Travis County Commssioners Court
April 20, 2004
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Item A5
A-5, consider and take appropriate actions on -- special session of the 78th legislature. I was over there a couple hours, did not speak. Trying to back up county judge harris. There were other city and county officials there. The committee ended our panel discussion by saying basically they would try to work with cities and counties. I don't know there is anything we can do today. We did put together some information. Barbara from Commissioner Daugherty's office worked with susan and me and together we put together a little letter with exhibits attached, which is a lot of information, but if you read the letter, I think it's a good overview. I think that letter ought to be from the Commissioners court. I went ahead and signed it. But I think it ought to come from the whole court. If you all had a chance to look at it.
>> and I think it's [indiscernible] has been presented to several members of our delegation already and I think it's very -- it's to the point and it's really easier to look at the fact we refer to it. I think it's really good.
>> and I think it's factual in basis and not alarmist. It is basically laying out what are I think a lot of unintended consequences of what they are talking about, which is our responsibility to tell them. It's a great letter.
>> I think the points said I think need to be really laid out and just somehow how it really does affect county government, Travis County in particular as far as its concerned. Judge, when you were there, did you see the representative from dallas county when he appeared?
>> actually speaking were mayor month. Ntford from fort worth, judge harris is from colin county. I don't recall hearing anybody from dallas. There were a couple of business people from harris county and they were supportive and they gave a sort of, I thought, a pretty good argument for tax increases, the impact of this on the average taxpayer in harris county. Economic development, I mean they just -- they painted a real bad picture for tax increase over the last 10 years and seemed like everything that's bad of an economic nature they blame real "governmental entities increasing taxes. But to be honest, I thought the panel was receptive to that argument and the elected officials who testified sort of challenged them in a way that I don't know that I would have. They argued basically that the state had no right ph elgdz meddling with the city and county.
>> good cops and bad cops.
>> I think it seems like the panel was taking a position that part of their responsibility was to protect Texas taxpayers regardless of what city and county they live in, if they live in the state of Texas. But at the same time it looked like everybody was pretty much leaning toward trying to work through this. And the governor has gone over -- governor and his staff and testified to the panel early and apparently made a pretty good impression.
>> he did. He started -- April and I sort of sat there all day and testified at 8:00 last night. But I would agree with the judge's interpretation. What they had was various groups with various interests talking about it. You can tell that there's a lot of controversy, a lot of things are in the air. I don't know that a lot of people have come to a decision. Each of your offices should have gotten this, but we bound and tabbed everything for the Commissioners court. We're making more in our office so like if any of you want any of these to give out or take them someplace, if you let me know.
>> they are very good.
>> they are kind of time consuming to put together. A little up front like I think jackie has been b. 16 of them sitting up there. But everybody has been jointly talking to our delegation and we have probably -- sweupb has talked to probably three-quarters of them. The Travis County delegation. So that is going well. And I think the points we've made have been well received by them. I think there's just a lot of misunderstanding. The judge is right, the concern on the other side was the taxes were going up. I mean that was just --
>> did you get a feeling, susan, receive any inkling as far as what the small counties actually are saying?
>> they are all feeling -- they all feel that -- like we do. I don't see -- I mean the judge is right, some of them really were more angry at the state for mandates. And I agree, I don't know that's where we need to go, but I think -- by the time I testified, there waerpbt whole lot of them there, but we did pass one of these out and the few that were there were interested. The testimony was very limited at that time. They were tired. But one of the things that I did get to make the point of is that the expenditures were going up faster than any cap and that this was not uncontrolled wild spending, it was the increases dictated by the kinds of programs that we have. And I thought that was -- I thought that was well received. They can see that when they see our handouts, in all honesty. I think that the facts are here. We've all looked at it over a lot of times I think it well represents our position. We just need to be vigilant and watch. A number of bills are coming out now.
>> the other thing that stood out to me was that the chair, he guess [inaudible], seemed to have a distinction between capping budgets and capping valuations.
>> that's right. He asked the question very specifically to the group and there is quite a group of Commissioners there, like would they prefer a cap on apray sals or a cap on the -- appraisals or a cap to tax rate. Without exception people preferred the cap on appraisal. And that kept coming up over and over again.
>> susan, when they talked about the caps on an apray sals were they talking about homestead appraisals?
>> yes.
>> versus all appraisals, which is quite different.
