School Finance Bill Goes Down and Likelihood of Special Session Goes Up (TX)

May 25, 2011

House’s failure to pass critical bill could land legislators in special session, legislators continue to cut millions in health care for poor women and financial aid would be cut from 41,000 students.

House is in at 9. Senate is in at 8 for local.

What do you know? The House waited until almost the last possible hour to deal with the must-pass issue of school finance and something went wrong.

Rep. Yvonne Davis, D-Dallas, killed Senate Bill 1581 on a point of order late Monday, meaning the only chance that the Legislature will pass a school-finance plan would be to attach it to another bill, likely SB 1811, in conference committee and have the House agree to go outside the bounds when that bill comes back up later this week. That means that you could have the House takin g a vote to distribute $4 billion in cuts to school districts without ever having passed the bill on the floor and without the chance for any amendments.

And now we’re back to this question: Will there be a special session? It depends on whether the House and Senate can agree on which school-finance plan to attach to Senate Bill 1811. The Senate clearly prefers its plan, Senate Bill 22, which is far less popular in the House.

From the Statesman’s Kate Alexander: “The technical issue aside, House members were struggling to sort through three competing school finance plans and no consensus had developed as of Monday night, said state Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, R-Killeen. Aycock acknowledged that the daunting budget numbers were getting in the way of good policy and no change could move forward. Senate Education Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, was clearly frustrated with the House’s lack of action. ‘The House is not ready to deal with or talk about school finance,’ Shapiro said. ‘It’s very distressing.’ … If no change is made, schools would be funded according to current law, and the state would run out of money for public education in early 2013 unless lawmakers took other action.”

If the Legislature does nothing and Gov. Rick Perry doesn’t call a special session to address school funding, the schools would run out of money in February or so of 2013, leaving it to the 2013 Legislature to quickly deal with the issue.

From Harvey Kronberg’s commentary at the Quorum Report: “Shapiro prompted Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst to admit the Senate expected the House to pass Senate Bill 22 or some version of a school finance solution. Dewhurst wasn’t willing to go as far as Shapiro, but Shapiro was ready to say it to the House: Kick out some kind of permanent school finance fix or come back for special session. Dewhurst did say that the Senate agreement with the House was predicated on passage of SB22 or some comparable plan. His implication was that the entire budget is now in jeopardy. But let’s draw the bottom line here. We’re not sure the 150 members of the House are willing to sign onto Eissler’s short-term solution or Shapiro’s long-term plan. Unless the House can find an informal consensus in the next several days and glom a school finance package onto another vehicle, the odds are vastly improved we will be back in special session this summer.”