Sunday, May 31, 2009
R.I.P. SB 546 and All Its Passengers
Yesterday there was a faint glimmer of hope for SB 546, the Fraser/Anchia energy efficiency bill carrying most of the session's remaining environmental legislation. But today it seems the bill's passage would be nothing short of a miracle.
"It would require too many things to go right," said Rep. Rafael Anchia, the bill's House author.
Too many things, indeed. For the bill to pass at this point, conferees from both chambers would have to reach an agreement, sign the bill, and then the House would have to suspend its rules with a 2/3 vote in order to override procedural barriers to bringing it to the floor ... before the legislators could even vote on the final version ... all before midnight tonight.
The procedural barriers would not have been a problem if Anchia and Senate author Troy Fraser could have reached an agreement on the bill's provisions in the first place.
The orginal bill was meant to increase the stringency of an existing energy efficiency program passed by the 80th Legislature. Under the existing program, the state's goal is to meet 20 percent of increased energy demand through energy efficiency measures. Anchia and Fraser couldn't settle on how high the new goal should be, or how much money could be spent on energy efficiency per megawatt hour.
According to Anchia, Fraser's version of the bill would have actually decreased the efficacy of the state's energy efficiency program
"I would prefer to let the bill die rather than adopting something that would undermine the existing program," Anchia said.
But giving up on SB 546 means that several other bills, which died in the House chubfest, die with it - including the solar incentives bill authored by Fraser in the Senate and sponsored by Rep. Mark Strama in the House.
"I'd love to see all those things pass," Anchia said. "But we can't even get an agreement on energy efficiency."
Anchia said House staffers have been working around the clock to come up with a compromise, but that Fraser's office hadn't returned calls in over 20 hours.
Coming to a Texas highway near you: License plate readers
Deep in the Senate's version of the massive TXDoT bill is a provision that, if not stripped out in conference committee, will allow local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to install license plate reading cameras on Texas highways. The technology - already in widespread use in surveillance-crazy Britain - is very powerful, enabling the government to automatically photograph the license plates of moving vehicles and check the information against databases. If the system finds a "match," officers can be alerted.
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Senate Bill 690: Trimming the Grassroots
Karen Hall’s knees still haven’t recovered from gathering signatures door-to-door for an amendment to Bryan’s city charter. “Democracy is a messy business,” she says, “but we like it.”
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Women to Watch: Rep. Kristi Thibaut, D-Houston
After she lost her first campaign for a House seat from Houston in 2006, Kristi Thibaut showed up in Austin anyway. What she encountered, as she lobbied unsuccessfully for lower utility rates with fellow ACORN activists, was almost enough to make her wonder why she'd wanted that seat in the first place.
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One Weekend a Month, Two Weeks a Year, Five Years in Jail
Sometimes our legislators don't even know what's in their own bills. This morning, Rep. Dan Flynn (R-Van) discussed his House Bill 1165 before the Defense & Veterans Affairs Committee and it was evident that he hadn't read - or maybe didn't understand - what all was in it.
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