Travis County Commssioners Court
April 29, 2003
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Item 38
38. A. Discuss legislative issues, including proposed bills, and take appropriate action. B. Consider other bills, if any, in response to action taken by the legislature, and take appropriate action.
>> something morning, judge, go --
>> good morning, judge, Commissioners. Sijs we have not given you an update on the priority 1 bills in a while, we thought if you wanted that, we could go through those bills and -- and give you the current status.
>> that makes sense to me.
>> yeah.
>> and [indiscernible] go through.
>> we are going to be looking at the -- at the report that is entitled Travis County Commissioners court priority legislation. Four pages. The first bill is house bill 1701 by taylor. That is a bill that increases the number of voters in pbt from 3,000 -- in the precinct from 3,000 to 5,000. That is on the local consent calendar in the house, it is alive and moving. The next one house bill 1771 by keel, and that is your bill to expand the definition of how you can spend your 9/11 dollars. That is on local and consent in the house. And it is set for tomorrow in the senate. So that is a alive and well and moving. House bill 2188 by rodriguez, is so-called I jury bill. That the district clerk requested. So that you can do the jury registration by mail and -- internet and telephone. In a has passed and it is over in the senate, we are trying to get a hearing on that bill in the senate. That's alive and well. House bill 2303 by keel is the meet and confer bill. That's on local. In the house and we are trying to get a hearing in the senate. But that is alive and well and moving, also. House bill 2401, by stick, is the criminal law magistrate bill for Travis County. And that is passioned the house and it is also on local in the senate. So it's very close to being -- passing both houses that is alive and well. House bill 2402, by stick. Relating to compensation of district judges in Travis County. Removes the cap. That is -- that has passed the house and it is in local in the senate. So again very close to being passed, alive and well. Moving down to house bill 3089 by dukes, this is the mandatory prebid bill. And that has been put on general calendar in the house, which is pretty much very backed up right now. We are -- we have a companion bill in the senate and we are going to try to get that on -- get that out and get that on local. Then bring that back to the house, get it on local in the house this time. That -- that -- it's got a few road blocks yet. If you go on to page 3, at the top there, senate bill 880, by whitmire, that is the bill that deals with the blue warrants, judge. And it will reduce the time period from -- from 61 day goes down to 31 -- 61 days do you know to 31 day -- down to 31 days, that's already passed the senate. Heard this morning in corrections, judge frasier came and testified. The bill passed out of corrections this morning. There is an exception that they have requested a continuance, they will get an additional 10 days. But that's intact and it looks like it -- it may keep moving. Then just below that, senate bill 918 by whitmeyer, that's a -- that's a related bill, blue warrants, that would require them to use a summons in all cases unless the defendant has an sconded or -- absconded, in most cases they would be required to try a summons rather than put them into the court, into jail, excuse me. You don't want them here I知 shoe. That would -- I知 sure. That will be heard this afternoon. We have asked the sheriff's office to have a witness there in support of that bill. Senate bill 984, but wentworth, and that is the exception to the open meetings law. For your benefit appeals committee for your self funded health plan. And that is -- has passed the senate and it is on local in the house. So that's very close to being passed. Senate bill 1099 by barrientos, this is a so-called 1445 procedural cleanup bill and that -- what we are going to try to do is -- is if we can get the agreement of all of the parties to amend that, todd baxter or senator wentworth's bill related to 1445. The event that the mainly bill goes, we are trying to get an amendment to put the procedural bill on it as well. Senate bill 1100. By barrientos. Commissioner Davis, that's the nuisance odor bill. Heard last week. There was some objection. We are working on an amendment to try to get that out of committee, stumbling a little bit on that one. Senate bill 1161, by barrientos, that's the -- that's the internet services and that's on local. In the senate, close to passing the senate, we will bring it over to the house, try to get it through the house. We don't have a house bill on that. And then at -- let's see. That's it. We have covered all of these bills. Chris has several that he would like to update you on. Let me -- chris, let me do one other one on priority 2. Judge, on the -- on whether or not the issue of -- of suing a county in contract, a -- a request has been made to -- to chairman nixon that the county be treated the same as the state in terms of suit on a contract. It would be the same limitations on that suit. We presented that to the chairman and he was at least positive in -- in taking it and he said that he would see what he could do. There's been no decision made about that yet. So it's still pending in the house, but he does have that language and we are hoping that he will accept that.
>> what limitations does the state have?
>> that would be the amendment that we presented to him last week. It would be the judgment would be --
>> [multiple voices]
>> that's correct. I know what that is.
