Post by Moses on May 31, 2005 21:09:13 GMT -5
Tue, May. 31, 2005
Session ends without school plan
By Jay Root
Star-Telegram Austin Bureau
AUSTIN - One hundred and forty days of raucous politics came to an end Monday, the last day of a Texas legislative session that will probably be remembered as much for what failed as what passed.
Lying in the recycle bin were thousands of pages of what might have been: a new school finance system, a property tax cut, legalized slot machines, an overhaul of ethics laws, private school vouchers and the Willie Nelson Highway.
What Texans got was a $139 billion budget, stricter abortion laws, a chance to toughen an existing ban on gay marriage, an overhaul of the workers compensation insurance system and a prohibition on lawsuits against restaurants for obesity-related health problems, otherwise known as "the cheeseburger bill."
"It's all over but the explaining," said Ross Ramsey, editor of the political newsletter Texas Weekly. "On the biggest issue of the session, they're going home empty-handed."
Lawmakers have been working to hammer out a fix for the state's ailing, $30 billion-a-year school finance system for more than two years. A court decided late last year that the way Texas finances public education is unconstitutional and ordered that schools be shut down unless lawmakers find an acceptable system by October.
The Texas Supreme Court will hear an appeal of the case in July, and Gov. Rick Perry says he might call a 30-day special session if there's any indication that lawmakers can find the kind of common ground that has eluded them since January.
"If they're real close, if they reach an agreement, he'll call them back," Perry spokesman Robert Black said. "He is working toward that end. That's what he would certainly like to see happen."
Legislative ash heap
By constitutional decree, the Texas Legislature must meet in odd-numbered years for 140 days. At any other time, they can only meet when the governor calls them together -- for up to 30 days at a time.
Perry and other leaders began the 79th session with high hopes that the Legislature could reduce the state's reliance on property taxes, get Texas out of legal trouble and provide more funding for public education.
The governor said in January that the session might go down as "the most historic in modern times." Likewise, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the Republican Senate leader, laid out plans for "a larger teacher pay raise than we've seen -- ever."
But after House and Senate leaders deadlocked in the final days of the session, the complicated tax swap, the teacher salary increase and the stronger educator accountability measures all wound up on the ash heap of legislative history.
It was not what Perry needed. At least two Republicans, U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, are considering a run against him in next year's GOP primary. If they do and school finance still isn't fixed, that failure will likely be Exhibit A in their campaign literature.
Amid all the finger-pointing last week between House and Senate leaders, Perry said the Republican leaders were "all in this together."
But Perry is wasting no time getting the message to conservative Republican voters that he has delivered. The governor has scheduled an event next weekend at Calvary Cathedral in Fort Worth, where he plans to sign legislation requiring minor girls to have written parental consent before they can get an abortion. He'll also sign a constitutional amendment -- it's just a formality, because only the voters can make it law -- designed to place an existing ban on gay marriage in the state constitution.
Voters will decide on the prohibition in November.
According to a letter sent by Perry's campaign, and forwarded by e-mail to supporters, Perry officials "want to completely fill this location with pro-family Christian friends who can celebrate with us" and might film the event for TV advertising later.
Pat Carlson, chairwoman of the Tarrant County Republican Party, said that if Hutchison runs against Perry, "it's very possible" that footage from the event would be used.
Carlson called the recently concluded meeting "not the best session, but not a bad session" and said that conservatives cared more about the abortion issue than changing the state's school finance system.
"School finance wasn't necessarily a priority of the conservative movement," Carlson said.
'I felt the love'
School finance wasn't the only initiative to fail. A move to expand gambling in Texas, an issue that brought casino riches to some of the best lobbyists in Austin, also was defeated. Conservative group kept the pressure up.
"The gambling lobby seemed to be everywhere -- looking to attach a variety of gaming proposals to anything that moved," said Suzii Paynter, public policy director for the Christian Life Commission, part of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. "We are extremely grateful that the Texas Legislature just said no."
Besides the policy failures, the session was marked by bitter confrontations between the House and Senate. Senators accused House Speaker Tom Craddick, R-Midland, of issuing "take it or leave it" proposals and "ultimatums."
Craddick denied that his offers were ultimatums but said he sent the Senate the most ambitious proposals the House was willing to pass.
On the last day, Craddick was at peace. Unlike Perry and Dewhurst, who were optimistic at the beginning of the session, he had said pretty much the same thing all along: Overhauling school finance is hard to do. He noted that Texans went to war with Mexico in part because the country reneged on its public education commitments.
