With the Senate version of the state budget already being picked apart in hearings, House members have only recently been given their committee assignments. But it was HB 1, the House preliminary budget released at the start of the session, that kicked off the earliest wave of denunciations from Democrats who feel that the proposed budget cuts are too draconian, and disproportionately target the most vulnerable Texans.
“We are here to champion the dreams and opportunities of Texas families, of our children, of our seniors, and we feel that these dreams and opportunities are now threatened by the budget that has been laid out today,” said Rep. Jessica Ferrar (D-Houston) at the Jan. 19 press conference that served as the Democrats’ opening salvo in a budget battle that for some boils down to a simple question: Who should bear the burden?
The House preliminary budget proposes $31 billion in total spending cuts, including $10 billion in cuts to healthcare and $12 billion in cuts to public and higher education. It would eliminate almost 10,000 state positions. It keeps the state Rainy Day Fund intact, a key goal of fiscal conservatives. And it cuts money out of the budgets of CPS and other child welfare services.
Both the House and Senate budgets are based on revenue projections given by Comptroller Susan Combs in January. However, Gov. Rick Perry is anticipating a higher revenue estimate in May.
“The main budget that has been presented has a devastating impact on Texas families and on future generations of Texans,” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-San Antonio) said at the Jan. 19 press conference. “Just as there is an infrastructure of roads and highways that helps all of us get to where we want to go on the road, there is an infrastructure of opportunity that helps all of us get to where we want to go in life. And the cornerstones of that infrastructure are our public education system, our higher education system, and our healthcare system.”
Fearing the worst, the Dallas Independent School District recently directed staff to prepare a budget based on worst-case scenarios. “Some departments will be at risk, within some departments they’re going to be less people” said Superintendent Michael Hinojosa at a Feb.8 DISD board briefing. Fresh from a trip to Austin, Hinojosa returned with slides to give DISD trustees some sense of the difficult choices to come.
“You can cut flat across the board and that doesn’t help your goals,” Hinojosa said to the assembled trustees. ”You have to be strategic in where you cut. Right now, I’ve asked all the chiefs to prioritize their departments from top to bottom, and to prioritize those positions that they need to run the district.”
The worst-case scenario for DISD, according to the superintendent’s briefing, is $250 million in cuts, which would mostly come from salaries. Under this scenario, 3900 positions (800 non-campus, 3100 campus—mostly teachers and counselors) would be affected.
“This is the starting game, this is not the end game. But the best case scenario is that we’re looking at 60 percent of this. There are some positions we can’t cut, and some positions where we can cut pay,” said Hinojosa.
HB 1 cuts $10 billion out of the Foundation School Program (FSP), the state’s general fund for public schools, along with a $1.3 billion reduction in grants. These grants fund textbooks, new instructional facilities, protections for property value decline, and pre-kindergarten. In DISD, Hinojosa worries that the Student Success Initiative, the Virtual School Network, summer school funding, and the school bus seat belt program may be affected.
Rep. Helen Giddings of Dallas finds the prospect of cuts to pre-K especially worrisome. “I’m very concerned about the cuts that we’re making in education. I think pre-K is very, very important, particularly for kids who come from less affluent families who in many cases arrive at the schoolhouse door two years behind their peers, not because of any kind of lack of intelligence but because of a lack of exposure. So when you cut out the pre-K program, you really are affecting the future of the state, not just the future of those kids who won’t get an education.”
Hinojosa hopes to minimize the pain by cutting bonuses and incentives, making sure that stipends are only used as an incentive to draw teachers into critical shortage areas, and furloughing teachers as an alternative to firing them. Under current law, DISD may only furlough non-teaching staff, even though teaching staff makes up 62 percent of the budget.
“I can promise you they’re not going to pay us back this time,” said Hinojosa about the Legislature. “We can’t expect the State of Texas to come back in two years to give the money back with interest. We need a business model that’s sustainable over the long haul.”
DISD is hardly alone in its travails. 66 campuses across Houston ISD have been named as having low enrollments, and some of those are going to be closing in the coming months, according to Rep. Sylvester Turner, who represents Houston’s 139th District. Like others, Turner argues that the FSP was already severely underfunded even without the cuts proposed in HB 1, a result of past funding shortfalls and the failure of the fund to keep pace with gains in enrollment.
“When you consider the number of people that are 18 years of age or younger in this country, Texas is Number Two,” said Turner at the Jan. 19 press conference of House Democrats. “When you consider what we did in the last biennium we are $4.4 billion short. And when you consider where we need to be based on growth, we are $5.5 billion short. When you add it together, we’re about $9.9 billion short for the Foundation School Program. Across the state, our public schools are closing because they don’t have the money to keep their doors open. About a month ago, I met with some of the board members in the Alpine Independent School District in my district, and they’re already closing and consolidating schools.”
Turner’s comments echo the general sentiment among Democrats that the true causes of the state’s fiscal woes have been obscured or misrepresented. “How we got here is no accident,” said Rep. Pete Gallego (D-Alpine).” We’ve known as a legislature, despite what you’ve been told in recent days, [that] it’s not the national recession, [and] it’s not the stimulus funds.”
