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Tue May 21, 2013 3:45 pm
Confirming the New UT Regents
By Paul Burka

UPDATE: The Nominations Committee has approved all three nominees the UT System Board of Regents. The full Senate will take up nominations next.

I walked in the east door of the Capitol yesterday with Senator John Whitmire. He asked if I was going to nominations. I said I was. Then he said, "I told them [the nominated regents], 'Don't even sit down. I know you're on a mission. And you're going to hurt your [reputation] very badly.'"

Kirk Watson carried the questioning in the early going. He got the candidates to agree that they cannot fire the president unilaterally, that the decision to initiate the dismissal of a president belongs to the chancellor alone. (For some background, read Jake Silverstein's exclusive interview with Chairman Gene Powell here.)

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Sat May 18, 2013 4:16 pm
Elements of the Budget Deal
By Paul Burka

These were the final elements of the budget deal that was reached yesterday:

--Add $200 million to the Foundation School Program
--Use a portion of TRS funding to get to $3.9 billion, the Democrats' target amount for restoring the school cuts

The major point of disagreement arose over the System Benefit Fund, which has long been a personal concern for Sylvester Turner, became a contentious issue between Turner and Williams.

The Senate's Medicaid budget rider, which laid out a possible path for Medicaid expansion, was rejected by the House.

The "all funds" budget number is $195 million. It came in $600 or so million under the spending cap.

Higher ed health related institutions received a sixteen percent increase. This was the best budget for higher ed in years.

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Fri May 17, 2013 12:26 am
Williams, Perry, and the Budget
By Paul Burka

This morning I wrote about the prospects for a budget deal, the topic du jour that is uppermost in everyone's mind. The post contained, among other comments, this line: "House Democrats complained that Senate budget chief Tommy Williams had 'misled' them." That is what I was told by what I believed to be reliable sources; the problem is, now I don't believe it was true--or that Williams had sandbagged a deal. A Williams staffer asked me to correct another statement in the article, which was that Willams and Perry are close political allies. While there may have been a time when that was true, it is not true today. For example, a rider in the appropriations bill read as follows:

"Of the funds appropriated elsewhere in this Act to the Health and Human Services Commission in Goal B [never mind the jargon], no amount may be spent to modify Medicaid eligibility unless the commission develops a plan to create more efficient health care coverage options for all existing and newly eligible populations, and the commission receives prior written approval from the Legislative Budget Board before implementing the plan."

Perry wanted the bold-face language removed from the rider. Williams stood firm in resisting. He was determined that the Legislature should write the checks. This is as it should be; the Legislature holds the purse strings.

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Thu May 16, 2013 7:46 am
Things Fall Apart
By Paul Burka

As we tweeted last night as events were rapidly developing, the hopes for a budget deal that would send everyone home happy appeared to evaporate yesterday. House Democrats complained that Senate budget chief Tommy Williams had "misled" them. Dewhurst showed up in the House chamber and disappeared into the back hall. Perry, forever in search of relevance, began contacting Republicans, urging them to vote against restoring the education cuts. Williams and Perry are tight—always have been—and they probably had this play in mind from the beginning; earlier in the month, Perry had indicated to Straus that there was too much money for education.

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Mon May 13, 2013 10:22 am
The Non-session Session
By Paul Burka

When the curtain went up on the 83rd Legislature, I thought the state was poised to have one of the best sessions ever. The treasury had oodles of money, there was a feeling that important issues needed to be addressed, and Speaker Joe Straus was in position to dominate the session because of the weakness of the lieutenant governor and the governor. Straus had made it clear that he wanted to do big things—in education, in water and transportation infrastructure, and in increasing transparency—and he had a team of veteran legislators who knew how to get it done.

Then came the vote two weeks ago on HB 11—funding the water plan—and the House leadership couldn't get the votes, and everything fell apart. Now, here we are at the end of the session, with fifteen days to go, and the House has accomplished ...nothing...and will accomplish...nothing. Instead of one of the best sessions ever, it was one of the most depressing.

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