Susan Combs indicated had to happen before she can certify the budget as balanced. The school funding formulas – despite their importance – do not have to pass this time, either. The solution that kicks in, however, means whatever the state shorts districts in the upcoming biennium is owed two years later, putting the state in a hole – maybe not as deep as the one they started with this time – right at the beginning of the session in 2013. Given that the budget as passed already shorts Medicaid spending – everyone acknowledges what’s in the budget isn’t enough to meet the requirements – adding another chunk for education would make the next session as difficult as this one. Legislators who want to go home and talk about how their cuts really aren’t that bad, and with growth things will be better in two years, can’t have that as their legacy leaving town this time.

Following Senate Filibuster, Special Session Convenes Today

Texas Legislative Sessions were made for the newspaper era, when you could throw away what you thought you knew yesterday and wait for the fresh, new update that arrives every day.

As last week ended, it appeared that all of the necessary ingredients to getting a state budget approved were lined up and ready for mixing. The budget conference committee report was adopted Saturday on most party line votes in both the House and the Senate, and the remaining, elusive element – a school finance formula – had been worked into the other “must-pass” bill even though a lot of members hadn’t seen it, didn’t like it or didn’t understand it.

Forget all that.

Fort Worth Democrat Wendy Davis chewed up the remaining time the Senate had available to pass the “must-pass” bill Sunday night by reading, line-by-line, the effects of the school finance bill on each district around the state, and reading letters from constituents about the harm legislators were doing with the budget cuts they had adopted. When Davis’ hour-plus filibuster ended, it was after midnight, Senate Bill 1811 was dead and by Monday night Governor Rick Perry had advised legislators to stay in town for a special session that started this morning.

The bill that Davis killed contains the budget “magic” that balances the budget: A $2.8 billion deferral of a payment to school districts from one budget year to the next, some increased fees, and a few accounting tricks. Without those adopted policies, Comptroller Susan Combs says she cannot certify the budget as balanced.

More worrisome to most members is that the legislation also included a hard-fought agreement on how to distribute the $4.2 billion cuts to public education that the budget requires. Those cuts ended up being based on two approaches, an across-the-board cut in the 2012 school year and an adjustment to existing formulas in the 2013 year that will hit property wealthy school districts harder, and could be a basis for formula changes for the rest of the decade.

Under the proposal as it reached the house and senate over the weekend, the Arlington ISD would take a 3.1% hit in state funding – or $22,890,757 – in the upcoming school year. In 2013, that reduction would fall to $6,053,290 – or 1.5 percent. By state definitions, Arlington is not a property wealthy district and is therefore funded straight from the formula, which hits property wealthy districts harder because in previous years, when the formula didn’t match what those districts received from the state the year before, they had been “held harmless” and been given the higher amount. That would end in 2013, though it’s likely the formulas would be revisited before more onerous cuts set in for future years.

In comparison, other districts took much greater cuts. The Austin ISD, for instance, would be cut $37.2 million in 2012 – the year of across the board cuts – but would take a $58.3 million reduction in 2013, a cut of 8.5%. Fort Worth would lose $29.6 million in 2012 and $9.5 million in 2013, while Mansfield’s reductions are about even in both years, $12.7 million in 2012 and $12.3 million in 2013. Just as a farther point of comparison, the Dallas ISD loses $62.3 million in 2012 and almost $100 million the next year.

As problematic as that sounds, the numbers are less onerous than what a budget originally approved by the House called for, and in some cases are considered manageable by some districts. The other thing it does is delay deeper cuts in some wealthy, more Republican areas, to the second year of the state’s biennium, which won’t kick in until after next year’s Republican Primary.

Whether that formula will be the starting point in this first called session of the 82nd Legislature is not clear. Perry’s special session call focused only on the school fiscal matters bill and a health-care reform bill that is touted as a way to more efficiently manage Medicaid spending, if the federal government will grant some waivers. The Medicaid bill, proposed by Republicans, does have some cautious Democratic backing, though some of the managed care elements in the bill are seen as a way to save money by denying care.

In the end, the session foundered on the very issues that looked problematic on day one: School district budget cuts, redistricting and a massive shortfall in revenue. With Perry, conservative members and interest groups keeping a lock on use of the state’s savings accounts – it is projected that the Economic Stabilization Fund might have more than $9 billion in it for the 83rd Legislative Session in 2013 – major cuts to the state’s main spending items were inevitable. Public education, higher education and health care make up more than 85 percent of all state general fund spending. Without dipping into savings or creating new revenue, cuts to those programs were a foregone conclusion.

The redistricting bills took up time – though, frankly, not that much – as did a list of emergencies declared by Perry mostly to satisfy the hard-line social conservatives in Republican primaries. Those items floated to the top of the list, taking up days of floor time that pushed the budget and its implications out of the way until the very end of the session. The behind-the-scenes negotiating on budget and school spending went well past the point most observers – based on history – would have thought a deal could be made, printed, distributed and approved. And even though a budget did get to members Friday and school-finance runs reached them Saturday afternoon, that just wasn’t enough time to digest everything and was no time at all to check with folks back home. Checking with folks back home was a cornerstone Democratic complaint, and with a special session that opportunity does present itself, though we’re not sure to what end.

A big question for political junkies is what the Democrats’ strategy might be for this special session. Perry could add other, more onerous (to Democrats) legislation to the call at any time, and there is an indication that as these must-pass issues get addressed, that’s exactly what will happen. Democrats managed to kill one of Perry’s “emergency” items, the sanctuary cities bill, in the Senate. However, if he adds that legislation to the list of items legislators consider in the next 30 days (by constitution, a special session can only be 30 days and only address items specified by the governor) it will most surely pass. There is no two-thirds rule to consider legislation in the Senate during a special session, and likely no hope of getting four Republican senators to join the 12 Democrats in voting no on sanctuary cities.

Also potentially on the call list are congressional redistricting a map was released this morning and a necessary fix to the state’s Windstorm Insurance program. The Texas Windstorm Insurance Act failed during the regular session when the Senate and House couldn’t agree. TWIA is the insurer of last resort for properties in hurricane-prone areas of the gulf coast, where the private sector has abandoned the market. It is a little amusing for some Democrats – those not on the gulf coast – to watch legislators argue about the benefits of a government-run program that everywhere else Republicans wouldn’t touch because it would interfere with the free market. The windstorm program affects 14 counties, including portions of Houston and its suburbs, so that buys in a huge number of House members in finding a fix.

The other item that could be included in the special session call is the failed effort to provide mandate relief to school districts in light of the budget cuts. Furloughs, salary reductions in lieu of layoffs and flexibility in class size were issues roundly debated in committee and conference rooms, but not much in either Chamber. They are still important items to manage school budgets – they actually should be considered all the time, not just during funding crises – but are also still fiercely opposed by teacher groups. It’s unclear if Perry’s current special session call is broad enough to include such a bill; it is clear that after school ends next week, a lot more teachers are able to go to Austin and watch the proceedings for themselves.

Perry has indicated that despite a congressional map being available, he is reluctant to expand the special session call unless he knows there is an agreement to pass a bill. It wasn’t even considered during the regular session, and failure to pass something means the map gets drawn by the federal courts, where it will likely end up regardless of legislative action.

It will take a few days to sort out what else did or didn’t survive the end of session flurry; some conference committee reports aren’t available even though the bills have already been approved. We will look at those and follow with another update as soon as possible.

With Only Days Left In Session, No Agreement On School Finance

This is just a short update because, by the time you read it, none of it may matter.

The Legislature goes into the final weekend uncertain, as of this writing, whether or not there will be a formula to finance public schools, and, if there is no school-funding formula, whether or not members will pass a budget.

A week’s worth of negotiations began Monday with the death of one of two remaining bills that might carry a school-funding formula as an amendment. Everything else had either never been debated and was dead because of deadlines, or had never even been considered on the floor of either the House or the Senate.

Late last Friday, the House approved a “fiscal matters” bill, SB 1811 that contained spending delays, revised fee splits and enough other tricks to balance the budget that was already being discussed by House and Senate conferees. Senators quickly rejected the House’s version of 1811 and asked for a conference committee, appointing conferees Saturday afternoon.

Then, nothing.

Angry that the Senate was holding up other bills, House members waited until late Tuesday to appoint members to the 1811 conference committee. In the mean time, SB 1581, a bill that might have been a vehicle for a school funding formula, was killed in the House on a procedural rule because it carried two subjects, school fiscal matters and the concealed handguns on campus legislation that had failed to get out of the Senate on its own. This was not the first time that the conservative social agenda had slowed down – in this case, stopped dead – deliberations related to the one thing legislators must do every two years, which is approve a budget.

The “emergencies” identified by Governor Rick Perry at the beginning of the session —voter ID, sonogram requirements before abortions, sanctuary cities – had taken an enormous amount of time, with most Democrats making all of their debating points during endless hours of floor debate before going on 2-1 party line votes on every issue.

Even after the sonogram bill passed—Perry signed it surrounded by statewide Right-to-Life leaders Wednesday – Republicans kept tacking amendments designed to restrict access to abortions onto just about everything that was moving through the House.

Now, with a budget that cuts $4.2 billion from public schools set to be debated beginning Saturday morning, there is still no agreement on how to distribute those cuts to school districts. There is a fall-back provision in state law, but it’s a killer for the state two years from now if that’s what members rely on to avoid a special budget legislative session.

Alternatives – too complicated to explain in detail – include bills that cut districts across the board, bills that weight the cuts in favor of wealthy school districts, bills that weight the cuts in favor poorer districts, and a dizzying array of “hybrids” of all of the above.

The option that seems to have the most promise of being accepted is an amendment in conference committee to 1811 – the bill currently does not address school funding formulas because that wasn’t its purpose—would cut 6 percent from all districts next year, and then implements the beginning of a Senate funding plan that would eliminate school finance provisions that have been in place since school finance reform was approved in 2006. This, in a favorite phrase heard around the capitol this session, “kicks the can down the road” on school finance, a prospect that does not please Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden, largely because that action has already been embedded into the budget as it relates to the state’s Medicaid obligations.

Legislators have agreed, all but formally, anyway, to fund Medicaid for about 20 or 21 months of the next two-year budget, then fix it by tapping the Economic Stabilization Fund when they return for the regular session in 2013. At that time, they will still have a few months before the budget ends to bring everything into balance.

House members oppose the Senate plan in part because it re-writes school finance in an amendment at the end of the session instead of having a thorough debate – despite an interim study that produced nothing legislators were willing to act on – on what the formulas should be. Given the performance after 137 days, it’s difficult to imagine members being more responsible about these hard decisions when they have more time: They’ve had all session and haven’t addressed the school finance question.

The heart of the difference on school funding is that some districts would have gotten less after the 2006 funding reform than they got before, and instead they have been “held harmless,” getting funded at pre-2006 levels. The Senate plan phases out this “target revenue” over time, and would as a consequence require property wealthy districts to kick more money back to the state, a prospect that would affect districts in Dallas, Houston and Austin but not Arlington.

The across-the-board cut being proposed would be in place only for the next two years, at which point the formulas, and target revenue, return and the debate starts over as if this session didn’t happen.
By the time you read this, it could all be resolved. We will try to sort out what happens over the weekend with another post on Tuesday. Have a nice holiday weekend.

House & Senate To Conference On Budget With One Week Left In Session

For anyone keeping score, Friday’s back-room deal between Texas House and Senate budget writers and the subsequent seven-hour consideration of a “must-pass” bill to enable that budget to balance was another a long line of victories for the conservative forces in and out of elected office that have dominated this legislative session.

After appearing to reach a hard impasse on Thursday over the Senate’s continued effort to use the state’s economic stabilization fund to balance the budget, budget conferees apparently found a way around that problem mid-afternoon Friday.

There was no formal announcement – except on insider blogs, emails, newsletters and from members connected to the conference committee – but when the House suddenly took up a long-delayed (three weeks, a lifetime in a 140-day legislative session) “fiscal matters” bill just before 6 p.m., it was the signal a deal was pending. Leadership in both chambers had indicated that Senate Bill 1811 had to pass because it contained adjustments in spending, the timing of spending, fee changes and other items that were necessary to balance the budget.

House members finalized work on SB 1811 Saturday and sent the bill the Senate, which refused to concur with the 40-plus amendments added by House members and appointed a conference committee. Presumably, the outcome of that conference and final approval of the conference report by both Houses will have to come before the conference report on the budget is brought to the floor.

The last-minute action last week – it had been widely anticipated that it was difficult, if not impossible, from a practical viewpoint, to get a budget after Thursday – refocuses attention today on a remaining critical item, approval of school-funding formulas.

As described by budget conferees, the budget cuts $4.2 billion from the state’s funding for public education, as well as cuts in higher education and health care spending. However, there is no approved vehicle for implementing the public ed cuts. The House version never made it to the floor and the Senate version couldn’t get the required votes to begin debate.

But an education “fiscal matters” bill, SB 1581, appears to be the vehicle to which a school-funding formula will be attached. There are at least three possible version of a formula bill – the House version by Houston Democrat Scott Hochberg, the Senate version by Plano Republican Florence Shapiro and a new, unseen amendment by House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler, a Republican from Houston.

The chief elements to debate in the bills are how high property-wealth districts are treated, how districts whose funding should be cut under present formulas are treated – those districts haven’t suffered those cuts in the last two budget cycles, they have been “held harmless” by state budget writers – and whether any formula that simply pro-rates the cuts across districts contains a provision that pays back later what the state doesn’t pay now, or whether this version is, in an over-used phrase since 2008, “the new normal.”

SB 1581 will probably also be the last-gasp for Eissler’s attempt to give school districts “mandate relief” by allowing budget flexibility in light of spending cuts. His ill-fated House Bill 400 has gone down on points of order by Democrats every time it has hit the floor; expect Eissler to try to add the bill as individual provisions to 1581 during floor debate. In particular, the ability to allow salary reductions and furloughs in lieu of layoffs, changing notification dates and hearing procedures for teacher terminations and relaxing the 22-1 student-teacher ratio in classes up to the fourth grade are critical to administrators. The 22-1 rule would still apply as an average, but classes could be as big as 25 students as HB 400 is currently written.

