Texas Public Employees Association
December 2004 Advocacy Alert & Legislative Preview
•Communicate with Your Legislator – Take Action
•Key Budget Writer Supports Employee Pay Raises
•TPEA Retiree Alert – Take Action
•State
Auditor’s Office Issues Reports
State Workforce and Employee Turnover
•Legislative Preview of the 79th
Legislature
Texas Public Employees Association wants state employees
to be aware of legislative activities and developments affecting your
job and career.
TPEA is sending this message to our members and to state employees who
have participated at TPEA events and given us their e-mail addresses.
TPEA also requested and received e-mail addresses as public information
from a number of state agencies.
If you do not wish to remain on this list, you
can unsubscribe by
following the instructions at the end of this email.
Advocacy
Update: Communicate
With Legislators Now!
TPEA urges all state employees to communicate with legislators
and other state leaders about the need for adequate pay raises and to
maintain current health insurance and retirement benefits. The more personal
your communications with legislators, the more effective they are. So,
an in-person meeting is best, but phone calls and personal letters are
also effective ways to communicate. Emails and form letters or cards are
less effective.
For some ideas on what to include in a letter, please see the sample letter
posted on TPEA’s web site - click
here. The TPEA web site, our magazine Texas Public Employee
and TPEA’s regular email updates all provide the factual basis for
advocating for TPEA’s Legislative Agenda for the 79th Legislature.
TPEA expects that the Appropriations Bill will begin in the Senate this
session, and we are asking all state employees and retirees to write to
your local legislators, that is your Representative and your State Senator,
as well as key members of the Texas Senate: Lt. Governor David Dewhurst,
who presides over the Texas Senate; Senator Steve Ogden, Chairman of the
Senate Finance Committee; as well as Senators Robert Duncan, John Whitmire
and Judith Zaffirini. TPEA encourages all state employees and retirees
to communicate as widely as possible with all state legislators and other
state leaders. If you have the ability, please also consider writing Texas
House Speaker Tom Craddick and House Appropriations Committee Chairman
Jim Pitts. The sample letter above includes mailing addresses for members
of both the Texas Senate and the Texas House. A good general-purpose web
site for legislative information can be found at
http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/capitol.htm.
Key Budget
Writer Supports Employee Pay Raises
In a front-page
story in the December 4 Austin American-Statesman
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden (R-Bryan) expressed his
support for a state employee pay raise and discussed other key issues
affecting state employees.
TPEA Retiree
Alert: Communicate
With Legislators Now!
TPEA
staff believes it is likely that the Performance Review group now at the
Legislative Budget Board (LBB) may be considering a recommendation to
remove prescription drug coverage for Medicare-eligible retirees from
ERS and essentially require such retirees to use the new Medicare Part
D prescription drug benefit that goes into place January 1, 2006.
TPEA cannot verify that this recommendation will be made, we have reached
this conclusion after hearing that this topic is under consideration from
multiple, credible sources. The LBB recommendation may try to structure
this change to hold retirees “harmless”. However, if this
recommendation is made, it will have considerable weight with the Legislature.
This recommendation will likely be based on fairly substantial cost savings
to the state.
TPEA wants all state retirees to be aware of this situation and to begin
contacting legislators. A sample letter to legislators and other state
leaders is available.
Health care costs continue to be the biggest problem state employees and
retirees face. Health care costs are still projected to grow at 10 to
13 percent per year. There will likely be other LBB recommendations and
suggested changes to the ERS Health plan that TPEA will oppose. These
could include efforts to reduce the state’s share for dependent
coverage; the imposition of premiums or other costs for non-Medicare-eligible
retirees; and a number of increases in co-pays, deductibles and other
costs. There is a high probability that legislation will be introduced
to authorize or require that ERS offer Health Savings Accounts (HSAs).
Please get involved now by contacting your State Senator and State Representative.
Please also consider contacting the other key legislators we’ve
listed on the bottom of the sample letter.
State
Auditor’s Office Issues Reports on
State Workforce and Employee Turnover
Recent reports from the State Auditor’s Office (SAO) provide additional
information demonstrating the challenges Texas faces in maintaining an
experienced state workforce that can continue to deliver quality services.
These SAO reports examine state employee salaries, turnover rates and
the level of experience in the state workforce, demonstrating the challenges
state government faces in delivering the quality public services taxpayers
demand.
TPEA believes that, taken together, these reports represent mounting evidence
that increasing state employee salary disparities and major cost shifting
of health care benefits are undermining state agencies’ ability
to field a stable and experienced workforce. The single greatest contributing
factor to this growing problem is inadequate and non-competitive salaries.
Legislative
Preview of the 79th Legislature
The 79th Session of the Texas Legislature convenes on Tuesday, January
11, 2005 for its 140-day Regular Session. As always, the Legislature faces
a host of important issues and competing claims for limited state resources.
The next Legislature is expected to address public school finance; reform
of the state’s workers compensation system; a long-term solution
to the state’s water needs; improvements in Texas’ Adult and
Child Protective Services programs, and; a challenge that cross-cuts virtually
every other issue the Legislature faces, writing a two-year state budget
for fiscal years 2006 and 2007.
