Gov. Rick Perry, at a bill signing ceremony Friday (Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman)
Gov. Rick Perry on Friday gave legislative budget writers an A. He left very few scrawls in the margins of their paper.
Texans trust elected officials to make needed investments to accommodate a state population that’s growing by 1,000 people per day, while “being responsible with hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” he said. “I’m proud to say we’ve done just that.”
With his veto pen, Perry deleted only $27 million – or about one-hundredth of 1 percent of the $202.5 billion of spending in the budget package he signed, which covers not just the next two years but the final months of the current cycle. It ends Aug. 31.
Perry vetoed $5.25 million of university special items, including $1 million of “transitional funding” that Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, secured for the University of North Texas at Dallas and $1.5 million for a department of Mexican American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Perry has criticized lawmakers’ use of the special items in higher education, saying they fund bloated programs that are never closely scrutinized.
Nearly $300 million in the budget and a related bill will not be spent because it hinged on passage of bills that died. As he’s done before, Perry highlighted the death of such spending, though his deletions are superfluous. They aren’t needed to stop it. Nevertheless, he did block $175 million of debt service payments for college construction from being passed. That’s because he refused to add tuition revenue bonds to the special session’s agenda.
The budget will use $3.9 billion of rainy-day dollars. Of that, $2 billion won’t be spent unless voters this fall approve a constitutional amendment creating a revolving loan fund for water projects. Perry bragged about the “historic water infrastructure legislation,” and also touted how the budget and other bills also provide for better college or career prep for young Texans, a strengthened university for South Texas and $1.4 billion of tax and fee decreases.
Sound like a man who’s through running for office? He’s off to Washington, his campaign aides report, to speak early Saturday to the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s 2013 “Road to Majority” conference.