House Freshman's Bills would Scrap
TPWD and Let Landowners Own Deer
Capitol Inside
March 17, 2025
Rookie Republican State Rep. Pat Curry wants to shrink Texas government on one hand and grow it with the other with bills that would abolish the Texas Parks & Wildlife and hatch a new agency called the Department of Marketing Services.
Curry - a wealthy local business leader in Waco - has submitted more legislation for consideration in the 2025 regular session than any other member of the freshmen class with 62 bills that he dropped in the hopper before the deadline for doing so on Friday. GOP State Rep. Joanne Shofner of Nacogdoches ranks second among the lower chamber's first-term member in the bill filing count with 50 proposals that she's authored in her debut session.
Curry seized the lead in the House frosh legislation submission tally on the day before the window closed when he filed 29 bills including the TPWD shuttering proposal and marketing services agency conception plan. The measure that would dismantle the state parks and wildlife agency could be Curry's way of making the most of an appointment to a Delivery of Government Efficiency Committee that Speaker Dustin Burrows created in an apparent attempt to emulate the Elon Musk effort at the federal level.
The Curry proposal to kill off the parks and wildlife department and commission may appear at first glance to be a cost-saving move in the spirit of making state government more efficient. But some House Republicans are speculating that House Bill 4938 stems more from a personal beef that Curry has with the agency over policies that deal with deer.
The bill would shift the TPW responsibilities to several other agencies including the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Public Safety. Curry is sponsoring another measure in House Bill 4939 that would declare deer to be the property of landowners when they have fences that are high enough to contain them. Deer fall into the category of wild animals that belong to the people of Texas in current law. State and local governments do not have the authority to restrict their ability to roam freely over the land here.
Curry's legislative program also features a proposal that allow the state to issue license plates that say "animal friendly" as a way of raising money for spray-neuter programs and the welfare of animals in general in House Bill 4600. Curry initially submitted a bill would have done the same without the animal friendly term on the plates.
The freshmen Republican House members filed less than 27 bills on average before the deadline.
more to come ...
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