Tag Archives: rainy day fund

About that Rainy Day fund

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

Peggy Fikac puts it in perspective. Why are state GOP leaders so firmly against spending more money from the rainy day fund for public education? As some explain with increasing clarity, it’s because budget writers have all but spent it … Continue reading →

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House Appropriations follows Senate, passes SB1

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

The grim march of the inevitable takes another step. The House Appropriations Committee voted along party lines on Saturday to recommend a controversial plan to reduce public education spending by at least $4 billion, cuts which hundreds of Texans later … Continue reading →

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Senate Finance committee does its thing again

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

I wouldn’t call the pace of this special session “fast”, but they do have the ball rolling, starting with the Senate Finance committee as they re-approve a budget, or at least a budget figure. The Senate Finance Committee voted 10-1 … Continue reading →

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Back to school finance

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

The Lege has started the process of picking up where it left off on school finance. The Trib reminds us how we got here. [T]he earlier failure of SB 1581, which put a behind-closed-doors conference committee in charge of any … Continue reading →

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Davis filibusters SB1811, special session looms for tomorrow

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

Hoo boy. Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, filibustered for a little more than an hour Sunday night, probably killing a school finance and revenue bill critical to the budget (it’s still possible for a four-fifths supermajority of the Senate to … Continue reading →

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Vote on school finance today

Posted on May 29, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

On Friday night, the Lege finally reached an agreement on school finance, which is to say on how to distribute the $4 billion in cuts to public education to the school districts. Today the Lege gets to vote on that … Continue reading →

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Budget passes

Posted on May 29, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

It’s official. The Texas House and Senate passed a state budget Saturday that cuts billions from public schools, state universities and health care for the elderly. The $172 billion legislation now goes to Gov. Rick Perry for his signature. Facing … Continue reading →

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We have a budget

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

Such as it is. Budget negotiators met briefly this morning and voted 9-1 to adopt a conference committee report that cuts the state budget over the next biennium by $15 billion, or 8 percent. The total amount of funding from … Continue reading →

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Still no school finance plan

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

Tonight’s the night for something to happen if it’s going to, because legislatively speaking there is no tomorrow. The 2012-13 state budget agreed to by House and Senate negotiators provides school districts $4 billion less than what they are owed … Continue reading →

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School finance still to be done

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

We may have a budget deal, but what we still don’t have is a school finance plan. The Senate’s long-stalled plan to apportion a $4 billion reduction in school aid had been suddenly resurrected, passed and zipped over to the … Continue reading →

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Trauma centers feel the pinch, too

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

Like everything else in the state, trauma centers at hospitals will see their funding get cut, and they are warning about the consequences. The officials from Memorial Hermann, Ben Taub and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston came … Continue reading →

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Budget deal reached

Posted on May 21, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

One less reason for a special session. Assuming nothing else goes wrong, and Rick Perry doesn’t veto it out of whatever sense of grandeur and vanity drives him. House Speaker Joe Straus indicated legislative negotiators have reached an agreement on … Continue reading →

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Senate passes supplemental appropriation with extra rainy day funds

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

I guess I hadn’t realized that the Senate hadn’t gotten around to passing a bill to close the deficit from the last biennium, since the House had done that a long time ago amid a huge debate about using Rainy … Continue reading →

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Nothing is dead, and nothing is certain

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

The deadline for passing House bills on second reading was midnight Friday last week, which means that tons of bills are technically dead, as they can no longer be brought to the House floor for a vote. However, bills can … Continue reading →

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So what happens if there isn’t a school finance deal?

Posted on May 14, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

You may recall that having to change the school finance formula to distribute the billions of cuts to public education is causing problems with the budget. What happens if no changes are made to the formula? The Trib contemplates the … Continue reading →

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House class size bill fails to pass

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

HB400, the House bill that would among other things allow for larger class sizes and furloughs and pay cuts for teachers, failed to pass before the midnight deadline last night. The bill from Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, would have … Continue reading →

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The end of full day pre-K

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

More ways in which the Lege is abdicating its responsibility to Texas. Although many experts say these full-day classes are beneficial to children, looming cuts to education funding have put many of these full-day pre-K programs on the chopping block … Continue reading →

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ParentPAC speaks about public ed funding cuts

