The latest budget news from The Texas Tribune.
It was more like a bidding auction today than a meeting of the Texas House Committee on Licensing and Regulation. Gambling advocates packed into three Capitol hearing rooms, and threw out number after number as they asked legislators — yet again — to consider the benefits of more gaming in Texas. Full Story
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The starting gun for the debate over gambling fires this morning: Gaming interests inside and outside Texas are asking lawmakers to expand legal wagering to include either resort casinos, slot machines at race tracks, or some combination. Full Story
A new political action committee is attacking Gov. Rick Perry with a television ad playing on a familiar theme: Perry's high-class living. The ad starts airing tonight in markets across Texas. Full Story
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The executive director of the progressive Center for Public Policy Priorities and the director of the Center for Fiscal Policy at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, debate the best way to dig out of Texas' multi-billion-dollar budget shortfall. Full Story
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After shocking abuse was uncovered at Texas Youth Commission facilities in 2007, lawmakers successfully overhauled the state juvenile justice system. Three years later, advocates worry that budget woes will halt that progress. Full Story
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While the right and left don't agree on much, both sides stipulate that the state's budget mess is a multibillion-dollar problem. In the debut of our new video series, the executive director of the progressive Center for Public Policy Priorities, former state district judge Scott McCown, and the director of the Center for Fiscal Policy at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, former state Rep. Talmadge Heflin, debate the best way to dig us out of the hole — and how we got into it in the first place. Full Story
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It’s storm season, and with the current budget mess, many coastal Texans fear the state may not be prepared to pay for damages. The BP oil spill in the Gulf is adding a whole new level of uncertainty to this annual conundrum, as Mose Buchele of KUT News reports. Full Story
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Ramshaw and the Houston Chronicle's Terri Langford on incidents of abuse and mistreatment at residential treatment centers, M. Smith on the state Republican Party platform and 10th Amendment embracers, Galbraith on a pipeline project raising crude concerns and the most important word in water law, Ramsey on former officeholders who are now lobbyists and the possibility of a speaker's race, Grissom on a fight over solar power in Marfa, Hamilton and Aguilar on the TxDOT audit, Philpott on budget cuts affecting school districts and my conversation with Dallas County D.A. Craig Watkins: The best of our best from June 7-11, 2010. Full Story
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Lawmakers have said it before, and today they said it again: Sweeping top-down change is needed within the Texas Department of Transportation. Full Story
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Citing budget cuts and a decline is revenue, the USCIS is proposing fee increases for more than two dozen immigration-related documents. Full Story
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Last week's request for additional budget cuts of 10 percent is expected to have a dramatic effect on state services — and local ones, too. Ben Philpott of KUT News and the Tribune reports on how a new round of slashing will affect school districts in particular. Full Story
Forecasters pegging a looming state budget shortfall at $18 billion don't have Gov. Rick Perry particularly worried. Full Story
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Texas’ “geriatric” inmates (55 and older) make up just 7.3 percent of Texas’ 160,000-offender prison population, but they account for nearly a third of the system’s hospital costs. Prison doctors routinely offer up the oldest and sickest of them for medical parole, a way to get those who are too incapacitated to be a public threat and have just months to live out of medical beds that Texas’ quickly aging prison population needs. They’ve recommended parole for 4,000 such inmates within the last decade. But the state parole board has only agreed in a quarter of these cases, leaving the others to die in prison — and on the state’s dime. Full Story
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The state's tax on corporations could end up half a billion dollars shy of Comptroller Susan Combs' predictions, officials with her office say. Full Story
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On Friday, state agencies were told to cut another 10 percent from their budgets as a way of closing what could be an $18 billion biennial shortfall. But those cuts will only scratch the surface of what's needed, so what to do next? Full Story
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The governor, lieutenant governor and speaker directed all state agencies on Friday to cut their budgets by an additional 10 percent. Last week, those same agencies had their current budgets trimmed by a total of around $1.2 billion in an effort to close a projected $18 billion budget shortfall in the next legislative session. Ben Philpott of KUT News and the Tribune reports. Full Story
Fresh off of asking for five percent cuts from state agencies and actually approving $1.2 billion of what was proposed, the state's top three leaders are asking for ten percent cuts in the amounts the agencies will be seeking next time the Legislature meets. Full Story
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A new Rasmussen Reports poll finds that 57 percent of Texans favor legalizing casino gambling as a means to draw down the coming budget shortfall, but only 21 percent support higher taxes. Full Story
More than two-thirds of Texans say their confidence in the state's public schools ranges from shaky to nonexistent, according to the new University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll. A majority of Texans believe that crime, low academic standards, lack of parental involvement and not enough funding are "major" problems that public schools face — but two-thirds say "too much religion in the schools" is not a problem. Full Story
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Coming soon to a large pink state capitol building in this very state: A day-long seminar on slot machines and casinos and all that, especially as it pertains to the state budget. Full Story