Appropriations
Act is Key Challenge for State Employees
While state employees are affected by a multitude of decisions made by
the legislature, none have anything close to the broad impact of the state
budget, or General Appropriations Act. No group of people in Texas is
more directly affected by budgeting decisions of the Legislature than
state employees.
The Comptroller of Public Accounts issues a revenue estimate for the next
biennium in January and this effectively sets the fiscal boundaries for
budget writers. The current 2004-2005 biennial budget totals $117.4 billion
and Lt. Governor David Dewhurst has said he expects the final 2006-2007
budget to be “north of $125 billion”, while Senate Finance
Committee Chairman Steve Ogden has said he expects the total “to
be in the neighborhood of $130 billion.”
There will be fierce competition for whatever funds are available to budget
writers. For instance, funding student enrollment growth among public
schools statewide over a biennium normally requires one to one and a half
billion new dollars. Requests for teacher pay raises and restoration of
the school district employee health stipend would cost several billion
dollars. Caseload growth for the Medicaid and CHIP programs could require
two to three billion new dollars, and efforts to restore cuts and other
programmatic changes to these programs made last session could raise this
total to five or six billion dollars. State universities believe they
need hundreds of millions of new dollars in appropriated funds. And, as
detailed below, it will require substantial new dollars for adequate state
employee pay raises and to maintain current health insurance benefits.
Employee Pay Raises and Compensation Issues
TPEA’s
Legislative Agenda for the 79th Legislature recommends pay raises of 4.5
percent in each year of the 2006-2007 biennium with appropriate monthly
minimum increases. Estimates from Comptroller Strayhorn indicate that
for general government agency employees this would cost $479 million in
General Revenue. A number of key state leaders have indicated an interest
in linking pay to performance, and TPEA supports efforts to provide funding
to agencies specifically for merit pay awards or other forms of compensation
for high performance. TPEA is also proposing increasing longevity pay
to $25 per month for every two years of state service and raising hazardous
duty pay to $12.50 per month for each year of service.
Health
Insurance Issues
TPEA supports maintaining current health insurance benefits with the state
continuing to pay the full insurance premium for employees and retirees
and half the cost for dependent coverage. In its Legislative Appropriations
Request (LAR) ERS estimated it would require an additional $426.6 million
in General Revenue funding to maintain current health benefits for state
and higher education employees and retirees. ERS’ LAR estimates
are based on a 13 percent annual cost increase trend. TPEA believes health
care inflation has slowed slightly and that ERS will ultimately require
less than the requested amounts. However, given the high cost to maintain
health benefits, TPEA is concerned about possible efforts to cut benefits
or shift costs. Among the proposals that may be under consideration, TPEA
is concerned about efforts to require ERS retirees to utilize the new
Medicare drug benefit and take away current ERS Medicare-eligible retiree
drug coverage. TPEA believes that this and other cost-cutting proposals
may be included in the Texas Performance Review report issued by the Legislative
Budget Board in January 2005.
Retirement
Issues
TPEA has received a high volume of calls asking if the rumor was true
that legislation has been introduced to change the primary retirement
eligibility requirement for ERS from the current “rule of 80”
to the “rule of 85.” While there has not been any legislation
yet introduced on this topic, this issue has been publicly raised and
could be considered by the next legislature. During a hearing of the Senate
Finance Committee earlier this year committee Chairman Steve Ogden requested
that both ERS and the Teachers Retirement System (TRS) provide him information
about how changing to the “rule of 85” would effect the financial
status of their retirement funds. TPEA believes the facts show that the
ERS retirement fund is strong and that there is no basis for such a radical
change as moving to the “rule of 85.” Unfortunately, the TRS
retirement fund has a significant unfunded liability that could conceivably
require the infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars to shore up the
fund, or a radical change in benefits, such as moving to the “rule
of 85”. TPEA will keep state employees informed on this issue.
Legislation
of Interest
SB 63, by Senator Todd Staples, increases state employee pay by $200 a
month.
HB 138, by Representative Chuck Hopson, increases hazardous duty pay based
on length of service with the state.
Important
Happenings
State Representative Jim Pitts (R-Waxahachie) has been named Chairman
of the powerful House Appropriations Committee by Speaker Tom Craddick.
Chairman Pitts represents House District 10, comprising Hill and Ellis
counties, and has served in the Texas House since 1993.
TPEA continues to monitor the election results of HD 149, where incumbent
State Representative Talmadge Heflin appears to have lost his re-election
to Hubert Vo. Representative Heflin had been Chairman of the House Appropriations
Committee and was a two-time TPEA Legislator of the Year. Rep. Heflin
has filed a challenge to the election results with the Texas House.
John Keel has been appointed State Auditor by the Legislative Audit Committee.
Keel previously served for ten years as Director of the Legislative Budget
Board, before retiring from that position this year.
Sign Up with An
Email Address Outside of the Office
TPEA has been building a new list of email addresses – ones that
don’t go to State computers or workplaces and instead to home and
web-based email accounts. Because you are receiving this email, we invite
you to join the new list. Signing up will ensure that TPEA can keep you
up-to-date on all issues concerning Texas State Employees. Click
here to add your email address.
If you are agency IT staff and need to contact TPEA about technical issues regarding this email please click here.
If
you do not wish to remain on this list, you can unsubscribe by
following the instructions at the end of this email.