There had been anticipation that Friday’s hearing on SB 1811 would be where the HB 400 provisions were added, but House leaders asked members to withdraw their amendments – there were more than 400 – in hopes of getting a bill passed.

Details of the amendments’ effects, and of the bill itself, need to be sorted out and there may be another round of changes after the conference committee meets. At least one presumed-dead item that chambers of commerce had been pushing for has made it temporarily onto the bill, that being a two-year extension of provisions in Chapter 313 of the Economic Development Act.

While there is controversy, and needed clean up of some 313 provisions, the bill’s 2014 expiration date presents a problem for large, multi-billion dollar manufacturing deals because of the time it takes to get those deals together and the uncertainty that 313 would be there when all the details were wrapped up. Galveston Democrat Craig Eiland got the bill amended over leadership objections – by policy Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Piits was objecting to all amendments – and saw it pass with 130 votes.

Earlier in the week, budget conferees mostly restored funding to economic development accounts in the governor’s office, the Texas Enterprise Fund and the Emerging Technology Fund, that were also priority items for the chamber in this budget.

Despite the agreement, and the restoration of some items that are critical, this is not a budget to be celebrated. It essentially funds about 20 or 21 months of the state’s Medicaid obligations, relying on a budget session in 2013 to restore the differences. Its major element in balancing the budget isn’t more revenue, but a delay in when a payment is made to school districts so that the cost shows up in the state’s subsequent two-year budget. Other, much smaller items will nevertheless also affect local governments. The state will keep a higher portion of the taxes collected on mixed-drink sales, and the budget appears to cut the amount of money the state pays counties for compensating jurors who participate in multi-day trials.

One possible sliver of good news affects transportation issues. While hardly any policy that advances or clarifies transportation funding passed this session, the budget does include issuing the last portion of infrastructure bonds authorized by voters in 2009. The $3 billion allocation uses up the funding authorized, and the budget also contains some funding to pay the debt service on those bonds.

The down side, of course, is that debt service will become a bigger component of the Texas’ already poorly funded transportation fund. But several members, at least on the Senate side, acknowledged that this is the end of the line for finding transportation money without raising a fee or tax to increase the absolute amount of money going into Fund 6, which is the major highway department account.

One of those senators, Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden, may not be back next session. He had already decided not to return this year but changed his mind, and he has been disgusted by the extent to which unelected interest groups have influenced votes in the Senate. Ogden is pretty conservative himself, but he’s also a pragmatist and has said for years the state’s overall tax system is “rickety.” Given the incessant anti-tax, anti-spending messaging by a handful of conservative groups, it appears that one of most effective leaders in trying to resolve some of the state’s long-term problems may just hang it up instead of fight those battles.

But, to end on a positive note, another member who acknowledged that transportation funding needs a fresh look is Tommy Williams, a conservative, influential Republican from Houston’s northern suburbs who is on Finance and also chairs the Transportation and Homeland Security Committee. It was the dialogue between Ogden and Williams about issuing the transportation bonds that gives transportation advocates some hope next session will be their time.

Mid-Week Update: Budget Conferees Split On Budget As Memorial Day Nears

Unless a significant number of pending legislative deadlines are as flexible as the rules in both chambers, Texas legislators appear headed for a return trip to town this summer to deal with a budget they seem unable to agree on during the regular term.

Two major bills that would enable a balanced budget were pulled from the House calendar Wednesday amid backroom talks by budget conferees, talks that were reported to include continued pressure from Governor Rick Perry to pass the tightest, lowest-spending budget among the current choices.

While the explanation for the delay was that conferees were “close,” according to lead House negotiator Jim Pitts, the appropriations committee chairman, the delay also stacks the deck against finishing on time, even with an agreement. Most seasoned observers believe a budget passed after Thursday can’t be legally enacted before legislators leave town on Memorial Day, and one very important person says Pitts’ continued optimism is unrealistic.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden said a special session was all but a certainty, and he apparently walked out of the informal conference with budget committee members and Speaker Joe Straus before the meeting was done.

Perry’s involvement has muddied the waters, as it did Wednesday when he appeared to threaten to veto SB 1811, which Pitts had taken to the floor just a day earlier to declare crucial to getting a budget agreement. The bill includes a fair amount of financial gimmickry, such as delaying payments to school districts due in August 2013 to September of 2013, effectively taking more than $2 billion in spending out of the upcoming budget and kicking it to the next two-year budget. Tax payment speedups approved by the Senate have already been removed by House appropriations, and a variety of changes in fees and penalties provide the balance of what is now called “non-tax revenue” to balance a budget.

This bill is necessary, Pitts says, regardless of whether it’s the draconian House public education spending line item or the more generous Senate education allocation that budget conferees ultimately settle on.

Without delving into a lot of numbers, the word is conferees are still about $1.5 billion apart on education spending, and no one is budging. Even an additional $1.2 billion in additional revenue just certified by Comptroller Susan Combs didn’t lighten the negotiator’s load as much as one would think. In part, it’s because more than half of that amount was already rolled into the other, non-education portions of the budget, which conferees have agreed on.

Other concerns have emerged in the last 24 hours that make the budget picture murkier still. The prospect of SB 1811 being a “must pass “ bill has turned it into a Christmas tree, in legislative parlance, with House members attempting to hang every failed initiative of the session on it as an amendment. There were more than 400 pages of amendments filed by Tuesday’s amendment deadline, for everything from the right to carry handguns on college campuses to a new building on the UT Austin campus to three efforts to authorize school vouchers.

House members, or at least Republican house members, the only ones who matter at this point, were apparently uneasy at having to vote on a lot of amendments that could come back to haunt them at election time. That’s as if laying off as many as 100,000 school district employees statewide wasn’t already a big enough problem.

With all the amendments pending, and the potential deals that come with them, Ogden declared the whole budget negotiation “the worst kind of politics.” In most sessions, words like that from a highly respected senior Senator would matter, but this session the debate is being driven as never before by outside interest groups aligned with Perry, groups that do not have to show up and govern once the budget dust settles.

In a moment of enlightenment, however long delayed, word out of a Republican House Caucus conducted during Wednesday’s lunch recess was that a few freshmen expressed frustration that using the $9.3 billion in the rainy day fund to help balance the budget was off the table.

Perry has pushed hard against using that fund, even after some of the money cited in Combs updated revenue estimate was used to increase the balance. With the recent high price of oil, many speculate that the Economic Stabilization Fund – the official name of the rainy day fund – could be close to $12 billion by the beginning of 83rd Legislative Session. Some of that money has been approved to balance the current state budget, and the only pragmatic argument made for not using more of the fund now is that it will be needed in two years to balance the budget legislators may or may not pass by the end of this month.

It’s a comical argument in some respects. Perry and conservative interest groups are arguing against spending the fund now so that it can be spent later, but in either case it would be applied to the same budget period. Budget realists are certain the state has so poorly paid for Medicaid spending in the budget now under discussion that putting more money into it before it expires in August 2013 is a certainty.

The other argument against using it is more ideological. Simply put, using the economic stabilization fund, even for what it was designed for, enables a higher level of government spending than can be accomplished without it. Spending less, no matter what it’s for and what the consequences of that lower spending might be, is the line in the sand drawn by Perry, a few state and national conservative interest groups and, apparently, a perceived majority of voters in next year’s Republican Primary.

Given Perry’s continued movement to the political right – the rainy day fund has been used in previous budgets approved since he has been governor – it’s difficult to put faith in the notion that, even with a pressing need in two years, Perry would necessarily let money be drawn out of the fund.

It’s that divide that is at the heart of frustrations by education advocates. School districts will take a reduction in state funding for the next two years under any scenario now contemplated; more than 5,000 teachers have already been given layoff notices for the upcoming school year. Yet the money that would avoid that situation is at least theoretically available, and, more maddening, is there for the express purpose of avoiding what seems now certain to happen.

As if these complexities weren’t enough, another piece of the puzzle came into clearer focus late Tuesday when the projected cuts to school districts under the only school formula bill still viable were released to members. Representative Scott Hochberg of Houston, the acknowledged master of public education funding in the House, filed his bill two months ago mostly to show the impact on districts if the $8 billion public education cut contemplated in the House budget actually went through. Most everyone assumed another kinder, gentler formula bill would come along, but the Senate version doesn’t have the support to get it up for debate. Suddenly, Hochberg’s bill is the school funding bill. It didn’t get considered in the House but was expected to be added as an amendment to an education cleanup bill that was the other major bill Pitts withdrew from the calendar Wednesday.

Explanations of school funding formulas are not for amateurs. Suffice it to say that wealthy districts get hammered in Hochberg’s bill, but non-wealthy districts don’t fare that well either. It’s not by some evil design; it’s just recognition that there isn’t enough money for schools to conduct business in any way that remotely looks like the current school year. Keep in mind that, throughout all of this back-and-forth on school budgets, neither the House nor Senate budget pays for new students in the system.

Some districts, such as the large, wealthy Spring Branch district in the Houston area, suggested that there be no legislation if Hochberg’s bill was the alternative. Under the bill, the Arlington ISD takes 3-4% cut, as opposed to a projected cut of less than 2% in earlier versions. At the other end of the scale, the Houston ISD would be hit with a 15% cut, while Dallas would take cuts greater than 10 percent two years in a row.

You can find a detailed list of each school district here.

If it’s possible to make the news worse, the general feeling around the capitol is that none of this gets better if lawmakers return in a special session this summer.

While much of the final days of the session involve managing a process, let’s not forget that we are talking about our economic futures, about the education of children who are expected to be the workforce for the thriving economy Perry continually claims we have, and, finally, we are talking about people in all of our communities losing their jobs because politics and power plays have decisively trumped responsible decision-making by state legislators.

Doors Closing, Special Session Looks Likely

School district officials who need a final state budget decision so they can move forward with their own budgets may or may not get the guidance they need before legislators leave Austin on Memorial Day.

Although there is no public disclosure of what’s going on between House and Senate members of the budget conference committee, word from insiders is that agreement isn’t coming very easy. An informal administrative deadline to get a budget decided and printed by Tuesday is likely to pass with no action, and Governor Rick Perry has entered the debate by lending his voice to an automated phone-call campaign by a conservative group urging adoption of the House budget, which would require much deeper cuts by school districts.

Perry’s entry into the debate, after offering no guidance except to promise a veto if legislators tapped the Economic Stabilization Fund, was not welcomed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden, one of the budget conferees, said Perry was “dividing Republicans” at a crucial point in the session.

While a special session for budget matters looks increasingly likely – other bills that codify more budget reductions, one-time revenue and a formula for financing schools are not yet approved – even that prospect may create havoc for school districts. One of many rumors for timing of a special session is pegged to a motion made last week by House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Pitts, who pulled down a “fiscal matters” bill – additional cuts and “non-tax” revenue – and postponed its consideration to July 11, 2011. The problem with that is that school districts need to submit budgets by July 1.

Other possible scenarios include approval of a budget that clearly isn’t paid for – much like the Senate budget – but masks the revenue shortfall with estimates that would, on paper, balance until the Legislature can return in a special session before the 2012-2013 school year kicks in to “fix” whatever needs fixing. Another option is a budget agreement without a school funding formula, which would fully fund districts in the upcoming budget year, but with the knowledge that drastic cuts would kick in during the second year of the state budget biennium.

Most observers believe that without approval by both chambers of a budget conference report this week, we are well on our way to spending part of the coming hot summer in Austin.

The Metro 8 Chambers of Commerce will attempt early this week to encourage budget conferees to support the Senate version of the budget, which has lower reductions in Medicaid and public education spending, and to restore funding to state economic development programs that have essentially been wiped out in budget negotiations.

Beyond budget matters, the Senate spent a week mostly in neutral until the redistricting map came out late Wednesday and reignited the partisan firestorm that had died down after tradition was sacrificed to produce a party line vote on the budget two weeks ago.

Senator Kel Seliger of Amarillo, who headed the Senate Select Committee on Redistricting, showed his maps to senators on Wednesday and released them to the public later that day.

As he had requested, the new proposed Senate map puts all of Arlington back into a district currently represented by Republican Chris Harris of Arlington. District 9 has been drawn along the Dallas-Tarrant county lines and up into Denton County, giving Harris a long, skinny suburban district. It also gave him a portion of Tarrant County that has become increasingly Democratic. In fact, although he won handily in 2008, Harris lost the parts of Arlington he represented. The new district, which extends through the mid-cities and into parts of Irving, is designed for a Republican.

Democrats found the map instantly objectionable. Despite representations of balance and fairness, it’s hard to imagine how, in a state whose growth in the last decade was driven by minorities, the map actually reduces the number of minority opportunity districts. If you take these things personally, the clear target is Fort Worth Democrat Wendy Davis, whose district was stripped of its two most Democratic populations and redrawn into more Republican, suburban areas.

In the name of balancing the size of Senate districts, Seliger’s map extends Senator Brian Birdwell’s rural district into east and southeast Fort Worth, drawing the urban, African-American populations in those neighborhoods into a district that runs to Granbury and Waco. The mostly Hispanic north side of Fort Worth was taken from Davis’ Senate District 10 and added to the district currently represented by Republican Senator Jane Nelson of Flower Mound.

Davis was elected in 2008 by a solid margin, but she has always represented a district that was marginally Republican. The removal of the two heaviest Democratic areas from District 10 makes her re-election a much more significant challenge.

In a tearful plea during Seliger’s public hearing, Davis said she feels the new map completely removes any chance the minority neighborhoods in Fort Worth hof having their views heard, as they are now decidedly small parts of districts that are overwhelmingly white, rural or suburban, and Republican.

Davis has indicated several times over the course of the session that she was shut out of redistricting discussions, with map reviews being conducted in small groups entirely by Republican senators.

In a fashion similar to the House redistricting process – faster, even – Seliger set a Thursday hearing, asked for amendments to be submitted by 5 p.m. the same day and scheduled a Senate floor vote for next week.

