Blueprint for Success

When the Texas Legislature convenes Jan. 13 for its 81st legislative session, hundreds of competing interest groups will be vying for a share of the state’s $168 billion budget and for attention from legislators regarding new laws benefiting various advocates.

County government isn’t exactly just another interest group, but it will still be in the middle of that fray, working to ensure unfunded mandates don’t come down the pipe and that new programs and laws are implemented in such a way that doesn’t harm taxpayers or local governments.

Legislators began filing bills earlier this month but are not yet in the depths of negotiations, so it’s now prime time for speaking with representatives, senators and their staff in person about any areas of concern, legislative goals, local priorities or other requests.

Several key legislative leaders took the time to speak with county officials during the interim Texas Association of Counties Annual Conference, held in August. County officials took the time to ask questions they had about the upcoming session — including legislators’ intent regarding appraisal and revenue caps — and legislators and other state government representatives wanted to encourage good communication among local officials.

Speakers included Terral Smith, the chief of staff for Speaker Tom Craddick; Kris Heckmann, the deputy chief of staff for Gov. Rick Perry; Julia Rathgeber, the director of policy for Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst; Don Green, Craddick’s director of budgeting and policy; Rep. John Otto, R-Dayton; and Rep Jim Keffer, R-Eastland, among others.

They gave tips on how to restore the partnership between state and local government. They admitted that partnership is difficult to achieve for the same reason it’s necessary: in the end, politicians are working for the same voters, though those voters don’t always differentiate between levels of government.

“(A partnership) does imply, I guess, equality, and there is not equality between the Legislature and the counties,” Smith, from Craddick’s office, told county officials attending the Texas Association of Counties Annual Conference. “Counties have to get their authority. It’s kind of like when I joined a law firm once, and they brought me in as a full partner. I soon learned there were partners, and then there were partners like me. The relationship, I think, is a partnership simply because the same people who elect county commissioners and county judges also elect legislators.”

While legislators do seem to have most of the power, partnerships with local officials are valuable because local officials tend to have their ear toward the ground more. Local officials know what residents and voters are passionate about, and they understand how different measures could impact different parts of a representative’s or senator’s district. Sharing that knowledge is key when speaking with a legislator.

“A lot of people don’t realize that our (state) Senate districts are larger than our federal congressional districts,” said Rathgeber, from Dewhurst’s office. “You can educate your senator on your particular issues — and provide alternative solutions so there is not a request that says, ‘we want such and such just because we want it.’”

“You have a lot of friends in the Legislature,” Smith added. “Just continue to work with your friends and hone your arguments and try to do it that way.”

Finding Partners

Oftentimes, when a county wants a specific issue addressed, the best way to get something done is to draft localized legislation. With 254 counties, it’s difficult for most solutions to benefit all counties, and many times issues can become contentious between rural and urban areas, instead of between, say, Democrats and Republicans or counties and another interest group.

“The problem that you have, and I discovered it up close and personally in the Legislature, is that the fast-growth counties and the suburban areas that are unincorporated areas are just a small portion of the state compared to the rural areas and the urban areas,” Smith said. “It’s easy for lobbyists, especially from different interest groups — whether it’s homebuilders, fireworks, or others — to find support (within a subset of counties) for just a general theme.”

That’s true of areas like fireworks authority: Some counties want greater regulations for safety reasons, while others enjoy the freedom of being able to light them off. It was also true of legislation regarding billboard regulatory authority: Some interest groups wanted counties to be able to protect scenic roadways from being infiltrated with certain billboards, but not all counties wanted that authority.

“The Legislature has been reluctant to give any kind of broad authority. Most of it is piecemeal,” Smith said.

If it’s the first time sitting down with a legislator about a particular issue, it may be best to come armed with more than one solution to a problem.

“Give them information about why a problem exists and how to address it through alternatives, rather than one route, so then that senator is equipped to talk to her colleagues about a broad range of options,” Rathgeber said, “as opposed to just one alternative that could pass or fail as it exists.”

For localized legislation, the best champion for a cause is most likely the area’s local representative or senator. Any legislation that impacts state dollars must begin in the House; otherwise it’s just about who a person sees around town most often. The same is true if a county wants to work with another county on legislation impacting just one region.

However, for legislation that could impact one office — say, something regarding redaction of private information from public documents — it’s best to approach specific committee members or legislators known to have an interest or history with a topic.

