THE 3rd CALLED SPECIAL SESSION OF THE 79th LEGISLATURE

APRIL 30TH - Review of the First Week of the Special Session

My first event this past week was early Sunday evening when I gave the welcoming address to a group of conferees from around the world gathered at the University of Texas to look at "Opening up a Closed World: What Constitutes Effective Prison Oversight" Dr Michele Deitch at UT and Professor Michael Mushlin of the Pace Law School in New York had been the driving force in setting up the conference and Senator Whitmire and I had been asked to welcome them. Since Sen. Whitmire was meeting with his Superintendents Sunday evening I usurped his time and added it to mine to give the entire welcoming address in the Lt Governors Reception Room behind the floor of the Senate at the Capitol. It was a very well attended reception, a very interesting group that included world wide expert including Judge William Wayne Justice amongst others. The outline of my remarks are on the webpage www.jerrymadden.org and I do believe they were very well received. The conference went on for most of the week and I did attend one of their sessions on Tuesday.

Last week was a very interesting and I feel very productive one for the House of Representatives. The week started on Sunday when we held a Republican Caucus and discussed the 5 bills dealing with the Supreme Court directive to fund education and the plans developed to meet those needs and the other items in the Governor's call which included the property tax relief, the dedication of any new revenues to property tax relief, and the changes to the taxes necessary to insure the property tax cuts.

Some of the issues that had arisen included the opposition of some school districts to the allowing of local enrichment to be free of recapture, the opposition which was expected from some groups that opposed the revisions to the franchise tax, the move to utilized just the surplus for property tax relief, the desire from some groups not to require an election to use all of the local enrichment options, and several individual problems of some companies with the methods in the franchise bill. There was general agreement amongst our Republican members that we needed to pass House Bill 1 which was the minimal answer to the Supreme Court requirement. There was also pretty uniform agreement that we must give the local citizens the right to vote on the local enrichment after the first year. I believe there was also a strong belief among the majority of our members that we needed to show leadership and courage and not do just the minimum of HB1.

On Monday morning I had some interesting meetings with people from the Texas Department of Corrections on Parole issues. This is another area my Corrections Committee deals with and we are really interested in looking at programs that work to integrate the offenders back in the community and do our utmost to insure they are in fact law abiding citizens and do not reoffend. We also want to make sure and monitor those violent predators that have served the time they were sentenced to by a judge or jury and that our monitoring programs work to tell us where they are at all time.

I also met with some of my good friends from Collin County who are part of the Texas Tea Party. They wanted to get me to oppose HB3 since they feel it is an unnecessary tax. We had a very friendly and informative session and I think we can say we remain good friends even if on this issue we disagreed. I do agree with them on almost all their social issues and have carried some legislation in those areas in the past. And I expect we will agree on more issues than we disagree on in the future.

The rest of Monday was the actual floor debate and voting on 4 of the 5 bills. The strategy had been to limit some of the areas that could be voted on in the Property Tax relief bills. This kept us from making budget votes on whether to do property tax relief or spend money somewhere else. The strategy had been initially to bring up HB3 but many of us had recommended to the Speaker we start with HB2 and since some of the fiscal information from the Comptroller was not available on some of the amendments to HB3 we did delay it and start with HB2. HB2 dedicated any money raised from the revised business tax, the cigarette tax increase, and the liars affidavit bill to a fund that can only be used to cut your property tax. The opposition to this wanted to use the revenues for something else (mostly Democrats) or did not want to increase any of the taxes (some Republicans). But as expected it passed.

The HB3 had been postponed to afternoon so the next bill on the calendar was HB1. This is the minimum plan to meet the court requirement. The major debate on it was whether or not to recapture the local enrichment. As I have said elsewhere all of our Collin County Legislators voted to no allow recapture on local enrichment but unfortunately there are still more receivers than givers and the bill was amended to recapture local enrichment. I honestly believe this was driven more by greed on the part of certain districts because I truly believe if this remains in the bill it will make it so they do not get any more money since it will be virtually impossible for most large recapture districts to get their people to vote for any enrichment when most of the tax dollars do not go to their children. The only redeeming graces here are that the Senate and state leadership continue to work on this, that it can be solved by increasing the yield amounts, and that as the property tax is reduced recapture(Robin Hood) is first reduced and pretty quickly eliminated for districts like Richardson and Plano and Lovejoy for instance.

