A new session of the Legislature offers an opportunity to address urgent issues.

A new session means a new chance for Texas to confront the biggest challenges it faces.

A new session of the Texas Legislature gets underway Tuesday, and with it will come a new House speaker, some new members, plenty of new committee heads and a brand-new opportunity for Texas to address some of its longest-standing and most urgent challenges.

Those challenges form a list much longer than there will be resources — from dollars to political capital — available to address them. As always, good leadership can make the difference between real progress and another session where the hardest choices are kicked down the road for someone else to tackle.

Here are a handful of telltale signs we’ll be looking for to know if the session is headed toward success.

The Bonnen factor

With bullish Rep. Dennis Bonnen, RAngleton, expected to be elected speaker of the House, there’ll be a new member of the triumvirate that traditionally sets the tone for each session. Bonnen is conservative but was a top lieutenant of outgoing Speaker Joe Straus, a moderate Republican. Their styles were different: Bonnen was known as the hammer to Straus’ scalpel. Fascinating political theater awaits as we find out how Bonnen’s more aggressive nature meshes — or doesn’t — with the strident leader of the Senate, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and political survivalist Gov. Greg Abbott.

Bonnen, a banker and most recently chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, will be leading a strongly conservative House, but one that added new Democrats to the mix after the midterms in November.

What path he’ll chart as the most powerful member of the House will say a lot about whether the Legislature manages to stay focused on the most important, and frankly most vexing, issues needing to be addressed, or whether it will allow Patrick, as Abbott did last year, to push the agenda far to the right and get bogged down in divisive social issues.

We’ll be watching Patrick, too, to see if he read the midterm tea leaves as we did: A strong reaction against the kind of elbowsout conservatism that chooses trumped-up worries about bathroom rules over the kind of hard work required to reform taxes, school finances and half a dozen other top priorities.

The incredible shrinking governor?

The next session marks the third time around for Gov. Greg Abbott, and comes as he’s fresh off a commanding re-election victory. How will he use that new status as a second-term chief executive? We hope with more leadership than he provided the last time around.

It’s probably unfair to compare Abbott to his predecessor, who Lord knows had his faults. But Rick Perry spent 14 years in the governor’s mansion, and by the time he left, he had left his mark on Texas and on state government. Abbott has yet to do so and last session spent far too much time playing an insecure, second fiddle to Patrick, whose ultra-conservative agenda the governor seemed happy to follow even as Straus took courageous steps in trying to steer the session back to the essentials.

The 86th Legislature would be a fine time for Abbott to break free from Patrick’s shadow, show some leadership and build a discernible legacy.

Education funding and tax reform

Everybody seems to agree that Texas’ dilapidated school finance system should be fixed — they just can’t agree on how. Complicating the issue is that some Republicans want to provide property tax relief this session by capping the growth of local property taxes, the largest source of education funding. Abbott’s proposed tax plan, for example, would siphon tens of billions of dollars away from schools over time, a Hearst analysis found. Ideas for making up the lost dollars — tapping oil and gas revenues, increasing gas or alcohol taxes — will be tough sells.

No doubt, Texans want a break on property taxes. But we’ll be watching to see if tax hawks in the Legislature engage in honest debate on the issue. Texas has no income tax, so the burden falls disproportionately on property taxpayers, who pay more as their property values increase. For years, the state has reduced the amount it contributes for public education, further increasing the burden, especially on homeowners.

Still, a few developments give us more confidence than we’ve had in a long time that the Legislature will address an education funding system the Texas Supreme Court found barely constitutional. Not only has Abbott pledged that Texas will spend more money on education, Bonnen, the incoming speaker, has vowed to make school finance his No. 1 priority this session. Business leaders across the state, whose success is tied to an educated workforce, are speaking out in support.

