Agenda Texas: Water Funding Gets New Life
At the Texas legislature, some things don’t stay dead for long. As time runs out for lawmakers to move dollars towards funding water, roads and education, it appears that for water, at least, an agreement may be in the works.
As KUT’s Ben Philpott reports for Agenda Texas, after a plan in the House died two weeks ago, lawmakers are now looking at an option that could put the issue in front of voters:
Step one of the agreement was the House finally sending Senate Joint Resolution 1 to the House Appropriations Committee for a vote.
SJR 1, if approved as a constitutional amendment by voters in November, would have spent several billion dollars of the state’s Rainy Day Fund on roads and water infrastructure. But that plan wasn’t going to work in the House.
“We insisted that we were not going to start doing a referendum type of government in Texas, like they do in California,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie. “We were elected, 150 members over here and 31 members over there, to make these decisions.”
You can listen to his report in the player above.
