DURING THE INTERIM
The Texas Legislature may not be in session, but lawmakers continue to work on issues of concern to our community during the interim. Some of the questions I am addressing include:
Education
College readiness: How do we ensure our public school students are prepared? How do we make college more affordable for all eligible students?
Public School Accountability: Can we link individual student data with strategic steps that make sure each student receives the necessary instruction before they fail and risk becoming a dropout? How do we make sure that community stakeholders are actively connected to school systems in order to meet the needs of struggling schools and ensure their success?
School Finance: How can we reasonably and fairly address school funding formulas so that geographic/socioeconomic differences are accounted for while providing all schools with the resources they need to meet rising state standards and reduce our 30 percent high school dropout rate?
Health Care
Access: As we continue to search for a way to make sure all our citizens have access to affordable health care, can we also guarantee an adequate supply of health care providers? Do we expand tuition reimbursement programs to attract primary care physicians to underserved areas? Do we improve reimbursement rates to increase the number of providers willing to see Medicaid patients? Can we meet the challenge of our historic nursing shortage?
Costs: Can we reduce state costs by doing more to promote wellness and prevention efforts, especially among our state employees? Texas has one of the nation’s highest teen pregnancy rates. Can we cut costs by reducing the teen pregnancy rate, including repeat teen pregnancies?
Quality of Care: How do we expand the exchange of electronic health information to promote efficient, high quality, cost-effective health care delivery that protects patient privacy needs and provides mechanisms for affordable and interoperable technology?
Natural Resources
Water: How do we ensure that we have the water we need to meet the needs of our growing communities? Can we work together as a region so that the drinking water needs of the Austin area can be met while also making sure water is available to ranchers, rice farmers, and the shrimping industry further downstream? Can we do more to improve local input into critical water decisions at the Lower Colorado River Authority?
Energy: How do we create a more integrated permitting process that brings together different agencies and commissions into a more unified approach? Can we guarantee that decisions about energy and water needs are made collaboratively and in recognition of the fact that both needs are interdependent? How do we protect regional air quality from emissions produced outside the boundaries of local control?
Native Plants/Invasive Species: How do we increase support for protecting our unique Texas natural environment from destruction by invasive species?
Budget
Deficit: Can we do more to prepare for an anticipated shortfall as high as $15 billion in the next state budget? Even with a $9 billion Rainy Day Fund, the budget gap could be an historic $6 billion — without the one-time federal stimulus funds available to plug our funding gaps. How do we address our ever-expanding “structural” deficit, created in 2006 when we compressed school property taxes by one-third but failed to appropriate sufficient revenue to replace the cut?
Permanent School Fund (PSF): Moving forward from our success in the House last session to transfer management of the PSF from the State Board of Education to the Comptroller’s Office, how do we ensure that this critical multi-billion dollar resource continues to bolster public schools now and into the future?
Transportation
Funding: The federal government’s transportation budget has steadily eroded over the years, so that all states are receiving less and less. The federal transportation stimulus funds received by TXDOT merely filled the hole left by previous and on-going federal transportation funding rescissions, resulting in no net new dollars. In addition, the state gas tax rate has not been increased since 1991.
How do we build the transportation infrastructure we need to alleviate current congestion and keep pace with population growth? Do we provide local elected officials with the authority to seek voter approval for local transportation fees to fund specific roadway projects in their region? Do we index the gas tax rate to keep pace with inflation? Do we authorize a reasonable increase to the state gas tax rate and dedicate the additional revenue solely to transportation projects? (Currently only about 1/2 of all gas tax revenue goes to fund transportation while 1/2 goes to fund the Department of Public Safety and public education.)
TXDOT: In 2008, the Texas Department of Transportation reported a $1 billion budget miscalculation. Following pressure from the Legislature, TxDOT management has been audited and is undergoing third-party review in order to determine what operational changes can be made to ensure that this does not happen in the future. We are also working with the Sunset Commission to determine whether or not additional legislative oversight is needed to keep the agency on track
Interim Committees
Standing committees are meeting over the interim to address specific issues, from the budget to school finance. The Sunset Committee is also meeting to review some critical state agencies and programs: Texas Department of Insurance, Public Utility Commission of Texas, Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Texas Water Development Board, Railroad Commission of Texas, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and many more.
Town Hall Meetings
I hosted four town hall meetings in different parts of our community this fall and heard from many constituents about what’s on your minds. I continue to visit with individuals and groups throughout our district as we prepare to hit the ground running in January, 2011 for the 82nd Legislative Session.