Austin at Large: Not Fixing What’s Broken

What the state of Texas does, especially when the Legislature is in session, has a unique impact on Austinites, and the property-tax pandering that the GOP regime is now turning up to 11 is an obvious case in point. To catch you up, Texas has nearly $33 billion in extra money, the largest budget surplus ever. Mostly, that’s due to inflation driving up sales tax collections, along with the federal funds from COVID relief, the infrastructure bill, and now the Inflation Reduction Act, which are allowing the state to spend less of its own money.

The surplus has almost nothing to do with local property tax collections, but in their infinite wisdom, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are down with giving half of the surplus “back to Texas taxpayers” in the guise of property tax relief. Ultimately, this $15 billion spend is expected to translate into about $300 in relief to each of the state’s residential property owners. I don’t know about you, but my property tax bill last year was about $10,000, so I’m not even going to notice a $300 discount. (Ultimately, we’re just shifting the burden onto commercial property owners for a spell.)

Part of the game here is that state leadership does not want to bust the constitutional spending cap – the state budget cannot grow faster than the state’s rate of economic growth. That can be overruled by a simple majority vote in both houses, but it’s a testament to the brokenness of Texas politics that nobody has the stones to actually take that vote.

Maybe Ask CPS About That

If Texas politics weren’t broken, the Lege could simply send everybody in Texas a check for $300, or whatever, and accomplish the same ends more equitably. But the state’s GOP leadership knows where their voters are, and since Texas has the lowest voter participation of nearly any state, the electorate is wildly unrepresentative of the state as a whole. It’s as if Texas outsourced its electoral participation to Idaho or the Dakotas.

But there’s really no need to resort to any kind of gimmicks or heroic measures; the state could easily provide meaningful relief to local property taxpayers by actually using this money to do its job and funding all of the parts of state government that are endemically underfunded. Like Child Protective Services and the state foster care system, or simply by increasing the basic allotment in education spending so that districts like Austin ISD don’t have to hold tax rate elections just to pay teachers a living wage and spare them the inevitable burnout.

Or by paying for its share of infrastructure. Take as an example Williamson County, which is really quite purple now but which has lots of the aggrieved GOP property taxpayers to whom Abbott and Patrick have decided to pander. WilCo property taxpayers funded the expansion of multiple state highways in the county, back when the Texas Department of Transportation was not flush with cash. The state could pay off those bonds and create instant tax relief. This same dynamic is true in many of the swing counties and Lege districts that have begun to urbanize – Collin, Denton, Fort Bend, northern Bexar, as well as WilCo and Hays. If the GOP wanted to stop some of its bleeding in these now inner-ring suburbs, it has real options.

Or Maybe Some Deck Plazas

Or they could, for example, pony up the $800 million – a rounding error in the size of the surplus – to build the deck plazas and enhanced bridges I discuss in the feature story this week. According to TxDOT, it can’t pay for those things out of dedicated highway funds, but it may end up having to if, somewhere down the road between now and the final “record of decision” giving it the go ahead for construction, it should be decided that the caps are essential to mitigate environmental justice harms caused by widening the interstate. That drop-dead date is now near the end of 2025, so there will be another Lege session between now and then, so maybe this is not a dead letter.

It would not take any of y’all very long to come up with other examples of how Texas government is broken in ways that a one-time cash infusion would fix. Perhaps expanding Medicaid, which would help the local taxpayers of every county with a health care district, including ours. (We have enough money to pay for Texas’ share, which the feds could match 9-to-1, for at least another budget cycle.) However, we also need to be clear-eyed about who, in the GOP regime’s view, benefits from increasing state spending on underfunded programs – the people of Austin, who will capture the lion’s share of those new jobs. Nobody in charge of Texas government wants to do us that kind of favor.

A note on last week’s column: The city of Austin felt I took a cheap shot at City Manager Spencer Cronk by suggesting that he might be OK with the Austin Police Association’s attempt to screw up civilian oversight at the ballot box, because he’s friends with the treasurer of APA’s straw group. As we noted when we first reported this story, Cronk has instructed the city’s negotiating team to insist on removing oversight from the police contract, so we should judge him by his actions rather than by innuendo. I agree, and should have written something else.