Last week was also a week when a lot of bills died. The clock ran out Thursday at midnight on any House bill that had not received approval on second reading. Reconsiderations of bills that failed Wednesday, a very long local calendar and drawn-out debates on a couple of controversial bills – along with some intraparty sniping by Republican members against each others’ bills – took a lot of time Thursday even though the House stayed in session from 9:30 a.m. until midnight.

One of the holdups was a package of bills (HB 2592, HB 2594) regulating payday lenders and other businesses – such as those that take car titles as collateral – to require additional disclosure so that borrowers will have greater knowledge of what they are getting into.

The legislation, all by Republican Vicki Truitt of Keller, met a fierce pushback from Gary Elkins of Houston, a Republican who is in the business and accused Truitt of making his life more difficult when his relatively small business wasn’t part of the problem.

Elkins was joined by a group of Republican legislators who argued against Truitt’s bill on grounds that it was an unwarranted expansion of government authority, and, oddly, by former Speaker Tom Craddick, who argued that he had legislation that was stronger and that Truitt’s bill was ineffective.

The debate consumed more than two hours on a day when many members repeatedly asked that leadership pick up the pace to get to their bills. The oft-delayed attempt to relieve school districts of mandates so they can manage the coming state budget cuts was pulled from the calendar and is dead; all bills facilitating a smoother budget transition are dead. All of these issues will resurface in the next two weeks as amendments to Senate bills, or later in a special session.

Friday was a day to pass bills on third readings in the House and to get out of town quickly in the Senate, but the hangover from a week of marathon floor sessions in the House was taking its toll. Truitt, unhappy at the opposition from her own party on the payday lending bills, took the microphone during a local bill sponsored by Republican Jodie Laubenberg to challenge her on her rhetoric from the day before.

Laubenberg was proposing creation of a municipal utility district, which has a governing board and taxing authority. During her objections to Triutt’s bill, she accused Truitt of expanding government authority, a constant refrain from Republicans this session, much of it at the direction of outside, special-interest groups.

Truitt asked Laubenberg a few questions to make sure a MUD – the state has hundreds of them – had a taxing authority, then accused her of hypocrisy and sat down.

Several Republicans also objected to a bill that would increase parental rights by requiring school districts to get permission before paddling a student. The bill, by Republican Barbara Nash of Arlington and Democrat Alma Allen of Houston, met resistance from members who argued that teachers need all available tools to impose discipline in the classroom. It failed on Wednesday and but passed upon reconsideration Thursday.

Still, it was a telling moment in light of the “expansion of government authority” rhetoric that has killed or watered-down a lot of legislation this session. Giving parents the right to object before a school district does something to their children seemingly lessens government authority, but apparently that was not important in this case.

As we move into the final two weeks, the arguments about what will or won’t happen on the budget and other critical items are all between Republicans. Through a series of rules-deviations and partisan lockstep in the House, Democrats have no real say in what happens next. There are two Democrats on the budget conference committee – Representative Sylvester Turner of Houston and Senator Juan Hinojosa of Brownsville – but they are two of 10 members and aren’t expected to have any real impact on the negotiations.

Ogden has said, even without Democrats, he can’t pass the House budget in the Senate because of its cuts to health and human services and education. There are not 16 Republicans who will vote for it, though there are probably not 76 Republicans in the house who will vote for the Senate version of the budget.

With the rainy day fund off the table, and Perry— in the words of Quorum Report founder Harvey Kronberg,—“choosing to negotiate outside the pink dome through an advocacy group with no interest in governing,’’ it appears the final recipients of state services and payers of state taxes are increasingly being lost in the shuffle.

“Emergency Items” Cause Meltdown in House

Two days, a few more hours of procedural obstructions, amendments and one more House meltdown later, major portions of the conservative agenda that Republicans appear to care about more than long-term financial issues or the lousy funding of public education cleared the House and were sent to the Texas Senate.

Monday and Tuesday saw two very late days in the House, along with not one, but two heartfelt appeals to tradition and civility by titular Democratic leader Pete Gallego of Alpine, another move to cut off Democrats from offering amendments on a controversial bill and the routine rejection of Democratic efforts to modify any bill if the Republican author didn’t want it.

The weekend blow-up was on HB 274, the loser pays bill. Monday night, it was sanctuary cities, a much more emotionally charged issue. Representative Burt Solomons, who also carried the Republican’s House Redistricting Plan, stood his ground through two days of amendments but didn’t engage in the substantive discussion beyond saying “I think in Texas this is necessary.” Republicans didn’t really argue at all, as if there was nothing to discuss beyond procedure.

Sanctuary cities is one of the “emergency” items declared in January by Governor Rick Perry. That designation means the bills rises quickly to the top of the calendar, and recovers fast from procedural rulings that might prove fatal to lesser legislation. As it passed the House, HB12 prohibits governments that employ public safety officers from enacting policies that bar enforcement of federal immigration laws. No such regulation by any city or county was ever introduced as evidence to support the contention this section was needed.

The more nettlesome part of HB12 is the provision that allows any citizen to bring a complaint to the attorney general against a government jurisdiction that the citizen charges has enacted policies or a “by consistent actions” attempts to block enforcement of federal law. The AG could take the governmental entity to court, possibly resulting in the cutoff of state grant funds if the entity is guilty.

After the hard stop applied to amendments on Monday, Republicans allowed Democrats to introduce their amendments on third reading, where it takes an impossible four-fifths vote to amend a bill. Democrats attempted to modify the bill around the edges, including applying a “loser pays” provisions in cases where the AG brings an action against an entity and the entity is not found guilty. Similar efforts to allow US citizens who are detained on suspicion of being in the country illegally to recover damages or even file lawsuits were turned back. Republicans did not argue on any amendment, they just voted against all of them.

There were dozens of Democrat amendments, along with speeches that contained more than a hint of self-righteousness. While the opposition of Democrats was sincere, heartfelt even, from the Hispanic members, it killed another half day in a session where the House has to hear every bill that originates within the body by midnight Thursday. It’s unclear whether allowing amendments the day before would have made any difference, but even among observers who don’t like the legislation, the death-by-amendment tactic was wearing thin by mid-day Tuesday.

In a final speech, Democrat Trey Martinez-Fischer of San Antonio acknowledged that Democrat amendments had indeed gotten their day on the floor, thanking the majority “for the bone you threw us today.”

Martinez-Fischer characterized the bill as a “targeting Latinos” and no one else, and went from the high road to the low road in criticizing Straus’ handling of the floor debate and Republican timing on the bill throughout the session.

The Arlington Chamber opposes state efforts to enforce the law until there is a comprehensive federal solution. It seems unlikely the state can solve the problem until a federal discussion, long sought but still seemingly far away, is in place. The specifics of the state bill also are troubling, particularly the section that declares open season on local government by anyone who can gin up a complaint. The potential additional costs from those measures, as well as additional work requirements for police officers, sheriff deputies, jailers—essentially anyone in the criminal justice system – come at a time when local government budgets are stretched thin and many are still freezing positions or laying off employees.

Coincidentally, the same day that Texas passed its sanctuary city bill, President Barack Obama was in El Paso pushing immigration reform at the federal level. The administration’s effort is similar in substance to the unsuccessful effort proposed in the middle of the last decade by President Bush, calling for increased border security, a program to allow immigrants to legally cross into the United States to work, and a path to citizenship for those already here. Bush’s bill went nowhere, mostly because of Republican opposition, and there is no reason to think Obama’s effort will fare any better.

No observable movement occurred on the state budget, but both chambers appointed conferees to see what kind of agreement might be reached. Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst included Democrat Juan Hinojosa of Brownsville on the Senate side, a question that was up in the air since all 12 of the Senate’s Democrats voted against the budget. Curiously left off of conference committees in both chambers were members with expertise in public education finance. Senator Florence Shapiro of Plano was not included but was mentioned as “consultant” to Senate conferees on education issues.

Senate conferees will be chaired by Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden, the Senate’s chief budget writer. Other members are Tommy Williams of The Woodlands, Robert Duncan of Lubbock and Jane Nelson of Flower Mound.

In order to smooth budget acceptance, both chambers need to pass a public education finance bill. The bill allocates whatever money is appropriated by selecting funding formulas that change every session. This year, the Arlington School District’s allocation is virtually the same no matter which bill is approved, though under either the House or Senate budget proposal that amount will be a reduction from the current year.

The biggest question is whether either chamber can approve such a bill. Given the partisan rancor that has emerged in the last week, it’s difficult to tell how willing Senate Democrats are to suspend Senate rules to bring up bills they are then going to vote against. On the House side, it may be difficult to get approval for a bill authored by a Democrat. Scott Hochberg of Houston is undisputed as the intellectual guru of school finance in the House, but he was left off the conference committee and his finance bill is buried way down on a very long House calendar.

The troubling divisions in both chambers that started with the Senate’s busting the two-thirds rule last Wednesday raise serious questions about whether the Legislature can reason through any difficult problem. Emergency legislation straight from the conservative Republican playbook has muscled its way to the top of the agenda, though to most in the capitol the emergency issues aren’t as urgent as a long-term financial trouble in education and Medicaid or the state’s complete abandonment of efforts to accommodate the continued growth everyone acknowledges is coming.

Partisan divisions have often surfaced, but seldom with the intensity and staying power we are now seeing. Democrat efforts to have an influence on anything have been stiff-armed almost from the beginning. In debate after debate, regardless of the issue, if the Republican author of a bill doesn’t want to accept an amendment offered by a Democrat—which is most of the time – the amendment is voted down on straight, party line votes. Every time.

And the national debate about shrinking government has seen some unfortunate votes on the House floor. On Tuesday, for instance, El Paso Democrat Carol Alvarado called for a third-reading vote on bill allowing cities to lengthen the time between required local-option sales tax elections, saving cities money on election costs. The bill did not impose a new tax, it did not increase a tax rate, and Alvarado’s colleagues had already approved it on second reading. But on third reading the bill could muster fewer than 70 votes, presumably because it had the word “tax” in it. Alvarado looked stunned when she walked away from the microphone, but after seeing this over and over again this session she should have been surprised she got to third reading in the first place.

On a final note, and to the chagrin of university and college presidents across the state, San Antonio Senator Jeff Wentworth found a vehicle to force state colleges and universities to allow concealed handgun licensees to bring their weapons to campus. He attached it to another higher education bill, one that the author did not withdraw once it became a gun bill.

The Rules Matter, Until They Don’t

For different reasons, both houses of the Texas Legislature blew up – or melted down, pick your metaphor – last week as time to get bills passed starts running out and key initiatives of the majority Republicans stalled on Democrat efforts to change, kill or slow those initiatives down.

The train wreck has been building all session, and just because legislators adjourned abruptly Saturday to keep things from getting worse doesn’t mean it’s over.

Republicans hold absolute majorities in both the House and the Senate. The rules – such as the two-thirds approval to debate matters in the Senate, procedural rulings in the House – are really all the Democrats have to fight with. This has been evidenced by Democrat amendments on everything from the budget to redistricting to “Choose Life” license plates being routinely rejected on straight, party-line votes. In other words, there is no compromise, no negotiation, just a methodical wading through established procedures so Republicans can pass whatever they want.

Apparently, that methodical wading through creates anxiety, tension and eventual frustration. Republican leaders last week charged that Democrats were just stalling, and they had already carried the legislative week over to Saturday. So, after several deep-into-the-night sessions on the House floor, on Saturday leadership pre-empted further discussion on HB 274, a bill requiring the loser in lawsuits against companies to pay all costs, and called for a vote. There may not have been a quorum present when the bill was called up for discussion, until leadership redefined quorum. Absences by Democrats – routinely excused almost without even a thought – were not excused. The move to cut off debate, which is rarely used, came with Democrats still standing at the back mike wanting to add amendments. The final vote was 89-12, which indicates that while Democrats had mostly abandoned the floor, more than a few Republicans were absent as well.

Democrat Craig Eiland, a member who is generally respected by both parties and is an unofficial leader of the roughly four dozen Democrats in the House, called the move “a grave mistake.”

House Speaker Joe Straus was elected with all the Democrats voting for him, an insignificant factor as it turned out but one that might have mattered had tea party activists peeled off more than 15 Republicans on the Speaker’s vote at the beginning of the session. Straus’ commitment to the House was that he would be fair, a commitment that is somewhat strained by his recognition of a quorum when there probably wasn’t one, by his support of a vote to cut off amendments when some were still pending and his comments that Democrats were using “small, but within the rules, points to gum up the system.”

Those are the kinds of things that led to a rebellion when Tom Craddick was speaker. They probably make Straus more acceptable to conservatives than he was at the beginning of the session, but it strains the oft-observed notion that the Legislature is a collegial body and “not Washington DC.”

One long-time capitol observer noted over the weekend that Straus’ action turned the House over to “mob rule,” from which the body will have a hard time recovering in order to finish its work.

It is worth noting, if only as a counterpoint, that when Democrats in the US Congress used their majority to pass federal health-care reform – Obamacare in negative terms – that they were accused by conservatives of “cramming this down our throats.” Now that conservatives pretty much run Texas government, cramming it down our throats has drifted from a complaint to a celebrated course of action.

On the Senate side, the blow-up came Wednesday, when Leiutenant Governor David Dewhurst allowed the Senate budget to be introduced without getting two-thirds of senators to bring it up. From there, one amendment was added – in itself an unusual thing, since the Senate budget is seldom amended on the floor – and it passed on a party-line 19-12 vote. It was the amendment that was added that had caused Democrats to back away from considering the budget on the Senate floor on Tuesday, and really spelled the end of any compromise before the document was sent to the House.

Democrats had some right to feel shafted. They had supplied a majority of the votes to pass a bill on “non-tax revenue” that was necessary to balancing the budget coming out of the Senate Finance Committee. The committee budget also included using $3.1 billion of the economic stabilization fund to reduce the impact of proposed cuts to public and higher education and health care. However, under pressure from right-wing activists who control Republican primaries – therefore the Republican Party, and given its majorities, therefore the Legislature – the rainy day fund contribution was stripped out by Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden. It appeared to be a bait-and-switch, though no one called it that. It’s reasonable to believe, however, that the non-tax revenue bill might not have passed if Democrats knew the next move was to kill the rainy day fund contribution. If the Democrats had opposed the non-tax revenue bill, it was dead, with 10 of the Senate’s 19 Republicans voting against it. At that point, Ogden didn’t have a balanced budget.

