June 29, 2005

House Leaders Save School Bill
with El Paso Medical School Deal

By Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside Editor

Texas House Republican leaders made the El Paso delegation an offer its members wouldn't refuse - and it saved the school finance bill from going down in flames late Tuesday night after 13 hours of debate.

The House approved House Bill 2 on a 77-70 vote after three El Paso Democrats and the city's only Republican lawmaker abandoned their opposition to the measure amid promises of state funding for a four-year medical school in the border town.

Without the El Pasoans' support, the bill presumably would have failed by a single vote or in a tie if Speaker Tom Craddick would have voted aye from the chair. As it turned out, the bill would have passed if just one out of the four El Paso legislators had back it because one Democrat was absent during the special session floor fight.

But the wheeling and dealing appeared to be an all-or-nothing proposition for a delegation that's been criticized both at home and in Austin as ineffective and irrelevant at times. The El Paso House members - Republican State Rep. Pat Haggerty and Democratic State Reps. Norma Chavez, Joe Pickett and Chente Quintanilla - had all opposed HB 2 during the regular session. The three El Paso Democrats had voted earlier Tuesday against a motion to table an amendment that would shelved the leadership's plan in favor of a Democratic alternative school funding proposal. The Democrats' plan failed by one vote.

Democratic State Rep. Paul Moreno was the only member of the El Paso delegation to vote no on HB 2.

The special session debate on HB 2 wasn't the first time the medical school has been used as a key bargaining chip on major issues before the Legislature during the past two years. During the regular session in 2003, Quintanilla, who was a freshman lawmaker at the time, went public with accusations that former House member Talmadge Heflin had dangled funding for the medical school as bait to secure the El Paso Democrats' support for a constitutional amendment that became known as Proposition 12. Chavez ended up being the only Democrat from the border city to join a dozen other Democratic members who sided with Republicans to pass the medical malpractice liability proposal with only one vote to spare. When the regular session ended, the medical school funding hadn't made the final cut.

The border city's envisioned med school came back into play during a summer special session on redistricting that year as word got out that funding for the project might be endangered if State Senator Robert Duncan didn't back out of a standoff with Craddick over congressional district lines in West Texas. Duncan, a Lubbock Republican, supports funding for the medical school because it would be part of the Texas Tech University System. Duncan was never threatened directly - but Craddick still prevailed in the one-on-one confrontation with the senator. When the Legislature finally approved a new U.S. House map for Texas, it contained a congressional district drawn so that a candidate from Midland would be favored to win. Craddick, a Texas Tech graduate himself, has represented Midland in the House for 37 years.

Members of the El Paso delegation appeared miffed earlier this month when Craddick reportedly removed the money for the medical school from the appropriations bill at the last minute before the regular session came to an end. The evaporated funding prompted to Chavez to suggest that Pickett had gone overboard claiming credit for winning support for the med school money from his post on the Appropriations Committee. Others blamed high-level Texas Tech administrators for quietly backing other projects on the drawing boards over funding for a medical school that would be located in a city 340 miles away from the university system's home base in Lubbock.

The final budget in regular session contained $7 million that would give Texas Tech the ability to complete construction of the El Paso medical school. But it failed to provide an additional $40 million needed to pay facuilty and other staff members and equipment and supplies.

The House leadership's second victory in three months on the school reform legislation by State Rep. Kent Grusendorf will not be complete until the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee can find the votes for a tax bill that Craddick says is essential to HB 2. The speaker said the House will debate an accompanying tax measure next Wednesday if the committee approves something this week.

Grusendorf, an Arlington Republican, said the school bill would provide a record increase in funding for public education while making the school system more equitable than it's ever been. The bill would boost funding at least 3 percent for each school district at the same time it created a $200 million incentive fund for teachers.

Last week Ways and Means Chairman Jim Keffer said he didn't have the votes in committee to pass HB 3 - the tax plan that cleared the House in the regular session. Keffer said the same thing this week about Governor Rick Perry's school finance proposal.

But Craddick reportedly has been working on a compromise plan that the committee might consider this week.