>> they were talking about homesteads. Apparently there was a law passed in I think it was the senate in the last session, but they ran out of time to get to the house where they actually did limit that, you know, there's a 10% cap now. It went down I believe to 3. 3 is what they are talking about. That's being bandied about. Now. But it's confusing because they are comparing the states that have state income taxes. Clearly they are trying to, you know, get more money. It's unclear whether what they are doing will raise more money. I think we need to really follow this from now on because it could have a dramatic impactous, but I also think we need to pay attention, as I sat there all day, is clarity of implementation. So it is very clear what we need to do and the time frame in which we need to do it. Questions were asked, I don't know, judge, if you were there, but the one panel member, one representative said, well, what about if you give an abatement, a tax abatement. When that abatement comes off, do you give it off together. There was some confusion. He asked the governor's person and they didn't clearly answer that, but that was a good point. It is really a disincentive to give an abatement if your rate is capped. You tend not to want to do that. That was brought up like would that hurt economic development in the state of Texas if there was a disincentive for abatements. Those kind of implementations. The question between debt and [inaudible] for the schools and everyone else. It's not real clear and of course there isn't a clear plan there. There's lots of plans out there. We just need to kind of I think continue to make input and really watch very carefully what happens. With counties.
>> I was there a couple of hours. The whole panel was present then.
>> yeah.
>> a lot of folk in the audience. I guess they started taking testimony early afternoon.
>> they started taking public testimony about 5:30. And there were probably 85 people signed up for that. Then you had the president of the auditor's association was there but he had to catch a flight back and couldn't testify. They limited them to three minutes, so there was very little -- you had to pick your point so the point I picked was, you know, the rate of increases and our mandated programs and then handed out the information. But a couple of people there were very interested in the handouts. So I'm hoping that I can perhaps get back and visit with them.
>> well, when I was there they had [inaudible] testimony. I don't know how they went about that.
>> I don't know how they did that either but that took all day.
>> a couple of business people from harris county must have spoken 15 minutes apiece.
>> right. It went like that all day. So yeah, I don't know how that happened either. Judge mccowan was there and spoke in terms of schools and we need to keep on top of this and make sure we understand and give input.
>> I would also suggest that this would be worthy of a trip to go see the Austin american-statesman editorial board. They have been keeping on top of this and have also made the points about city and counties, but I think to reinforce it not with, well, we think the sky will fall, but to follow it up with what really is the case history of what it is that we have to do, have to pay for, situation with bond ratings, et cetera, and what I thought was very powerful in susan's backup was the judge's letter, the constitutional limits that are already in place to make sure that the fears that the state legislature has about untapped, out of control spending are already in place to protect the public about what is going on and when you trigger things like rollback elections because somebody has gone too far in terms of extension of the budget.
>> one of the things I think that as we go out and talk to people that was important and I thought of it as I sat there, you know, it's easy to say I don't want any more taxes. There were a whole lot of people saying that. We don't want to pay more taxes. We don't want to pay more trot taxes, they are too high, we don't like it. But I think probably what was not connected to that was what those taxes pay for. And that is, yeah, I mean I personally don't like to pay more taxes either, but I do want a justice system and I do want roads. And the connection of what services you would be willing to get rid of if there were a cap, no one talked about that. And that's the reality. It's not as though the money just goes to government to do with whatever. I mean it is a funding of the program. So I think that if we're talking to media, that needs to be tied in very tightly and that is under the tap that the governor -- cap the governor had depending on how the rates went in, but we would have lost something like $45 million this year in the Travis County budget. So those are dramatic programmatic reductions. And so as you are talking, you might see say these are the things you wouldn't have because if you don't want to pay those taxes, you just can't have both.
>> I think we done a good job of saying if it had been in place 10 years ago this is what our loss would have been and these are the services we would have had to cut. Some of these elected officials were saying you have to understand you impact public safety and in my community, $1.5 million equals x number of police officers, you almost have to say and here's why x number of police officers or we cut these over here. And I believe that if you were to let my residents vote on it, they would approve not making these cuts.
>> that's right.
>> and one person was saying that look, if we have an election, it is not only the county having an election, but it's the other governmental elections and the cost of any election -- one figure was $7,000. My guess is if you have multiple elections in our community, the total impact is probably up in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
>> yeah, an election is not free and that's money that could have been used for something else. The other point they made is that the Commissioners are on the ballot every four years. If in fact people in their particular community are unhappy with the spending or a city council man or mayor that is correct is the electorate format. That was brought up throughout the day.
