House adjourns, passes deadline without passage of HB 300. Carona and Hegar spar over the wreckage. Keep up with events today on the NPT blog

In a frantic afternoon, House and Senate members scrambled to gain the upper ground in an argument over local option tax language in HB 300, the Texas Department of Transportation sunset bill.

The local option language would give El Paso County Commissioners (as well as commissioners in other urban areas) the ability to call elections to authorize raising the gas tax and automobile fees in order to fund transportation projects.

The issue has been a point of contention between the House and Senate this session. Earlier this week Senators amended HB 300 to include the local option language.

But on Thursday, Joe Pickett, D-El Paso, chair of the House Transportation Committee, got House members to vote 84-59 in favor of a motion asking the HB 300 conferees (who hash out a final version of the bill) to take the local option language out.

That hasn't stopped Senators from trying to keep it in.

Sen John Carona, R-Dallas, chair of the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee announced this afternoon that he now had the numbers in the House to ensure HB 300 would pass with the local option language included in it. (77 signatures with 5-8 more on the way.)

“The momentum has clearly shifted in favor of this,” Carona said this afternoon regarding the numbers. “Clearly we have the votes necessary today...to pass this in the House. The only remaining obstacle is Joe Pickett.”

So what happened? How did Carona get 20 house members to change their mind?

Something “pretty close to deceit” was the answer of a “really upset” Joe Pickett.

“That’s not the case,” he said of the new numbers. “He (Carona) doesn’t have them.”

According to Pickett, lobbyists had been “garnering votes” from House members for the local option language by getting them to sign a petition that asked conferees to “help extend debate on this issue.”

“They were telling people, ‘just sign this petition, help us extend debate on this,’” Pickett said. “How do you extend the debate on a bill that is an up-or-down vote?”

Pickett’s point is that once a bill leaves conference committee, it can either be accepted or rejected by the respective chambers. If rejected it goes back to conference - something there isn’t time for this late in the session.

A fuming Pickett went outside the House chamber, where lobbyists hang out waiting for state Reps to come and talk to them - and gave them hell.

“I called them out on it,” Pickett said. “I confronted them directly because they were not being upfront.”

Pickett believes that House members who signed the petition didn’t realize they were condoning the local option language, something Carona insists they did.

“One of those same members (who witnessed Pickett’s confrontation with lobbyists in the hallway) turned to me and said, ‘I can’t vote for this,’ well, you just did in essence, by a straw poll vote,” Pickett said.

State Rep. Carl Isett, R-Lubbock, author of HB 300 agreed with Pickett when asked after the confrontation.

“Our colleagues are coming to us on the floor, they saying, ‘I’ve signed this thing. And when we tell them what they’ve signed they say ‘oh no,’” Isett said. “I think there are mixed messages being sent.”

Isett said the the conferees had compromised on the other two differences between the House and Senate versions of HB 300 – the number of TxDoT commissioners and the issue of formula funding. The conferees need to agree to a version of the bill tonight or tomorrow morning in order for there to be time for the bill to be passed before Sine Die.

The local option language remains a hot-button issue and was the subject of a downtown rally in Austin lunchtime, at which Carona (and indeed Shapleigh) spoke, vowing not to compromise.

One Tarrant County Judge speaking at the rally, called for those who oppose the local option language to “get out of the way” while supporters chanted “let us vote!,” reported the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

According to the Austin Chronicle, there was also a “radical anti-tax crowd” counter protesting. Yesterday Carona and 16 other Senators including sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, sent a letter to House members urging them to re-consider the local option language.

Isett remained resolute this afternoon.

“We are not willing to accept” the local option language. “We had a motion direct from the House. Our members clearly said, ‘do not bring us a bill with local option taxes,’” he said.

Isett added that the issue was “controversial” and not part of the Sunset commission's recommendations for TxDoT.

“We need to have that conversation, but they are two separate conversations and they need to be in two separate bills,” he said. (Local option taxes were the subject of Senate bill 855, authored by Carona, which died in the House.)

Carona maintained he is not budging on the issue and told reporters later in the afternoon that he would kill the bill if it didn’t include the local option language. [link]

“Arguments like, ‘well, there may not really be the (House) votes there,’ are really smokescreens by people who simply don’t want to have to vote on a tax bill - despite what they may say to the contrary,” Carona told NPT earlier this afternoon. “These are people who simply place their own personal interest, specifically their re-election above the good and interests of the state of Texas.”

Killing the bill would mean the Legislature would come back to the issue of TxDoT sunset in two years, the agency operating as it does now in the meantime.

Isett is not a fan of that option at all.

He said waiting two years would also kill other provisions in the bill - including $2bn in new bonds to build highways.

“We’ll have status quo and no new money for highways,” he said.