>> okay. Other than that --
>> [indiscernible] the warrant I was planning to go and ask them to show a little more backbone --
>> we are going to try to have a response for you by noon tomorrow on that hopefully they will have decided.
>> where I senate bill 15619 and house bill -- 1569 and house bill [indiscernible]
>> those are webberville bills.
>> yes. One is on intent in the senate, the other passed through the house. They are trying to get it through the senate.
>> that's halfway there.
>> halfway there, but senator barrientos has been -- been doing a good job of keeping that one --
>> okay.
>> -- slowed down.
>> thank you.
>> [indiscernible] close that bill [multiple voices] in writing? Can you come up with something in writing that we could distribute showing our opposition?
>> judge, what I ended up doing on that was basically I sent a personal letter in writing to senator barrientos telling him that the court unanimously opposed senate bill 1569 and also house bill 2212. And of course I -- I will sent a letter -- I also sent a letter to the other delegated member. But we never did vote, per se, as a court. Just a personal letter --
>> we voted on the --
>> we voted on it.
>> but we never did suggest to do anything in writing. I would really appreciate it if we could have direction to do just that. A letter signed by the entire court.
>> I don't know that we have a whole lot of clout over there. Especially if you -- it might make difference -- there are so few of them, we can give all of them a copy of it. It -- they will do what they will do, but they ought to know what our position is on it. I would come up with a short letter or resolution that we sign today. Basically distribute it to them.
>> okay.
>> that would be helpful.
>> [multiple voices]
>> do that. And for those two bills.
>> I think going from the advice that we have gotten from chris and bob in the past, a short declare active letter is much easier to digest than whereas clauses. So it should be in the form of a letter.
>> can you have it back to us today?
>> you want us to be ahead and draft something for you all then?
>> yes, please.
>> okay. We'll do that. And unless you have any other questions, on -- on the 1 or 2, chris has several bills he wants to update you on as well.
>> I would, judge, point out or make some brief comments about four bills that the court has discussed in previous meetings. The first one is the state budget, house bill 1. As many of you may be aware, the senate adopted its version of the budget last week. I expect that to be on the senate floor this week, today. It is approximately a billion dollars higher than the house version of the budget that was adopted a couple of weeks ago. Both bills exceed the comptroller's revenue estimate. The house bill by approximately $3 billion, the senate bill by approximately $4 billion. Meaning that the legislature will have to either pass additional legislation which creates revenue or reduces expenditure in the form of health and human services consolidations for example, which the house has been working on, or in the form of other revenue generating measures, which the senate has talked about a fairly lengthy list of possible options. The significance of that, of course, for -- for the county, not just Travis County, but really all of the counties, is is that the additional dollars that are going to need to be raised or they are reflected in higher amounts in the senate version are substantially in health and human services areas, which are the areas where your staff indicated the greatest potential impact to the county. So we very much have an interest in what the legislature decides to do with the appropriations bill and how they choose to race additional revenue. Raise additional revenue. I would just comment without really saying more that there is not good agreement between the leadership right now about how to solve this problem. Lieutenant governor, the speaker and the governor are not on the same page by all accounts of how to proceed and so it is unclear to me exactly what the next step is or where we are going to go. The second bill I would mention is house bill 1204, senate bill 544, which has been discussed at some length earlier today by the court and in previous meetings. And I would simply say two things about that. First, there will be a substitute prepared by senator wentworth that he will submit early next week to the senate igr committee. I do not expect it will be identical to house bill 1204 as representative baxter passed it in house. But I don't know at this point. Tom and I worked on this quite a bit. I don't know exactly what it's going to look like. However I will point out one significant dirchts between senate -- difference between senate bill 544 as it was passed, filed, house bill 1204 as it passed the house, that is senator wentworth's bill maintains minimum requirement of what must be in an agreement between the city and the county. I believe, tom, that you would agree with had he that the agreement between Travis County and Austin would not satisfy those basic requirements. In simple terms Austin and Travis County have talked about a dual track continues to exist, that simply would not meet the provisions of senate bill 544 in my opinion as it was filed. So it is possible if senator wentworth elects to include those provisions in his committee substitute and push that version of a bill forward, that we may be a few steps farther back in terms of your agreement with the city of Austin than you might otherwise like to be out. Tom, if you want to comment on that.
>> I haven't read his original bill in so long, I can't remember what's in it.
>> okay. So the -- the point is that it does have some specific provisions. It doesn't -- it basically says you can't just say that you have an agreement. It has to have some basic elements in it or it's not going to meet the requirements of this section. And I believe that it is an opinion he has expressed at some level in the committee hearing and elsewhere is that perhaps here in central Texas we did not live up to spirit or the letter of the law that was previously pass. I would make that comment on those bills and move on. We will be working on that obviously this week.
