84th Texas legislature

L

Larry T. Spider

1,000+ Posts
Next week, the leg is set to meet for 140 days plus a possible special session. The big issues look to be funding roads, water projects, education, and health care. Decreasing revenues from oil could play a role in what gets done. Abbott has talked about wanting to fund a lot of projects in those areas but has also talked about reducing the tax burden on business owners and property owners. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

I'm not the WM police, but I would prefer for this to be a thread about what is going on and people's opinions on that rather than a laundry list of things that we would like them do to (that will never happen).
 
One thing that I suspect will be a large issue will be expanding the number of charter schools. This is one of Dan Patrick's main issues. I am mixed on the issue because I support parents being able to make a choice of their child. However, I am not for sending tax payer money down a rat hole that is less successful than public schools. The Dallas area has had some real problems charter schools having cherry picked students (not in all cases), and parents involved at least enough to move their kid doing worse than public schools.

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link

Here is a link to one water project that will eventually impact the Austin area. I keep hearing that water will be on the agenda but I have not heard specific proposals. Anybody heard anything? If we are going to keep trying to get people to move here, having water might be a good idea.
 
At this point I have nothing to add other than I am interested in this topic generally and would like to read the opinions of those here on the various topics going forward.
 
Surprised to hear that about the Charter schools. First let me admit I do not pay much attention to school issues since my kids are all out - make that I only pay attention to the taxes which piss me off, but I pay.
I am surprised though about the Charter comment because my daughter teaches in a Charter in Tenn and my granddaughter graduated from the Charter HS in Nashville. On both cases we are highly positive. On the teacher, she taught public school there and would probably have quit teaching by now had she not gotten into the Charter school. According to her everything about it is top notch - especially the support she gets from administration AND the parents.
The granddaughter is the one I brought up on board a year back when she did not get accepted into UT but then got accepted into the Engineering program at Johns Hopkins. So we feel her High School did a good job.
Water is something that we must address, and hopefully sooner than later. Been to Medina Lake lately? It is a very very sad sight.
 
The charter schools in texas tend to be at the top or the bottom of the spectrum. If it is like that in tenn, it could be that she found one at the top end.

Lake medina doesn't really exist at the moment. Last time I checked it was like 3% full. At a certain point of excess, funds that would be intended for the rainy day fund can be diverted to water projects. Hopefully that will help over the next decade.
 
True that, true that........touche!!!!!

My point being because we have a new or well we have a credit card with a large credit line is we don't need to go max it out every freaking month.

Everytime I turn around, Democrats are we need to spend it for education, or for infrastrucutre or now I am hearing water plans.....

We can hold off on spending that money and find other means of funding everybodies wish list or not.......show some damn restraint in spending this is not California, you are welcome to get the **** out of Texas if you want to spend all this money that nobody has in their wallet.
 
And I also believe that 90% of all politicians are crooks and need to be thrown out never to return every two years!!!!!!!

Using the Rainy day fund should be as a last resort not the first thing mentioned out of the gate......by any political party or political leanings......
 
Larry,

I have to at least in part come down on Major's side on this. The Texas GOP has just as much appetite to spend money as the Democrats did, perhaps even more. Accordingly, the endorsement of Republican lawmakers (especially guys like Ritter and Pitts, who are not fiscal conservatives) doesn't add any credibility to the water projects. And of course, the endorsement of a bunch of business groups sure as hell doesn't. They just stand to make money on the $2 billion that the state is going to spend.

Since Texas Republicans like throwing money around like Democrats, they need to come up with ways to find money without raising "taxes," lest they piss off the Grover Norquist types in Texas. They use three tactics. First, they will dramatically raise anything that's not called a "tax" and that isn't paid primarily by rich guys, such as administrative fees, fines, tolls on public highways, college tuition, etc. Second, they engage in accounting gimmickry with the numbers. Finally, they raid dedicated funds to finance projects the funds weren't intended to finance.

The Rainy Day Fund was intended to close budget deficits when the economy (and therefore the state's revenue projections) is weak. It wasn't designed to pay for water projects, and it shouldn't be used for that purpose.

If these projects are worthwhile and if there's not enough areas of the budget to cut, then the Legislature needs to make the case to the public that a tax increase is in order. Another option, capital projects like investment in water resources are the kinds of things for which it makes sense to issue bonds (i.e. deficit spend). Why not do that?

One other thing, with the price of oil in free fall, the state is going to face revenue shortfalls. It may not happen in this biennium, but it's very likely to happen in the next one. We may need that Rainy Day Fund to avoid having to make very large budget cuts.
 
