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By W. Gardner Selby and Lisa Sandberg
San Antonio Express-News Austin Bureau
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Perry to legislators: Let's go get the job done
AUSTIN — With the desk of a San Antonio colleague suddenly vacant, lawmakers opened the 2005 regular session Tuesday, with the state's Republican leaders hoping to overhaul public school funding and write a two-year budget without socking taxpayers.
"I have great optimism," Gov. Rick Perry told the Senate after telling the House he remembers being sworn in as a rookie legislator 20 years ago. "Let's go get the job done."
Rep. Elizabeth Ames Jones, a Republican re-elected to a third term representing a Northeast Bexar County district, didn't take her oath of office, after Perry announced she was his choice to succeed Charles Matthews on the Texas Railroad Commission.
Jones is expected to seek a six-year term on the commission next year. Matthews was selected last week to head the Texas State University System.
The Republicans now have an 87-63 majority in the House after Democrats picked up a seat in the November elections, though former Rep. Talmadge Heflin of Houston and Eric Opiela of Karnes City , both Republicans, have charged voting irregularities and asked the House to overturn their defeats.
Members nearly unanimously elected Rep. Tom Craddick, R-Midland, to a second two-year run as House speaker.
One of four Democrats to vote "no," Rep. Paul Moreno, D-El Paso, said later, "I cannot support an administration that has been so inhumane to the needs of children, the elderly, the handicapped. I just can't."
Two years after a session tinged with acrimony over tort reform and congressional redistricting, Craddick predicted the 79th Legislature will be a historic success. The regular session ends May 30.
"As members of a large body ... we agree on issues ... we disagree on issues ... and we agree to disagree ... but we respect one another and everyone else who interacts with us," he told members.
Craddick welcomed 18 new legislators, as well as the wife of a Houston member who is in the National Guard and serving in Afghanistan . Melissa Noriega is serving for Rick Noriega, a Houston Democrat, only while he is overseas.
Rep. Robert Puente, D-San Antonio, joined others who spoke in favor of Craddick's re-election as speaker without mentioning a criminal ethics investigation into how pro-Republican groups collected and spent campaign funds in the 2002 elections that elected the first GOP House majority since the 19th century.
The Travis County district attorney has been probing Craddick's links to Texans for a Republican Majority, whose top fund-raisers were indicted last year and charged with taking illegal corporate contributions. Craddick has said he's done nothing wrong and does not expect to be indicted.
Puente praised Craddick for exacting no retribution on Democratic members when they returned from Ardmore , Okla. , toward the end of the 2003 regular session after successfully depriving the House of a quorum needed to take up congressional redistricting.
Republicans prevailed after three special sessions on redistricting that year.
"I went into his office expecting to be read the riot act, to be taken to the woodshed," Puente said. Craddick "had me come into his office, he had me sit down and the first thing he said to me was, 'How the hell did you get 51 people to go on the bus?'
"And his second question was, 'Why did you pick Ardmore ?'"
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst watched over the Senate as members elected Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, as president pro tempore, a position second in line to the governor behind the lieutenant governor.
Shapiro, who heads the Senate Education Committee, urged colleagues to dedicate the session to children.
Dewhurst told reporters he hopes to present a "consensus" school reform and funding package by the end of this week. He has asked senators to sign off on plan principles.
Sen. Leticia Van de Putte of San Antonio , re-elected Monday as chairwoman of the Senate Democratic Caucus, said she hopes any plan entails teacher pay raises and full-day pre-kindergarten.
Senators privately have discussed a one-third reduction in school property tax rates that would then be applied as a statewide property tax, while increasing state sales, motor vehicle sales and cigarette taxes.
They also have studied replacing the corporate franchise tax, now paid by one in six businesses, with a tax paid by all businesses.
House members, who last year devised a payroll tax opposed by Perry for its effect on job creation, have been mum on whether they might attack funding issues differently this year.
Lawmakers convened a day after Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn said state taxes, fees and the Texas Lottery would yield $6.4 billion more in 2006-07 than lawmakers earmarked in 2004-05.
She said, though, that $6 billion is needed to fund health insurance for the poor and to cover the state's share of retirement fund contributions for new school employees and to reverse an accounting maneuver approved by the budget-strapped 2003 Legislature that put off a month's school aid to the next two-year budget.