Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee says the debacle over tuition revenue bonds for universities during the last few days of the 79th Legislature must not happen again.

"I'm embarrassed. What we were doing out there at the end was handing out Christmas presents," Sen. Steve Ogden (R-Bryan) told QR. "It was not about protecting taxpayers' money. It was all about how do we make sure each elected official gets credit for construction of a new building."

Ogden was speaking about the demise of House Bill 2329, authored by Rep. Geanie Morrison, chair of the House Higher Education Committee. The initial bill would have authorized more than $1.1 billion in bonds for campus construction projects. However, after a mix-up in printing and distributing a conference committee report on the bill, which Morrison blamed on a drafting error by the Legislative Council, negotiations between the two chambers stalled.

Ogden said the whole process for authorizing tuition revenue bonds was wrong. He cited the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. "They received funding last session and promised not to come back for more, but they did," Ogden said.

Ogden said he would like to see a scoring process agreed whereby proposed campus construction projects are graded according to need. " This deserves an in-depth study. There needs to be a more rigorous approach and less politics. If a building does not get above a certain score it would not be approved," Ogden said.
Ogden said negotiations over HB 2329 had been a mess from the very beginning. He said it started with House conferees Morrison and Rep. Beverly Woolley (R-Houston) trying to get Senate conferees to sign a conference committee report without his knowledge. Sens. Troy Fraser (R-Horseshoe Bay), Eddie Lucio (D-Brownsville), and Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa (D-McAllen) signed the report.

"They came over to the Senate floor while we were laying out the Appropriations report," Ogden said. "The senators were led to believe I had agreed to the proposal and they signed in the interests of time. We had not agreed anything and they were misled. I'm not sure if it was malicious. I do not think it was. But, it was a pretty bad way of doing business."

At a luncheon for the media the day after Sine Die, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst explained that negotiations continued even after the mishap on printing the report. Dewhurst told reporters he took a call from Speaker Tom Craddick on the last afternoon of the session suggesting that House conferees take $550 million and prioritize its top projects and Senate conferees do the same.

"I said I did not think it would work but I would try it," Ogden told QR.

House negotiators proposed $75 million in TRBs for the University of Texas at Austin to build an Experimental Science Building, yet nothing for Texas A&M University at College Station, which is in Ogden's district.

The House plan also proposed next to nothing for campuses south of I-10. The only border institution that would have received new bonding authority would have been the University of Texas-Pan American to build a $7 million upper level campus in Starr County.

The main campus at UTPA would have received no TRBs, and neither would the University of Texas campuses at San Antonio, Brownsville, or El Paso. The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio would have missed out, as would its Regional Academic Health Center satellite in Harlingen. Texas A&M campuses in Corpus Christi, Kingsville and Laredo would also have gone without TRB funding.

"What the House offered us at the end was drawn up almost entirely by political considerations," Ogden said. "Their sheet was very troublesome. It was rigged to force our hand into making some very bad decisions. It was not right ethically and it was not right politically."

Hinojosa, one of the Senate conferees for HB 2329, agreed. Hinojosa said he could not believe the House proposals. "We thought we had an agreement and then they (House leaders) reneged," Hinojosa told QR. "Everything on the House side was run by the Speaker and the Speaker was not happy with what the conference committee agreed. There was next to nothing for South Texas universities."

Morrison defended the House approach. "I feel very good about the process," Morrison told QR. "We went through the House process and Senator Ogden went through the Senate process. We tried to come up with a product that was good and we just couldn't get there. We simply had more projects than we had money."

Morrison said she would have liked her own bill to prevail because it was geographically fair. She said the $550 million House plan that failed to provide any TRBs for the border and South Texas was merely a "starting point" for negotiations on the last day of the session.

"That was just a working document that was used in the process," Morrison said. "That was just something talked about. It was not a final offer. I would never have agreed to certain regions of the state missing out. What I wanted was my bill. That was my position all along."

Heather Tindall, a spokeswoman for Craddick, said House and Senate conferees were always $300-$400 million apart. Tindall said that if anybody killed HB 2329 it was Senator Ogden.

"We had TRBs all across the state. The House plan was broad based and fair, and three members of the Senate signed off on it," Tindall said. "The 50-50 split was just a negotiating tool. We never agreed on it. It was never part of a final package. In the end, I think it is fair to say they (the Senate) killed the bill. Senator Ogden killed it."