He replaced the rainy day funding with more cuts to state agencies and a hope that Comptroller Susan Combs will certify more revenue to balance the budget. There is no guarantee that the latter will happen.

All of these procedural items are fodder for insider gossip, but they matter to members and they won’t be quickly forgotten. Mostly it matters because they are used on the most contentious subjects, and in the case of suspending the two-thirds rule, they seem to be used by Senate Republicans only for partisan matters, such as 2003’s mid-decade Congressional Redistricting plan or Senate consideration of voter ID the last two legislative sessions.

It is as if the majority Republicans – and perhaps Democrats, if they are ever again a majority – want their opponents to simply line up without a fight so they can be bowled over.

Governor Rick Perry has added his own spin to all of this, declaring as emergencies a variety of bills supported by those same conservative activists, such as a bill requiring that a pregnant women view a sonogram before electing an abortion, the loser-pays bill, voter ID and a bill outlawing “sanctuary cities” in order to require local police to enforce federal immigration laws. Perry has not identified any sanctuary city by name, he just knows they are out there. Declaring a bill an emergency – perfectly within the rules – suspends a variety of other rules in the House that require lead times in posting legislation before it can be heard. Bills that suffer procedural delays can be quickly returned to the floor under the emergency ruling.

Where from here: As of this writing, approval of the state budget is the major item that is wrapped in several layers of uncertainty. House members, as is always the case, refused to accept the Senate budget when it came over Friday morning, and appointed House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Pitts, Republicans Myra Crownover, John Otto and John Zerwas and Democrat Sylvester Turner to the House side of a conference committee. While the lone Democrat isn’t likely to have much influence, many thought it was odd that the selection was Turner – a capable, long-time member from Houston, and not Scott Hochberg, also from Houston, who is one of the few members of either party and either chamber who understands public school finance.

The Senate, apparently exhausted and unable to function, left town Friday without appointing conferees. It remains to be seen whether any Democrat will be on the Senate side of a conference committee, given their uniform vote against the budget. A Republican-dominated committee, however, might lean towards the harsher, less generous House budget. Although, as one pundit observed, the one thing the Senate dislikes more than anything else is the House.

In addition to losing weekend days for budget conferees to start meeting, there are other moving pieces affecting the budget that are not yet considered. A House non-tax revenue bill has been delayed at Pitts request every day for a week. The bill that must pass every session tinkering with public education funding formulas hasn’t been heard in the House and can’t muster the votes to be considered in the Senate (unless the two-thirds rule is a permanent relic of a more collegial era). Failure to approve the school funding bill would allow an action called “pro-ration” to kick in, which has uneven but negative consequences for every school district in Texas.

Mandate reform: Another victim of the House’s inability to discuss things is HB 400, the mandate relief bill, or flexibility bill, tied to public education cuts. On this one, Democrats are fighting to the last man on behalf of teacher unions, who have no good choices. The bill allows school districts to throw off state salary and procedural requirements in order to preserve more jobs – it allows salary reductions and furloughs for teachers, counselors, librarians and nurses, all protected classes. Without the ability to apply state budget reductions by reducing pay, it seems fairly obvious more employees will lose their jobs. The bill also reduces procedural costs for districts when they terminate teachers. Currently, teachers are entitled to full-scale hearings that districts say can cost them up to $50,000 per instance – money, they remind everyone, they aren’t going to have no matter which version of a budget gets passed. The alternative, according to administrators, reduces cost but preserves due process, a contention teachers reject.

The bill was sent back to committee late Friday night – the second time in a week – for printing errors in the version sent to the floor. It is scheduled on today’s massive House calendar, but so is almost everything else still pending.

At the higher education level, mandate reform is probably dead in the Senate. A bill loosening state requirements so colleges and universities could better manage their business while receiving less money was sailing through the Senate until Jeff Wentworth of San Antonio passed an amendment requiring public universities to allow concealed handgun licensees to carry guns on campus. At that point, Senator Judith Zaffirini of Laredo withdrew SB5, the mandate reform bill, rather than have it be a vehicle for guns on campus. Wentworth had been unable to get the two-thirds votes needed to consider his CHL bill separately.

A capitol observer noted in one of many late-night blog posts over the last few days that everything in the Legislature seems to be controlled by a relative handful of Texans. Harvey Kronberg, who owns and manages the online newsletter the “Quorum Report,” noted that redistricting bills have made House and Senate districts so dominated by one party or the other – a trend that would continue if bills up for consideration this session are passed – that the general election in November doesn’t mean anything anymore. With the exception of pro-Obama and Obama-backlash elections the last two cycles, nothing much changes in November. As a result, we elect more partisan, more idealogically rigid members, who are less likely to want to compromise. And their parties make it difficult for them to think they can compromise.

Given the Legislature’s Republican tilt this session, Kronberg concluded, “25 million Texans are being held hostage by half a million voters in Republican primaries.”

That is certainly a debatable charge – in times past, and in other states, you could substitute Democrat for Republican and make the same claim – but it does not bode well for political discussion as long as a single, loaded phrase can pretty much shut down rational debate. Any time a bill that might allow government to do something is even mentioned in the Texas House this session, there is a rush of objections that it “expands government authority.” This turns out not to be true in many cases, but that charge will bring 40-50 “no” votes every time. We need some reason in our political discussions and we are not getting it.

Mid-Week Update: Senate By-Passes 2/3rd Rule, Passed Budget Down Party Line

After a mostly civil, three-hour discussion that could serve as budget primer, civics lesson and fodder for political junkies, the Texas Senate Tuesday endured a burst of partisan acrimony and then failed to come up with enough votes to bring consideration of the state’s budget to the floor.

The 19-12 party line vote came about, depending on who you talk to, because Democrats selfishly want the burden of cutting school-district funding to rest squarely on Republicans, or because the most conservative senators are so unyielding in their resistance to using the rainy day fund that getting two-thirds of the Senate to suspend its rules – a vote the Senate takes dozens of times in an average day – was simply not possible.

In the very short run, that means that Wednesday, senators will break with tradition and break the two-thirds rule, bringing up the budget on the traditional day of the week reserved for consideration of House bills, which don’t require a two-thirds vote. The budget under consideration did originate in the House, so, technically, it’s a House bill.

But breaking the two-thirds rule is not done lightly, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden almost begged senators who had indicated they would not vote to suspend the rules to change their minds. A protector of the Senate’s normally collegial atmosphere, and of its traditions, Ogden appeared deeply troubled by the likelihood that the only way the budget could be considered in the Senate was by breaking the two-thirds rule. He also reminded Democrats that the budget proposal that came out of his committee is a kinder, gentler version than the one passed by the House that cuts $8 billion in public education funding.

“The differences between this budget and the House version are much more significant than the differences amongst ourselves,” Ogden said.

He said a senate budget not approved under traditional rules will weaken his position as lead negotiator when the bill goes to the inevitable conference committee.

Ogden has been working for 10 days to find 21 votes to consider the budget. He did get some Democratic votes to get the bill out of committee, but on Tuesday, as he described changes he wanted to bring to the floor to pass the budget, he lost all Democratic votes in what they argued was a concession to conservative groups who, frankly, don’t want to see more revenue injected into the budget.

It was those groups putting pressure on Republicans, and teachers’ unions putting pressure on Democrats, who Ogden obliquely referred to when he said “outside influences” had penetrated the Senate chamber and the Senate’s traditional way of doing things.

Because suspending the rules would have meant only a majority would be needed to pass the budget, the whole budget debate was conducted on the rules suspension, since it was the last bargaining chip Democrats had. And in the process of discussing the merits of a budget that still cuts public education by $4 billion, cuts Medicaid by more than that and takes a whack at higher education, other bills the Senate has considered or were considered were woven into the discussion, as were examples of previous times the Senate has broken the two-thirds rule (all on partisan issues such as the Republican congressional redistricting do-over in 2003 and the rules to consider voter ID each of the last two sessions) and the reality that the Senate budget is indeed a kinder, gentler version than the House.

No Democrat disagreed with the last assessment, and all effusively praised Ogden for his fairness, his openness, his honesty and his efforts to find agreement.

“I appreciate all the appreciation,” Ogden told Democrat Mario Gallegos of Houston, “but what I really need is a couple of votes.”

It was an unusual debate in another sense: Senators seldom bring up a bill without knowing they have the two-thirds to suspend the rules. By bringing it up Tuesday, the maneuver somewhat blunts criticism when the budget is brought up without the rule on Wednesday.

The break with Democrats who might have voted with Ogden came when he announced that he would be bringing an amendment that would strip use of the Rainy Day Fund out of the bill, substituting instead more cuts in Medicaid and a bet that Texas Comptroller Susan Combs would certify more revenue because of the state’s improving sales tax revenues.

Those changes led Democrat Wendy Davis of Fort Worth to call the budget a “house of cards,” since it depends, in part, on things happening that the Senate can’t control. Along with a bill approved last week that advances some tax payments and delays some state spending by one day – from one fiscal year to another – Davis argued that the gimmicks potentially put the state farther in a hole two years from now even with an improved economy.

It was the vote on those gimmicks that also riled Democrats on Tuesday. Ogden acknowledged that without the revenue changes embedded in SB 1811 by Robert Duncan of Lubbock, the budget he attempted to bring up couldn’t pass. The problem was, 1811 was approved with every Democrat voting for it and a majority of Republicans voting against it, and Democrats assumed that meant the budget they would consider would use $3 billion from the rainy day fund.

Still, Ogden argued the budget was sound, the cuts were “acceptable” and the state’s economy “might even have a surplus” in two years.

“We’re not doing anything in this budget that will harm Texans,” he said.

The policy issues were roundly and frankly discussed for most of the three hours that Ogden stayed on his feet. He argued that, in addition to an improving economy, budgets can always be cut.

“If we take the position that nobody can cut anything, then we’re not any better than Washington, DC,” he said. Texas has, he says, not a crisis but “a temporary cash flow problem.”

The trouble is that Ogden has, on many occasions, called the state’s tax system “rickety” and introduced measures, some extreme, such as a statewide property tax, to illustrate the need to fix the revenue system.

But it was the Rainy Day Fund debate that ultimately united Democrats against bringing up the budget.

Republicans said the fund might be needed later, to balance the very budget that was being debated. Because the state’s Medicaid spending isn’t completely in the state’s control, legislators typically balance their biennial budget the last few months of its existence when they come to Austin in odd-numbered years. Ogden and Republican Senator Dan Patrick – the staunchest anti-rainy day fund member of the Senate – said the money might be needed in 2013.

Longtime Democratic Senator John Whitmire didn’t care for that argument. “What’s the difference between spending the rainy day fund now and two years from now?” he asked.

Texas is one of the lowest-spending, lowest-tax states in the union, and Democrats argue that the level of spending being contemplated in the current state budget is insufficient even by Texas’ meager standards. Austin Democrat Kirk Watson, who has been making substantially the same budget presentation since he spoke to the Arlington Chamber last August, used the oft-repeated observation that this budget amounts to a rainy day.

“The voters created the economic stabilization fund for a situation exactly like the one we find ourselves in today,” Watson said.

Ogden noted that it’s an academic question since he can’t get the votes for a budget with a rainy day fund appropriation, and that conservatives are more comfortable using the fund in arrears.

“The debate among conservatives is between spending the rainy day fund in arrears and for future spending,” he said. “That’s why we’re here.”

The policy debate was almost over when Republican Tommy Williams of Williamson County noted that the rule suspension vote would be the first time the budget had broken down purely along partisan lines, hinting that Democrats just wanted to delay the vote and have something to complain about.

Democrat Royce West of Dallas didn’t wait long to answer the charge.

“The first any of us heard about this budget change was this morning,” he said, noting that he voted for the budget in the Finance Committee. “We wanted some assurances on the backside, frankly, that we wouldn’t get rolled.”

As proposed, the Senate budget puts more money into public education than the House version, though it still does not pay for any new students in public schools, an omission Democrats pointed out makes the actual reduction in subsidies to schools even steeper in reality.

Senate Identifies “Non-tax” Revenue to Match Budget

Although it’s far from final – by months, probably – the Texas House cleared a big hurdle in less-than-expected time by kicking out a redistricting bill in a day, more or less.

While the 16-hour debate is the second longest single session so far this year, last Wednesday’s discussion could have gone for days. With computers aiding the map making, all members had a better idea of what was coming, and what the proposed changes meant, than they have in years past. That, and a 2-1 Republican majority that slapped down every attempt by Democrats to improve their lot made the hearing relatively expeditious, given that it solidifies power arrangements and determines political futures for several years.

There is a 100 percent chance the map will be challenged in federal court, and it skates pretty close to the margin for federal approval. In other words, it’s not a done deal. While minority population growth outstripped everything else in the last decade, those increases are not reflected in the districts that were rammed through last week. Under the guidance of House Redistricting Committee Chairman Burt Solomons, the map contains substantial deviations from the ideal House district population of 167,000. In many cases, both on the low and the high side, the districts deviate by the maximum possible 9.9 percent. That allows Republican districts to be under populated – by cutting out minority and low-income voters – and Democratic districts to be overpopulated by packing minority voters into those districts.

Solomons defended the map by arguing that it increases the number of Hispanic opportunities commensurate with population growth, an argument no Democrat buys. The genius of this map from the Republican standpoint – if it holds – is that it increases minority opportunity without increasing Democratic districts. It basically makes minority districts heavier on minorities, but doesn’t do much to increase the total number of them.

Given the heavily Republican dominance of the new House districts – at least on paper – it was surprising to see a handful of Republicans vote against the map. The group, which in part reflects the same elements who voted against Speaker Joe Straus back in January, apparently felt that this map was not Republican enough. A map that was represented to be a “true conservative” map was introduced as an amendment but withdrawn from consideration. So, like the speaker’s vote, the hardest-right members of the Republican Party were left with nothing to vote for, so they just voted no.

