Ten Ways To Fix Texas
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I know what you’re thinking: How much does it cost? The answer is around $5.5 billion a year. That’s a lot of money, but I have a way to help pay for it. The last time Texas faced a school finance crisis, I asked an expert in the field if the state should place a limit on administrative expenses by local districts. “You can’t do that,” he said. “Then Houston will have no place to put its incompetent teachers and principals.” Suspicions confirmed. The governor should direct the commissioner of education to devise a plan to reduce administrative expenses statewide by 50 percent, with the savings to be redirected to teacher pay.
05 — FIX THE PROBATION SYSTEM
This ought to be a no-brainer. It costs $14,600 a year to sustain a prison inmate, compared to $730 to supervise an offender on probation. But the state’s probation system, everyone agrees, is a mess. Many probationers escape supervision altogether, because too few probation officers have to supervise too many cases for too long. Currently, the maximum probation period is ten years. That’s a long time for an offender not to make a misstep and violate the conditions of his probation. Getting in a fight, drinking booze, failing to show up at an appointment with his probation officer—any of these can cause probation to be revoked, requiring a return to prison. So frequently does this occur that the state’s prisons are almost out of bed space. In an attempt to prevent an overcrowding crisis that would require building more prisons—another expensive undertaking—the Legislature passed a probation reform bill this spring that reduced the maximum supervisory period to five years for a select group of third-degree felons and provided for the hiring of more probation officers. The idea was that more supervision would reduce crime and make prison beds available for violent criminals. Right idea, wrong governor: Rick Perry vetoed the bill. The Legislature should pass it again at its first opportunity.
06 — INCREASE OUR WATER SUPPLIES
Texas is one drought away from catastrophe. Already, towns like Blanco, west of Austin, and Electra, west of Wichita Falls, have experienced days when they ran plumb out of water. In the booming suburbs north of Dallas, on the Interstate 35 and U.S. 75 corridors, population is outstripping water supplies. In a prolonged dry spell, state officials say, 435 communities would not have enough water to meet their needs. By 2050, the number will swell to 900, affecting 38 percent of the state’s projected population. Two things must happen between now and then. One is that a source of funding must be found for projects that can move water from where it is (but only a fraction of it is used), which is East Texas, to where it isn’t, which is the other three directions. A major water bill in the recent legislative session proposed placing a fee on large commercial, industrial, and residential users. The residential fee was just 13 cents per one thousand gallons for usage above five thousand gallons a year, but 2050 is a long time away, and political expedience is ever with us, so the fee idea died. The second necessity is a plan that will fairly allocate the water—but everybody’s idea of fairness is not the same. City folks fear that they will provide most of the money but rural communities will be the beneficiaries. Rural folks fear that their towns will dry up because the metro areas can outvote them. The realities of politics are that it will take another prolonged drought like the one in the fifties before anyone gets really serious about water.
07 — RESTORE CUTS FOR MEDICAID
Wielding the budget ax in 2003, the Legislature imposed a 5 percent cut on the amount it paid to doctors and hospitals who treated Medicaid patients. The amount necessary to restore the cuts was trivial by the standards of a $138.3 billion budget—a total of $67 million—and the consequence of not restoring the cuts is potentially serious, which is that the providers, as the health care jargon goes, may not accept new Medicaid patients. If that occurs, the patients will seek treatment in emergency rooms, where care is far more costly than it is in clinics. Paying the docs is the easiest thing to do on this entire list, and yet the Legislature managed not to do it.
8 — CREATE NEW FLAGSHIP UNIVERSITIES
One of the best ways to jump-start economic growth is to build major research universities. Yet the only top-tier public research universities in the state are UT, A&M, and the lesser-known UT-Dallas, in engineering and technology. Texas needs more flagships to bring in federal research dollars and create ongoing, cutting-edge economic development, as the University of California system has done for that state. The UC system includes five of U.S. News and World Report’s top ten public universities in America. The Texas higher education system has none. It does have some flagship wannabes: the University of Houston; Texas Tech; UT—San Antonio; and the University of North Texas, based in Denton but soon to open a campus in Dallas. For at least twenty years, there has been widespread agreement among higher-education policy makers that the state has to have more flagships. So, what’s the holdup? Just two little things: politics and money. Jealousy among Texas’s regional universities and their rival backers in the Legislature is so intense—toward UT and A&M and toward each other—that the people involved would rather see all fail than one or two succeed.
What makes the situation so frustrating is that it doesn’t cost much money—or take much time—to turn a good university into a great one. Fifty million dollars a year for ten years—half a billion dollars total—would go a long way toward enabling a university to recruit (i.e., steal from other universities) the kind of faculty members who bring in the big research dollars and signal the national academic and research communities that something big is going on in Texas. The University of Houston has the shortest distance to go to flagship status, and the best location—especially if it were to join the UT System and affiliate with the medical institutions in the area. Another $500 million spread over ten years could be shared among UT-Dallas and the other three wannabes, moving them closer to elite status. That’s a total of a billion dollars. And the overall cost to the state budget would be zero: Take money that has already been earmarked for economic development—the $300 million Texas Enterprise Fund, replenished each legislative session, that is used by the governor to attract companies to Texas. As the California example proves, there is no greater payoff in economic development than top-ranked universities.
09 — MAKE COLLEGE AFFORDABLE FOR ALL
Once we have upgraded our universities, the next issue is whether students will be able to afford them. The demographic reality is that Texas is going to be a majority Hispanic state. If we fail to provide for these kids’ education—to keep them in public schools until they graduate and to see them through college—Texas is done for. Without an educated workforce, we can’t have a thriving economy in the Information Age. But students who come from poor backgrounds often see attending college as something they will never be able to afford. Fortunately, it doesn’t cost that much to send kids to college—if you’re the state, that is. The Texas Grant program pays the full cost of tuition and fees at public institutions to students who graduate from high school after completing the college-bound curriculum and maintain a 2.5 grade point average in college. Current funding is $331 million, which does not cover all eligible students. Full funding would cost another $193 million. There’s not a better investment to be made.
10 — BRING BACK THE POLITICAL CENTER
Fair redistricting: These are not words that one normally sees paired, but together they envision a reform that would go a long way toward making Texas politicians more accountable. Regardless of which party has been in power in Texas, the trend in redistricting has been to draw safe seats for incumbents. The result has been to reduce the number of seats that one party can hope to wrest from the other, until it is down to a handful in each house of the Legislature. The only race that matters to most legislators is their party primary; the general election is a foregone conclusion. The result of safe-seat redistricting is to shrink the political center, to cause politicians to gravitate toward the extremes of the spectrum, to institutionalize party-line voting, to discourage independence, and to ensure that lawmakers cannot face the ultimate accountability, which is defeat by the opposing party. Various proposals to have a nonpartisan (or bipartisan) panel draw districts in a way that would make seats more competitive have gone nowhere. A few states have tried it, but, sad to say, Texas will not soon be one of them. Neither will the center soon return to Texas politics.
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