Blogs

Courtesy House of Representatives member page.

For anyone worried their neighbor might spy on them with a small unmanned aircraft (aka drones), Lance Gooden, and the Texas House, has your back.

Amid talk of “big brother” and a “brave new world” of technology, the House tentatively passed a bill criminalizing certain types of drone photography on Thursday evening.

House Bill 912, by Republican Rep. Lance Gooden from Terrell and more than 80 co-authors, would make it a Class C misdemeanor to use drones—unmanned aircraft—to take photos, except as exempted by the bill. It would also impose a fine of $5,000 for all photos taken by a drone without permission, or a $10,000 fine for distributing the photos.

Gooden said the whole purpose of the bill is to “ensure that our privacy rights are protected,” and that the fines would only apply if malicious intent could be proved.

Some lawmakers worried about the steep fines and how they’d be enforced.

Republican Rep. Drew Springer (Muenster) asked Gooden how, exactly, officials would enforce this law. How are we going to find the helicopter, Springer asked from the back mic. Are we going to send the police to see who captured the pictures?

Dallas Republican Rep. Jason Villalba clearly came prepared: He brought a tiny toy helicopter up to the back mic and explained that the kids’ toy had a small camera in it. He wanted to know if a kid piloting the toy would be incriminated if it took a photo. Gooden said no.

Lawmakers tacked on a slew exemptions: Satellite imaging by Google is allowed, and any photos taken for planning or maintenance purposes, oil pipeline safety, port authority surveillance, or for agricultural purposes will be allowed.

The Texas Department of Public Safety can also use drones, but it must adopt rules for its own drone usage, and no one, DPS included, can take photos of licensed daycare facilities or public schools.

One amendment, by Villalba, would have broadened the bill’s exceptions to include any legitimate law-enforcement activity.

But the amendment failed on a record vote after Gooden shot it down.

“Let’s just scrap the Fourth Amendment and say you can monitor me at any time, as long as it’s legitimate,” Gooden said. “The point of this bill is to give guidance to law enforcement and say these are all acceptable uses… giving a blanket exemption to anyone defeats the purpose of the motivation behind this bill.”

The bill passed to third reading on a voice vote. The House must pass the bill on to the Senate tomorrow.

The Lead:

There are so many ways to kill a bill in the Texas Legislature, and many bills will meet their demise today: It’s deadline for the House chamber to pass House bills on second reading.

Monday was the last day for House committees to report House bills out favorably to the floor. A lot of bills did not make it, like Denton Republican Rep. Myra Crownover’s House Bill 400, which would have eliminated smoking in certain workplaces throughout the state. The committees’ jobs now are to work on Senate bills.

And today any House bill that hopes to pass this session must get through a second reading by midnight tonight. Then it still has to make it through a third reading and pass on to the Senate by the end of Friday.

There are ways to revive proposals, of course. Texas Tribune reporter Ross Ramsey told StateImpact Texas that late in the session, lawmakers start repeating a weird phrase: “I’m looking for a vehicle,” Ramsey says. It means they’re looking to revive their bill and attach it as an amendment to “a Senate bill or something else that is further along in the process and still alive.”

According to the Legislative Reference Library more than 4,000 House bills were filed this year, up a few hundred from 2011. So far 1,757 have been reported out of committee and the full House has approved 669 bills (last session, 797 House bills passed into law). The House will pass quite a few more before tonight’s deadline.

Yesterday’s Headlines:

1. San Antonio Democratic Rep. Mike Villarreal called a press conference yesterday to press for a House committee to pass a watered-down version of the Senate’s payday loan reform bill to the House floor as soon as possible. The Observer‘s Forrest Wilder reports Villarreal is so adamant to stop usury that, if the reform bill doesn’t pass, he promises to travel around the state helping cities draft ordinances to restrict payday loans.

2. The Quorum Report (subscribers only) reports that some Republicans are trying to defund the Public Integrity Unit, a section of the Travis County DA’s office that investigates criminal allegations against state lawmakers. They’re using Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg’s DWI arrest as an argument for moving the PIU from the Travis County District Attorney’s office to the Office of Attorney General Greg Abbott. Word is Republicans would rather be investigated by their own party.

3. A once almost unanimously supported bill to create a new super school and medical school in the Valley is stalling in the Senate after McAllen Sen. Chuy Hinojosa introduced an amendment that would move the school to his district in Hidalgo County, instead of waiting for an advisory board to decide on the location.

4. The Burnt Orange Report has the details on a bill passed out of the House yesterday to protect public schools’ right to call a dressed-up holiday pine tree a “Christmas Tree.”

Line of the Day:

“Either way, members of the House should vote to see if we should add more transparency to ourselves… Before we start to ask other elected officials, other agencies, to be more transparent, we should start with ourselves.” —Rep. Giovanni Capriglione on the demise of his transparency bill that would require lawmakers to disclose connections to businesses with government contracts.