Even if the map holds, the state’s demographic trends show that eventually this population will seep into other, currently Republican-dominated districts, making the margins the party holds now problematic going forward. Especially in light of the party’s budget-cutting-and-nothing-else approach to the state budget and the resulting devastation that will wreak on public schools, universities, colleges and medical care for low-income Texans.

The state saw no movement but a lot of maneuvering on a budget solution, though the pressure to reach a solution amps up this week. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden has been unable to find 21 votes to bring up the budget the committee approved 10 days ago, and last week, during debate on a “non-tax revenue” bill, the Senate melted down to the point that Ogden recommended sending members home for the weekend.

Eventually, after a closed-door meeting that calmed everyone down, the body approved Senator Robert Duncan’s SB 1811, which supporters claim finds $4.1 billion in land sales, cost savings and accelerated tax payments to match up with spending in the Senate’s budget. Duncan’s bill produces no actual revenue, and it relies to an extent on some things that might not occur. If the state can’t find a buyer for land it proposes to sell, or can’t close on it during the next budget biennium, that revenue won’t show up. Similarly, Duncan’s accelerated tax payments just move revenue from one year to the previous year, creating a problem for the following year. It is, as even some members will acknowledge, budget trickery of the kind Texas has often resorted to when it projects shortfalls.

And, even then, getting the bill passed required a healthy dose of Democratic support. For a variety of reasons, almost half of the Republican senators voted “no,” either because they recognize the fiscal trickery for what it is, or because they are adhering slavishly to the tea-party line, which demands government budgets be cut, and no other options explored.

If Ogden can solve the Senate, then that just leaves the House, where a bill that contains an injection of more than $3 billion from the rainy day fund in order to balance is considered dead on arrival. So, with 30 days left in the session there is no clear path visible to an approved budget.

The other major bill that is likely to drag out discussion is reconsideration, probably Wednesday, of House Public Education Chairman Rob Eissler’s “flexibility” bill. HB 400 allows districts to give furloughs or reduce salaries rather than lay off employees; it busts the 22-1 student-teacher ratio in grades kindergarten through 4, it eliminates seniority protections so districts can keep their best teachers and not just the ones who have been there the longest, and it reduces the notice time when a teacher is terminated from 45 days to 15 days.

As one might expect, the legislation is heavily opposed by teacher unions, chiefly because it strips away protections they have spent years accumulating, and it makes the new system permanent. Teachers would probably still oppose the bill, but perhaps less vigorously, if the changes were temporary, which is what they consider the state’s budget shortfall to be. A Senate version of the bill that does make furloughs and salary reductions temporary means the fight isn’t over even if Eissler can move his bill through the House. He has 76 co-authors as of Monday – all Republicans – and there is a chance he can pick up another handful of them. That’s enough to pass the bill off the House floor, but not without a fight and not without delays.

The Chamber of Commerce supports HB 400 and currently all representatives who have any part of Arlington are signed on as co-authors. This bill is definitely a lesser-of-evils approach, but it could protect some school district jobs. In the upcoming interim, we hope legislators will tackle the fiscal structure that makes the school finance system unstable in good times, and almost worthless coming out of economic downturns.

House Redistricting Heats Up; School Flexibility Bill Hits Snag

The balance between rational debate about effective public policy and pure political theater is always tilted away from the former in legislative bodies – Congress, the Texas Legislature – but sometimes they try to pretend one is the other. If any doubt remains about how important pure politics are in Texas, witness the legislative schedule since last week.

After the House pushed the filing deadline for filing redistricting amendments and the redistricting debate itself back one day, everything stopped. Legislation set for floor and committee debate Thursday was pushed to yesterday and everyone left town. Neither the House nor the Senate met Monday, and even though the House was scheduled to come back at 11 a.m. Tuesday, it was after 4 p.m. before anything of substance happened.

Meanwhile, the political message machines worked overtime on Easter weekend – odd, given that so many of the participants are self-described devout Christians who needed the holiday to celebrate their religion – to roll out another litmus-test choice on redistricting.

In the second phase of the battle that far-right conservatives decisively lost over who is House Speaker, a redistricting map ostensibly drawn by former Rep. Joe Nixon was introduced and dubbed the “real conservative” House map for Texas. Members were informed that failure to support the “Nixon plan” would garner them a zero on that vote in ratings issued by conservative groups at the end of the session.

At some point we’ll try to talk in measured tones about how this ideological lockstep harms the political debate, but for now let’s just say the Nixon plan is a disaster if you’re at all interested in getting a plan that the federal courts will approve. In Tarrant County, for one example, the completely in Arlington District 94 represented by Diane Patrick is dragged to the west to include the mostly minority Stop Six neighborhood in southeast Fort Worth. There is no reason, in a sane world, to do that except to dilute the minority vote, deny re-election chances for Fort Worth Democrat Marc Veasey and proudly proclaim “we showed them.” Showed them all the way to a redistricting plan drawn by the federal courts. Many Republicans don’t like the Nixon plan but they are worried about how the few-but-loud voices of tea party activists will characterize their votes on something more sensible.

And while we’re talking about sensible, the Texas House took another step toward jumping off a cliff on public education issues Tuesday. Necessary legislation that would give school administrators some flexibility in managing the state budget reductions took a possibly fatal hit late in the afternoon. Public Education Chairman Rob Eissler’s HB 400 was twice temporarily pulled down to address technical challenges, but after an hour the point of order by Democrat Boris Miles of Houston was sustained.

Without HB 400, administrators are not able to offer salary reductions and/or furloughs in lieu of layoffs, not able to make notification of layoffs more sensible in terms of timing, and not able to adjust stretch staff by relaxing the 22-1 teacher-student ratio in lower grades. Teacher groups opposed the bill, and Miles was no doubt carrying their water. However, without this bill, the outcome is likely to be more teacher layoffs. It’s admittedly a bad choice for teachers, but, to the extent they supported efforts to kill HB 400, they took a bad choice and made it worse.

Another element that has not helped Eissler and his supporters is the messaging that continues to argue there is all kinds of fat in school district budgets, and that they should be able to sustain the $8 billion the House wants to cut without harming instruction in the classroom.

No doubt there is fat in bureaucracy, there always is, public or private sector. It’s doubtful it adds to $8 billion. In truth, though, the numbers don’t matter because the “cut government” mantra has never bothered to engage the facts. While not taking sides in the ideological wars, it is clear that the effort to punish school districts for employing people – more than 80 percent of their budgets are in personnel – come from right-wing foundations and tea party activists. One group of young Republicans even published – and has so far not withdrawn – a statement that the ratio of administrators to teachers in Texas school districts was one-to-one. Please.

Just as an example, according to the Texas Education Agency, the teacher-administrator ratio in Arlington is 16-1. Superintendent JerryMcCullough has announced a budget for next year that preserves most teachers but, as he said, “cuts the hell out of everything else.” He also acknowledged that unless the state fixes its structural deficit problems, in two years teachers will be the only place left to go when looking for budget cuts.

The budget cut pressure adds fuel to the notion that districts can cut waste and not harm teachers, which furthers pressure on Democrats and liberals to dig in when trying to maintain teacher’s contractual rights, administrative hearings after layoffs and all the other things that administrative flexibility would threaten.

Growth in Texas and a better economy would make the school problem better, but perhaps not solve the school finance problem. The state’s revenue system is simply not structured in a way to pay for the minimum needs in the state’s education, health care and transportation systems. The House and Senate seem on a collision course when it comes to approving budgets – the Senate dips into the economic stabilization fund for $3.1 billion, the House takes nothing per Governor Rick Perry’s instructions – so resolution to any of this is hard to see.

Help might come, or at least contribute, to growth if the Legislature will approve bills currently in committee to extend the state’s major economic development program. The House Ways and Means Committee spent two hours late Tuesday night discussing the extension of and modifications to Chapter 313 of the Tax code, which provides help to large companies looking to locate or expand in Texas. The chapter doesn’t expire until 2014, but a parade of witnesses testified that these deals take years to complete, and that some deals currently under discussion need an extension to guarantee the chapter will be there when they come to fruition.

Ways and Means adjourned about 1 a.m. Tuesday morning. More on Chapter 313 later. The House takes up redistricting today at 10 a.m. It’s likely to be a long day.

Senate Finance Passes Budget, House Redistricting Up For Debate Next Week

Because of the timing of proposed legislative action and the weekend holiday, the information in this newsletter may not reflect actions taken late last week. We will post a mid-week update to catch up.

The most important thing that happened in the Legislature last week happened quickly, or at least it appeared that way. Less than an hour into its Thursday morning meeting, the Senate Finance Committee voted 11-4 to approve a budget that spends more on education and health care than the House of Representatives, and in part does so by dipping into the Economic Stabilization Fund – the Rainy Day Fund – to make up part of the shortfall.

Given the line drawn by Governor Rick Perry, with the full support of conservative activists and think tanks, that no rainy day funds would be used in the upcoming biennial budget, the committee action sets up a direct conflict with the House. Anticipation of just such a clash is the reason state officials and lobbyists who must work with the Legislature have been saying for months that they have no summer vacation plans.

As if to underscore the conservative push, one of the four “no” votes was Republican Senator Dan Patrick, arguably the farther-right member of the Texas Senate. Democrats John Whitmire, Eddie Lucio and Judith Zaffirini also voted against the budget because of its significant underinvestment in education and health care. Two democrats, Royce West of Dallas and Juan Hinojosa of Brownsville, voted to kick the budget out of committee and get it on the Senate intent calendar this week.

Of course, the vote happened after Senate finance spent untold hours going through the budget, an effort that gained momentum when last week, when the committee started closing in on a budget, making a final trip through some of the budget articles to adjust funding in individual programs and, late Tuesday, taking a serious look at non-tax revenue to close the state’s budget gap.

Since real revenue is off the table, the majority of what the committee reviewed were one-time gimmicks – early collection of taxes, putting money into the budget with no intention of spending it – that in many cases just kicks serious budget issues two years down the road.

A committee headed by Senator Robert Duncan of Lubbock “found” more than $4 billion to count against the $24 billion budget hole. Some of it, such as $800 million in early payments of the margins tax for large taxpayers, doesn’t produce more revenue, it just puts the money into the budget in the second year of the biennium – collecting it in May instead of September 2013. Not to get too detailed, that just means the state’s next two-year budget, which should be approved during the 2013 legislative session, will not have that $800 million to spend.

“It begs the question, what do we do in two years,” Duncan said.

This smoke-and-mirrors approach to balancing the budget is nothing new in Texas. It balanced the budget this way in 2003, and as Duncan’s comment illustrates, it’s not a secret around the Capitol. That doesn’t’ mean legislators won’t brag about how they balanced the budget without raising taxes on next year’s campaign trail.

Senators Bob Deuell and Kevin Eltife, both East Texas Republicans who are hard workers but don’t seek the spotlight, were plainly bothered by the approach, along with suggestions by Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden that some money intended for the Permanent School Fund be diverted to general revenue.

Ogden’s proposed constitutional amendment, SJR5, has a complicated two-part mechanism that essentially puts money into the constitutionally dedicated Permanent School Fund, then takes it out and kicks it over to the Available School Fund to pay for public education. The portions of the proposal that deal with consolidating management of all the revenue streams feeding the PSF received support, but diverting the money from the fund’s corpus got a lukewarm reception at best.

In part, the mechanism for using the money to balance the budget was unclear. Since the constitutional amendment couldn’t be voted on until November at the earliest, how any of the money that an approved amendment might make available could actually be used by the state to fund schools or nursing homes was murky at best, a fact not lost on Deuell.

Ogden took the dissent with good humor, even laughing when Senator John Whitmire suggested the idea be voted down on the spot rather than leaving the matter pending as Ogden intended when he introduced the proposal.

“This committee should have some choices on how we balance the budget, and this is one of them,” Ogden said.

Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, a former senator and one of the many rumored candidates-in-waiting to run for Lieutenant Governor – or something – in the musical chairs that seems likely when filing for the U.S. Senate starts next year, also rained on Ogden’s parade.

Patterson suggested they use the one obvious choice that legislators seem determined to avoid even though it’s available and doesn’t require any gimmicks to use.

“When you’re choosing between the rainy day fund and the Permanent School Fund, I’ll take the rainy day fund any day,” Patterson said while testifying about the mechanisms that get money into and out of the Permanent School Fund.

All of this discussion, of course, is in service to the Finance Committee’s effort to put more money into education and health care, into the budget in general, than is in the House budget. Senators have declared the House budget unacceptable, and some House members have indicated that the Senate’s effort to rescue education and health care funds is a waste of time. For conservatives who were elected because of the no-spending-is-good-spending campaign, any semi-legitimate way of putting more money into the core programs that are being hammered this session is actually a bad thing.

The matters were all left pending. A bill that somehow looks like revenue, but isn’t a fee or tax increase, will eventually emerge, either from Senate Finance or the House Appropriations Committee. Details of what the Senate list looks like are hard to come by right now; perhaps they will be more public in a week. Duncan’s $4 billion revenue bill – a substitute version of a shell bill he filed earlier – wasn’t available until late Tuesday. Audience members testifying on the bill acknowledged they couldn’t comment in any detail because they didn’t know what they were testifying on.

The budget and the cuts to education and health and human services have dominated discussion in the Capitol all session, but on Wednesday the House demonstrated, in its first floor attempt to address House redistricting, how contentious that is likely to be. It took members almost two hours just to agree on rules for filing amendments to the redistricting bill, and in all of that debate there were only two proposals to consider.

Supported in committee only by Republicans – and not all of them – the map the House will consider was just released 10 days ago, and House Redistricting Committee Chairman Burt Solomons Wednesday indicated his intent to have the map up for a floor vote Tuesday. Given the politically explosive nature of any redistricting bill, it isn’t a surprise that Solomons doesn’t want the maps hanging out there very long. Nothing this partisan looks better the longer it stays in sunlight, and objections to the way Hispanics have been either carved up or crowded into districts to maintain large Republican majorities are already on the record.

On Wednesday, Solomons ran into a different problem when he attempted to put a deadline on when legislators could submit amendments prior to HB 150 coming to the floor. Solomons said the original deadline was Thursday at 5 pm, and as a gesture of helpfulness he proposed extending the deadline another day, to 5 pm on Good Friday.

