San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Abbott’s self-defeating war on cities
Gov. Greg Abbott gets excited about the flood of people rolling into Texas from California. He also takes feverish pride in corporations moving to or expanding in the state.
These enthusiasms are stamped all over his Twitter feed. A recent example, from May 20:
“TX has led the nation for the past 8 years in new economic development & corporate relocation. Even during the pandemic, we went from having the 10th largest economy in the world to the 9th largest economy. The TX model continues to attract more businesses & jobs for Texans.”
And this one on the influx of Californians, from January 2020:
“To the Californians moving to Texas: Remember those high taxes, burdensome regulations, & socialistic agenda advanced in
CA? We don’t believe in that. We believe in less government & more individual freedom. If you agree with that you’ll fit right in.”
To Abbott, the Texas Model is simple, as it was to governors before him: Keep taxes low, state services at a minimum and regulations threadbare. Die before amending the state constitution to allow a personal income tax.
Don’t violate those core beliefs, and corporations and people will stampede into Texas. That’s proven more or less correct over time.
But despite talking about the Texas Model as an article of faith, Abbott has messed with it. So did Rick Perry, his immediate predecessor in the Governor’s Mansion.
In different ways, both broke with Texas’ historic small-govern
ment ethos.
Big tax breaks
In the early aughts, Perry added a big dose of corporate welfare to Texas’ way of attracting corporations. He conjured into being the “deal-closing” Texas Enterprise Fund to give grants to corporations looking to relocate to Texas. He was also the force behind the Chapter 313 program, which allows local school boards to grant big property tax breaks to manufacturers and energy companies — costs that all Texas taxpayers are forced to bear.
As a Hearst Newspapers investigation (SA Inc.’s cover story) demonstrated, many of the corporations that have benefited from tax breaks likely would have built their big capital projects in Texas without the giveaways.
Many Texas lawmakers have gotten wise to the waste of Chapter 313 — enough to thwart its reauthorization in the recently ended legislative session.
Chapter 313 has allowed companies to avoid more than $10 billion in property taxes. The Texas Enterprise Fund has stuffed more than $600 million into the pockets of corporations since 2003.
There’s nothing small-govern
ment about that.
Animus toward cities
Abbott’s violation of the Texas Model is his eagerness to peel away big cities’ local control, even as he brags about how major employers and workers and their families are flowing into the state. As if they’re settling anywhere other than Texas’ urban centers.
Austin, Dallas, Houston and
San Antonio and their suburbs routinely turn up on the U.S. Census Bureau’s lists of fastestgrowing cities and metropolitan areas. Combined, metros account for about 90 percent of the state’s economic activity.
Yet you don’t have to look far to see the anti-city bias of Abbott and many GOP lawmakers.
In the session that ended last week, Abbott supported and signed into law a measure barring cities with populations of
250,000 or more from reducing their police department budgets. He backed legislation that would have stopped local governments from using tax money to hire lobbyists to work on their behalf in Austin; it failed.
In 2017, he signed a bill forbidding local governments to set themselves up as “sanctuary cities” for undocumented immigrants, and he has supported caps on local property tax rates.
But Abbott’s support for the voting restrictions championed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is perhaps his worst offense against cities, home to far more Black, Hispanic and Asian voters than anywhere else in Texas.
Thoroughly urban state
Senate Bill 7 would have cut the number of polling sites in the largest urban counties; reduced voting hours on the last Sunday of early voting, apparently to thwart some Black churches’ “souls to the polls” events; given a freer hand to partisan poll watchers; and required video surveillance of polling sites in cities with populations of 100,000 or more.
Democratic lawmakers in the Texas House killed the bill. But Abbott is likely to add the legislation to the agenda of a special session.
SB 7 fed on the lie that President Donald Trump was cheated out of re-election last year — and that the imaginary voter fraud has to be stamped out. What the measure was really about was safeguarding GOP officeholders in Austin and Washington.
As former Mayor Henry Cisneros and his co-authors noted in “The Texas Triangle: An Emerging Global Power,” eight of the 35 counties that make up the Triangle broke for Biden in 2020, including the biggest: Bexar, Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Travis.
Voter suppression is Republican leaders’ response.
One of the great unknowns is when major employers — those in Texas or considering a move here — will get fed up with attempted voting restrictions and other attacks on cities. When will they decide to hire elsewhere? After all, companies such as USAA, Dell and Southwest Airlines are trying to recruit the best talent from across the country and internationally. And they’re looking for more candidates of color.
Ignoring the fact that Texas is a thoroughly urban state, as Abbott and Patrick do, hurts their efforts.
Empower innovation
In March, public policy institutes at the University of Texas, Rice University and Southern Methodist University published “Texas Metropolitan Blueprint: A Policy Agenda to Secure the Competitiveness and Prosperity of Texas.” It took a dim view of assaults on local autonomy.
“Texas’s governor and legislature have increasingly sought to restrict local jurisdictions’ power to choose their own priorities and fund them — a move away from locally focused, conservative governance,” the authors wrote. “Local leaders need both the resources and the authority to craft policies that address their particular needs.
Texas should be empowering local innovation, not blocking it.”
If Abbott got the memo, he crumpled it up and tossed it.