2023 Texas Legislative Session

We started Texas' 88th legislative session a couple weeks ago and it runs through May 29. Most of the action happens at the end, but Abbott and Patrick have already outlined some of their priorities, and given the Republicans have solid majorities in the House and Senate, their priorities have a decent shot of coming to pass. For the uninitiated, Texas only convenes a legislature once in two years (aside from special sessions), so I thought it might be worth having a thread.

The backdrop to the session is that we just announced a $32 billion surplus (from a total budget of $188 billion). As our comptroller says, its a rare opportunity to have this much extra to spend. We were not that long ago dealing with a budget deficit and cutting education budgets to balance it, and I won't be surprised if we're dealing with another budget deficit even as soon as next year. Republicans, of course, want to do tax cuts when they get surpluses (the Dems want to spend it on infrastructure, as is their wont, but they don't have the votes to matter). Abbott's and Patrick's announced priorities include border security, education reform, school safety, property tax cuts, and the grid.

The two (inter-related) things on my mind in all this is the education reform (school choice), and the impact of property tax cuts on schools.

Starting on the latter, Abbott wants to cut $15 billion from property tax revenues. The only part of this plan the media seems to know about is $3 billion in funding for homestead exemptions. I actually like this idea. Right now, your homestead doesn't get taxed at all on the first $30k of its valuation. They want to raise that to a proposed $70k. That primarily helps lower wealth people, especially in rural areas where valuations are lower, without much meaningful property tax reduction for the River Oaks crowd (they'll be fine). What I'm not as clear on is which budgets get backfilled with the $3 billion. Property taxes primarily pay for the school district, the city, the county, hospital district, county improvement district, community college, and around Houston things like flood control and the port. Will Texas pay for the losses to the school districts and the port etc, or just the county entities relying on property taxes?

Also, subtracting this $3 billion, there's another $12 billion in property tax revenues Abbott wants to cut and I don't know the plan for that. Who gets that money?

The other thing is Abbott wants to push school vouchers (paywall) again to expand school choice. I'm an outlier here (amongst liberals) in that I think the privatization of k-12 education with state vouchers would be a benefit to the state. But only if you go all in, not with some hybrid model of state schools competing with private schools for government dollars. I'd want to see the public schools spun off into nonprofit private schools that compete with all the others for students and their vouchers with some state agency oversight. But, that's not what Republicans are going to try for. They want to make a frankenstein hybrid model that will undermine the funding of public schools without making the private schools prepared to serve all students equally (this article talks about many of the weaknesses of the hybrid I fear). I emphatically don't want that. We need to pick a lane -- capitalism or socialism -- and stick to the one model.

Anyway, we talk about federal government and the culture wars too damn much in this forum. Texas politics is going to impact many of our posters more than Biden's classified documents ever will. Cross your fingers for this legislative session.