>> chris, can I throw out a couple of things. One of the amendments that you all have requested that we pursue was some sort of relief from the fact that we have got 19 cities to deal with. At one point senator baxter's bill had the requirement that there be arbitration if there's no agreement going into effect immediately, which put us in a real tough spot. The good news is senator baxter's bill did move the deadline to January 1st, 2004. Representative baxter's bill. The bad news is that they are not receptive, the stakeholders interested in the bill or representative baxter in any sort of bracket that would not require us to enter into an agreement with every city with e.t.j. In the county. Apparently owing to the fact that the state-wide builders organization is interested in having it apply to some of the smaller cities. I think Travis County, the home builders, 90% or even 99% of their issues it's the city of Austin. In other parts of the state there are home builders where it's more the smaller cities than the bigger cities. It looks like at this point we are going to be going through this process with 20 cities, January 1st '04.
>> so will that mean that that will have to be an agreement, an interlocal agreement between Travis County and the cities within Travis County to deal with this particular bill? And also if that is the case, what type of -- what needs to be looked at is what type of funding will be required to deal with the staffing to make sure that we are able to enter that type of relationship with -- with [indiscernible] in Travis County. That's -- I would like to know how much money are we talking about? If something like this was to go through. What type of impact, unfunded mandate impact would that be as far as increasing staffing, as far as t.n.r. Is concerned. Talking about the county, I don't know about the city. Speaking of the county at this point the -- [indiscernible]
>> it's safe to say there will be some impact. We have got agreements in place with the cities that account for 91% of the plats in the e.t.j. In Travis County. Some of the 19 cities would be required to enter into agreements with we have a process to plat in their e.t.j. In two and three years. So it's definitely going to require some work from t.n.r. And the county attorney's office.
>> exactly.
>> that we wouldn't otherwise be doing.
>> so ...
>> judge and Commissioners, I would briefly mention two other items. We have also had quite a bit of discussion about the regional mobility authority legislation. This -- this-- this bill is a committee substitute for house bill 3588, I just got it this morning. I have not read it in its entirety. However, this bill will take the place of all of the other regional mobility authority and transportation legislation that we have been discussing. It's about 160 pages long. Enclosed in this bill is the r.m.a. Provisions that we have been debating, exclusively developer agreement provisions, the $5 billion dollar bond authority that was being discussed, trans Texas corridor, the governor's proposal, it's all in here. This is the transportation bill of the session.
>> who sponsored that?
>> it's sponsored by the chairman, representative krusee.
>> okay. So he's combined all of those bills that [indiscernible]
>> yes, sir.
>> what's the name of that bill?
>> 3588. It is not available online. We got this from the staff. It may be convicted outlet of committee I知 told as early as -- kicked out of committee I知 told as early as today. Tom, i've not had a chance to see if our r.m.a. Amendments, which if you will recall, we met with his staff they basically accepted most of what we had requested. I don't know if that's in here yet or not. You can have this copy and we will begin to review that and let the court know. This is a -- this is a rather dramatic and significant piece of legislation insofar as restructuring the way transportation works in the state. And then the last item I would simply mention is the turp bill, senator armbrister have filed a committee substitute that's moving forward, concerns that staff mentioned in connection with that bill taking authority away from the court with respect to possible methods of dealing with -- with a sip here at some point. That language is out of the armbrister bill. We may have other concerns with it. But at least those two specific ones were addressed. I think we have -- I think April needs to brief the court on -- on one other important issue.
>>
>> [one moment please for change in captioners]
>>
>> ... It al lous the employees for the cscd to in fact it lists them, they're automatically available to be and a state's life, health an accident insurance program, and I think it was originally intended because in many county, probably smaller county, their insurance is not as good as the state's insurance, it has a positive effect for many counties. Here in Travis County we have very good insurance, it may actually have the reverse effect for us, but we are really only coming forward with it because notwithstanding that once these 300 employees come out that will have an impact on our acturairal, but there's some language that leads to a certain amount of confusion. While the bill says they're automatically eligible as of a certain date, it says unless they are expelled or waived coverage. We don't know what that means. We don't know if that means they will be eligible for ours. The time frame letting us know they're going to be eligible, how that is going to work back and forth between state and us, are the employees going to be coming to us and expecting us to help them with state's open enrollment because they're here. I mean there is just confusion in the language. I understand that -- that alicia's office has spoke within the county attorney's office and they've looked at it and feel that the language is sufficiently clear for them to be able to make good and guided decisions on that, but because other people have read the bill and questions were raised, we thought it needed to be something that y'all were aware of, and that there needed to be any guidance with regards to clarifying the language, you might want to speak with the county attorney's office on that and make sure that we're all comfortable with how this will be implemented and what downstream effects there may be on the county.
