In their inaugural speeches last week, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick and Governor Greg Abbott said that governor, the speaker and members were going to find a way for long term property tax relief with the billions of dollars from the surplus. Both laid out property tax cuts as their top priority.
Filed by Senate Finance Committee Chair Senator Joan Huffman, SB 1 would increase the homestead exemption from $40,000 to $70,000 at a cost of $1.8 billion for the state.
Another $12 billion has been earmarked for further property tax cuts to be proposed in separate legislation. The amount that homeowners could write off of the taxable value of their home before assessment would nearly double under the budget proposed by the Senate last Wednesday.
The pair were also united on school choice, saying that this will be the session in which the state joins 30 others in passing some sort of choice program, though legislation is still forthcoming. The measure generally allows parents to withdraw their students from public school and take the amount the state is spending to educate them to go to a private school, a plan facing opposition from many small, rural districts who don’t want to lose the dollars.
Abbott and Patrick each addressed the electric grid and expect a bevy of bills aimed at ensuring the lights stay on in Texas no matter what.
Abbott praised last session’s efforts toward that goal. “Last summer we set eleven all-time power generation records and last month, we weathered brutally freezing temperatures across the state all without any disruptions,” he said, “This session we will build a grid that will power this state, not for the next four years, but for the next 40 years.”
Patrick was more specific about plans for stability, saying that the state must incentivize dispatchable generation, like natural gas plants, in order to ensure there is plenty of electricity to meet the demands of one of the fastest growing states in America.
“We need dispatchable energy we can count on. We will add more megawatts of thermal generation and strengthen the grid,” he said.
Other priorities laid out by Patrick for the session were represented in the Senate draft budget released Wednesday afternoon, including $350 million for rural law enforcement, and $2.5 billion to create a university fund for institutions outside the University of Texas and Texas A&M systems, allocate $4.6 billion towards state border security efforts, more money for state hospitals and mental health services, and $228 million towards foster care reform.