Turns out that clearly indicating some people would have to work on what is otherwise a religious holiday to meet the timetable created an unusual coalition of minority Democrats and religious Republicans who mounted objections to the timetable and the speed with which redistricting is moving through the House.

Several members asked for more time, pushing the amendment deadline to Monday and the bill’s consideration to Wednesday. Solomons hung tough until Democrat Harold Dutton of Houston, a skilled legislative player, laid out the case for the map being overturned by the courts simply because the process was questionable. Dutton’s case was joined by Republican Charlie Howard of Sugarland, who said members should be with their families celebrating “our Savior’s resurrection.”

So there it was; a vote to keep Solomons’ timetable was a vote against God.

After an extended conference around the Speaker’s rostrum that involved approximately a third of the House members, Dutton pulled down his request for an extension, Solomons pulled down his timetable and reintroduced Dutton’s proposal as his own. Because HB 150 was already set on the House calendar for Tuesday, a vote to change it required two thirds of House members. That might not have happened on Dutton’s proposal – he is an attorney who knows how to use the rules to his advantage when he is outnumbered, which is often – but once it came from the Republican committee chairman himself, the vote was almost unanimous, with a few members voting “present.”

The current map proposal is available by clicking here. As previously reported, it puts portions of the City of Arlington in five different House districts, including one, District 93, described Wednesday by a House member as a “lightning bolt,” that sweeps through North Arlington and then picks up population from Haltom City, Haslet and Fort Worth on its way to the Denton County Line.

If the House cannot agree on a final map, it will be drawn by a legislative redistricting board of legislative and statewide elected officials, all of whom are currently Republicans. In any case, it’s a sure thing the map will end up in the federal courts and some of Wednesday’s debate was for the purpose of establishing a record for court review when the time comes.

Major Events Fund Clears Hurdle, First House Redistricting Map Out

While it isn’t very clear from any final actions taken, state lawmakers are moving forward in admittedly small steps on some major issues as we drift into the last six weeks of the Texas Legislative Session.

Of particular local interest, legislation allowing the state’s Major Events Fund to help local governments offset the costs of conducting, well, major events, cleared the House on Friday by a 134-6 margin. Sponsored by Senator Chris Harris and Representative Diane Patrick, both of Arlington, SB 309 expands the fund’s uses to include the Academy of Country Music Awards, political conventions and a cutting-horse show. Revenue from the Major Events Fund is being used to offset the costs of local governments for event-related efforts, such as security, for the Super Bowl.

Some conservative activists have opposed expanding the fund – actually, they have opposed its existence – but in some cases it appears the opposition misunderstands the bill. No money is appropriated from the state budget. A portion of the sales tax generated by the event is returned to local communities if they have applied for it in advance. Final determination on the amount generated and the amount that can be reimbursed rests with the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts.

The Senate needs to concur with the House bill – which should be a no-brainer since it initially passed the Senate unanimously – and from there it goes to the governor to sign. While there is no expectation Governor Rick Perry would veto the bill, he has to act early enough that there would be time for both chambers to vote to override a veto if one occurs. Perry has occasionally vetoed bills that he never opposed, but that usually happens after the Legislature leaves town, when no override vote can be taken.

A hearing to take testimony on making the $1 million revenue exemption from the margins tax permanent drew a lot of participants. The exemption was originally set at $300,000, and in 2009 legislators raised the exemption to $1 million for a temporary, two-year period. It’s set to be reduced to $600,000 – and not change again – if nothing happens this session.

Many spoke of the tax’s complexity and just the difficult economic times we’re in, but pushing back against making the $1 million exemption permanent was a $150 million fiscal note; as in, that’s another $150 million in revenue the state will have to find in a session where they’re currently more than $24 billion short.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Harvey Hilderbran said he was working on a fix that would make permanent exemption revenue neutral, but he offered no details. All bills addressing the exemption were left pending.

On other fronts, legislation giving public school officials flexibility in addressing personnel issues as a result of state budget cuts took a halting step forward Thursday with approval of SB 12 by the Senate Education Committee. The bill is a compromise worked out by its author, Senator Florence Shapiro of Plano, with Democrats Wendy Davis of Fort Worth and Royce West of Dallas, and Republicans, Dan Patrick of Houston and Robert Duncan of Lubbock. Similar in intent to HB 400, which came out of the House Public Education Committee last week, SB 12 allows administrators to furlough employees in lieu of laying them off, moves away from laying off only the most recently hired teachers, and moves the notice period for laying off teachers closer to the end of the school year. School districts have already started notifying teachers that they will not be returning next year. SB 12’s provisions, if approved, would not go into effect until the 2012 school year.

Unlike HB 400, which is awaiting a setting on the House calendar, SB12’s layoff and furlough provisions are temporary, which makes them more acceptable to teacher groups that don’t like either bill. The House bill also relaxes the 22-1 student-teacher ratio in classrooms up to the fourth grade, while no such provision exists in the Senate version.

It’s unclear how much the more conservative House is committed to protecting teacher’s jobs, but anything that keeps administrators from laying teachers off would seem to be a better deal for teachers. Organized teachers’ groups view both bills with skepticism, and mostly they hate the House version. The Senate compromise was probably the best administrators can expect if they want to get any flexibility. If Senate Democrats stay united, they have the votes to block any changes in teacher hiring from reaching the floor, though in the end that means more teachers would probably get laid off.

The root of the layoff issue, of course, is the proposed state budget that cuts public education funding by 25 percent. The House budget has already been approved; the Senate hasn’t yet been able to get a budget out of committee even though Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden told members at the beginning of the week that a decision needed to be made by last Thursday.

The finance committee’s discussion on other items – ranging from closing or selling public park lands to boll weevil eradication – shows how difficult these budget-cutting issues really are. In reviewing the state parks’ budget, tempers flared at the mention of closing “underperforming” parks, or of attempting to sell them or even give them to local entities.

Senator John Whitmire of Houston noted that most local jurisdictions refused to take state parks because they couldn’t afford to operate them. He said closing parks “sends a horrible message to future generations,” and advocated mothballing parks that were too expensive to operate rather than getting rid of them.  “You’ll never get them back if you give up the land now,” he said.

Senator Kevin Eltife of Tyler noted another problem, which is the passage in 2007 of a statewide bond issue to upgrade parks.  “One of the parks that is on the list (to be closed) we just spent $5 million on,” he said.

Boll weevil eradication, seemingly a relic of days gone by, came back up when state funding for the program was recommended for elimination. Some areas of the state have generated trust funds for the effort that exist outside the state budget, and to show that regional or local concerns still rule even in difficult budget times, Duncan made it clear he wasn’t interested in seeing funds raised for eradication in his West Texas district shifted to other parts of the state that had not bothered to raise money on their own.

Finally, though, at the end of the week, all eyes in the House were on HB 150, otherwise known as House Redistricting.

The Chamber has no position on redistricting, but with six weeks left in the session redrawing district lines will gain in importance over education and the budget as an issue occupying members’ attention. The proposed map, which has already been challenged in several different quarters, puts portions of Arlington in five different state representative districts, including one that runs from the eastern county line, across North Arlington and then turns north, meandering all the way to the Tarrant-Denton County line.

The inelegant design was drawn, in case anyone who follows politics doesn’t know, to create as many districts as possible where Republicans can win. If Democrats were drawing the map, it would be to create a map where as many Democrats as possible could win.

With 101 Republicans in the House, even the most partisan members understand that they can’t protect all of them in drawing districts to conform to the state’s growing population. With urban areas gaining population and rural areas shrinking—at least on a relative basis—rural districts will get larger geographically and some incumbents will have to run against each other. In most cases, that pits incumbent Republicans against each other, though there is a district in Houston that puts incumbent Democrats in the same district.

A new district is proposed in Arlington, taking in most of the east side south of Interstate 30 and wandering south of I-20 towards Mansfield. That district is anticipated to be a district a Democrat, and possibly a Hispanic, could win. It is tentatively numbered District 101.

District 94, currently represented by Diane Patrick, moves south and east, occupying a bit more of Central Arlington while giving up all of North Arlington. It would remain the only district completely enclosed in the Arlington city limits.

District 96, represented by Bill Zedler, would sprawl across a large portion of the southern part of Tarrant County, taking in almost all of Mansfield and losing some bothersome Democratic precincts that previously made it a marginal Republican district.

District 93, represented by Barbara Nash, bizarrely wipes out most of the existing lines, adds all of North Arlington to the district and then fills out the population with residents of North Fort Worth, moving up I-35 to the Denton County line. If this map prevails, Nash as the incumbent would run in a district where at least 60 percent of the population was new to her.

A sliver of District 92, represented by Todd Smith, would come into Northeast Arlington. Smith has often expressed a desire to represent more of Arlington. His current district has one voting precinct in Arlington; one that, he has pointed out more than once, has no one living in it.

“If you know anyone in Arlington who lives in my district, please let me know who they are,” he said at a post-session meeting at UT Arlington in 2009. If the map holds, Smith would become the Arlington representative with the most seniority.

With the growth in the state’s Hispanic population, Hispanic groups immediately challenged the map – statewide, not just the Tarrant County portion – arguing that it breaks up concentrations of Hispanics to dilute their impact and create almost 90 districts with Republican majorities of more than 55 percent. A common discussion about how redistricting would affect the Texas House has most insiders predicting that Republicans could safely hold 83-87 districts. A map that goes over 90 could run into trouble with the U.S. Justice Department or the federal courts.

It is widely perceived that Republican percentages will be reduced as the Hispanic population grows throughout the decade, but this map could protect large Republican majorities for at least the next two or three election cycles.

As of this week, no Senate maps have been made available to the public.

Legislators Debate Loosening School Graduation Requirements

With the state budget still the biggest unsolved mystery in Austin, the House took a break this week to spend some time arguing about education policy in a way that’s only slightly related to the budget.

The most interesting debate all week was the two-and-a-half hour floor discussion Wednesday afternoon on House Public Education Committee Chairman Rob Eissler’s bill, HB 500, to – depending on your perspective – allow schools flexibility in high school graduation requirements or begin eviscerating the state’s accountability system before it has even been fully implemented.

The Arlington Chamber opposes HB 500, which would reduce the high school graduation requirement to passing four of 12 tests, three of which could be taken in a student’s freshman year. Essentially, business groups and business/education groups argued students could make zeros on the other eight tests and still graduate. The bill passed easily, since Eissler entered the debate with 125 co-sponsors, but the arguments about it are important for our expectations of public education. Meeting or not meeting those expectations is clearly going to be part of how, and to what extent, we pay for public education in the future, since we’re clearly not paying for it this year.

Todd Smith of Euless, who again serves on the House public education committee after a few years absence, walked away rather than support the bill when it was kicked out of committee, and he took to the microphone twice in speaking against it.

“In my 15 years in the Texas House, the one constant has been a commitment to gradually higher standards in our accountability system with the simple goal of graduating students who are career- and college-ready,” said Smith in his speech in opposition to the bill. “This is a major sea change. For the first time, we are dramatically lowering our standards.”

Smith’s impassioned appeal didn’t bring along many votes—the bill passed 138-5 on final reading—but his point is important and one that will no doubt be heeded when the bill receives what could be a very frosty reception in the Senate. Education Committee Chair Florence Shapiro has vowed to see the new end-of-course exams system implemented, and notes that using funding as a way to delay it is a smokescreen.

Most of the tests that will be used to implement the new system are already paid for in the state’s current budget.

Eissler defended the proposal as giving districts flexibility – allowing them to substitute their own standards – but he never categorically denied the charge about the number of tests a student could, essentially, draw designs on and still graduate.

It’s certainly fair to argue that there are legitimate differences of opinion about the value of testing in public education, and not just as a graduation requirement. Almost no one will support the TAKs test system, and there is cautious hope that the new accountability system, which is supposed to test what is taught in class instead of breaking to teach students how to pass a standardized test, will bring teaching and testing back into balance. But the frustration with TAKs has created a backlash among elected officials that led some to suggest during Wednesday’s debate that maybe we don’t need testing, period.

Nothing was offered along those lines, but Representative Larry Phillips of Sherman did propose hitting “pause,” essentially taking time off from testing for two years because of “extraordinary times.” And that, in turn, caused others to urge that his amendment toss testing out the window all together.

While Phillips argued that schools in his district weren’t ready to implement the new end-of course tests passed in 2009, he drew support that, in some cases, pushed for letting every school decide for itself what the standards are. Arlington Representative Diane Patrick, a co-sponsor of Eissler’s bill, said that would make it impossible to have a basis for comparing districts.

Phillips, channeling Eissler for a moment, also spent a good bit of time complaining about the way the House’s ideas were treated in the Senate, and the inter-chamber rivalry was never as prominent as while Phillips had the microphone. In the end, though, he stuck to his no-money argument as the fundamental basis for putting things on hold.

The funding argument didn’t help Phillips, which Patrick and Smith both opposed and which didn’t pass. But his extraordinary times argument – he used the phrase at least 15 times in the debate – is disturbing because the implication is that things will be better in two years. There are a couple of things wrong with that argument.

In the midst of a debate over whether or not we can effectively measure student achievement, the fact that the House three days earlier had just voted to remove $8 billion of funding for public schools shadowed everything but was never acknowledged. The public school funding system is broken, and if we’re going to use that as a reason to slam on the brakes for student testing, we could see a whole generation of high-schoolers graduate without any idea of what they know and whether they’re ready for businesses to hire or colleges to enroll.

Couple that with clear avoidance of discussing a fix for public education funding because it involves using words like “tax” and “revenue,” and “extraordinary times” was easily the most flagrant, unchallenged argument of the debate. Phillips is a solid, contributing member of the House – chairman this year of the Transportation Committee. No doubt he was representing his mostly rural district. But we need to have a more honest debate, or at least one that focuses on the issue, if we really want to investigate whether testing is of value in the public school system.

