Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Legislation that would create a $100 million-a-year state program to encourage use of solar energy and require homebuilders in new subdivisions to offer solar energy to home buyers won approval from the Senate on Tuesday.

More of us than ever are mindful of switching off lights, weatherizing our homes and doing all that we can to save energy. State legislators can get it too. This session, they have an opportunity and responsibility to save us even more money on our electricity bills, create thousands of green jobs and reduce pollution across the state. Our representatives now have less than six weeks to pass the best of nearly 100 bills that have been introduced on clean power and green jobs. These energy efficiency and renewable energy bills set the stage for rebuilding, repowering and renewing our state’s economy during tough times. They will build a sustainable future for Texas.

For nearly six years, North Texas leaders have asked for -- and failed to get -- lawmakers' approval to let local residents decide whether to pay higher taxes and fees in return for billions of dollars' worth of rail and road improvements.

There he was rallying wanna-be members of the Republic of Texas, the group that gained notoriety in a previous century for its hunker-down secessionism. Meanwhile, the state he leads – or, I should say, was elected to lead – stands on the verge of becoming the next mega-state.

The stem-cell fault line is in full view these days in the Texas Legislature. And to understand the actions of the players, it is important to define your terms.

Perry says, accurately, that he never suggested that Texas should secede, though he still says it legally could. Which it can't, of course. Americans settled that with an awful, bloody war that ended 144 years ago.

The state’s largest regulated electricity delivery company says it’s drawing up plans to seek some of the $3.3 billion that the Obama Administration is making available to promote development of the “smart grid.”

Eliot Shapleigh, a state senator from El Paso, compiles a report each legislative session called "Texas on the Brink." Skimming it will provide more than enough data to show just how functional the Republican leadership of this state has been since 1994. Here are a few embarrassing tidbits about Texas that Rick Perry doesn't want the rest of the nation to know so he can start planning his little fantasy of national politics.

Job losses in Texas have averaged 50,000 a month since January. Those numbers don't begin to tell the human story of loss of dignity that a loss of income brings, but if compassion doesn't move you, perhaps the financial hit on the Texas unemployment compensation fund will.

The Texas House has approved a $178 billion state budget that would increase spending by 5 percent over the next two years and would strip the governor's office of its operating budget almost entirely.

The partisan bickering derailed an unrelated debate Friday in the Texas Senate, where both GOP leaders and Democrats huddled behind closed doors for more than an hour. Afterward, members from both parties vowed to patch things up, with one top Democrat expressing regret about the "tone" of his party's complaint.

Here’s a terrible program that used punitive fines to plug holes in the budget. Some face $1,750 fines for a first time offense. Currently, of the 1,600,000 in the program, more than 1,080,000 can’t pay. Our founders never intended for debtor’s prisons to substitute for a tax system.

It’s a kind of switcheroo in which state Senate budget-writers cleaned out the state’s main public school fund, and one for school technology, sprinkled the dollars elsewhere in the budget, and then replenished the state school funds with about $2 billion in federal stimulus money.

But some Republicans see the need to get things done, for their constituents and for their state, and at least two have stood out over the past week or so in the Texas Legislature: Sen. Kevin Eltife of Tyler and Sen. John Carona of Dallas.

“Right now, state leaders can decide the fate of 56,000 uninsured Rio Grande Valley children and 250,000 throughout Texas by making a very simple but effective change in our law,” said Luisa Saenz, director of Children’s Defense Fund-Rio Grande Valley.

In January, six months after stepping down as the executive director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Glenn Shankle signed on as a lobbyist for Waste Control Specialists, the company recently licensed by TCEQ to build a massive radioactive waste dump in West Texas. His lobby contract is worth between $100,000 and $150,000, according to the Texas Ethics Commission.

The proposals by Democratic Sen. Eliot Shapleigh of El Paso would require the state to factor changes in our climate into the state's water plan. My column today deals with the fact that the country as a whole should improve water planning efforts in case climate change produces more droughts. We can't plan with absolute precision, but Shapleigh is right: We should start considering the impact of climate change on our water supplies.

The district had been trying for years to prod customers into using less energy with tactics like rebates for energy-saving appliances. But the traditional approaches were not meeting the energy reduction goals set by the nonprofit utility’s board.

From the 2000 through the 2006 election cycles, payday lenders, title lenders and other predatory businesses and affiliated associations gave $10.2 million to state-level candidates and party committees in 41 states; individuals associated with those companies have contributed at least $3.54 million in 45 states, bringing the total to nearly $14 million, according to Scott Jordan, who has written two reports on such contributions for the nonpartisan National Institute of Money in State Politics.

A Texas Senate panel on Wednesday was scheduled to vote on two bills that would help Texas Tech and six other leading universities in the state get tier-one status, but in the end the proposed legislation was left pending again.