Legislative UpdateThe Texas Legislature has wrapped up the 81st regular session without passing
“must-have” legislation. Some Texas state agencies—including the Texas
Department of Transportation and the Texas Department of Insurance—face an
uncertain future because lawmakers failed to pass legislation that would extend
their existence. This oversight will result in a special session at some future
date.
As always, legislators began the session by spending a day piously debating
and adopting rules of procedure, and then spent the next 139 days violating,
ignoring, or suspending those rules. But there the similarities to all other
sessions ended.
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The 2009 session was characterized, first and foremost, by the volume of work.
Lawmakers filed 7,609 bills and proposed Constitutional amendments. That’s an
increase of 19 percent over the 2007 figure and 29 percent more than 10 years
ago. It’s likely that no other American legislative body has ever filed that many
bills in a biennium. The volume of bills was made even harder to handle by a
five-day, late-session talk-a-thon in the House that prevented a voter
identification bill from being considered for passage but held up dozens of other
measures, as well.
As a result, the number of bills passed dropped slightly (please see the
accompanying chart). In 2007, lawmakers passed 23.5 percent of bills filed; this
year, only 19.3 percent made the cut.
For city-related bills, the success rate was even lower: roughly eight percent.
That’s good news for cities, since the lion’s share of the city-related bills would
have harmed municipal authority in some way.
In the final days of the session, it required procedural sleight-of-hand to pass
even the most non-controversial of bills. On the last day, almost nothing
happened. House members, for example, spent most of their time passing
resolutions recognizing staffers, friends, or family members. The highlight was a
high
resolution that recognized a lawmaker’s grandson for graduating from
school
. Then, the House suddenly adjourned without enacting important
legislation. Not long after, the Senate, in a fit of pique aimed at the House, also
called it quits.
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Opposelegislation that would unduly restrict the ability of the City to set its own
budget or raise the necessary revenue to provide services to City residents and
businesses.
There were over 25 different proposed bills that had to do with increases in
appraised value. Most of these had more of an impact on the way appraisal
districts operated, but there were a few that would have also negatively
impacted our ability to raise revenue.
There was one bill that we strongly disagreed with. SB 700 sought to limit the
authority of a city council to generate property tax revenue and was voted from
the Senate Finance Committee on Monday, April 20. However the bill died in the
calendaring stage.
As voted from the committee, the bill would have required a city to
automatically conduct a property tax rate ratification election any time the
city wishes to adopt a tax rate that exceeds the rollback rate(current law
requires a petition from citizens to trigger a rollback election).
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Supportlegislation that preserves local land use authority.
Opposelegislation that would erode local land use authority by restricting
the ability of cities to zone or rezone properties.
As is the case during each legislative session there are many attempts to
restrict cities ability to adopt or amend zoning regulations. This was also a
high legislative priority for TML. We are not aware of any bills that were
successful in this regard, but we will be updated on this matter by TML
next week.
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Supportlegislation that would permit greater local regulatory oversight of
intra-state pipelines.
Opposelegislation that would continue to preempt municipal regulation of
intra-state pipelines.
There were many bills introduced regarding mineral rights, gas drilling,
and pipeline regulations. A couple of bills that the City was opposed to,
HB 4441 and HB 2110 sought to take away local control and input over
pipelines and drilling. These proposed bills didn’t make it out of
committee or the calendars.
On the other hand Senator Davis, proposed quite a few bills relating to
gas drilling and pipelines that were favorable to cities. Only one of those
was successful and is waiting for the governors signature and that is SB
686 -Allowing Natural Gas Gathering Lines in TxDOT Rights-of-Way
–this legilslation is a hard-won compromise between pipeline operators,
local governments, and TxDOT, that would allow gas lines to be placed in
highway rights-of-way, helping reduce the need for condemnation of
private property.
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Support passageof an amendment to Texas Tax Code chapter 321
clarifying the “place of business” definition.
S.B. 636 -Sales Taxes: does the following in relation to sourcing of city
sales taxes: (1) provides that when goods are shipped within Texas by a
retailer with more than one legal "place of business" for sales tax
purposes, sales taxes shall be generally sourced at the location where
the retailer first received the order for the goods, provided the order was
placed in person; and (2) provides an exception to number 1 above for
cities with certain economic development agreements in place prior to
January 1, 2009, provided such cities provide notice to the comptroller
regarding those agreements.
This bill was sent to the governor on June 3 rd and awaits his signature.
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Seek passageof an amendment to Texas Tax Code 11.13 allowing taxing
entities to offer homestead exemptions as a hard dollar number under 20% cap.
Last year as we developed our budget we gave the residents of Southlake a
$5000 homestead exemption. After we approved this we were questioned as to
whether cities had the authority to actually set a hard dollar number as an
exemption rather than a percentage of valuation. While our city attorney
disagrees with this point of view, we attempted to get this clarified during the
legislative session.
HB 637 –Rep Guillen authored a bill relating to the authority of a governing
body of a taxing unit to adopt a local option residence homestead exemption
from ad valorem taxation as a hard number of not less than $5,000 or more than
$30,000.
The House committee sent this bill to calendars in April where it never received
any more attention. While this legislation did not pass, it is the City’s opinion that
we have the authority to continue issuing homestead exemptions in this manner.
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Here is a quick glance at some of the next legislative milestones. June 21 is the
deadline for the governor to sign or veto bills. The city manager’s office on
June 26 will be attending a legislative seminar sponsored by TML to be
informed about the impact of the 81 st legislature on municipalities.
And of course there is the potential of a special called session sometime in the
future, which the governor indicated he would call for.
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In the mean time if you have any legislative questions please give me a call.
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