After the Attorney General released a controversial opinion toward the middle of the 2007 legislative session that stated county clerks must redact social security numbers from public records, several legislators immediately filed bills that sought to follow that opinion. The bills varied in scope and solution, but when it became apparent that clerks could begin facing criminal penalties for releasing information, the County and District Clerks Association of Texas banded together with the Texas Land Title Association (TLTA), the Texas Association of Realtors and the American Association of Professional Landmen — whose members had also been impacted by the AG opinion — to urgently explain why a redaction mandate would do more public harm than good. Together, the groups worked with Rep. Keffer to pass a bill through the House Energy Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over matters that the landmen and TLTA generally work on.

That effort was successful because multiple interest groups had the same intent and a unified voice. And there are many other examples that exist of legislation that passed or failed based on whether different groups saw eye-to-eye in time for the Legislature.

TAC conducts a pre-legislative session symposium for its constituent founding associations each year to discuss desired legislative changes and hopefully work out disagreements before bills are filed.

Mid-Session Etiquette

Once the session gets going, spare minutes with key legislators will be more difficult to find, and it’s easier for bills and issues to get lost in the mountain of changes, shelved for another two or four years. That means that county officials will have to adjust their communication efforts, said Victoria Ford, a government affairs expert who has worked in the House, Senate and Governor’s Office. Instead of expecting sit-down conversations or leaving phone messages, expect to walk and talk in Capitol building hallways and in between committee meetings.

“You may not always get a chance to sit down and comprehensively explain your issues to anybody, ever,” she said, though she did offer some advise on making the most of whatever time does become available.

1. Keep positions short, clear and concise. Prepare an elevator speech for each issue, which includes no more than five sentences: the issue of interest, the specific problem and its context, why the legislator should care about the problem, the solution to the problem, and what exactly they can do to support the solution, including the bill number of the legislation and when it will be up for vote. “You want them to be able to think, in their head, ‘House Bill 1215, marriage license, good,’” Ford said.

2. Give legislators contact information that includes the bill number of interest and your position on the bill, yes or no.

3. Mass letter writing campaigns become more effective, since most legislators will only have a couple minutes at a time to talk; individual emails are normally answered by a legislator’s staff, so one email probably won’t gain much attention.

While testifying in a public hearing is one way to voice concerns or support to legislators, Ford said it’s not the most effective since, by that point, negotiations have already been taking place and interested parties are already adding amendments behind the scenes.

“Testimony is useful because it puts it on the record that someone cared about this issue, but testimony is not really what convinces a member to vote one way or another,” Ford said, adding that testimony should be kept to those same five elevator-speech sentences. “You do not convince a member how to vote, 90 percent of the time, while you are testifying.”

But officials interested in shaping and promoting legislation need a greater informational foundation than just KISS (Keep It Simple…). Not only is it a good idea for officials to know their own issues frontwards and backwards in case a question arises, but when it comes to competing for dollars, it’s just like any other rivalry: know your competition. Otherwise, it’s difficult to argue why one problem deserves funding over the next.

Progressing to Stage 2

The procedure and effort that it takes to get a bill out of committee and into the respective calendar differs slightly between the House and the Senate. Bills that pass through their original Senate committees automatically move to the Senate calendar, whereas the House has two calendar committees (the Calendars Committee and the Local and Consent Calendars Committee), the members of which vote on whether or not to place a bill on its respective calendar.

“Usually in the Senate if you have worked out enough of the issues that you have with your bill to get support to pass it out of committee, then you should be fine being able to collect your 21 votes to move it out of the Senate. In the Senate, the bulk majority of the work that is done on a bill … should be done in committee,” Ford said, adding that a bill won’t pass if either the lieutenant governor refuses to call it up or if there aren’t 21 senators who will vote for the bill before it is called.

The added step in the House means that controversial bills that make it out of committee have the potential to be blocked by members of the House Calendars Committee, who work together with the Speaker to determine if a bill will be generally supported by the House membership. That means polling has a greater significance in the House, and it’s recommended that a group trying to pass legislation contact the Speaker and representatives on the Calendars committee before crunch time, to avoid any suprises or disruptions.

The other block, of course, could come from the Governor, who has the authority to veto any bill.

As a result of all the roadblocks and involved interests, many pieces of legislation are effectively drafted over the course of multiple sessions before finally ending in success. In that case, persistence is key.