On a slightly more positive note, the House public education committee did kick out HB 400, which provides school districts flexibility in managing their budgets and could reduce the pressure on using staff and teacher layoffs as a way to deal with the budget cuts the state appears intent on imposing. Specifically, the bill:
 Repeals last-in, first-out for reduction in force;
 Reduces state-required early notice of contract non-renewal from 45-days to 15-days before end of contract;
 Ensures the Commissioner of Education can only overturn local termination by overturning findings of fact, not substituting judgment;
 Allows for a state-mandated district maximum average of 22:1 class size in grades K-4, instead of a state-mandated per-class hard cap of 22:1;
 Allows for furloughs, which are currently prohibited by state law.

Members who supported the bill, all Republicans, including Smith and Mark Shelton of Burleson, were warned to expect a deluge of phone calls from teacher groups opposing some the bill’s measures. The ideas, however, are more likely to protect jobs, and that was the point. There was one major compromise – provisions allowing districts to reduce salaries were removed – which, frankly, teachers shouldn’t have expected to get given the fiscal climate. It’s a bit of a mystery why teacher groups are more upset about this legislation than they are at a budget that cuts public education across the board by 25%.

HB 400 is a good bill in that it’s a necessary bill in light of the circumstances we find ourselves in, and any employer will instantly appreciate the lifting of restrictions on how they manage their business.

On Monday, several weeks later than originally anticipated, the House Ways and Means Committee will hear legislation to extend the $1 million revenue exemptions from the business tax for another two years. Currently, the exemption is scheduled to reset at $600,000 and not change.  Preserving the exemption would make the $24 billion state budget shortfall worse, but there are several identical bills to continue the margins tax exemption, bills that will probably be filed every session by members looking to score points with specific businesses.

Guns On Campus Debate Expected Today

While Texas legislators are putting less money than ever into the state’s universities and community colleges, they aren’t shy about telling them what to do.  When the Senate convenes today Senator Jeff Wentworth’s bill requiring schools to allow handguns on campus comes back up for a vote.

Wentworth’s bill, which passed the Senate two years ago, allows concealed handgun licensees to bring their weapons to school with them. He argued that such a provision might halt, or mitigate, the horrendous massacres on college campuses caused by delusional gunmen who, in Wentworth’s words, are ultimately bent on suicide and want to take as many innocent people with them as possible. His reference points were recent – Virginia Tech two years ago, and historic—the Charles Whitman shooting at UT Austin in 1966. Whitman used a rifle and fired from a tower, so it’s hard to see how much difference someone with a handgun would have made. But, no matter.

Wentworth argued that you have to be 21 to have a CHL in Texas, so most carriers would be seniors, graduate students, faculty or staff. His argument indicated that he thought a significant number of students at state universities began when they were 17. But, no matter.

He noted that the bloodbath in Texas many predicted when concealed handguns were allowed 15 years ago never materialized, and that other states, such as Utah, already have such provisions with no adverse affects.

But last Thursday, as he was seeking a vote to suspend Senate rules so he could bring up the bill for a final vote, he instead pulled the legislation down.  The vote was a technical one – he needed two-thirds of the Senate to suspend the rules to bring the bill up for consideration, which is how almost every bill in the Senate gets considered – but the debate was on the substance. In his long career in the Legislature Wentworth has been all over the place ideologically, but in this case he was doing what a handful of other senators no doubt would have also done, and that is carry water for the gun lobby. He indicated in his exchanges with Democrats Royce West and Rodney Ellis that he hadn’t heard from university presidents who oppose the bill. What he didn’t say is that presidents, who are state employees, walk a tightrope when commenting on pending state policy. Express too strong of an opinion and you could run afoul of ethics laws that bar employees from lobbying the legislature. UT Arlington President Jim Spaniolo has been accused of just that by a college Republican group because he appeared to suggest having guns on campus wasn’t a good idea.

The opposition from West and Ellis was predictable, but Wentworth’s fortunes started to flag when two of the Senate’s most respected Republicans – Steve Ogden of Bryan and Robert Duncan of Lubbock – suggested they would also oppose the bill.

Ogden, whose district includes Texas A&M and is one of the dwindling number of pragmatic, “adult” legislators left in Austin, indicated that in his last Senate campaign, the people who were on college campuses overwhelmingly opposed the bill. Those who were for it, Ogden noted, “are on campus infrequently, if at all.”

He further pointed out that only a very small percentage of Texans have handgun licenses – as opposed to the presumably huge numbers who have guns – and if you translate that percentage to the eligible population on a college campus, you’re left with a very low number of people to be in the right place at the right time to intervene in a mass shooting: a number not much greater than the campus police who are already there and already armed.

“It’s really almost random,” Ogden said. “I don’t buy the safety argument.”

Shortly thereafter, debate suddenly halted. After a 10-minute huddle around Lt. Governor David Dewhurst’s desk, Wentworth withdrew the bill and indicated it would come back up on Monday. Apparently, Senator Mario Gallegos of Houston had decided during the debate to withdraw his vote for suspending the rules.

A similar bill has already passed the Texas House by a wide margin, even though some who voted for it privately complained about the clout the National Rifle Association has on matters such as these. It appears this bill is likely to eventually get past the current obstructions in the Senate, and there is still plenty of time this session to work out a House-Senate compromise. Legislators may or may not find a way to agree on a budget for the next two years, but they’re likely to come to terms where guns are concerned.

House members, after all, are considering a bill that would allow legislators to carry guns in private places where no one other than licensed, law enforcement professionals may have weapons – such as bars and churches. How, exactly, that provision makes Texas safer after some of the performances we have seen from legislators over the years has not yet been explained.

Cuts Equaling $24 Billion Included in Budget Passed by House

For all of the 25 or so hours state House members spent this past weekend debating the state budget, they could have taken about 15 minutes when they received the bill from committee and, with one vote, had their whole weekend free to devote to opening-day baseball and the Final Four.

The $164.5 billion, two-year budget that received initial approval early Sunday evening was, on the big issues, no different from what the House Appropriations Committee started with in January. Despite more than 400 pages of amendments, public and higher education took substantial hits as the proposed budget was balanced with more than $24 billion of cuts.

Most amendments tinkered around the edges, taking money from programs not favored by conservatives, such as family planning, and directing them to other areas. The actions didn’t change total spending, but between re-routing some funding and the serious cuts levied on education programs at all levels, legislators showed their definite bias away from developing and supporting future adults in favor of the state’s shrinking, current over-50 population. After all, they are the ones who vote.

A full reading of the budget amendments will take a few days.

Despite pleas to use the state’s economic stabilization fund to offset some cuts – though the input from the fund would only have been in the $3 billion range – conservative lawmakers adhered to a strict regimen of budget cuts, regardless of the potential impact of those cuts on their communities. The budget was approved on a 98-49 party line vote, with all Democrats voting no (along with two Republicans, including Aaron Pena, who was elected in January as a Democrat and then switched parties).

The Arlington Chamber of Commerce Board last week approved a resolution urging the Legislature to use the Economic Stabilization Fund – more popularly known as the Rainy Day Fund – to offset the impact of education budget cuts. After a presentation that reviewed how the state budget crisis has gotten to this point, the resolution also asked legislators to fix the margins tax system that is the basis of public education funding, and is structurally deficient by $2 billion to $4 billion each budget year.

The vote on Sunday is only the first of four steps to pass a budget, and based on backroom chatter, the House and Senate are miles apart on their spending plans, with many Republican senators saying they can’t vote for the House budget and many House Republicans saying they can’t support what they’ve heard will be coming over the from the Senate. The Senate Finance Committee has not yet approved a budget, and in fact just today Chairman Steve Ogden appointed two more budget subcommittees – on higher education and natural resources – with instructions to report back by the end of the week. Ultimately, if a budget is approved, the deal will be made behind closed doors in a House-Senate conference committee probably very late in May.

As a way to help the state’s revenue problems, gambling proponents made their case last week to the House Licensing and Administrative Procedures committee. Citing revenue to the state anywhere from $1.5 billion to more than $3 billion per year, proponents of both destination resort casino gambling and of adding slot machines and video gambling terminals at pari-mutuel horse-racing tracks in Texas cited polls that show both measures would be approved by voters if they were allowed to consider the measures as constitutional amendments. A vote of two-thirds in both houses of the Legislature is required to put HB 382, HB 2111 and SB 1118 on a ballot in November.

For casino operators, Texas is a huge, untapped market that they now only have access to when Texans travel to adjoining states, Las Vegas or Atlantic City. For horse track providers, additional gaming is survival. Track owners testified that purses around the state are down because the level of competition among horses is greater in surrounding states, all of which provide machine gaming at the track and use part of that revenue to pay larger purses for the horse races.

Opponents to the bills were from religious groups opposed to gambling and conservative political groups such as the Texas Eagle Forum.

Despite the tilt in favor of gambling at the hearing, the measures are not considered likely to get very far this session. No hearings have been set in the Senate, and Ogden, the finance chairman, has indicated he is no hurry to schedule them. The bills in the House were left pending.

On a local level, Representative Diane Patrick’s bill to expand use of the state’s Major Events Trust Fund for the Academy of Country Music Awards and political conventions was reported favorably today out of the House Economic Development Committee. The bill would allow such events to return a portion of the sales tax revenue to local jurisdictions to offset costs of putting on such events, such as security. A companion bill, SB 309 by Senator Chris Harris of Arlington, passed the Senate two weeks ago.

Arlington Chamber of Commerce urges state to tap Rainy Day Fund to offset budget cuts

The Arlington Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors on Wednesday called for the Texas Legislature to use the state’s Economic Stabilization Fund – the Rainy Day Fund – to offset proposed cuts in education spending for the 2011-13 state budget.

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Budget Debate Is Set & Will Gambling In Texas Pass?

State legislators are starting to move on major legislation with 11 weeks left before adjournment. Some of that legislation is critical – the state budget, education funding formulas – and some of it – voter ID, bringing guns to work – is critical because, since leadership declared it a priority, it needs to move before the calendar gets so jammed the stuff that actually affects everyone gets lost.

The House Appropriations Committee, on a party line vote, kicked out a state budget that is roughly the same as the one they started with in January. No funding for growth in the public education or higher education systems, way short of paying for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, but one that balances the budget after cutting out about $24 billion in spending. On an 18-7 vote (all seven no votes were Democrats) the committee moved the bill, HB1, and set it for debate on the House floor Friday, April 1.

The Senate is nowhere close to coming up with a budget, which sets in motion some pretty interesting logistics once the House acts, which may not be Friday but probably will be over the weekend. Its conventional wisdom that the ultimate budget will be written in late May by a secretive and somewhat frenzied House-Senate conference committee, but that committee can’t be appointed until the Senate has a budget to conference on, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden says his committee is nowhere near a consensus.

Although left for dead after November’s election, gambling legislation will get its hearing tomorrow at the House Licensing and Administrative Procedures Committee. Rather than attempt to incrementally build a case for destination-resort casino gambling, advocates are going all in with legislation to open up Texas for slot machines at existing horse-racing tracks as well as casinos in several areas of the state and on the land of federally recognized Indian tribes.

Depending on what the appetite for the revenue is – even some social conservatives who oppose gambling on moral grounds are looking for money – the handful of bills heard Tuesday will be the starting place for what comes next. House Bill 382 and accompanying joint resolution, HJR 112 by Jose Menendez of San Antonio are the full-blown casino bills. Similar legislation is carried in the Senate by Rodney Ellis, with SJR 34. The slot machines at racetracks and Indian lands only bill is carried by Rep. Beverly Woolley of Houston, HB 2111, and by Senator Juan Hinojosa, SB 1118. Full-blown casino gambling faces a huge hurdle, needing a two-thirds vote in both houses of the legislature, followed by ratification in a November constitutional amendment election. Woolley’s bill needs only a majority. It’s a matter of just passing interest – though it might say something about the casino legislation’s prospects, that all of the casino legislation is carried by Democrats. Woolley is a Republican and, by virtue of resisting Tea Party pressure to vote against Speaker Joe Straus, is part of House leadership.

For those interested in political theater, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Pitts’ bill, HB 275, to use $3.2 billion from the Economic Stabilization Fund – otherwise and more popularly known as the Rainy Day Fund – will be heard Thursday, March 31 on the House floor. This use of the fund is for balancing the budget that the state is currently spending, which expires in August. A three-fifths vote – 90 members – is required to pass the legislation. Given that Governor Rick Perry has backed off his opposition to use the bill for the current budget, odds are this legislation will pass, but the hearing is likely to be a precursor for the debate the following day – April Fool’s Day, no significance attached—on the state’s budget for the next two years.

Like the approval last Wednesday of Voter ID legislation after an 11-hour debate, look for the budget discussion to be long and contentious. Pitts acknowledged that the House may have to stay in Austin all weekend to get something passed. But, after it’s all finalized, it seems likely it will be approved mostly as submitted. In part, this is because amendments have to be pre-filed, and they won’t be considered if they spend more than the budget coming out of committee allows. It’s pretty easy to forecast that this vote will end up looking very much like the final voter ID vote, which was 101-48, with all Republicans voting yes and all Democrats voting no.

Legislature Taps Rainy Day Fund & Major Events Bill Gets Closer to Passage

Unlike many others, Texas legislators did not take last week off for Spring Break, and the result of their being in Austin was a little bit of movement on the major issue facing them – the state’s $27 billion budget shortfall. But it was just a little movement. That still allowed plenty of time to advance other pending crises, such as the lack of ability to carry guns to work and on college campuses, and the effort to strike down voter fraud that no one, so far, has proved actually exists.

Perhaps most significant for North Texas; bills that would expand the state’s ability to reimburse local communities for the costs of hosting major public events received an uncontested hearing in a House committee last Thursday and may get amended and approved on first reading in the Senate today.

Arlington Senator Chris Harris and Representative Diane Patrick filed SB309 and HB 735 respectively, which would open up the state’s Major Events Trust Fund to reimburse local communities – ideally, this one – for hosting the Academy of Country Music Awards and either, or both, political conventions by the major parties. Money can only be returned to the cities for documented public costs – such as law enforcement – and only if the event generates more sales tax revenue than those costs. In other words, there has to be a net gain to the state above the reimbursed costs, said Robert Wood, director of local government issues for the Texas Comptroller’s office.