>> and two of the most expensive promise that we have done, 10 years ago we were spending less than $300,000 on e.m.s. We just were. And we only had one station out in the county to speak of. Well, 812,000 people later, here we are, we're spending $9 million on the seven e.m.s. Stations and starflight. And I would be very happen that if we had put that to a vote that would be something people think is a good investment. Another thing that I -- that all of us felt strongly about is that while we have to take care of our road system, it doesn't say we have to take care of tonight a way that gets equity in the precincts and that everything ought to be good or excellent as opposed to okay. And the Commissioners court with judge Biscoe and Commissioner Davis' leadership, we invested general fund dollars to get the precinct 1 and precinct 4 roads up to the same standards as what was already happening in 2 and 3. It was the right thing to do. It was the correct thing to do, but it is not the mandated thing to do. We also made some -- because of the user fee through the road and bridge office was not covering everything that we wanted to do. Switching from seal coat to mix in many of our subdivisions, which was a customer service kind of thing, that's not required. So there were things that we did affirmatively to be responsive to our constituents. And to get past some huge equity issues where it was not correct how it all turned out and we need to do reinvest dollars in precincts that had not gotten their fair share of dollars. That was done through general fund dollars, not through the license fee and it was the right decision to make.
>> the governor's staff indicated -- they were talking about what problems the state had to deal with and if they had a surplus, which is kind of interesting, they were worried about what to do with the surplus and he thought the next problem they look at is human services. I think that's relevant because many of the human services are not mandated, but if we do not make them and that's a problem for the state, they are going to have to pick it up and that does cause a problem with them. And this community has supported spending that money and it ties into the other programs that we have. But I thought that was interesting they thought that was the next area they would have to look at in the next biennium because that does impact. If we don't do what we're doing, that will exacerbate the problem at the state.
>> the other area that would be really affected would be all of the preventive, whatever we consider preventive. I just think it's not -- showing we're very smart if we don't see beyond the current mandate that we're having tro address and not try to do something that tour tour kaeuls a need for -- curtails a need for that mandate and that's where all of our preventive programs come in and they are just very important. Showing -- to show that we indeed understand what's happening and what can be done to prevent future problems.
>> I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. Education, I think, is very critical issue as far as alerting the public with what we basically [inaudible] cutting property taxes, it sounds good, but when you start scaling back and peeling away the -- I guess the factors in this particular issue of -- does pose some problems. Just coming off the campaign trail, I know there was a lot of folks that were asking a lot of questions about the property taxes, even before this particular issue had come up, and there are still persons asking about property taxes. There are a lot of folks in the community that when it comes to paying the tax bill, the only thing they look at is the total. They really don't understand or do not understand or haven't taken the time to look when you look at Travis County, we're only paying like about 16% of that overall bite of the bill. Those kind of things I think -- I wish I would have had this piece of information that I could have shared because of the fact that it really does go into detail as far as what Travis County does and what it can do and what its limitations are as far as the property taxes are concerned. And that's very important because it's sad that we are lurched into the arena of just cutting property taxes. And that's the sad part about it. And if folks realize that a lot of things go to our indigent attorney fees, the criminal justice system, the caseload with our court system and a whole lot of other factors that we deal with as far as mandates coming from the state of Texas, they would understand why we have to deal with-i think our property taxes in a wise money. And it's no mistake in what we have been able to do here as far as Travis County and that's to manage our money very well. I don't think that standard and poors or moody's would have given us the triple a rating if we weren't managing our finances and taking care of our finances very well at Travis County. Unfortunately when this is all tied in into the big scheme or the big picture as what is being proposed by the governor as far as property taxes, we are locked into that. And home hypofully this letter -- hopefully this letter the Commissioners court will sign off on will explain educationally how we can do -- what we do with our money and how we work with the money that is given us. We are very limited by what the state allows us to do and I think you all have done a real good job on this as far as getting this most age out. I know that I'm going to, as I send my quarterly newsletter out to the community, I'm going to make sure those neighborhood associations get this copy.
>> good idea.
>> because it's very appropriate because it's a educational piece and I want to make sure I have as many copies of this in my office as possible so folks can really understand what Travis County is doing and how we would be impacted if we are locked in and tied in with the governor's proposal as far as cutting property taxes, you know, across the board. Just property taxes. It really will probably affect Travis County. So thank you for such a great job. Thank you.
>> this will be back on next week. Anybody else here on this item today?
>> judge, did you want a motion related to the full court signing the letter that you got that's called the 1999-point letter?
>> I think that would be good.
>> move approval that that come from the full court and appreciate the fact you took the lead on it.
>> you did a great job.
>> discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote.
Last Modified: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 9:31 AM