What We’re Watching Today:

1. The House deadline. We’ll have reporters on the House floor until adjournment probably somewhere around midnight. We’re looking at a few bills, including Dallas Republican Dan Branch’s HB 25, which would increase the percentage of performance-based funding that could be withheld from higher institutions. There’s also bills on public breastfeeding, student misconduct in public schools, groundwater conservation and taser and mace regulations.

2. President Obama will be visiting Manor and Austin today to talk about economic growth. Traffic should be fun.

In a last-ditch effort to salvage payday loan reform this session, Rep. Mike Villarreal (D-San Antonio) called on a recalcitrant House committee to send legislation to the Full House. (Sen. John Carona, a Dallas Republican, was scheduled to attend the press conference but couldn’t make it.)

“It is time for this Legislature to protect consumers from the cycle of debt,” said Villarreal. “It is time. We need to do this now. We should not put it off any longer.”

In April, the Senate passed a surprisingly tough bill that would’ve imposed strict caps on interest rates for payday and auto-title loans, effectively shutting down the $5 billion market in Texas.

But the House Committee on Investments and Financial Services has refused to budge. Villarreal, who chairs the committee, said today that he is the only ‘yes’ vote on his payday reform bill, even though his version is significantly weaker than what the Senate passed. The committee has two Democrats and five Republicans. In a hearing on April 29, members of the committee spent hours perishing the thought of regulating payday and title loans, which often carry interest rates in excess of 500 percent APR. “It allows individuals to exercise their freedom,” said Rep. Charles “Doc” Anderson (R-Waco).

Villarreal’s approach would limit the size of loans based on borrower income; limit the number of loans a consumer can have at any given time; restrict the number of “rollovers” or refinances; and pre-empt cities from enacting their own payday regulations.

That approach, Villarreal said, respects markets while “also recognizing our state’s long history and tradition of moral and legal opposition to usury.”

If the Legislature fails to do something meaningful, Villarreal promised to travel around the state, helping cities pass ordinances to regulate the industry. So far, Austin, Dallas, Denton, El Paso and San Antonio have enacted ordinances.

With more money to play with this session, lawmakers in both chambers have already approved sending more dollars to public schools and women’s health providers. On Tuesday, House members tried to make sure businesses get theirs too.

House Bill 500, which passed this evening, would effectively hand back $667 million to Texas businesses with a slew of changes to the franchise tax—$270 million of which came from amendments tacked on during hours of debate on the floor. The plan is in keeping with Gov. Rick Perry’s call for business tax “relief,” though the Texas Tribune notes the bill will be a tough sell in the Senate.

The much-maligned business tax has never raised as much as it was intended to, saddling lawmakers with an $8 billion deficit at the start of each session since the tax was reworked in 2006. House members dug that hole a little deeper today.

Rather than rework the tax law in a streamlined fashion, House Ways and Means Chairman Harvey Hilderbran (R-Kerrville) proposed a series of tweaks aimed at particular businesses. Lawmakers—mostly Republicans, some Democrats as well—dropped in amendments adding $20 million at a time, one after another. Most defended their proposals as relief for small business owners. Rep. Angie Chen Button (R-Garland) threw in a $20 million break for corporations with federal contracts, mentioning defense contractor Raytheon as a particular inspiration.

Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Houston) brought an abacus to the back microphone to remind lawmakers he was watching what their amendments cost. He kept the heat on Hilderbran all afternoon. Hilderbran and Turner talked in circles about just who benefits from lowering the tax on businesses, building to a fiery exchange.

Hilderbran: “The small businesses, the mom-and-pop employers, get a tax break in this bill, and their employees will be better off.”

Turner: “Is there a tax break in HB 500 for mom and dad who do not own a business?”

Hilderbran: “If they work for those businesses they benefit from this too, because those businesses thrive, they’re more competitive and they’re gonna grow and then they’re gonna be in a position to elevate wages and hire more people.”

Turner: “Let me telll you my concern here with this bill and some of the others, we talk about—”

At the sound of the speaker’s gavel, signifying his time was up, Turner dropped his head, gathered his papers and stepped aside. Hilderbran sighed, “Daggum, Sylvester.”

On Twitter through it all, the Center for Public Policy Priorities’ tax and budget experts Dick Lavine and Eva DeLuna Castro groused about the ham-handed show of policymaking like they were watching from the Muppet Show balcony. Castro noted the debate showed the “difficulty of cutting business taxes when they’re so low to begin with.” Lavine poked at lawmakers claiming their tax exemptions would only cost a few million, naming school programs the state could fully fund with the difference.

Facing criticism that their cuts would cost the state too much in the next two years, some lawmakers just bumped their cuts back a few years. Lavine called one amendment, from Houston Republican Jim Murphy, a “time bomb” for the 2016-17 budget.

Dallas Democrat Yvonne Davis struck a grave note about the tax reform effort, recalling what a mess the margins tax was when lawmakers created it seven years ago.

“It had an $8 billion hole in it when we passed it. It never performed the way they thought it was going to perform, and what we’re doing today is not fixing that problem,” Davis said. “This has become just a pork barrel add-on attempt to get money for your special interests and special projects.”