"School finance has been there since the Alamo problem. It is a hard situation to solve. We had a hard time. The Senate had a hard time. We just couldn't get it accomplished."
At the beginning of the session, members wore stickers saying "140 days of love." By Monday, as members were trickling out, babies were being kissed and pictures were being taken, members had printed up new stickers.
"I felt the love," they said.
SESSION SCORECARD -- WHAT MADE IT, WHAT DID NOT
Most of these measures await Gov. Rick Perry's signature:
STATE BUDGET
• Appropriates $139 billion in state and federal spending for Texas over two years, representing a 19 percent increase from the previous state budget.
EDUCATION
• The Texas education commissioner will be required to reduce the number of written reports and amount of paperwork required of school districts, principals and teachers.
• The governor may appoint a nonvoting student regent to the governing board of each public university.
• The University Interscholastic League must study steroid use among Texas high school athletes and develop an education program about the dangers of using performance-enhancing drugs.
LEGAL AFFAIRS
• Sweeping changes to the workers compensation system won approval. The state will create managed-care-style physician networks and provide injured workers with a small boost in benefits.
• Lawmakers adopted new legislation related to asbestos-related lawsuits. The Houston Republican who sponsored the bill said its consequences could be as far-reaching as those of legal reforms adopted by the Legislature in 2003.
• The so-called "cheeseburger bill" bans Texans from suing restaurants or food manufacturers for obesity-related health problems.
• The state will provide for counties to pay jurors $40 a day, up from $6 a day.
HEALTH ISSUES
• Texas prison inmates must be tested for the AIDS virus before they are released.
• The state will set up a Web site to help Texans obtain less expensive prescription drugs from Canada. The legislation won final approval Sunday.
• Unmarried girls younger than 18 must have a parent's written consent to have an abortion. The same bill restricts doctors from performing abortions on women who are more than 26 weeks pregnant unless giving birth would jeopardize the woman's life or the baby has serious brain damage.
OTHER ISSUES
• An overhaul of the state's embattled Child Protective Services agency got the final green light Sunday from both the House and Senate. It provides for the addition of 2,500 CPS workers, cutting caseloads and moving some of the agency's tasks to the private sector.
• Lawmakers decided to place a proposed constitutional amendment before voters that would ban same-sex marriages.
EDUCATION
• New health, foreign language and fine arts textbooks probably won't make it into Texas classrooms for the upcoming school year because the Legislature failed to fund them. Publishers say that they had an agreement with the State Board of Education to publish the books, and that the books have been printed. All told, it amounts to about $378 million in textbooks not funded.
• Texas schools won't have a uniform start date on the day after Labor Day. House Bill 2, which would have required that, failed Saturday.
• The demise of House Bill 2 also doomed across-the-board pay raises for teachers.
• The Legislature was poised this year to restore a $1,000 stipend to pay for teacher health-care costs. Teachers received that amount before 2003, but lawmakers reduced it to $500 to raise extra money to balance the budget. With the failure of school overhaul efforts, they'll still get $500.
• Legislation to revamp the Texas Education Agency failed on a technical objection over a provision that would have created a system allowing parents to obtain taxpayer-supported vouchers to send their children to private schools.
TAXES
• Proposals to reduce local property taxes by one-third failed with the collapse of separate revenue bills. House and Senate lawmakers could not agree on offsetting taxes to pay for the tax relief.
• Lawmakers failed to close loopholes in the franchise tax.
UTILITIES
• A House lawmaker failed in his efforts to restore a special fund that provides utility discounts for low-income electric users. Instead, budget writers swept money from the fund to help balance the budget. As a result, nearly 400,000 poor Texans will pay 10 percent more for electricity, beginning in September.
• SBC, Verizon and other phone companies won't get the easy access to the cable TV market that they had sought under legislation promoted by state Rep. Phil King, R-Weatherford. It was a rare defeat for San Antonio-based SBC, which spent more than $3 million for more than 100 lobbyists.
• Phone companies won't get new freedoms to set their own rates after the failure Saturday of House Bill 789.
-- R.A. Dyer
BILLS AND FAILURES
• The breakdown of attempts to overhaul school finance could give Gov. Perry's challengers fresh ammunition. 11A
• Last-ditch effort to raise salaries of judges fails. 11A
• It was a do-nothing legislative session. BUD KENNEDY | 1B
• Casting blame won't change the reality of a failed school finance overhaul. EDITORIAL | 10B
Jay Root, (512) 476-4294 jroot@star-telegram.com
© 2005 Star-Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
www.dfw.com
Session ends without school plan
By Jay Root
Star-Telegram Austin Bureau
AUSTIN - One hundred and forty days of raucous politics came to an end Monday, the last day of a Texas legislative session that will probably be remembered as much for what failed as what passed.