>> I want to add to that, though we've understood it, it's a very difficult bill to understand, and we would have written it considerably differently if we were writing at all. I understand the concern that the auditor's office raised with it.
>> yeah, and I just want to clarify, I understand that the county attorney is comfortable with it, but I have not had an opportunity to discuss it with him. I like the auditor's office found it very ambivalent. It says that it would extend health coverage to cscd employees but it doesn't say -- I didn't read anywhere, john, where it said that they had to go, and so it leaves us with the possibility of adverse choice, meaning that if our options are better, our health insurance is better, and I think it well be than the state, then the people could choose to come to Travis County. It doesn't say -- it talks about money going into a pool, but I guess we would have to negotiate like we do now in terms of the cost of that health insurance, so I also found it ambivalent. But would like to discuss wit the county attorney to see where you find where the employee absolutely has to go to the state. I didn't read that in reading the bill so...
>> alicia, are you saying ambivalent or ambiguous?
>> ambiguous. I知 sorry, ambiguous.
>> so it's...
>> ambiguous.
>> I believe the draft that we first represented with of the bill was very confusing. I think that there's -- barbara just came in, she left me a voice mail yesterday that some of the language has been cleaned up but there's still some impact against the county both financially as well as administratively, and she may be able to add some history to that.
>> it makes me ambivalent.
>> [laughter]
>> and if there's something that we need to do today or do we need to work to get rid of the ambiguousness of the situation so that we can move on to other things? I think we get it that it's murky.
>> so what if anything should we do today?
>> barbara, unless you have something, I would like to sit down and discuss it with you.
>> my thought is that from the perspective of what is in it from a legal perspective, there's really no reason to do anything, but there are some issues that I don't know anything about what the -- what the facts related to them are that may make a difference. Like I don't know whether the court wants to consider the difference in benefit level that they'll gets a state employees as opposed to county employees, and do something as a result of the fact that there may be not as good a benefit for the employees under the health plan that the state would give them as it is under the county. There's a thing that dan alluded to which is we're currently being paid for 300 -- approximately 300 employees being in our plan who -- by the state through their payment for benefits that will not be in our plan anymore. And whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know, because if they're real sick fellows we may not be getting as much in premium payments as we're paying out in expenses, but they're real healthy people then they may be -- and I don't know. That's fact related that I don't have any information on so I can't really say from a legal perspective I think that it's urgent that you move forward on some action but there may be some policy or management reasons to do something that I can't advise you on because I don't have the facts.
>> if I could just offer some clarification.
>> on the same item?
>> yes.
>> I think our position is that we need to look at it further and you think this may pass?
>> it has already passed the house.
>> you think this may pass the legislature?
>> yes, sir.
>> then I think next week we ought to have a written sentiment of impact so we can decide whether it's a good thing or a bad thing and if we don't know -- I don't know that it helps is what I知 saying. We ought to see something in writing, however it shakes out, I think we ought to let that drive what we do.
>> get the stake holders together.
>> does that make sense?
>> [indiscernible] unless we -- impact on us is adverse, insignificant? We can wait until next week to get it. Now, we need four people to take action and I do think that on this September election I think we ought to ask the other counties [indiscernible] the fiscal impact on them and let the state know the fiscal impact on us. $800,000. The state impact is $9 million, right?
>> it's an estimate.
>> I think our position ought to be to let the state know -- ask the other counties to notify senator of that. It makes sense to us to move the election to November, basically.
>> yes, sirs and let me just say that his substitute is due out Thursday of this week, so we will know on Thursday whether he -- he has been very, as far as I know, not been public about whether he's made a decision to change that...
>> and the motion is Travis County to put in the record to basically recommend November, and notify them of this in writing in this afternoon. Have we done that?
>> yes, sir.
>> [multiple voices]
>> already out two weeks ago.
>> you signed it judge and we delivered it to his office.
>> okay. The counties do the same thing?
>> then that is part of the motion.
>> the counties kind of rally around this. Beg your pardon?
>> voted but something that was done on the floor and so there's always an opportunity when we go to luncheon for somebody to bring something up from the floor once again and that will be an tune at 12 noon tomorrow over at the double tree.
>> [indiscernible]
>> we should bring lots of copies of our letter to pass out tomorrow.
>> any objection?
>> no, sir.
>> all in favor? That passes by unanimous vote.
Last Modified: Tuesday, April 29, 2003 6:52 PM