The Texas legislature is more than halfway through its current session. Thousands of bills have been filed, but comparatively few will even make it to the floor for a vote. Which proposals are picking up steam, and which are likely to die at the end of the 140-day session? Mark Owens, Ph.D., with the UT Tyler Center for Opinion Research and the university’s political science department has that analysis.
Mike Landess: For UT Tyler Radio, I’m Mike Landess. Texas legislators are more than halfway through their 140-day 88th session. Thousands and thousands of bills have been filed, but which ones are getting traction? UT Tyler Political Science professor Mark Owens is our guest. What is the headline on this legislative session right now?
Mark Owens: Right now, a lot of the legislators feel in the crunch of their own deadlines to get legislation through their committees. So we’re seeing bills move through the legislature right now, and yet they haven’t actually become lost. So this is the idea really, that midpoint that you just talked about. We’re looking to see what bills are getting a lot of support, what bills are maybe getting 50-50 to support to see if the speaker or lieutenant governor can be persuaded to see those bills all the way to a law.
Mike Landess: Well now, that’s the next question then. That is, are the priority items set forth by the governor and the lieutenant governor on track or off the tracks? Where are they?
Mark Owens: Yeah, it’s a good point. I mean, a lot of the governor’s topics really were set into the budget, how he wanted to spend that surplus, which is there. And so I think collectively, a lot of his big items like border security or others are gonna move after the budget to make sure that they can authorize the legislation that’s set forward. But he has things here, which at the same moment are looking at education savings accounts, because that’s going to see what opportunities you have with the local property tax.
Mike Landess: I just talked to Dr. Marty Crawford, recently - the Tyler Independent School District superintendent, and he and a number of superintendents spoke out the day before the governor came to do his pitch on that. And he says, you know, your polling says the same thing that we’re seeing, and that is the majority of Texans would approve something like that.
Mark Owens: The Senate Education Committee passed this bill out of the committee, 10-to-two, a week ago on March 30. And one of the things that you get from this is that we saw details from the bill. Any student, per student, $8,000 off of someone’s property tax. Now, this would be the property tax that goes to the ISD. It’s not gonna necessarily touch the junior college funds or things like that, it’s gonna be for each student. So I think that this means that necessarily, it doesn’t mean no property taxes if you were to go to a private school. The idea here is that the ISDs will get a certain substantial part of those funds as well. But people do get this choice, and when this moves forward, I think there’s gonna be more amendments to the bill from the floor. These are typically the kinds of bills that, you know, communities and people are more interested in it because they’re from a certain part of Texas. And this law is gonna affect them differently in Dallas as it would Lubbock and how it would in Tyler. So this is a great opportunity to see what would happen, but I think it still bears question into what does it get paired with on the thought of increasing teacher pay or increasing some other state investments? Two, those ISDs, knowing that this is going to create an uncertain capacity right now and what their budgets would look like to the future.
Mike Landess: That was one of the concerns that Dr. Crawford mentioned to me. And he was saying that they’re drilling down on the idea of choice, and he said, we’ve got choice in TISD. He said, so it’s worth looking at saying, “So what’s the issue?”
Mark Owens: We are blessed in Tyler to have the different schools, which are magnets and also the charter options that exist. We really do have a lot of excellent schools coming around. I think when you get outside of this and think that, you know, you have a couple privates and maybe just one public school option. That’s where this really identifies a lot, and any place where there’s no overcrowding and the largest cities, you know, this is something we saw from polling, is that school choice is something that people are interested in if they’re living in the highly populated suburbs of Dallas. And they might not have the capacity to live close to those magnets the same way we’re able to move through traffic in Tyler, get kids to Caldwell, get kids to the more athletic magnet, right? These are all easy things that are central to our town.
Mike Landess: Now, the other thing that they talked about a great deal was the whole business of cutting property taxes and being able to take that lump of money. We talked about that at the very beginning. How do you think that’s gonna work out?
Mark Owens: Yeah. I would expect in this case, right? I haven’t seen much talk of an actual check coming back to anybody. I think the thought the future here is going to be the change maybe in the homestead exemption that’s allowed. And I think that’s something that people have planned for immediately before because we’ve continued to have surpluses through the last couple of years. And that means that we might have a longer certainty of having property tax relief to the future, but annually, it will be less relief than you think about getting all the money back at one time.
Mike Landess: Don’t look for that check in the mail.
Mark Owens: Maybe not, maybe not.
Mike Landess: Another issue that has been forefront in Austin is banning puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors who identify as transgender. And there was a question about whether they would stop it for somebody who’s already in process or how that would work.
Mark Owens: The modifications that we’ll likely see are gonna come from bringing in doctors or perhaps an administrative directive, right, to give the governor, to give the state health department or whoever might oversee this, more ability to make administrative law and choices that update things throughout time in something like this, where the legislature’s wondering, how can we define this and where does something start and stop. They may delegate this to the executive branch and not necessarily to the governor, but to the governor’s experts.
Mike Landess: How about the mandatory school library standard? We just saw the ruling that came in Llano in which a judge said, “Hey, you took all those books off the shelves, put ’em back.” What’s gonna happen with that, do you think?
Mark Owens: I think in this case, this is real opportunity that with that decision, you see the first sort of protection about right access to knowledge and learning. And in this case, that if this was good enough before one year ago, it might still be good enough for our schools. And I think that there are certain opportunities where, still to the governor and to legislature, they’ve talked about maybe having more parental choice. It’s still part of his parental bill of rights, but it might be just creating an avenue for parents to be in process of making an option, right? Or a suggestion of what book and maybe where it be placed. You know, I think in this case, it’s less about limiting putting a book on the stack, the state making a standard.
Mike Landess: I’m wondering how that’s gonna play with local school districts. I would think that some of them are gonna push back and say, “Hey, wait a minute, this is our school district. This isn’t a state-run school district.”
Mark Owens: As long as it is broad. Right? In this case, there are a lot of books that fit into broad categories. And so when you get in that opportunity, still have like community decisions when they think about textbooks for college. I mean, some get proposed, but they certainly don’t make it into our selective list and what we can choose from.
Mike Landess: Where’s gambling right now? That one was sort of a surprise. After pushing back for years and years and years, there’s talk about it actually taking place. Maybe casino gambling would happen.
Mark Owens: This is not something that’s gonna move forward on a party line vote. The State House State Affairs Committee moved forward a bill about mobile gambling. So this would let you be on FanDuel or DraftKings and let you, so when you’re at the Cowboys game or the Mavericks. It passed outta committee nine-to-three. The three objections were all Republicans in this case. You have all Democrats in favor and most republicans in favor. But Lieutenant Governor (Dan) Patrick has not indicated any interest in moving forward on the bill because he says he can’t get 21 votes to support it. He is saying, “I won’t put forward something that doesn’t have widespread support among Republicans,” so he really might have 21 votes. He just doesn’t have a full support within republicans and you know this idea. So if the bill passes, it’s gonna pass with republican and democratic votes.
Mike Landess: Our guest has been UT Tyler Political Science professor Dr. Mark Owens. To hear this conversation again or to share it, go to KVUT. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio.
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