Buried in the four-inch stack of amendments to the house budget bill is a subtly crafted ambush on the Public Integrity Unit of the Travis County District Attorney’s office. This is the outfit that investigates corruption cases involving public officials, the most famous of which in recent memory was Ronnie Earle’s dogged pursuit of Tom Delay in the TRMPAC case. Earle has moved on, but Republicans haven’t forgiven or forgotten. This session, Arlington Republican Bill Zedler filed a bill (HB 1928) seeking to move the unit out of the Travis County D.A.’s office and into the Attorney General’s office, which is to say, out of Democratic control and into Republican-held territory. Similar efforts in previous sessions went nowhere, and Zedler’s bill has yet to get a hearing.

But he may not need one to get the revenge Republicans have been seeking. That’s because one of Zedler’s proposed HB 1 amendments, a seemingly simple half-page item (on page 251 of the stack) moving funding for the Public Integrity Unit over to the AG’s office, contains what appears to be a cleverly couched sneak attack. (more…)

Tagged: bill zedler, budget, HB 1, state budget

The next several days of Texas House budget debate may be as much about the culture wars as state spending.

Pre-filed amendments to the three budget-related bills before the House contain limitations on private school vouchers, funding for Planned Parenthood and directives to higher education to fund centers for traditional family values if they provide funding for support centers for gay students. Debate is set to begin Thursday on House Bill 4 to erase a deficit in the current budget and on House Bill 275 to take $3.2 billion out of the state’s so-called rainy day fund. Debate is set for Friday and into the weekend on House Bill 1, a bare bones spending plan for the next two years.

Some of the pre-filed amendments may never be debated because there is a possibility that they are not procedurally proper for an appropriations bill. But they do show state spending is about more than just spending – or in this case cutting.

(more…)

Tagged: abortion, conservative coalition, craig eiland, gay, joaquin castro, Ken Paxton, Planned Parenthood, scott hochberg, state budget, state employees

(Editor’s note: Every week, for the remainder of the legislative session, BurkaBlog will be publishing an original column by R.G. Ratcliffe, who was the state political reporter for the Houston Chronicle for twenty years. During those two decades, I’ve known R.G., who resigned from the Chronicle in February to work on a book, to be one of the most trusted voices in the Capitol press corps. I’m thrilled to have him posting here. His columns will offer a deeper take on one of the week’s top stories. –P.B.)

This session’s budget crunch has turned into a twisted episode of “The Biggest Loser,” the reality television show in which overweight contestants compete to see who can lose the most weight. At the Capitol, the question is, which parts of our state budget will lose the most money in the plans being floated to bridge the $27 billion shortfall. Who will be our biggest loser? Most of the attention has been on teachers, children, and the elderly in nursing homes. Rallies at the capitol and heavy coverage on the nightly news about the impending disaster these groups could face from state cuts have put them at the forefront of the debate. But as the House prepares to vote on a bare bones available-revenue-only proposal next week, there’s another, more often overlooked contestant on the show—Texas’ 154,000 state employees, many of whom could face effective wage cuts of up to 40 percent under current Texas budget plans.

Who are these folks? Well, they are child protection caseworkers, prison guards, tax auditors and rank and file bureaucrats. They work for the government. In a staunchly fiscal conservative, Tea Party world, these employees are often viewed skeptically. (more…)

Tagged: employee retirement system, health insurance, jim pitts, public sector, state budget, state workers, Texas house

A statement from Talmadge Heflin (who else?) at the Texas Public Policy Foundation:

“The first draft of the 2010-11 Texas state budget reinforces the message from Comptroller Susan Combs’ revenue estimate last week. The Texas Legislature needs to get to work on pruning the next state budget back within the available revenue.

“The legislature needs to be mindful of the hard lesson it learned in 2001, when it spent the entire accumulated surplus of the 1990s at once and dug itself a $10 billion hole in 2003. The way for the legislature to avoid setting the same trap for itself is to continue to show fiscal restraint.”

This is nonsense. It is not worthy of TPPF, but it is what happens when you hire a hard-core ideologue. The reason why Texas found itself in a $10 billion hole in 2003 was a combination of a nationwide recession and the 9/11 aftershocks referred to in the following analysis by the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve. Excerpts follow:

The high-tech and dot-com busts sent the country into recession in 2001, but Texas felt the impact longer than many areas, partly because of its large number of high-tech jobs. The 9/11 aftershocks that hurt the travel industry added to the tech crunch, prolonging Texas’ recession through June 2003.

[This time period covers the entire biennium leading up to the adoption of the budget for 2004-2005.]

Overall, the Texas service sector weathered the storm, recording an annual employment decline only in 2001, when 67,100 jobs were lost Texas’ goods-producing sector lost over 188,000 jobs during the downturn, more than a quarter of them in high-tech manufacturing.

Hardest hit was the information sector, with its high percentage of telecommunications service positions. Texas telecom firms shed slightly more than 29,000 jobs during the downturn. Productivity growth has since returned to this industry, yet new jobs remain elusive. Professional and business services also saw jobs decline considerably. Computer systems design, an industry that includes such companies as Plano-based EDS, lost about 18,000 jobs during the recession, accounting for almost 30 percent of the category’s decline.

The trade, transportation and utilities industry was hurt by the post-9/11 drop in demand for air travel. Texas airline transportation employment fell by 12,200 during the downturn and continued to edge down through 2005, rebounding slightly in 2006. Other segments of trade, transportation and utilities, such as retail and wholesale trade, contracted during the downturn as consumer demand weakened across the U.S.

Once the Texas recovery began in mid-2003, employment growth swung back quickly in services while jobs continued to fall in goods-producing industries. In late 2004, however, goods joined services on an upward track, helping fuel the state’s robust economic growth of the past few years.

Does anyone out there other than Talmadge Heflin really believe that an increase in state spending created the 2003 budget crisis, as opposed to a major recession? The budget was a drop; the recession the ocean.

Tagged: revenue estimate, state budget, susan combs, talmadge heflin, texas public policy foundation