Opposition has come chiefly from conservative activists who oppose the state spending money on these events, even though the money the state spends is not actually part of its budget and therefore doesn’t contribute to the shortfall.

The other significant event of the week was a small step forward in the impasse over using the state’s Economic Stabilization Fund, commonly known as the Rainy Day Fund, to help close the gap in the state budget that expires in August 2011. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Pitts won the PR battle with Governor Rick Perry, filing a bill to use the fund and then holding the committee at ease when Perry’s staff failed to show up to testify. Pitts even had the committee clerk leave the room and call the governor’s office, where apparently no one was able to answer the phone.

After another two days of backroom negotiations, Perry reversed his public opposition and issued a statement supporting use of $3.2 billion from the fund to solve this year’s budget shortfall. He remains steadfastly opposed to using the fund to fix the 2012-2013 shortfall. It does lead some to wonder what the Economic Stabilization Fund’s purpose is, if not to ease the current crisis.

House Appropriations unanimously approved the bill last Tuesday. It has not yet been placed on a calendar for hearing by the full House.

The Senate approved, by a 30-1 vote, SB 321, prohibiting employers from disciplining employees who are licensed to carry a concealed handgun from bringing guns – not weapons, just guns – to work. The prohibition extends only to guns left in vehicles in the parking lot; employers may still bar employees from bringing them into the workplace. Some workplaces, such as schools, are exempted. Many companies prohibit employees from having guns anywhere on their property, but if the gun stays in a vehicle there is little proactive enforcement, so many don’t see the bill as a significant step. It does raise a question about how a conservative legislature can so easily decide to intervene in the relationship between an employer and an employee, when in many other cases such intervention is decried as government activism and a slap at an employer’s privacy and property rights.

A bill allowing licensed handgun carriers to carry weapons on the property of the state’s public universities is moving through the state House.

And, in a session when the expectations of transportation activists have been severely curtailed, a few bills that attempt to move the needle on funding issues are up for hearings this week in the House Transportation Committee. The most significant, HJR 64, banning diversions of gas tax money from the state highway fund for use in other areas, is the one most advocates believe has to pass before a dialogue about increasing revenue through a gas-tax increase or some other means can even begin. Representative Joe Pickett of El Paso, the committee’s chairman last session, brought the diversions bill forward. It faces a rough road ahead, because if diversions were ended, the highway fund would be $500 million better off but the state’s general budget would lose the same amount of money. When you’re looking for $27 billion, it’s hard to imagine budget writers giving up that revenue, at least this time around. Plus, it requires a change in the state constitution, which means Pickett needs 100 votes in the House and 21 in the Senate.

Two other transportation bills of interest, HB 2255 by Transportation Committee Chairman Larry Phillips of Sherman and HB 2675 by Linda Harper-Brown of Irving, would, respectively, extend public-private partnerships for toll projects and study the possibility of skipping a gas-tax increase all together and consider a fee based on miles driven. The latter is considered the future of transportation funding, charging drivers for their actual use of the road, including when and how much they drive. Gas tax revenue per vehicle is steadily declining as more fuel-efficient cars enter the fleet, and alternative-fueled vehicles pay nothing at all.

Legislature Kicks Into Gear While Budget Solutions Are Scarce

As if someone threw a switch in Austin, the state legislators went from idle to at least third gear last week, with another acceleration coming this week. Committees geared up and extended the length of the legislative day, and a flurry is guaranteed this week with the deadline for filing most House bills set for Friday.

Despite the activity, most of the major, long-term issues affecting the state are far from settled. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden acknowledged his committee is nowhere close to getting a budget bill onto the Senate Calendar, while House Appropriations Committee chairman Jim Pitts was cautiously optimistic that something might get voted out and printed by the end of next week.

There were also some cracks in the budget-cuts-only approach favored by Republicans. Senator Bob Deuell called for a gasoline tax increase, Irving Representative Linda Harper-Brown filed a bill removing the constitutional dedication of 25 percent of the gasoline tax to public education and Pitts filed a bill to take $4.2 billion from the rainy day fund.

But, Deuell didn’t actually file a bill, Harper-Brown’s bill requires a two-thirds vote of both houses and Pitts’ bill, which needs a three-fifths vote, calls for using the rainy day fund to balance the current budget, not the one that threatens to lead to teacher layoffs across the state.

Despite the apparent uphill fight, the revenue shortfalls have led to gambling bills – both full-blown, casino gambling and slot-machines only at racetracks and on Indian reservations – being filed in both Houses. What was once considered a dramatic change for the state that had a real shot, the election of 24 new Republicans last year tilted the balance away from any gambling bill being passed. Republican conservatives oppose it on moral grounds and Democratic liberals oppose it because of its potential impact on the poor. In any case, gambling was never going to pull the state from its economic doldrums by itself, though slot machines could be up and running quickly and casino legislation could bring in significant licensing fees toward the end of the next two-year budget cycle.

With the budget and the changes necessary to implement it taking the time of most serious legislators, some items of importance to the business community are coming up in the next couple of weeks. The House Ways and Means Committee will review a laundry list of existing tax exemptions beginning next Monday, and on March 21 Chairman Harvey Hilderbran¬¬¬¬¬¬ has indicated the committee will take testimony on industry vs. industry tax issues: In other words, tax my competitors but leave me alone.

Also this week, Senate Education Committee Chair Florence Shapiro will introduce her shell bill to roll back state requirements of school districts that the state can’t pay for. This won’t help the state budget, but, depending on the changes, it might preserve some jobs at the school district level. Some of the biggest possibilities include allowing districts to reduce salaries or grant furloughs rather than laying teachers off, and changing the 22-1 per class student-teacher ratio to a slightly larger ratio, averaged over a campus or a grade level.

Despite Deuell and Harper-Brown’s efforts, this is not a session that will see much serious discussion of improvements in state transportation funding. House Transportation Committee Chairman Larry Phillips of Sherman will try to get several public-private partnerships revived after last session’s Texas Department of Transportation reauthorization failed and the Comprehensive Development Agreements that allow the private sector to participate in local toll roads went down in the sunset process. But even Phillips said his bill can’t be blanket reauthorization, but rather an omnibus bill that captures specific projects around the state. Suspicion and opposition to toll roads still surrounds most transportation discussions in Austin, as does, predictably, any rational measures to increase revenue. Texans love to drive, they prefer to drive on roads they don’t pay a toll for, but so far state leaders aren’t interested in providing alternatives. This scenario, by the way, is exactly replicated at the federal level, where the U.S. Highway Trust Fund is broke and, as in Texas, the gas tax is not providing enough money to build up the fund. And in Congress, as in Austin, the revenue discussion comes down to this: No.

At this point, that summarizes the discussion on revenue for the state generally, although behind the scenes a lot of Republicans in leadership positions are quietly seeking revenue they can plausibly increase without it being called a tax.

The other dance that has started in earnest is the chicken dance, where state leaders who have heard the business community’s complaints about budget cuts claim that leadership on new revenue solutions isn’t being generated by those businesses. “We really haven’t heard from the business community on this,” has become an oft-repeated phrase.

Except that they have heard, they just haven’t provided any feedback that would lead the business community to feel confident that a call for additional revenue – fees, or, even taxes – would receive any response except a Tea Party press release.

Most involved realized that the current projections are very bleak and that the potential impact is simply unacceptable to some communities. But no one wants to be out in front with a solution this time around.

UTA President, James Spaniolo: The Economic Impact of Texas Research Universities

The Dallas Morning News
Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Calling for investment in the future when Texas is facing a historically difficult budget may sound like a hard sell. But as lawmakers grapple with how to allocate the precious state revenue available, we must make the compelling case for investing today in Texas’ colleges and universities.

The cause is perfectly symbolized by the University of Texas at Arlington’s new Engineering Research Building, a landmark center to be dedicated this week that adds 234,000 square feet of state-of-the-art laboratory and classroom space to our campus. The building would not exist except for state lawmakers who had the foresight in 2006 to authorize tuition revenue bonds needed to help fund the project.

You can read the rest by clicking here.

Wider implications of school funding cuts

The depth and breadth of state budget cuts in public and higher education funding is sinking in locally. But in Austin, where many freshman state representatives who won elections running against Barack Obama are scrambling to understand the implications, there are no good answers and no real words of encouragement, at least not from anyone who can make something happen.

While education’s problems are only part of the state’s larger budget shortfall, education funding is such a big part of the budget that it really deserves a discussion focused only on education.. Also, it’s likely that even an economic recovery won’t solve the public education problem because that problem was created with the new, margins tax system implemented in 2006 and even in better economies, the margins tax has produced much less revenue for schools than was anticipated or needed.

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Speaker Straus Committee Appointments Shake Up the House

With a lot of pressure building to get legislation moving in the Texas House, Speaker Joe Straus on Wednesday released his list of the committee appointments for the 82nd Legislative Session. The release was later than most had hoped but earlier, by at least a day, than Straus had indicated last week.

Most significantly for the Arlington Chamber, Rep. Diane Patrick was placed by Straus on the House Appropriations Committee. The appointment gives the community a stronger voice in the critical budget decisions that are facing the legislature. Late on Friday, Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Piits named his subject-area subcommittees, and Patrick has been added to the subcommittee that will hear the education issues. That’s a perfectly logical choice; it means a lot more work for Patrick and her staff. The down side to the appointment is Patrick no longer serves on the Public Education Committee, though she remains on Higher Education. Given that the issues in education this session are more about spending than policy, this is probably not as big a blow as it would otherwise be.

Other interesting items to take away, at first glance, from the committee appointments, are the increased number of Republicans as committee chairs, reflecting their dominance in the House this session. And for those who attacked Straus for being a Republican in name only, his nomination of Rep. Larry Taylor to head the House Elections Committee seriously undermines those claims. Taylor isn’t just any Republican, he is officially the most partisan Republican in the House in his role as chairman of the House Republican Caucus.  Tarrant County is represented on Redistricting by two members, Republican Charlie Geren and Democrat Marc Veasey.

Most of the 15 reps who voted against Straus’ election as speaker were not given seats on powerful committees, or on committees of their choosing. Ken Paxton and Van Taylor, both of Plano, were relegated to the Urban Affairs committee, which has evolved into a place that mostly deals with police and fire union issues. Tan Parker of Denton County had been vice chairman of the House Economic Development Committee and was assumed to be in line to move up to chairman in place of Democrat Mark Strama. Parker is not on the committee at all. Straus allowed some appointments as “seniority” appointments, which gave members with tenure a preference, mostly over freshmen. Straus’ mark, and his attitude about those who did and didn’t support him, can be seen in the “speaker appointments” category. The remaining members of the core group that selected him to challenge Tom Craddick last session—a few have retired or lost their primaries—did quite well.

For a commentary from the Texas Weekly on committee assignments, click here.

For a complete list of the committee membership, the breakdown of committee chairs by party and an explanation of the seniority vs. speaker appointments, click here.

Lt. Governor Dewhurst & Speaker Joe Straus Announce Committee Assignments

Senate committees can be found here.

House committees can be found here.

Speaker’s race melodrama

After eight solid weeks of misinformation, threats, intimidation and who knows how much money, the forces aligned to derail the re-election of Texas House Speaker Joe Straus showed up with 15 red “no” votes on the tally board in the House when Straus’s name – and only Straus – was offered for Speaker.

The vote will be read by interested parties according to their perspectives, but the significant issue is that, historically, those who don’t support the speaker end up marginalized for the rest of the session. They don’t get committee assignments in their areas of interest or ones that will aid their communities. They don’t pass many bills. This year they stand a chance of being at the bottom of the pecking order when Republicans sort out which House members get preferential treatment in the redistricting process.

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The Costs of Doing Nothing

With Congress back in session last week and the Texas Legislature scheduled to begin Tuesday, it’s time to see the big fiscal changes promised with the sweeping new majorities in Congress and in the Legislature. Right?

Maybe.

More than 1,000 people who attended the Texas Department of Transportation’s annual conference in Austin last week heard legislators, congressional staffers and well-placed observers promise that, well, a lot of promises may not be kept.

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Difficult Financial Decisions Face Lawmakers in 2011

Call it a train wreck, a perfect storm…all are overused phrases but they do, in part, create at least a tone for what the Texas Legislature will be like when the new session begins January 11th next year. This was true even before an anti-Washington tidal wave deposited a lot of new, inexperienced legislators in the House chamber, politicians who have vowed to cut big government. Sadly, for them, they were elected in Texas, where big government has never really existed. 

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Gambling gaining momentum, transportation goes into a ditch

As the heat of the summer settled over Austin in the last three weeks, state leaders have given a few not-so-subtle signals about where they are regarding the state’s chronic underinvestment in transportation infrastructure and the measures they’re willing to consider to address the projected $18 billion budget shortfall that will face the Legislature next January.

If the number of legislators who show up means anything, then the early July hearing by the ho-hum sounding Licensing and Administrative Procedures Committee demonstrated that there is a lot of interest in licensing, particularly licensing some form of gambling in Texas beyond pari-mutuel wagering and the Texas Lottery.

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Tax on businesses for unemployment comes under fire at Senate Committee

Most business owners already know that the tax they pay into the Texas unemployment system has almost doubled from last year. Last week, at what on paper appeared to be a pretty routine meeting of the Texas Senate Economic Development Committee, that increase provided for some lively commentary as senators rehashed the state’s decision during the previous legislative session not to accept federal stimulus funds for unemployment insurance.
Texas Workforce Commission Executive Director Larry Temple noted that the state’s unemployment fund, projected during the session to last through October of 2009, was actually chewed up by the end of last August. The recession hit Texas late, but hit it hard when it finally showed up.

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House Transportation Committee keeps up pressure on TxDOT; Speaker releases interim charges

The House Transportation Committee met last week in a meeting that may, unfortunately, be a sign of things to come, at least as far as relations between lawmakers and the Texas Department of Transportation go.

The hearing, in Austin November 16, addressed largely inside issues, a continuation of dialogue, arguments and posturing about how TxDOT operates and the very negative attitude committee members have about those operations.

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