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TEXAS AFT LEGISLATIVE HOTLINE--MONDAY, OCTOBER 26,
2009 The Sunset Advisory Commission was created "to identify and eliminate waste, duplication, and inefficiency in government agencies." Commission members are five state senators and a private citizen appointed by the lieutenant governor and five state representatives and a private citizen appointed by the speaker of the Texas house. Chairmanship passes between the Senate and House every two years. Current members appointed by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst are Senators Glenn Hegar (Commission chair), Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa, Joan Huffman, Robert Nichols, and John Whitmire and public member Charles McMahen. Representatives Carl Isett and Linda Harper-Brown are members, but House Speaker Joe Straus has not yet made appointments to four vacancies, including the Commission's vice-chair. During the interim between legislative sessions, Commission members and their staff review policies and programs of almost all state agencies approximately every 12 years. Theoretically, an agency under review that is not specifically "re-authorized" for an additional 12 years will go out of existence. At the beginning of the process--which for this interim probably will star in November, 2009, Commission staffers interview agency workers, clients, and other "stakeholders" before presenting preliminary recommendations to the Commission in a public hearing. A second public hearing is held to consider the Commission's final official recommendations. Those final recommendations usually are incorporated into "sunset bills" and introduced in the following legislative session. Sunset bills for sizeable agencies often run to two or three hundred pages and contain numerous subjects--some of which may not be well understood by more than a few interested folks. While a few self-described purists decry attempts to use sunset bills for policy changes that have not been thoroughly vetted by the Commission--at least attempts with which they don't agree--these bills are widely seen as vehicles for mischief-making and even occasional beneficial changes. In 2005, Rep. Kent Grusendorf tried to shoehorn a taxpayer-funded private school voucher program into the Texas Education Agency's sunset bill. As chairman of the House Public Education Committee and a top lieutenant in the House leadership circle, Grusendorf should have been in good position to deliver for right-wing billionaire and voucher campaign financier James Leininger. But Texas AFT and our allies in the legislature formed an unmovable wall of resistance and made clear that continuation of TEA would not be held hostage to vouchers. Grusendorf not only lost the fight for vouchers in that bill, but--with a lot of help from Texas AFT members from across Texas--he also lost his House seat in the following election. In 2009, Representative Jessica Farrar and Senators Royce West and John Whitmire successfully amended the Department of Public Safety sunset bill with language clarifying the federally-required confidentiality for school employee criminal history background information. Media moguls had managed to stall a standalone bill to accomplish that purpose, but Texas AFT worked with these legislative allies to outmaneuver the opposition. Even though the issue had not been "vetted" during the Sunset Commission's review, the amendment stuck because it was recognized to be necessary and represented a clarification of existing policy, rather than new policy. During the current 2010-2011 sunset review cycle, 28 agencies
and organizations will be examined. These include a few that
have some particular interest to Texas AFT members, such as the
Texas Youth Commission, the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission,
and the State Board of Examiners for Speech-Language Pathology
and Audiology. Also scheduled for review are two large agencies
of major statewide interest--the Texas Department of Insurance
and the Texas Department of Transportation. (A full Other agencies of particular interest to Texas AFT members
are scheduled for As illustrated by the examples above, sunset review is an important part of the larger legislative process. Texas AFT takes an active role at every step of the sunset cycle in matters affecting our members. We work with Commission members and staff in all review stages, make comments and testify at the public hearings, and lobby on the resulting bills during the legislative session. And, of course, we will keep you and all our members prepared to act when needed. |
