Legislators want to bar local lobbying but delay review of state’s D.C. office
During the final days of the 2019 legislative session, Texas House lawmakers rejected a bill that would have prevented cities, counties and school districts from hiring outside lobbyists to advocate for them in Austin.
As soon as the measure failed, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick promised it would become law next session. Hard-line conservatives view the lobbying ban as a priority this year and have filed companion bills in both chambers of the Legislature to codify it.
Texas Republicans have not extended the same level of scrutiny to the state’s in-house lobbying activity in Washington, D.C., which operates within Gov. Greg Abbott’s office and was scheduled last year for its periodic review by the Sunset Advisory Commission, the state office that reviews programs and most other agencies and recommends whether they should continue operating.
Last August, the commission of eight Republicans and two Democrats postponed its review of Texas’ Office of State-federal Relations until 2022, citing the COVID-19 pandemic.
The office serves as an intermediary between the state and federal governments, lobbying Congress, the White House and federal agencies on state priorities. Like cities and counties, the office pays for
those efforts using taxpayer dollars, though federal records show it has not hired outside lobbyists since 2007.
“I see absolutely no difference between the state of Texas having a state-federal relations office, which — I haven’t heard the governor denounce that,” said state Sen. John Whitmire, D-houston, the only Democrat in the Senate who voted for the lobbying ban last session. “It’s the same model that they’re trying to prevent at the local level. So, I guess they get the prize for hypocrisy on that one.”
Agencies up for sunset review automatically are abolished after a yearlong wind-down period unless the Legislature passes a bill keeping them alive. The decision to push back the sunset deadline for Texas’ federal lobbying office has raised the eyebrows of local officials, who argue the lobbyists they hire serve virtually the same function in Austin as the Office of Statefederal Relations in Washington.
A spokeswoman for Abbott did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Though the governor’s office does not define the Office of State-federal Relations’ role as “lobbying,” in a September 2019 report to the Sunset Advisory Commission, officials from Abbott’s office said the agency “serves as the state’s advocate” in Washington. The report also said the function of the office “is best explained via the agency’s response during and in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey,” which included working with agencies “to accelerate recovery for Texas” and providing “proper direction in the push to appropriate federal disaster recovery dollars.”
“That’s what lobbying is,” said veteran Austin lobbyist Bill Miller. “You educate and ask for things. That’s precisely what that office does, and if they’re not doing that, then they’re not doing their job.”
City and county leaders argue that their lobbyists are especially needed as Republican leaders have intensified their efforts in recent years to rein in local governments through property tax caps and numerous laws overriding local ordinances. Republicans say the lobbying ban would ensure residents’ tax dollars no longer fund lobbyists who advocate against measures such as lower property tax caps, which they say goes against the interest of the taxpayer. And they note the law would not prevent cities and counties from hiring in-house government relations employees who are not required to register as lobbyists.
Local governments and the state devote minuscule portions of their budgets to lobbying. San Antonio is spending $450,000 on lobbyists at the Legislature this year — and $690,000 for federal lobbying through 2022. For comparison, the city’s general fund budget for fiscal year 2021 — which pays for services such as police, fire protection, streets and parks — is about $1.3 billion.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg called the need for citybacked lobbyists at the Legislature “a matter of self-defense” — and pointed to skyrocketing energy prices during the recent winter storm and how the Electric Reliability Council of Texas handled the statewide electrical grid as “perfect examples of situations where advocates can help local residents.”
“We need people who are single-mindedly working for our ratepayers in the state Capitol to fight on our behalf as lawmakers consider ERCOT changes and other energy reforms,” Nirenberg said in a statement.
Lawmakers approved a $985,000 budget for the Office of State-federal Relations this year, or about 0.001 percent of the state’s $61.4 billion spending plan for general purpose revenue.
In a December meeting of the Senate State Affairs Committee, state Sen. Bob Hall, an Edgewood Republican who authored the Senate version of the antilobbying bill this session, defended the state’s lobbying office.
“Our dealing with the federal government is to make sure we’re protecting our people from the federal government as part of our basic responsibility,” Hall said. “And we’re making sure that we’re protecting the people from local governments as our basic responsibility, because it was the state governments that were initially assigned that responsibility when they were elected by the people.”
State Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-granbury, told Hall he wanted to ensure lawmakers were being “absolutely precise” in explaining why “something that we’ve asked the counties or other geopolitical subdivisions to do, we’re doing for a different reason with a different office.
“So, that’s why I wanted to make sure that we’re not being — what’s the word I’m looking for — we’re not being inaccurate in how we’re treating our own level of government,” Birdwell said.
The sunset commission voted in August to delay its review of the Office of State-federal Relations, along with the governor’s Economic Development and Tourism Office, because both “have been inundated by the state’s response to the pandemic, and conducting sunset reviews on either would be a disservice to the public,” state Rep. John Cyrier, a Lockhart Republican who chairs the sunset commission, said at the August meeting.
The Office of State-federal Relations has been around since 1965, operating out of the public eye for most of its existence. The office began hiring outside lobbyists in 2003 under then-gov. Rick Perry, who received bipartisan criticism for bringing in lobbying groups linked to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and fundraising scandals involving former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom Delay.
Perry, a Republican, defended the use of taxpayerfunded lobbyists at the time, arguing that they helped the state draw in more than $1 billion in federal funding through Medicaid and for highways, ship channel dredging and other earmarks. Perry’s office estimated that by hiring outside lobbyists, the state shaved about 15 percent off the cost of hiring inhouse employees.