For 2306, and our look at the recently completed legislative session.
- Click here for the article.
2019 may have been the perfect year for lawmakers to pass an ambitious and expensive school finance reform and property tax reduction plan. Now Texas politicians face questions about whether doing so — without raising taxes elsewhere — will be sustainable in less auspicious times.
A confluence of fiscal coincidences made 2019 a cheerful year for budget writers:
- A mostly sunny economic forecast led lawmakers to believe they’d have $10 billion or so more in state funds to spend in this two-year budget compared with the one they passed in 2017.
- A one-year bump in federal reimbursements for the state’s health care costs allowed lawmakers to free up billions of dollars for other programs.
- A U.S. Supreme Court ruling poured another $550 million or so into state coffers by allowing the state to collect additional sales tax revenue from online sales.
- And a historically full state savings account helped pay off pressing infrastructure needs, alleviating pressure on other programs competing for funding in the two-year spending plan.
Lawmakers decided to pump almost all of the new revenue at their disposal into the education portion of the state budget.
The result was a new school finance bill — still awaiting Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature — that will cost more than $11.5 billion in 2020 and 2021. Of those funds, about $5 billion go toward cutting property taxes on homes and businesses and $6.5 billion pay for educational reforms, including a 20% hike in schools’ baseline per-student funding.
