Austin leadership should stop war on cities

House Speaker Dennis Bonnen may have stepped down, but his words will echo for a long time. When he famously said (as captured by a concealed microphone) that he wanted his first session as speaker to be “the worst session in the history of the Legislature for cities and counties,” he put on display our state’s dirty secret: There is a bitter fight between state and local government; it’s making good policy hard to achieve, and Bonnen’s resignation will do little to change that.

There are plenty of Texas lawmakers determined to vilify local government in order to save their political necks.

It hasn’t always been this way in Texas. There was a time when state and local governments behaved as partners in an ambitious goal to build a terrific state. For decades that partnership produced remarkable results. But somewhere along the line, the relationship fell apart. Today, it’s no longer a constructive partnership. It’s a bitter feud.

And like so many bitter feuds, the root cause is money — in this case, the rapid increase in local property taxes. Texans are angry that they keep going up, and we’re even more angry that there’s never enough money for schools, roads, you name it. Something is terribly wrong, but few know who to blame. The complicated nature of state and local funding keeps most people off balance. Accountability is almost impossible to achieve.

So, the state blames local government for runaway spending. Local government blames the state for cutting financial support. As Texans grow angrier, the blame game only gets worse.

I stand firmly on the side of our locally elected officials. These are the men and women who live in our communities and who sacrifice so much to make sure we are safe, we have decent streets, our trash gets collected, we have good schools, and much more. They are Democrats and Republicans. They work hard to not waste our tax dollars, and they hate raising taxes as much as we hate being gouged.

I stand in opposition to Texas lawmakers who try to escape accountability for skyrocketing property taxes by vilifying local government. After all, the state shares the blame for tax increases thanks to unfunded mandates, refusal to fund education, dereliction in not expanding Medicaid, failure to properly invest in roads, infrastructure or mental health.

Adding insult to injury, state lawmakers have given corporations massive tax breaks, and they hold corporate loopholes wide open. These corporate giveaways add up. Yet state lawmakers tremble in fear of special interests.

They can’t bring themselves to collect the corporate taxes they used to, and the state is becoming a deadbeat financial partner. Local officials have no choice but to keep raising our property taxes just to make ends meet.

There is no better example of this than Proposition 4, which Texans are voting on tomorrow. We’re being told it’s meant to ban an income tax, which it will, but it’s also likely to spur legal challenges that some experts fear could threaten the state’s franchise tax which businesses pay. Lawmakers passed a subsequent fix to reduce the likelihood such suits could prevail, but if they do this will keep pressure on higher property taxes across the state.

Bonnen’s departure isn’t going to change a thing. Plenty of Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, think vilifying local government will distract folks from the real property tax problem. But it’s going to backfire, because hundreds of loyal Texans — Democrats and Republicans alike — who serve faithfully as our locally elected officials will not stand for this. They’ll rally behind candidates who believe in a constructive, honest relationship between state and local government. And those candidates are likely to be Democrats.