A Grant By Any Other Name
May 24th, 2007 at 11:27 am
The last bill brought up on the House calendar Tuesday night would have expanded the use of ‘Ogden bonds’ deisgnated for road construction. Instead, Democrats killed it the best way they know how: they just kept talking about it. By midnight, the proposal was an ex-bill.
That was the second time Tuesday that the House struck down a lending scheme created by Sen. Steve Ogden.
The Senate finance chair surprised Democrats earlier this month, by amending the top 10 percent rule reform bill with a $1500 college grant for every student in the upper tenth of their graduating class. When SB 101 landed in the House Higher Education Committee, though, chairwoman Geanie Morrison stripped it like a hot Miata in a chop shop, cutting the ‘Ogden grants’ and other Senate compromises, so the House could re-amend it just the way they wanted.
During floor debate on the bill Tuesday, Democratic Rep. Pete Gallego offered an amendment to re-insert the grants, but that didn’t fly. (Other Senate measures, including a provision to sunset the bill’s changes in 2015, found their way back on board.) The bill passed out of the House on a tight 77-67 vote Wednesday afternoon, without the scholarships, and will face off against the Senate version in conference.
Across the rotunda, Senators returned the favor by amending the Ogden grants back onto another Morrison education bill Wednesday. Sen. Royce West brought the amendment this time, an exact replication of Ogden’s original proposal. The amendment passed 31-0, setting up the bill for another conference committee showdown.
The $25 million it takes to fund the Ogden grants would come out of general revenue money — not at the expense of college grant programs that are already in place. The proposal would help make college more affordable, at a time when lawmakers have done nothing to rein in state universities’ ballooning tuition.
Still, Morrison says she doesn’t like the idea of adding a new scholarship program when the state’s college grant funds are already underfunded. “I’d hate to have us start another scholarship program when we have a need-based program we haven’t fully funded,” Morrison told the Observer.
Even though Ogden made it clear, when he brought his original amendment, that his proposal wasn’t going to take money away from existing need-based grants, Morrison isn’t convinced. “It’s still money,” she said.
