It seems that the major players agree on something when it comes to HB 300, the TxDoT sunset bill– the House’s "chubbing" has not got in the way of the bill’s progress.
“It’s actually given us some down-time to think through some of the issues and begin already a dialogue with Sen. Hegar,” said state Rep Carl Isett, R-Lubbock, Tuesday.
The de facto conferencing has coincided with House partisanship congealing into parliamentary meltdown. Democrats have “chubbed” the Local Calendar - grinding the pace of the House down to a crawl in order to kill SB 362, the Voter ID bill, which needed to be heard by midnight Tuesday. Republicans, for their part, have refused Democratic overtures to bring up important bills out of order and thus minimize collateral
damage caused by the chubbing. (More details here.)
Sen Glenn Hegar, R-Katy, author of the Senate version of the sunset bill, agreed with Isett’s assessment.
“We started making progress last week,” he said, describing how he and fellow Senator Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville have been informally visiting with Isett and House Transportation Chairman Joe Pickett, D-El Paso.
“I would say we’ll probably, by midday tomorrow, have worked through ninety per cent of the issues,” Hegar said. “We just have a few that are left…By Thursday noon we’ll have all this wrapped up and be ready to go back and get signatures from our conferees.
HB 300 was lucky not to get caught in the cross fire over voter ID.
“We got it out of the House before the chubbing started,” Isett said. However, the bill has certainly felt the effects of the partisan rancor.
“I think the chubbing is an unfortunate distraction from the serious work the legislature still faces,” said Sen. Carona, R-Dallas, chairman of the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee. “Every member over here is trying to find a way to save their legislative agenda and they’re doing so by tacking on their bill to other bills of similar subject matter.”
Carona was referring to the mad dash in the Senate to rescue legislation caught behind SB 362 on the House Calendar, and therefore destined for the same fate. Senators have been “tacking on” their bills, which are floundering in the House, onto legislation still moving through the process in the Senate.
“Senators are trying to amend anything and everything to these bills because they’re dying on the (House) calendar. Well the TxDoT sunset bill became a prime vehicle for people to try and amend,” Hegar said.
In order to make sure the bill wasn’t amended to death, Hegar said he tried to make sure the changes were taken in committee – the “front end” of the process – rather than on the Senate floor. As such the bill passed with only a few amendments and after a mere four of hours of debate. (The House version took on 177 floor amendments and took up most of the day when it hit the floor.)
Hegar said about thirty stand-alone bills, “that were working through the system before the chubbing” were grafted into the TxDoT sunset bill as amendments - they represented, “mostly bills that would likely pass if the House could get to it.”
However Hegar’s description is not true of one important amendment, which rolled in much of Carona’s SB 855.
That Senate bill, which seemed to have run aground in the House after passing the Senate, would give an option for populous urban areas, including El Paso, to hold local elections that could approve raising taxes and/or fees in order to fund transportation projects.
“I think we’re very concerned about the local option taxes,” Isett cautioned. ”I think most of my colleagues feel like the middle of a recession is a terrible time to add additional taxes on Texas families. I think everything else in the bill is negotiable.”
Pickett said he doubted there were forty votes for the measure in the House. Hegar said that of all the additions to the bill, the local option tax amendment was the one the greatest number of Senators were “uncomfortable with.”
Carona was philosophical on the subject of his amendment.
“Any time you deal with legislation that deals with issues of taxation, you’re not likely to find many supporters. Politicians are politicians,” he said. “Members would prefer not to have their name associated with any type of tax increase or even the authorization for such as this bill attempts to do.”
He maintained though that something needed to be done about Transportation funding as the current method was in “desperate straights.”
“By 2012 we will be unable to build any new roads whatsoever from fund six, which is our primary source of revenue,” he said.
Apart from local option taxes, the allocation of transportation dollars across the state remains the big sticking point. (Go here for background.)
Both Hegar and Pickett expressed optimism in a compromise Sen. Nichols had been instrumental in brokering between the two chambers over the funding issue.
“Sen. Nichols and I spoke on that early on,” Pickett said. “He and I have an understanding on how that could work.”
Hegar said that compromise involved divvying up TxDoT’s funding pots between those dedicated to localities and those dedicated to maintaining statewide standards when it came to things like road maintenance.
Hegar said that by diverting almost all of TxDoT’s funding to localities based on formulas - that were in turn based on population, congestion and Metropolitan Planning Organizations - the House bill failed to take into account different needs across the state.
For example, road maintenance in the valley requires more money than in the northwest because of differences in rainfall - as such, the state needed to spend more money in the valley in order to maintain statewide standards, Hegar said.
“There are some parts (of funding) that can be an allocation, driven by letting the MPOs know what they have,” he said. “Also, there are some areas of funding we may not be able to allocate based on MPOs, population and congestion because Texas is a very large, rural state.”
For Hegar, the key to fixing TxDoT is making it a more open agency - not one that is organized and funded in drastically new ways.
“You cannot give complete to-the-penny allocation requirements,” he said regarding formula funding. “However what you can do is give certainty and transparency.