We all felt this bill had to pass and it did overwhelmingly.

This then brought up HB3 the Perry Sharp franchise tax bill. It had a lot of interesting debate. As I said last night we did a couple of very good things to the bill. The statewide election requirement to increase the rate provides a lot of protection against future legislatures raising the tax. And the segment that does not allow a business using illegal immigrants from counting as a wage reduction for calculations in the tax makes it less of an incentive to hire people that are not legally in the country. I also liked the two amendments that protected the leasing companies and that helped companies like EDS, that had faithfully paid the franchise tax while others found loopholes and avoided payments, from losing any losses they had as carry forwards on their current franchise tax. Also the amendment on medical savings accounts while described as a clean up will be a positive for the use of these plans by various companies.

There were a lot of people who worried about this vote and who will have some concerns. However the general reaction has been positive in the press and I am hopeful will be well received by most of our citizens once the session is over. The vote for the bill while not overwhelming was fairly substantial and had both Republicans and Democrats supporting the bill.

We also passed the bill on car sales taxes Monday evening and then there was a point of order sustained by the Speaker on the Cigarette Tax bill.

On Tuesday after just a few hours sleep I had several meetings in Austin. I met with the Texas Property Lending Association and talked about bills that I had worked on and supported in the last session. They are now better organized and I look forward to getting some good results with them in 2007. I then spent almost two hours with the Governor's criminal justice staff and we worked on some critical areas we believe need either action of the Legislative, Executive or both in the near future. Some of those items you will be hearing about in the next week or two. I will keep you posted as we move on these areas.

Wednesday I attended the meeting of the Subcommittee of Correction on Correctional Managed Health and on our special populations in Texas prisons. We had very interesting and emotional testimony from experts in these areas. These hearing will lead to several recommendations for the 80th Legislature.

Thursday I met with the Representative of the Catholic Bishops who gave me a progress report on some of the requests of the bishops and some of the things they are doing in the area of serving inmates and the needs of former inmates, plus programs in the community to keep children from getting involved in criminal activities. On the floor that day we had a resolutions calendar where I did a resolution for our Probation Department people on some of their work with some of their Polish colleagues and we did a resolution on the Conference at UT. We also took up and passed the HB5 which is the cigarette tax increase bill.

After the session I stayed in Austin working on several items and met with the Governor on corrections issues particularly those we had worked on with his staff earlier in the week. We made several recommendations to him and I believe they were favorably received.

Friday was my day to return to Plano and get some work done in my insurance office and spend some time with my family and of course also write these reports to you. I will be returning to Austin early Monday morning.

As we start the third week of the 3rd special session of the 79th Legislature there is reason for a great deal of optimism on all sides. The House has passed all the major tax legislation and the Senate Finance Committee has met and sent to the Senate floor 3 of the bills. One of those is HB3 which is the Perry-Sharp or Sharp-Perry plan for changing the business tax structure. This bill was sent to the Senate floor without amendments. If it passes the Senate in this form it will go directly to the Governor for his signature. This legislation will change the tax structure of the state of Texas and will allow us to significantly cut property taxes over the next 3 years or more. I firmly believe that under this plan most of my constituents will see their taxes lowered. While I in my business may pay more I am certainly willing to do that to lower most of my voter’s property taxes. The Senate has also sent the property tax fund bill HB2 and the automobile tax bill HB4 to the floor for debate. They are working on HB1 and HB5 and hopefully they can get some resolve on recapture and on funding. In addition they have an SB6 which we will work on as it comes to the House. The Senate is also working on the education bill and once the tax items are passed I am sure the Governor will open up the call at least to those items in their education bill. That will give us a short time to work on them but I am optimistic we will get them done. Those of my readers who want us to do more in education should encourage the Senate to move quickly and pass HB1, HB2, HB3 and probably HB4 and 5 also. That should get the Gov to open the call later this week to education items. If those bills are not passed this week it will be very difficult to get the school bills done by the end of the session.

It will be an interesting week and a critical one. I appreciate all of you and look forward to hearing from you.

Jerry Madden