I consider this to be a victory.
The state’s constitutional spending cap will remain untouched this session, and House and Senate leaders are blaming each other for the lack of action on the arcane but politically important measure.
Senate Republicans had sought to tighten the rules that guide how much future state budgets can grow, but House and Senate negotiators said in interviews Sunday that talks between the chambers fell apart late Saturday on Senate Bill 9, the last bill standing on the matter.
“The Senate passed the people’s priorities, the Governor’s priorities and my priorities on the spending cap and ethics reform during this legislative session,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said in a statement Sunday. “The House chose to ignore these very important bills.”
House Speaker Joe Straus argued it was the Senate that was intractable on an issue that defied simple answers.
“The House passed responsible, well-thought-out language that recognizes the spending limit is a complicated issue, not a sound byte,” Straus said in a statement Sunday. “The Senate rejected this approach.”
Under the Texas Constitution, state spending cannot grow faster than the state’s economy. Ahead of each legislative session, state leaders set a growth rate for state spending based on the estimated rate of growth in Texans’ personal income over the next two years. (The rate picked just before the current session: 11.68 percent.)
Gov. Greg Abbott joined Patrick in calling for basing the growth rate instead on the estimated combined growth in population and inflation, a figure that, more often than not in recent years, has been smaller in Texas than the growth in the economy. But the House, concerned about the impact on future Legislatures, preferred a non-binding measure that would have factored in how different areas of government spending grow at different rates.
In the end, the two chambers remained miles apart.
[…]
In the House, Appropriations Chairman John Otto, R-Dayton, viewed the Senate’s approach as unworkable. As the House’s lead budget writer, he also expressed concerns about how the bill would impact future Legislatures.
“All of you know we passed a very conservative budget out of the house,” Otto told House members last week. “It would have failed SB 9.”
Otto opted to replace Hancock’s population/inflation metric with limits for different areas of government spending, such as transportation and health care, with each one based on a combination of how spending in that category was expected to grow as well and how the population served by each category was expected to expand.
He also amended the bill so that those new spending limits were no longer mandatory, but would simply be reported to state leaders who then could choose to factor that information into setting the growth rate.
During negotiations with the Senate over coming up with a compromise version, Otto said his concerns about hamstringing future legislatures remained.
“I wanted it to be considered. I didn’t want it be the mandate,” Otto said. “I was happy to include what the Senate’s methodology was as well as the methodology that was in my substitute.”
Just a reminder, in addition to the existing cap, we also have a constitutional mandate for a balanced budget, which in its way serves as a spending cap, too. At a time when the state has a lot of short-term needs like its pension funds and all kinds of facilities that need maintenance, the Lege chose to hoard billions of dollars that may never get spent given how much harder it is to tap the Rainy Day fund. Restricting spending further, with a school finance ruling looming and an economy that has cooled considerably, is just plain nuts. I’m glad we managed to dodge this bullet for another biennium, but I don’t know how much longer that can happen in the absence of some fundamental changes in our politics.