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

Good. The two-year budget passed by the Texas House is destructive, reducing public school budgets by $7.8 billion over the biennium. The budget passed by the Senate is better, but it cuts about $4 billion and leaves school funding woefully … Continue reading →

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The budget work is far from done

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

The Senate may have passed its budget via some creative interpretation of its rules, but there’s more to what has to happen now than just the conference committee. As Abby Rapoport notes, they still have to rewrite the formula for … Continue reading →

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Senate passes its budget

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

Once the rules were suspended to allow the budget bill CSHB1 to come to the floor, this became a mere formality. The Texas Senate took minutes to tentatively approve a proposed $176.5 billion, two-year state budget Wednesday in a party-line … Continue reading →

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Senate fails to bring the budget to the floor

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

It started Monday when Senate Finance Chair Sen. Steve Ogden said he might pull same Rainy Day funds out of the budget in order to get more Republican (read: Dan Patrick) support for it. After some discussion about alternate ways … Continue reading →

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Senate makes progress on the budget

Posted on May 1, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

They still haven’t gotten to the actual budget yet, but they’ve passed a bill that allows for some extra “non-tax revenue” plus a bunch of accounting gimmicks, which makes their less-penurious-than-the-House budget possible. The Texas Senate, digging publicly for money … Continue reading →

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Dewhurst flips, then flops, on using rainy day funds

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

First he says he’s against it. [Lt. Gov. David] Dewhurst sounded supportive of the overall level of spending in the Senate plan, but voiced a preference for using what he calls nontax revenue items instead of the rainy day fund. … Continue reading →

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Senate Finance Committee passes its budget

Posted on April 22, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

The fight over the Rainy Day Fund is now officially on. A $176.5 billion budget for the 2012-13 biennium — 5.9 percent smaller than the current budget but almost $12 billion larger than the version passed earlier by the House … Continue reading →

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Is it time to fix school finance?

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

It’s pretty much always time to fix school finance, since school finance is always broken, so here goes the Senate. Maybe. State Senate leaders want to end the much-despised public education funding system by 2017, although they disagree on how … Continue reading →

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House approves a little more money, Senate readies its budget

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

Just a little. Texas House budget-writers voted Monday to free up an additional $3 billion for key state services through such moves as speeding up tax collections, delaying payments and suspending the back-to-school sales tax holiday. The bills next go … Continue reading →

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Here comes the Senate budget

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

We know that the Senate budget will spend more money than the House budget, not that this is a high bar to clear. We know that the Senate has searched high and low for the funds to support the higher … Continue reading →

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More on the effects of cuts to health and human services

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

Most of this should be familiar to us by now. Deep spending cuts in the recently passed House budget would profoundly change the state’s medical system, placing tens of thousands of Texans in the difficult position of finding alternate care … Continue reading →

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A matter of perspective

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

The Trib’s Thursday morning brief begins as follows: Competing rallies on Wednesday provided a stark backdrop to the House vs. Senate tug-of-war playing out in the Capitol. While one group of protesters called on the Legislature to roll back its … Continue reading →

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School finance reform bills on tap

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

Whether you look at the House budget or the slightly less drastic Senate version, public schools will not get the funding they are due under the current defined formulas. That means that how the funds are distributed needs to be … Continue reading →

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House passes its budget

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

The Trib has a good writeup of how it went down on Sunday. Mot of the heavy lifting was done before then, in the bills that closed the books on the previous biennium and allocated Rainy Day funds for them … Continue reading →

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Budget debate resumes tomorrow

Posted on April 2, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

Postcards: The Texas House [has called] it a night. They finished up the section of the budget bill that deals with public and higher education around 12:40 a.m. then adjourned until Sunday. Some members were planning to attend a Saturday … Continue reading →

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A little budgeters remorse?

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

Just a little. Not much. As a vote looms on a bare-bones budget that would slash education and threaten nursing homes with closure, House GOP leaders softened their rhetoric on Tuesday to emphasize that it is a starting point and … Continue reading →

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House votes to spend some Rainy Day funds

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Charles Kuffner

From the Trib: House lawmakers preliminarily passed two bills Thursday that together will balance the state’s budget for the remaining months of the fiscal year through a mix of spending cuts and use of the Rainy Day Fund. The cuts … Continue reading →

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