Coming into the session, one of the big goals of the Senate Transportation Committee was to reform the unresponsive TxDoT. Committee Chair John Carona, R-Dallas, was hoping to raise or at least index link the gas tax. Failing that, the back-up was to provide local funding tools to counties and municipalities, to allow them to take some charge of their own transportation destiny.
Instead, Senate Bill 855, Carona’s bill to do that, limped to engrossment Wednesday after a deluge of local exemption amendments that smack of obstructionism. The result, Carona said with obvious frustration, “is what happens when the folks at the top decide not to get behind a state-wide initiative.”
Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, called it a “disaster” that, with so many exemptions added, puts the whole new tax burden on “my two favorite people, the police officer married to the school teacher.”
Carona was unimpressed. “I don’t want to be a talk-radio Republican, I want to be a problem-solving Republican,” he said to Patrick, adding that this was in no way a shot at his talk-radio colleague.
That was far from the only argument: The Bexar county delegation was split when Republican Jeff Wentworth accused Democrat Carlos Uresti of re-writing an amendment after he had agreed to it, and significantly changing its intention. Uresti called it a clarification, but in fact it re-wrote the rules for the Alamo region from a maximum tax raise election of 10 cents every other year to one election every four years.
Even with all the amendments, Carona could only rustle up a 23-8 vote. Yet the bill’s biggest problem may be that, rather than going down the normal path to passage of suspending Senate rules to have a third vote today, that’s been pushed back until Tuesday. The delay is courtesy of Senate Finance Chair Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, who, after admitting that Carona was trying to solve a problem that needs solving, called it “a bill that says ‘I have no options.'”
He then threw out a list of possible constitutional problems (ironically, mostly to do with the bill being too locally specific) which Carona said he would rather deal with now than “have a cloud over this bill.” He added, “I will tell you, I think this puts me at a disadvantage on this proposition” as Ogden now has a week to pick holes.
The upshot could be ugly: As Sen. Kevin Eltife, R-Tyler, joked as he headed to the dias, “Nobody wants to get caught between Finance and Transportation.”
But Carona remained optimistic that the House is heading towards a much more consensus-driven version of the bill, and something far more sensible will get hammered out in conference committee.
This article appears in April 3 • 2009.
