Wednesday, May 21, 1997

Legislature's top 5 priorities still undone

Texas legislators, who left the starting gate on Jan. 14, have now rounded the final turn and face a furious stretch run to the June 2 finish line. Work on their agenda's five major issues remains incomplete.

Longtime Capitol observers have seen this repeated time and time again. Every two years, we seem to witness months of lawmakers filing bills and debating and amending them and postponing final action until the last few days when everything is passed in such a wild flurry of activity that you wonder if anybody could even know what all is being voted on.

Rather than justifying longer or annual sessions, such a pattern validates having a deadline, a moment of truth that forces lawmakers toward those compromises that most fully benefit the common good. Without an end point, a cutoff date - well, let's don't consider the possibilities.

Here are the 75th Legislature's five priorities, which the Reporter-News identified back on Jan. 12:

Property taxes

Gov. Bush's promotion of property tax relief has so dominated the session's time and energies that many other worthwhile bills didn't stand a chance of even being heard. Yet versions passed by the House and Senate differ as widely from each other as both do from Bush's original proposal. Bush, who has kept a hands-off policy regarding legislative debate, may have to step in to close the gap. Without genuine property tax reform, this session will be deemed a failure.

Welfare

The Clinton administration's long delay in rejecting Texas' proposal to permit the privatization of welfare eligibility determination has kept the Legislature from completing a comprehensive state plan to institute massive welfare reform. Many loose ends remain.

Water

Lt. Gov. Bullock gave this item such a high priority that he promised lawmakers' 75th session would be known as the "Water Legislature." So far, however, Texans have yet to see a long-range water conservation plan emerge.

Judicial selection

Preliminary House approval has been given to a bill that would separate appeals court contests from partisan primaries, letting candidates for those top judicial positions run without political labels in a November election. That's a great improvement over the current method that forces judges to campaign like party politicians, and it deserves final passage in both chambers.

Home equity loans

With the House and Senate each having approved some form of home equity lending, this looks like the year Texans will finally catch up with everyone else in the country and be able to use the investment in their homes to obtain loans if they so choose. The better House bill is less restrictive than the Senate's.

In addition to those five priorities, many other bills are awaiting a final vote. That's a tremendous amount of work to accomplish by a week from Monday. Perhaps it's a good argument for an even shorter legislative session, not a longer one.