More conservatives fighting for local control.....unless they don't like what the locals decided. From the AAS:

Declaring that freedom and private property rights should not be bound by city lines, Gov.-elect Greg Abbott on Thursday called for doing away with a “patchwork quilt” of local bans on everything from paper and plastic bags to fracking that he said threatens to turn Texas into California.
“Texas is being Californianized and you may not even be noticing it,” Abbott said, addressing a downtown Austin conference hosted by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential think tank. “It’s being done at the city level with bag bans, fracking bans, tree-cutting bans. We’re forming a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.”

“Texas is being Californianized and you may not even be noticing it,” Abbott said, addressing a downtown Austin conference hosted by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential think tank. “It’s being done at the city level with bag bans, fracking bans, tree-cutting bans. We’re forming a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.”

Part of this is local control vs private property rights which are both typical conservative values. Will be interesting to see what happens.
 
I hope Abbott is talking to the extreme because imho it is not any business of the State what a community wants to do - provided of course it is not contrary to current law. If they want to ban plastic bags why in the heck is that a matter for the State to worry over? Old fashion or just stupid I don't get it.
It's just that I always thought the further down the chain you can push responsibility the better.
 
It was estimated that we will need 101 billion in order to hold our current level of spending, adjusted for inflation. Looks like we have 113 billion to work with, which is a good thing with the caveat of low oil prices potentially hurting the bottom line. It will be interesting to see how they handle the unexpected.
 
Other issues that could come up that we haven't talked about are:
-Continuing/increasing the border surge
-repealing in-state tuition for illegal immigrant children
-open carry for handguns
- school choice

Senate bill 276 is the one to watch for school choice, which I favor if done correctly. I personally think this bill is trash and will cause a disaster for public and private schools in its current form.

First, it will be passed off as something to help poor kids - its not. The voucher is for 5,300 and the family has to cover the rest of the private school tuition. Poor people have no way of making up the amount of money and aren't afforded any choice. The closest private school to my elementary is 10k for elementary and 15k for high school. Good luck poors This is republicans throwing their upper middle class base a bone and keeping the poors out of their private school AND being able to act like they care about the poor kids. Triple win!

Currently private and charter schools that take state money have to have students take state accountability tests. This bill would give the schools the money but exempt them from the tests.

It is only for students currently in public schools or entering first or kinder. So what am I going to do if I have 3 kids in private school? Go start them in public school for a while then transfer them to private school and collect my 16k per year.
 
I read SB 276. It's a sloppy bill. The voucher bill I support is the one that former Rep. Grusendorf used to file. It was means tested, only applied to kids in low performing schools, and required the private school to accept the voucher as full and final payment. The teacher groups still considered it Armageddon and blasted it as a crazy idea, but it was very reasonable and modest.
 
The bill you describe is almost exactly what I support. The only thing that I would add is that if you take state money you take state tests. If they are necessary for public school accountability, I see no difference for private schools.

The teacher groups will always scream about anything because they understand incrementalism and are more scared of the slippery slope than anything in the actual bill. They lose credibility as the boy that cried wolf in many instances. But, teacher groups don't really represent teachers level of liberalness. Many teachers are religious and vote republican as a result. Many sadly just do what their husbands tell them which is usually conservative in college educated texas homes. My hallway at a poor/minority school has 1 liberal, 4 conservatives, one that doesn't care about politics, and 1 I don't know that well, and 0 that know anything about what's going on at the legislature. I would love to see an independent poll of texas teachers because I think people would be surprised at the results. I don't know of one that exists other than on specific educational issues.
 
I don't disagree with anything you said. I would love to see some polling of texas teachers so that republicans can see that when they crap on teachers, they are crapping on a lot of their voters. Also for the teacher groups to see that a lot of their members or potential members are not far left. The main problem with the texas teacher groups is that they are national and have to toe the party line even though the average texas teacher is much more conservative than their overall membership.

Completely unrelated but an interesting link about the makeup of the legislature. No real surprises but I thought the differences between reps and dems in the race and religion categories were interesting.

link
 
I have been waiting to see if more was going to come of this before posting, but it looks like it has run its course. Some open carry nuts wen and visited legislators a few days ago and became pretty hostile and refused to leave in a few situations. This was kind of an open house type of day, so it wasn't really inappropriate for them to be there, but getting hostile and yelling at legislators only hurts their position. There is a video in the link. As a result, legislators are getting panic buttons installed.


I know that CHL holders may carry in the capitol and have a special security line. I have heard that people that work there will get a license even though they don't carry just to avoid the longer security lines. link
 
The Senate changed their rules to only need 19 senators to bring a bill up for consideration. They had previously needed 21. The republicans hold 20 seats in the Senate so this isn't a coincidence.
 
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