Continued economic growth, no net tax increases and a projected revenue surplus for the current fiscal year were some of the predictions for Texas made by participants at the Oct. 3 “Perspectives on the Texas Legislature: 2013 Session” conference at the Baker Institute.
State legislators, budget professionals and journalists were among the speakers at the daylong event, which was hosted by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas. A conference highlight was a keynote address by Texas House Speaker Joe Straus. The speaker examined the short- and long-term challenges facing Texas, as well as the state’s considerable opportunities for continued growth and prosperity through the deepening and refinement of the successful Texas economic model. As reported in this week’s Texas Lyceum Poll, 70 percent of Texans believe the state’s economy is better off than the rest of the country, while only 7 percent consider the it to be worse off.
Other conference participants noted the higher-than-expected revenues being collected by the state during the current fiscal biennium, along with the possibility of continued growth during the next biennium. The upside to these two projections is that the revenue surplus for the current fiscal year will allow the legislature to cover the shortfalls that were built into the current budget in 2011, while the growth projections should allow the legislature to avoid the painful cuts that dominated the debate over the 2011-13 budget when they are crafting the 2013-15 budget this spring.
At the same time however, there was near-unanimous consensus that there would be no net tax increases nor a notable expansion of fees during the upcoming session. Furthermore, there was considerable agreement that the state’s rainy day fund would be tapped only sparingly, and even then only for projects that were without question one-time expenditures rather than recurring expenses. Thus, anyone who was hoping that the $4 to $5 billion that was effectively cut from K-12 public education last session would be restored during the upcoming session is likely to be disappointed.
The conference also examined political dynamics in the Texas House and Senate for 2013. The 2013-15 House is expected to closely resemble the 2011-13 House in terms of partisan composition (with a slightly smaller GOP contingent of between 90 and 95 out of a total of 150), leadership (no one doubts that Joe Straus will be re-elected by his fellow representatives as speaker), the presence of bipartisanship (there will continue to be both Republican and Democratic committee chairs) and the locus of political power (the centrist conservative wing of the Republican Party will continue to control the legislative agenda).
In contrast to the consensus of continuity in the House, there existed more doubts regarding the Texas Senate. One question related to how effective Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst’s leadership of the Senate would be in the aftermath of his failed U.S. Senate bid. A related concern was tied to the lieutenant governor’s re-election plans; while Dewhurst has publically stated he plans to run for re-election in 2014 many doubt that in the end he will be a candidate.
Other questions concerned whether Dewhurst would continue the Senate tradition of naming both Republican and Democratic committee chairs or if he would yield to the requests of the most conservative members of the GOP Senate delegation and name only Republican chairs. My general read was that the consensus was that he would most likely pursue a bipartisan approach, but with no one categorically ruling out the possibility of an all GOP committee chair lineup.
A final intra-Senate uncertainty was regarding who would chair the Senate Committee on Education in 2013, with Dewhurst reportedly undecided about whether the successor to retiring Sen. Florence Shapiro would come from the delegation’s centrist conservative bloc (Kel Seliger of Amarillo or Robert Deull of Greenville) or from its movement conservative bloc (Dan Patrick of Houston). Given Patrick’s outspoken support for parental choice reforms such as vouchers, this decision could have a profound impact on the debate over K-12 public education policy during the 83rd Legislative Session.
Mark P. Jones is the Baker Institute’s fellow in political science as well as the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies and chair of the Department of Political Science at Rice University.