Lying in the recycle bin were thousands of pages of what might have been: a new school finance system, a property tax cut, legalized slot machines, an overhaul of ethics laws, private school vouchers and the Willie Nelson Highway.
What Texans got was a $139 billion budget, stricter abortion laws, a chance to toughen an existing ban on gay marriage, an overhaul of the workers compensation insurance system and a prohibition on lawsuits against restaurants for obesity-related health problems, otherwise known as "the cheeseburger bill."
"It's all over but the explaining," said Ross Ramsey, editor of the political newsletter Texas Weekly. "On the biggest issue of the session, they're going home empty-handed."
Lawmakers have been working to hammer out a fix for the state's ailing, $30 billion-a-year school finance system for more than two years. A court decided late last year that the way Texas finances public education is unconstitutional and ordered that schools be shut down unless lawmakers find an acceptable system by October.
The Texas Supreme Court will hear an appeal of the case in July, and Gov. Rick Perry says he might call a 30-day special session if there's any indication that lawmakers can find the kind of common ground that has eluded them since January.
"If they're real close, if they reach an agreement, he'll call them back," Perry spokesman Robert Black said. "He is working toward that end. That's what he would certainly like to see happen."
Legislative ash heap
By constitutional decree, the Texas Legislature must meet in odd-numbered years for 140 days. At any other time, they can only meet when the governor calls them together -- for up to 30 days at a time.
Perry and other leaders began the 79th session with high hopes that the Legislature could reduce the state's reliance on property taxes, get Texas out of legal trouble and provide more funding for public education.
The governor said in January that the session might go down as "the most historic in modern times." Likewise, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the Republican Senate leader, laid out plans for "a larger teacher pay raise than we've seen -- ever."
But after House and Senate leaders deadlocked in the final days of the session, the complicated tax swap, the teacher salary increase and the stronger educator accountability measures all wound up on the ash heap of legislative history.
It was not what Perry needed. At least two Republicans, U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, are considering a run against him in next year's GOP primary. If they do and school finance still isn't fixed, that failure will likely be Exhibit A in their campaign literature.
Amid all the finger-pointing last week between House and Senate leaders, Perry said the Republican leaders were "all in this together."
But Perry is wasting no time getting the message to conservative Republican voters that he has delivered. The governor has scheduled an event next weekend at Calvary Cathedral in Fort Worth, where he plans to sign legislation requiring minor girls to have written parental consent before they can get an abortion. He'll also sign a constitutional amendment -- it's just a formality, because only the voters can make it law -- designed to place an existing ban on gay marriage in the state constitution.
Voters will decide on the prohibition in November.
According to a letter sent by Perry's campaign, and forwarded by e-mail to supporters, Perry officials "want to completely fill this location with pro-family Christian friends who can celebrate with us" and might film the event for TV advertising later.
Pat Carlson, chairwoman of the Tarrant County Republican Party, said that if Hutchison runs against Perry, "it's very possible" that footage from the event would be used.
Carlson called the recently concluded meeting "not the best session, but not a bad session" and said that conservatives cared more about the abortion issue than changing the state's school finance system.
"School finance wasn't necessarily a priority of the conservative movement," Carlson said.
'I felt the love'
School finance wasn't the only initiative to fail. A move to expand gambling in Texas, an issue that brought casino riches to some of the best lobbyists in Austin, also was defeated. Conservative group kept the pressure up.
"The gambling lobby seemed to be everywhere -- looking to attach a variety of gaming proposals to anything that moved," said Suzii Paynter, public policy director for the Christian Life Commission, part of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. "We are extremely grateful that the Texas Legislature just said no."
Besides the policy failures, the session was marked by bitter confrontations between the House and Senate. Senators accused House Speaker Tom Craddick, R-Midland, of issuing "take it or leave it" proposals and "ultimatums."
Craddick denied that his offers were ultimatums but said he sent the Senate the most ambitious proposals the House was willing to pass.
On the last day, Craddick was at peace. Unlike Perry and Dewhurst, who were optimistic at the beginning of the session, he had said pretty much the same thing all along: Overhauling school finance is hard to do. He noted that Texans went to war with Mexico in part because the country reneged on its public education commitments.
