Abbott snips $120 million from $216.8 billion budget
Funding cut for highemission vehicle repair, lottery bonuses.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday signed the 2018-19 state budget into law, vetoing about $120 million of the $216.8 billion in spending approved by the Legislature.
The vetoes included eliminating $87 million over two years for a program aimed at helping low-income Texans repair or replace high-emission vehicles and another that will end, as of Sept. 1, 2018, a $4.2 million annual pro- gram that seeks to boost lottery sales by paying bonuses to retailers who sell large jackpot tickets.
Sunday is the governor’s deadline for vetoing bills. Monday’s generally light touch with the veto pen on the budget well ahead of the deadline contrasted with Abbott’s heavier hand two years ago, when he vetoed nearly $233 million in discretionary spending and made more than $295 million in overall reductions in the $209.4 billion budget approved by the Legislature.
“I am once again signing a budget that addresses the most pressing challenges faced by our state,” Abbott said in his state-
ment Monday.
“This budget funds a life-saving overhaul of Child Protection Services, continues to fund the state’s role in securing our border, and ensures that the workforce of today and tomorrow have the resources they need to keep Texas’ economy growing and thriving,” Abbott said.
“This is a smart, responsible fiscal road map for the next two years,” said Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, chairwoman of the Senate Finance Committee.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick joined in the praise.
“We have met the challenge of keeping this budget well below the growth of our population times inflation while meeting the critical needs of the state in a tight budget cycle,” he said.
In his veto statement on the lottery provision, the governor said the bonus, paid on top of a commission the retailers already earn for the number of tickets they sell, “was created in 1993 to help jumpstart the rollout of the lottery, but the lottery is now well established in the state.” Last year the Texas lottery sold just over $5 billion worth of tickets, a record. Proceeds from the game fund public education.
Still, Dawn Nettles, a longtime agency watchdog and publisher of the Texas Lotto Report, predicted that removing the bonus program would hurt lottery sales in the long run by alienating retailers. “This is horrible news,” she said. Abbott “is making a big mistake.”
The biggest veto in dollar terms was $87 million over two years for the Low-Income Repair Assistance Retrofit and Accelerated Vehicle Retirement Program, which, Abbott wrote in his veto message, “has done little to provide measurable improvements to air quality” in areas of the state that have not met national ambient air quality standards. He also said localities involved in the program have yet to fully spend previously approved money.
The program “is similar to the ill-conceived and dubious Cash for Clunkers program and should be abolished,” Abbott wrote.
Brian Zabcik, a clean air and water advocate for the advocacy group Environment Texas, said Abbott’s veto of the vehicle repair program and another veto of $6 million for a program to help local communities reduce ozone levels were “penny wise and pound foolish.”
“It sacrifices the longterm health of all Texans for an imagined financial gain,” Zabcik said. He said the vehicle repair program has been shown to help cut nitrogen oxide emissions by 70 percent.
Abbott said the $6 million for things like bicycle and car pool awareness programs targeted to “near non-attainment areas” — including the Austin, Beaumont, Corpus Christi, El Paso, Granbury, Killeen-Temple, Longview-Tyler-Marshall, San Antonio, Victoria and Waco metropolitan areas — could be funded locally, while keeping state money directed to those areas more likely to face “business stifling regulations” from the federal Environmental Protection Agency if they did not come into compliance with federal standards.
Also among Abbott’s vetoes was $859,091 for a colonias initiative in the secretary of state’s office. In explaining his veto, the governor said that several other agencies provide assistance intended to improve the lives of people in neighborhoods along the border with Mexico that lack modern sewer, water and other services.
The secretary of state’s office got involved with colonias after a series of articles in the American-Statesman in 1998 revealed slow progress in upgrading water and sewer systems despite hundreds of millions of dollars in federal and state money.