Harvey upends political agenda
Storm’s impact on school, taxes taking priority
AUSTIN — Nearly a month after Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas, the reality of the storm was beginning to sink in on the minds of politicians, policy makers and advocates bracing for a long recovery.
In short, any political plans people had pre-Harvey are now moot.
“Whatever any of us thought or hoped that the agenda for the next session would be, it is going to be overtaken by Mother Nature,” House Speaker Joe Straus told a full auditorium at the University of Texas Saturday. “It’s going to the biggest challenge that we face.”
And even tax increases, typically a taboo topic around the Capitol, could be on the agenda. Two Houston city officials and several state lawmakers said despite the Legislature’s reluctance to allow tax increases, Harvey has changed everything and should at least open the discussion to using state sales taxes to pay for schools funding or badly needed flood control projects and systems, like the coastal spine, or Ike Dike.
Police Chief Art Acevedo said it shouldn’t just be left to the city of Houston and Mayor Sylvester Turner to find sources of revenue to better protect the state’s largest city and such a key
economic region that benefits all of Texas.
“The Legislature needs to step up,” Acevedo said.
The comments came during The Texas Tribune Festival, an annual threeday event in Austin featuring politics and government leaders from around the nation.
Houston Chief Resilience Officer Stephen Costello, known as the flood czar, said during one session that a temporary increase in the state sales tax just for Houston would go a long way toward finally building the coastal spine system that would protect the region from storm surges.
While in years past, state Sen. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, said the tax conversation may have been a nonstarter in the Legislature, that should change given the destruction Harvey has brought to the state. Hard ‘path to victory’
Politicians said it’s still too soon to know exactly what the state needs to do to help the areas slammed by the storm cover, such as how much money it will cost to fix schools and roads and invest in such infrastructure to guard against future storms.
What policy experts and politicians across the board do know is it could take years for the state to recover.
The storm may provide an opportunity for a special legislative session for lawmakers to rethink the state’s school funding formula given property taxes, which schools depend on for funding, are expected to tank in storm-ravaged areas, said state Rep. Dan Huberty, RHumble.
“I don’t believe 1 million children are going anywhere, but their homes have been destroyed,” he said, noting his home sustained $50,000 in damage from Harvey. “I just don’t see any path to victory for the schools if we don’t take this very seriously going forward.”
Huberty wants lawmakers to return to Austin for a special legislative session focused on storm relief. In that conversation, they could rehab the state’s school funding formula to level out funding for districts that stand to lose property tax revenue from the storm.
While Harvey damaged hundreds of schools across southeast Texas, it’s also upended expectations for this year’s round of standardized testing, known as the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness.
The focus on the STAAR bothers HD Chambers, the superintendent of Alief Independent School District. Whether the state will move or delay the test is the second question people ask after how his schools are doing.
“Our state has programmed our public education system so much that the thing we worry about most, or second most in this case, seemed to be about STAAR,” Chambers said during a panel discussion on testing and accountability.
Teachers and other people responsible for educating children lost everything and went through their own traumas before returning to the classroom.
“Before we start expecting them to deliver instruction with profession and craft at a very high level, we have to do everything we can do to help them be a person,” he said, and allow them to adjust to the “right mindset to being able to educate kids.”
Education Commissioner Mike Morath said he’s still undecided about whether to cancel, delay or ease how the state grades schools based on the tests. However, his tone changed from last week when he told the State Board of Education it was unlikely Texas would tinker with the STAAR. Evacuation debate
The political conference waded into other politics of the storm, including the controversial decision of whether Houston officials should have ordered an evacuation.
Acevedo, Houston’s police chief who had only been on the job nine months when Harvey hit, gave a stern defense of Turner’s handling of preparation. He pushed back at questions about whether Turner should have ordered an evacuation after Gov. Greg Abbott suggested people should leave Houston.
Acevedo said it would have been impractical to evacuate such a large city, saying “Where would they have gone?” He said sending people to other parts of Texas that were hit just as hard or worse would have been a disaster.