College construction: Accord reached on $3.1 billion in college bonds,
House and Senate negotiators reached agree-ment Thursday on $3.1 billion in bonds for construction and renovation projects at 64 public higher education campuses in Texas.
The sponsors of the measure, Rep. John Zerwas and Sen. Kel Seliger, said they were confident that the proposal would be approved by each chamber before a Sunday deadline.
The projects are a top priority for the universities, health-re late d institutions and technical colleges that would benefit. The Legislature last approved a major round of campus projects in 2006 for $ 1.9 billion. A bond package failed two years ago at the 11th hour of the legislative session when negotiators couldn’t agree on allocations for some campuses.
This time, striking a compromise between the House-passed version of House Bill 100 and the Senate-approved version was not difficult, said Zerwas, a Republican from Richland who chairs his chamber’s Higher Education Committee. “We didn’t have that many differences,” he said, with the House version allocating $3.1 billion and the Senate $3 billion.
In addition, Zerwas and Seliger, a Republican from Amarillo who leads the Senate High- er Education Committee, get along well and enjoy working together — an important factor in the pressure-filled final days of the legislative session, which ends Monday.
Under the so-called conference co mmittee report signed by all 10 members of the negotiating panel — Zerwas and Seliger co-chaired the committee — the University of Texas will get $75 million to renovate Welc h Hall, a chemistry building, and Texas A&M University will get the same amount to build a biocontainment research facility. The House version had proposed $80 million for each project, while the Senate had allocated $ 73.8 million for UT and $71.9 milllion for A&M.
Texas State University’s share was the same in both versions and remains at that level in the final bill: $63 million for construction of an engineering and sciences building at the San Marcos campus and $48.6 million for a health professions building in Round Rock.
As is customary for campus projects, the legislation calls for the schools to repay the interest and principal on the bonds using tuition revenue. In practice, the Legislature has appropriated general revenue — tax money — to pay off the debt.
Some lawm ak ers, including Seliger, wanted the Legislature to fund the projects with cash, but the longstanding tradition of bonds prevailed. The 201617 statewide budget approved by House and Senate negotiators includes $240 millio n for the first year of debt payments.
Zerwas and Seliger said they had not received any assurance from Gov. Greg Abbott that he would sign HB 100, assuming it clears the Legislature. But they expressed opti-mism, noting that the Republican governor has emphasized the importance of higher education and of raising the stature of the state’s public universities.
And some of the schools’ needs are urgent, Seliger said, citing as an example Texas Southern University in Houston, which would get $60 million to replace a hurricane-damaged li-brary.
“This governor would have informed us of any concerns long before now,” and he has not, Seliger said.