Carona Says Filibuster About Process, Not Vengeance

Sen. John Carona (seated) talking with fellow local-option supporter Kirk Watson (photo by John Anderson)

Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, just held an angry press conference to answer questions on why he’s prepared to filibuster HB 300, the TxDOT Sunset bill, after a conference committee stripped out his local-option gas tax.

The measure would have given certain metropolitan areas the option to vote on whether to raise gasoline taxes in their localities to fund transportation projects in their regions. Opponents have misleadingly portrayed it as an attempt by the Legislature to raise taxes itself. The Senate version amended Carona’s local option onto HB 300, but the House version did not, and the conference committee removed it. Carona angrily accused Sen. Glenn Hegar, R-Katy, of bad-faith dealing with the committee to remove it, showing one version (with local-option) to Watson and Carona while negotiating another version (without it) with House members.

The threatened filibuster, Carona said, is not an act of vengeance.

“It’s about the appropriate process for legislation to be handled down here,” Carona said. “This conference was not given any opportunity for public posting, there were no official meetings called of the committee. It was all done piecemeal, out of the eye of the public and out of the eye of the press.

“At the same time members of the Senate were negotiating in good faith with the author of the bill, Sen. Hegar, it appears quite clearly and convincingly, he was engaged in negotiations on a separate conference report with members of the House. It’s one thing around here when you win an issue because you’ve used the rules, you’ve been clever, perhaps you’ve worked a little harder, it’s another thing when you’ve been deceitful and dishonest.”

Speaking to reporters earlier, Hegar disputed this. As reported in Quorum Report, Hegar said he could lay out a timeline on how the conference report was developed, and said if the Senate insisted on the option tax, it would be “playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun.”

Carona shot back that he had a list of 81 House members willing to support the option, but he declined to release it because “it wouldn’t do anything but be used by the other side for political embarrassment to those members, or for, frankly, assuring their greater obedience in the future.”

Austin Sen. Kirk Watson told "LegeLand" that he supports Carona on the local option issue.

“This was a wonderful opportunity that is now lost for us to provide some more resources to ensure that we could have better rail, better roads in Central Texas and throughout Texas,” Watson said. “Our state leadership has abdicated its responsibility for providing appropriate resources for our transportation infrastructure. If it’s going to abdicate that responsibility, at a minimum what it ought to do is get out of the way and allow local entities to make the important quality-of-life decisions for their citizens. And in this case, it had an even greater protective mechanism in that we were going to rely upon the voters themselves to make that decision.”

Asked to respond to a Republican Party of Texas statement that the Legislation itself was trying to raise Texans’ taxes, Watson said, “That’s just wrong, and that’s one of those bumper-sticker type of arguments that doesn’t lead to good policy. That ‘no new investments’ demagoguery has been what has led us to a crisis situation when it comes to transportation.

“What this [local option] does is it says, ‘We trust the people to make decisions on their own behalf.’ The very same people that we think are smart enough to elect us to these offices we ought to believe are smart enough to make decisions about revenue sources that can get them out of traffic congestion – more roads, more rail, the kinds of things that will make a difference in their quality of life.”

The earliest the bill could come up, said Carona, is 11:30pm tonight, if the Senate is still in session. More likely, HB 300 would come up tomorrow, the last day of the 81st Legislature. (UPDATE: Carona was wrong. HB 300 became eligible for consideration at 4:17pm today, but has not come up yet.)