Some state business gets done, but many at Capitol underwhelmed

Bills headed to Perry span health, education, marriage.

May 29, 2007

By Jason Embry, AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Students will face new testing requirements to graduate from high school, parents will save money for college through a revamped Texas Tomorrow Fund, Texans will vote on whether to spend $3 billion on cancer research, and couples will pay twice as much for a marriage license unless they take a premarital training class.

When they weren't fighting over who was in charge, lawmakers made those and hundreds of other changes to state law during their 80th regular session, which ended Monday.

Many of those proposals and others still need approval from Gov. Rick Perry, who has until June 17 to veto them, sign them or let them become law without his signature.

Other proposals failed and will not reach Perry, such as a statewide smoking ban, a late push for a summer freeze on the gas tax and a revamp of the law that guarantees a spot at any state university for freshmen who finished in the top 10 percent of their class at a Texas high school.

As they prepared to head home, some lawmakers were more proud of their work than others were.

"The people of the state of Texas, especially the least fortunate of the state, are far better off because of the work that has been done — and has been done, I might add, against the odds," said Rep. Helen Giddings, D-Dallas, referring to plans to cover more children with state-funded health care and to pay doctors more for treating children on Medicaid.

Others wondered whether lawmakers did much more than revisit decisions they'd made in previous years.

"This session is analogous to running on a treadmill," said Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio. "We may be moving, and there may be some hills and some speed, but at the end of the day, we're in the same place."

The Legislature spent much of the year in response mode, whether it was moving to block Gov. Rick Perry's order that schoolgirls receive the human papillomavirus vaccine or overhauling the troubled Texas Youth Commission after reading reports about a sexual abuse scandal in the agency.

Lawmakers also had to respond to a federal lawsuit by significantly increasing the money paid to physicians and dentists who see children enrolled in Medicaid.

And they had to respond to some of their own decisions from previous years, most notably by changing state laws written in 2003 that give private companies a key role in building and operating toll roads.

A compromise reached last week assures lawmakers that local toll road agencies, rather than private operators, will get first shot at building and operating turnpikes. The bill also limits the signing of private toll road contracts in the next two years.

The toll road issue has stirred up some voters around the state; some fear Perry's highway plans will overtake their land, and others don't like the idea of paying tolls.

"Our form of government is all about people weighing in and having some say in how to fix things, and that's all this body really tries to do," said Rep. Corbin Van Arsdale, R-Tomball. "Every two years, we get together and try to fix things, so the focus is on what's broken."

One flop of the session was a push by Perry and some lawmakers for major bills to soften the effects of rising appraisals on property values. Those proposals ran into staunch opposition from cities and counties that were helped by key legislators.

Michael Quinn Sullivan of Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, which advocates smaller government and lower taxes, said this year's session hasn't been very good for taxpayers because lawmakers did little on the appraisal issue and did not use the surplus to provide further tax cuts.

"That no additional harm was done to taxpayers is nice, but I think voters expected something substantive to be accomplished," Sullivan said. "On that count, this session failed to live up to the '06 campaign promises."