2019 Texas Legislative Session Preview

The Texas legislature’s 2019 session will begin Tuesday, January 8.  One of the first items of business will be the Biennial Revenue Estimate delivered by the comptroller of public accounts. The following Monday, January 14, the Legislative Budget Board budget estimates are delivered to the governor and the Legislature. The next day is the inauguration of the governor and lieutenant governor after which the Legislative Budget Board general appropriations bill will be delivered to the governor and the Legislature. Later the same day is the governor’s State of the State address to the Legislature when he’ll deliver his budget to the Legislature.

In the Texas Senate, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick will likely pass out committee assignments within days of his inauguration. If the new Speaker of the House, Dennis Bonnen, holds to the same schedule as the former Speaker, Joe Straus, it will be three more weeks until House committee assignments are handed out.

Pre-filing of bills started shortly after the November election results were certified and bill filing will continue until Friday March 8. Although there will likely be 5000 or so bills filed less than 1000 will likely get much attention and only a few hundred will even get voted on let alone signed by the governor. One issue that Democrats and Speaker Bonnen agree upon is that Public Education finance is a high priority item.

Public education finance is a topic with two fronts, the most obvious being how much money will the legislature allocate and the less obvious being the formula that will be used when distributing those funds to the hundreds of school districts across the state. Given the large previous budget cuts and then small increases that fail to keep pace with increased costs state funding only covers 35-40% of district budgets. Expect a big fight over how much money the state allocates and another quieter fight over how each districts share is calculated.

Dan Patrick has claimed for years and even campaigned on the idea that property taxes are too high especially the portion charged by school districts. He says he’s going to fix that by capping property taxes and other foolishness. The reality is that the reason districts have had to raise their tax rates is that the state legislature with him in the lead has repeatedly failed to adequately fund public education forcing districts to pick up the slack. Expect Patrick to use shell game tactics to obfuscate what’s really happening and his talk radio hucksterism to sell it. The best thing we can say about incoming Speaker Bonnen is that in the past he’s shown quite a lot of spine in standing up to Lt. Gov. Patrick and House Democrats hope that continues.

While in many ways less significant than public education finance marijuana legalization is also highly likely to be in the news as various groups continue the push toward that goal. In November Michigan became the tenth state to legalize recreational marijuana use, roughly twenty other states have passed some form of broad medical marijuana legalization, so it would be surprising to see the legislature finally make a move in that direction. This is especially true considering the huge tax revenues from legalized marijuana that states like Colorado are now reporting.

Our state legislators have until midnight Monday, May 27, to get all their work done. Let’s all hope they make good use of their time.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - January 4, 2019