"School finance has been there since the Alamo problem. It is a hard situation to solve. We had a hard time. The Senate had a hard time. We just couldn't get it accomplished."
At the beginning of the session, members wore stickers saying "140 days of love." By Monday, as members were trickling out, babies were being kissed and pictures were being taken, members had printed up new stickers.
"I felt the love," they said.
SESSION SCORECARD -- WHAT MADE IT, WHAT DID NOT
Most of these measures await Gov. Rick Perry's signature:
STATE BUDGET
• Appropriates $139 billion in state and federal spending for Texas over two years, representing a 19 percent increase from the previous state budget.
EDUCATION
• The Texas education commissioner will be required to reduce the number of written reports and amount of paperwork required of school districts, principals and teachers.
• The governor may appoint a nonvoting student regent to the governing board of each public university.
• The University Interscholastic League must study steroid use among Texas high school athletes and develop an education program about the dangers of using performance-enhancing drugs.
LEGAL AFFAIRS
• Sweeping changes to the workers compensation system won approval. The state will create managed-care-style physician networks and provide injured workers with a small boost in benefits.
• Lawmakers adopted new legislation related to asbestos-related lawsuits. The Houston Republican who sponsored the bill said its consequences could be as far-reaching as those of legal reforms adopted by the Legislature in 2003.
• The so-called "cheeseburger bill" bans Texans from suing restaurants or food manufacturers for obesity-related health problems.
• The state will provide for counties to pay jurors $40 a day, up from $6 a day.
HEALTH ISSUES
• Texas prison inmates must be tested for the AIDS virus before they are released.
• The state will set up a Web site to help Texans obtain less expensive prescription drugs from Canada. The legislation won final approval Sunday.
• Unmarried girls younger than 18 must have a parent's written consent to have an abortion. The same bill restricts doctors from performing abortions on women who are more than 26 weeks pregnant unless giving birth would jeopardize the woman's life or the baby has serious brain damage.
OTHER ISSUES
• An overhaul of the state's embattled Child Protective Services agency got the final green light Sunday from both the House and Senate. It provides for the addition of 2,500 CPS workers, cutting caseloads and moving some of the agency's tasks to the private sector.
• Lawmakers decided to place a proposed constitutional amendment before voters that would ban same-sex marriages.
EDUCATION
• New health, foreign language and fine arts textbooks probably won't make it into Texas classrooms for the upcoming school year because the Legislature failed to fund them. Publishers say that they had an agreement with the State Board of Education to publish the books, and that the books have been printed. All told, it amounts to about $378 million in textbooks not funded.
• Texas schools won't have a uniform start date on the day after Labor Day. House Bill 2, which would have required that, failed Saturday.
• The demise of House Bill 2 also doomed across-the-board pay raises for teachers.
• The Legislature was poised this year to restore a $1,000 stipend to pay for teacher health-care costs. Teachers received that amount before 2003, but lawmakers reduced it to $500 to raise extra money to balance the budget. With the failure of school overhaul efforts, they'll still get $500.
• Legislation to revamp the Texas Education Agency failed on a technical objection over a provision that would have created a system allowing parents to obtain taxpayer-supported vouchers to send their children to private schools.
TAXES
• Proposals to reduce local property taxes by one-third failed with the collapse of separate revenue bills. House and Senate lawmakers could not agree on offsetting taxes to pay for the tax relief.
• Lawmakers failed to close loopholes in the franchise tax.
UTILITIES
• A House lawmaker failed in his efforts to restore a special fund that provides utility discounts for low-income electric users. Instead, budget writers swept money from the fund to help balance the budget. As a result, nearly 400,000 poor Texans will pay 10 percent more for electricity, beginning in September.
• SBC, Verizon and other phone companies won't get the easy access to the cable TV market that they had sought under legislation promoted by state Rep. Phil King, R-Weatherford. It was a rare defeat for San Antonio-based SBC, which spent more than $3 million for more than 100 lobbyists.
• Phone companies won't get new freedoms to set their own rates after the failure Saturday of House Bill 789.
-- R.A. Dyer
BILLS AND FAILURES
• The breakdown of attempts to overhaul school finance could give Gov. Perry's challengers fresh ammunition. 11A
• Last-ditch effort to raise salaries of judges fails. 11A
• It was a do-nothing legislative session. BUD KENNEDY | 1B
• Casting blame won't change the reality of a failed school finance overhaul. EDITORIAL | 10B
Jay Root, (512) 476-4294 jroot@star-telegram.com
© 2005 Star-Telegram and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
www.dfw.com