Texas House Sends Disastrous Two-Year Budget to Senate

Texas AFT Legislative Hotline

Texas House Sends Disastrous Two-Year Budget to Senate (“Thank God for the Senate”)

The Texas House late Sunday night passed a destructive budget proposal that, if enacted, would devastate Texas public education. The nearly party-line vote was 98 to 49, with all but two Republican House members supporting the bill and not a single Democrat voting for it.
House Bill 1 as it left the House last night would cut $8 billion from basic state aid to school districts and chop more than $1 billion in state grants to public schools for programs like full-day pre-kindergarten. For each of the next two school years, HB 1 would leave our public schools on average with some $900 less per pupil than they are receiving in the current school year. To make their budgets balance, school districts could be forced to lay off from 80,000 to 100,000 teachers and other school employees. In the modern era of school finance, going back 60 years, there is no precedent for this sort of man-made disaster.

 

Find out how your representative Voted on HB1 HERE.

The chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Republican Jim Pitts of Waxahachie, claimed “this budget does fund the essential services of state government within our revenue.” But the truth is otherwise. A better description was offered by Rep. Sylvester Turner, the Democrat from Houston who serves as vice-chair of the same budget-writing committee. He said, “This bill dismantles the educational infrastructure of Texas.”
Chairman Pitts also asserted that HB 1 “lives within our means,” raises no new taxes, does not use one dollar of the Rainy Day Fund for 2012-2013, and reflects the Republican majority’s commitment to “limited government.” That line of argument drew a withering response from Rep. Donna Howard, Democrat of Austin. She noted that the bill might push expenditures off the state’s books but actually would just push many costs down to local governments, forcing local tax increases. The majority’s pose of fiscal rectitude is belied by a budget that “sacrifices fiscal responsibility in the name of fiscal conservatism,” said Howard.

Faced with the meat-ax budget cuts in HB 1, State Rep. Harold Dutton, Democrat of Houston, had this to say: “Thank God for the Senate.”

The Senate does indeed now become the center of the action on the state budget. Senators already have made tentative decisions to add $6 billion to funding for public schools above the base level in the original version of the budget filed in January. Both Republican and Democratic senators have spoken out for use of the Rainy Day Fund for 2012-2013. The Senate’s chief budget writer, Senate Finance Committee chair Steve Ogden, Republican of Bryan, has said flatly that the legislature needs to find more revenue to correct the structural deficit created by a botched tax overhaul in 2006. He has even called for a corporate income tax to replace the 2006 business “margins tax” that has never produced adequate revenue for our schools. Clearly the Senate has its own ideas on the budget, and the final product will not be known until a House-Senate conference committee finishes its work late in the session.
So the fight goes on. Though better than the House disaster, even the current Senate draft of the education budget would leave our schools short by roughly $400 per pupil below current levels—an unprecedented cut.