For example, in the 79th session, the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas worked to introduce a bill that, if passed, would allow certain parole violators to bond out of jail pending a parole hearing. The purpose was to decrease jail overcrowding, save taxpayer money by expediting the hearing process and allow counties to recoup some costs from the state for extraordinary medical expenses related to convicted inmates awaiting transportation to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison system. The original bill contained contentious points between various groups, along with what amounted to a large fiscal note to the state, and it failed. So, during the interim, the Sheriffs’ Association spent time working with the groups that had opposed the bill and reached areas of understanding. Since the bill was favored by a majority of the interested parties by the start of the 80th session, it passed both the House and Senate and went to the Governor’s Office. The story ends there, since it was vetoed. The Sheriffs’ Association will again work to introduce improved legislation this go-around.

“A comprehensive approach to the Legislature is your best bet,” Ford said.

The amount of work and lack of time is especially true for legislators who sit on their respective budget committees, said Don Green, director of Budget and Policy for House Speaker Tom Craddick.

“The magnitude of the workload of the House Appropriations and Senate Finance committees is so massive with the amount of topics that they deal with financially — from highways to schools to public health to Medicaid to prisons — it’s difficult to get the attention of a member at the right time,” Green said.

“It’s really important on Appropriations and Finance that you find a champion,” he added. “If you don’t have somebody there that is going to step up and make a motion to spend money on something, you can go about and visit every member of the Appropriations Committee, and being a good politician, they will say, ‘Oh, yeah, we should do that, I think that’s a good idea,’ but if you don’t have that person that will really step up when it comes time to make that motion to add money, it won’t do you any good.”

Knowing the different House and Senate rules and deadlines is an important step in working with legislators on bills that impact state funding. The appropriations bill always starts in the House and must pass within 90 days of being filed, so that it enters the Senate sometime around the end of March or the beginning of April, Green said.

Amendments to most bills can be added at any time. However, if there is an amendment to the appropriations bill, the amendment must be pre-filed according to a given deadline, before the bill is to be heard before the House or Senate.

During most legislative sessions, there are usually between 500 and 600 amendments to the appropriations bill, Green said. Each pre-filed amendment must first be reviewed by the Legislative Budget Board staff, which determines if an amendment really does take away as much money from the budget as it adds. If an amendment doesn’t do that, it won’t be heard on the House floor unless two-thirds of members vote to hear it anyway — a near impossible task. Even after all the amendments go through the budget board process, amendments reaching the House floor can take days to sort through, especially since rules do allow for members to amend amendments, and those amendments do not have to follow the original calendar rule of balancing the budget. That can make an amendment easier to add, but more difficult to pass.

“The calendar rule usually says, if you are going to add money to the budget, you also have got to take money away from the budget,” Green said. “That can be a very tricky proposition for a politician.”

But that rule can occasionally be avoided by filing an amendment to an amendment, instead of a direct amendment.

“A lot of political games get played with that calendar rule,” Green added.

And, though the Legislative Budget Board often reviews potential impacts to local government budgets, its focus is on balancing the state budget. If a bill comes down the pipe that could cost local governments money, that’s not necessarily something the legislature takes into consideration unless there’s an advocate there to provide that information, which is one reason why it’s important for counties to have liaisons, such as those employed by TAC, who stay in contact with House and Senate committees and staff members throughout the session.

The Texas Legislature Online Web site allows any interested stakeholders to sign up for automated email alerts pertaining to committee actions and upcoming meetings, which can help officials follow bills as they progress through the session. In addition, TAC’s Core Legislative Team issues important action alerts during the session when the need arises. Any county official can become an extension of TAC’s Core Legislative Team and provide valuable access to local legislators by contacting TAC’s Legislative Department at (800) 456-5974.

First Impressions Count: Capitol Etiquette 101 While rules, calendars and deadlines do vary slightly between the House and the Senate, there is also some general etiquette to follow once legislators have returned to the table, especially when providing testimony at public hearings.

According to legislative liaisons from the Texas Association of Counties, the best etiquette includes:

Getting Up to Speed: Interim Charges That May Affect Counties

The 80th legislative session is still two months away, but work on the 2010-2011 budget has already started, and legislative interim committees have finished or are close to finishing their respective assignments.

Several of those studies could impact county government.

Most notable, interim committees were charged to study:

A more complete list of interim charges affecting county government can be found in the February 29, 2008 and December 21, 2007 editions of County Issues. The County Issues archives are available via the Texas Association of Counties Web site at www.county.org/resources/library/cissue.

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