Referring to a document presented on the floor of the House in 2006 by the Legislative Study Group,
“The tax package that was passed in 2006 created a permanent structural deficit resulting in a built-in budget hole that we have now seen in three straight legislative sessions,” said Gallego. “When the tax package was passed into law, Ms. Strayhorn (then-state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn) predicted that the bill would not raise enough revenue to pay for the proposed property tax cuts. The fiscal notes for the legislation projected that Texas would face a $14 billion shortfall over five years. Who knew that she would actually low-ball it?”
“The tax package that was passed in 2006 created a permanent structural deficit resulting in a built-in budget hole that we have now seen in three straight legislative sessions,” said Gallego. “When the tax package was passed into law, Ms. Strayhorn (then-state Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn) predicted that the bill would not raise enough revenue to pay for the proposed property tax cuts. The fiscal notes for the legislation projected that Texas would face a $14 billion shortfall over five years. Who knew that she would actually low-ball it?”
“Bear in mind that when we think about these cuts, we’ve got to consider the context in which we exist,” Rep. Castro added. “We’re already as a state 50th in per capita spending. So you’ve got to ask yourself when you see a base budget like this: at what point is this budget akin to asking an anorexic person to lose more weight?”
It’s not just school districts who are running for cover. County governments are also profoundly affected by the whims of state legislators. ““I didn’t wait for the State of Texas to convene,” said Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. “When the Comptroller forecasted that there would be a shortfall of least $15 billion dollars I advised our budget director to make a presentation to the Court, which I did over a month ago before this Legislature even convened.”
Dallas County receives about $100 million worth of pass-through grants from both the state and federal governments, according to Price. “We know that the state has been asking most of the departments for at least a 15 percent contribution, in terms of reductions, in their budgets. I basically instructed the budget director to do 25 percent and see what the impact would be on Dallas County.”
“On Health and Human Services (HHS), you talk about impacting immunization,” Price adds. “When you start talking about impacts, then you start talking about weatherization money that comes from HHS. It has a profound impact on the whole issue of public health. I’ve said that all along. 60 days ago I asked staff to start preparing for a cut in grant funding. We have to decide if the state no longer funds something, can we afford to fund it?”
As a County Commissioner, Price also has long experience with the state’s methods of subtly shifting costs onto counties and localities. “We sued the state about 15 years ago [winning a judgment] that they had to take and pick up post-adjudicated inmates after 45 days,” said Price. “Sometimes they were leaving those inmates here for as long as 100 days, and we were picking up those costs. As far as we were concerned that’s an unfunded mandated, so we sued them. So there are many ways that they can impact us, we’re aware of that, and we’re formulating contingency plans all the time to be able to deal with it.”
“It goes on ad infinitum. We are aware that when the state sneezes, we catch cold,” said Price.
In addition to the cuts to education, HB 1 also proposes $10 billion in cuts to healthcare. Indeed, one of the hardest-hit agencies, according to Rep. Garnet Coleman of Houston, will be the Department of Aging and Disability Services (DADS), which provides a raft of support services for elderly Texans.
“Of the people who are covered by Medicaid, 70 percent of them are the elderly and disabled in either nursing homes or in homecare, and what this budget would do is cut $1.5 billion from the payments to those nursing homes,” said Coleman. “So the quality of care that they get in the nursing home will drop. Remember, people in nursing homes generally go in with their own money. They spend down the dollars they have left in their bank account, and then Medicaid starts paying. So the longer someone lives the more likely it is they’re going to be on Medicaid.
“By the way, caseload growth in Medicaid is not provided for in the budget at all,” Coleman adds. “There is a 17 percent reduction in investigations and licensing. If you don’t have the people to go check on the nursing facility quality then the quality would be allowed to deteriorate which would harm the seniors.”
Rep. Giddings is quick to stress that it is not only liberals who might be chafing under the new climate of austerity.
“Even conservative people have concerns with the cuts in this budget,” said Giddings. “That’s what happens when you start dealing with a budget and everyone starts to look at their own constituency, their own district, and the needs of their own district. That’s where the outrage begins. Even the most conservative of people who want to say, ‘Yeah, let’s cut the budget,’ it’s all fine and good until something gets cut in their district. HB 1 closes down four community colleges, all in Republican districts. I can tell you that while those people would mostly be considered conservatives, the outrage was real.”
With the Senate’s somewhat less harsh version of the budget now in hearings, the continued wrangling over the Rainy Day Fund having yet to play out, and the possibility of a more positive revenue projection to come from Comptroller Combs, there’s a chance that the most apocalyptic scenarios will be avoided. Nonetheless, Giddings sees the current crisis as an opportunity to argue for fundamental ideals of fairness, regardless of its outcome.
“I think there’s no question that we’re all in this together, because Texans can be compared to a boat. When there’s a hole in one end of the boat, people can rush to the other end if they want to, but eventually the whole boat fills up with water and sinks.”
“I think there’s no question that we’re all in this together, because Texans can be compared to a boat. When there’s a hole in one end of the boat, people can rush to the other end if they want to, but eventually the whole boat fills up with water and sinks.”
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