Will it be another bandage? Will it merely heal open wounds? Or will lawmakers truly set Texas on a healthy course to grow our own educated workforce — rather than having to import it from states such as California? True reform will accomplish the basics — such as updating old formulas to reflect the true cost of educating Texas’ diverse population — but it will also make the necessary investments for excellence, including boosting teacher pay and instituting full-day prekindergarten. Stay tuned to see if lawmakers and state leaders put the money where their mouths are.

Harvey recovery

Abbott never called a special session to respond to the devastation of Hurricane Harvey. He had his reasons, at one point saying that Houston had all the money it needed for urgent needs. At another point, the governor argued simply: “Haste makes waste.” He feared rushing to spend state money would limit Texas’ options and our access to federal funds. Maybe that’s true.

But we hope Abbott and other state officials were true to their word when they indicated repeatedly that they planned to use funds from the Economic Stabilization Fund to help Houston later. Well, it’s later. And given that the savings account, nicknamed the rainy day fund, recently reached a record high of $12.5 billion, there’s no excuse not to act.

This session marks the state’s first opportunity to help fund massive infrastructure projects and pass regulatory changes that could make our city and state safer during the next major hurricane.

Will they get it done? We’re cautiously optimistic. More than a year has passed since the storm and the sense of immediacy that once existed has waned.

We hope the governor’s sense of duty to our city of millions — responsible for a third of the state’s economy — has not.

Consider this the litmus test for action: tapping the rainy day fund to build a third reservoir project in west Harris County.

Criminal justice reform

Will 2019 be the year Texas lawmakers finally catch up with the national conversation on criminal justice reform and make the changes advocates have been demanding for years? Let’s hope so. Not just for Texans, but for other states that closely watch our policies on sentencing and prison life. When Congress recently passed its own prison- and sentencing-reform law, plenty of credit was paid to Texas as an exemplar of what could be done. But there’s much more to be done. Some members filed legislation last time to end civil asset forfeiture. We expect similar legislation again. Under current law, owners can lose what’s theirs even if they’re never convicted of a crime. That’s screwy — and we’re hoping libertarian-leaning conservatives give the bills a bigger boost this time.

Expect to see discussion, too, about whether bail reform ought to be addressed by a statewide set of rules, or perhaps ones that apply to our biggest cities.

What about efforts to decriminalize possession of pot? Or continued focus on better mental health care and addiction treatment within the jails? What of the conditions inside the private and public facilities housing youthful offenders? Legislative improvements are always welcome in those areas.

Unincorporated Harris County

The challenges of unincorporated Harris County are nothing new. For decades, neighborhoods have sprouted up in the vast prairie west of Houston without any formal municipal governmental structure. Special districts have provided basic needs, such as neighborhood streets and water. The county government picked up the rest — notably law enforcement and roads. No mayors. No city halls. No local sales taxes.

This model is becoming unsustainable. If grouped into a single city, the total population of unincorporated Harris County would be the fifth largest in the United States. Issues such as infrastructure costs and upkeep, law enforcement and the basic duties of government are piling up, and Commissioners Court lacks both the funds and the statutory authority to deal with it all.

Meanwhile, obscure rules written in Austin prohibit these neighborhoods from forming their own cities, which could levy sales taxes and pass ordinances. Alreadyexisting cities are hesitant to annex special districts, which often have long-term debt.

So why would the Legislature finally address this big-picture issue after ignoring it for so long?

Hurricane Harvey revealed the weaknesses of these special districts to meet residents’ needs, and the ongoing fight over property taxes has the county looking for another way to pay for services.

Formal studies, notably from the Kinder Institute, are being published about the problems in these areas — and potential solutions.

The status quo in the unincorporated county can’t go on forever, and only Austin can change it.

A sense of excitement

You needn’t be a politics junkie to get excited at the outset of a new session of the Legislature. Yes, we’re often disappointed by the time the voting is all done come spring. But this is the chance we have every two years to push and plead with lawmakers to fix problems confronting Texas. It’s early yet, and we’re still optimistic they’ll make us proud of our democracy.