Rep. Jonathan Stickland is watching the calendar. The 84th legislative session is half over, and just 10 weeks remain to consider more than 8,000 bills addressing issues ranging from gun rights to the state budget.
It’s a time when some lawmakers preach the need to work together. But now, Stickland said, is the time for the gloves to come off and for lawmakers to get down to business.
“The Kumbaya is over,” said Stickland, R-Bedford, who recently made headlines over a fight with House leadership over posting a sign on his Capitol office door. “We’ve been down here passing resolutions and telling each other how great we are and how great everyone else is. Now we have to start dealing with legislation.
“We are about to disagree a lot and fight it out publicly,” he said. “Things are getting testy, and they are going to get testier.” Lawmakers have 140 days in the regular session to complete the state’s business. The only bill that must be passed before June 1 is the state’s two-year budget.
From the San Antonio Express-News: Energy slump strikes Texas Capitol - Truce arising as oil price falls.
Under the dome of the Texas Capitol, the stage was set for a confrontation.
To one side would stand captains of the state’s most powerful industry, who at the height of a five-year oil and gas boom employed more than 400,000 workers and contributed $15.6 billion last year to the tax base. To the other would stand opponents of expansive drilling, which has wrecked roads, fouled the air, intruded on urban neighborhoods and riddled the land with waste water wells of a type linked to earthquakes.
But at the last minute, an uneasy truce descended. Just as lawmakers were preparing for their biennial legislative session, charged with addressing a range of problems related to drilling practices, oil prices fell from $100 a barrel to the $50 range.
Industry activity, to put it mildly, slowed. So did much legislative momentum to address the consequences of the great oil rush.
Halfway through the session, the House Energy Resources Committee is getting to work. Of the 18 bills it has been assigned, three concern the relatively cosmetic issue of a name change for the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the petroleum industry.
Most of the other proposals are fairly modest and arcane, with the exception of a potentially momentous measure to ban municipal regulation of drilling.
“It looks to me like the Legislature’s pretty confused; they don’t know what to do with themselves,” said Michael Webber, deputy director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. “There’s a little bit of deer-in-the-headlights going on now, because the rhetoric on the campaign trail was so thick about how we’re going to be rich forever.”
From the Austin American-Statesman: Big business lobby groups to Texas Senate: We don’t like your tax cuts.
Big business lobby groups sent a letter Friday to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and the Texas Senate Friday criticizing the more than $4.6 billion tax cut package the upper chamber could vote on as early as next week.
Those groups, including the Texas Association of Business and the Texas Oil and Gas Association, have complained that the proposal favors smaller businesses and does not include reductions to business property taxes, which they contend is more burdensome than the state’s business franchise tax.
In the letter, seven of those groups also told senators they should consider tax cuts only after spending enough money on “congested roads, educational challenges, obsolete infrastructure, high debt and underfunded pensions.”
“If, after paying our state bills, there is money left over for tax relief, that relief should be fair to those who pay the most taxes in the first place—both individuals and businesses,” the letter says. “That portion of tax relief to business should encourage growth and investment, enhancing our ability to expand our production and payrolls.”
The proposal on the table does not do that, according to the letter, which says the “package of tax bills up for consideration in the Texas Senate falls short of these principles and creates new inequities in our tax system.”
From the Texas Tribune: Sid Miller Clashes With Legislature Over Budget.
Newly minted Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller has been generating more than newspaper headlines since he began calling on the Texas Legislature to dramatically boost his agency’s budget.
He’s also getting blowback at the Capitol.
He was asked to move his car off of Capitol grounds after parking where he wasn't supposed to — and now officials say he's even been denied access to the secured driveway circling the building. And a couple of weeks ago, while pressing his former colleagues to support his request for a bigger agency budget, Miller was asked to leave the center floor of the House chamber — the area inside the brass rails that is generally reserved for current members.
State Rep. Charlie Geren, chairman of the House Administration Committee, which handles the chamber’s internal affairs, said it's nothing personal. Miller "wasn't kicked out of anywhere"; he was simply told to follow the House rules. But the episodes highlight a rapidly deteriorating relationship between the cowboy hat-wearing commissioner and the Legislature that once counted Miller as one of its own. Miller has been loudly complaining about the impact deep 2011 budget cuts had on the Agriculture Department and its ability to protect consumers.
From the Houston Chronicle: Lawmakers may partly close tax loophole draining local government coffers.
State lawmakers are looking to partly close a tax loophole that has allowed big companies to drain tens of millions of dollars from local government coffers in recent years, but any reforms that pass may still not end the legal battles that have been driving down appraisals on industrial and commercial properties.
Several reform bills were filed this year as counties began putting pressure on legislators to do something about an increasing number of lawsuits by major companies trying to take advantage of the loophole, which allows property owners to avoid the traditional fair-market system of appraisals.
School districts have been among those hardest hit. Valero Energy Corp. used the loophole to force the Texas City school district to refund about $5 million, while two other lawsuits by the company compelled the Port Arthur school district to pay $32 million in refunds and other charges. The company has new lawsuits pending that could mean even more tax refunds from the two school districts.
The loophole is also costing the state an estimated $70 million to $80 million a year in six counties, according to a January report by the nonpartisan Legislative Budget Board that called for sweeping reforms. The state must pay its share of tax revenue lost by school districts.
From the Texas Tribune: In Legislature, Toll Roads Facing Strong Opposition.
While Texas lawmakers appear intent this year on pumping billions of extra dollars into building and maintaining highways, another shift in the state’s approach to transportation is gaining traction. Anti-toll sentiment at the Capitol is at its highest level in at least a decade.
Lawmakers have filed more than a dozen bills this session aimed at either tapping the brakes on new toll road projects or undoing the state’s current tolling system entirely.
"In light of the Legislature's commitment to fully fund transportation, it is a breach of trust with taxpayers to demand that they pay the double tax of tolls and transportation taxes,” said state Rep. Matt Shaheen, R-Plano.
This week will draw a bright spotlight to the issue. On Monday, Shaheen and several other Republican lawmakers plan to attend a rally in honor of “Toll Free Texas Day” organized by the anti-toll groups Texans for Toll-free Highways and Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick also hopes to attend the rally, schedule permitting, according to a spokesman. The event will be followed by separate House committee hearings on Tuesday and Thursday in which anti-toll bills will be heard.
The pushback against toll roads and toll lanes has been simmering for years, and can largely be traced back to former Gov. Rick Perry’s 2002 proposal of the Trans-Texas Corridor, a massive 4,000-mile network of privately operated toll roads, railroad tracks and utility lines. Public opposition to the plan eventually prompted the Legislature to declare it dead after first approving it. Yet toll projects continued to flourish around the state. Texas now has more than 500 miles of tolled highways, most of it developed over the last decade.
Over the summer, the Texas Republican Party removed a provision from its platform backing “the legitimate construction of toll roads in Texas” and replaced it with language opposing some aspects of toll projects in Texas, particularly the use of public money to subsidize private entities.
