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Still, university leaders say, this is not a crap shoot. Set goals, and they will reach them. All of Texas will benefit.The money is available. Texans should use it.
The Star-Telegram recommends voting for Proposition 4.
This is an example of how the Texas Constitution gets bound up in pointless change. Prop 5 would allow appraisal districts in adjacent counties to have consolidated appraisal review boards to handle property-owner appeals.
Adjacent counties can already consolidate their appraisal districts and thus their appraisal review boards. The argument for this amendment is that some counties have trouble recruiting qualified review board members. If that’s true, it would also be true of recruiting qualified appraisal district staff. Consolidation as already allowed makes sense. Prop 5 is a solution searching for a problem.
The Star-Telegram Editorial Board recommends voting against Proposition 5.
The Veterans’ Land Board sells bonds to make reduced-rate loans for veterans who buy homes or land. It’s a great program. The amount of outstanding bonds, backed by the state but historically paid off by loan recipients at extremely low default rates, is limited by the constitution. Every time the VLB needs more money, it has to come to voters for a constitutional amendment.
Prop 6 bundles all of the bond authorizations from voters since 1946 -- a total of $4 billion, including $2 billion that has been paid off and the bonds retired -- to create a revolving fund for loans. When a set of bonds is paid off, the VLB could reissue that amount rather than come back to voters for approval.
That eliminates the need for periodic elections, but $4 billion would be far more than the VLB has had available at any one time in the past. The most recent voter-approved bond authorizations were $500 million in 1995 and another $500 million in 2001.
Is $4 billion too much? Is it enough? Voters can’t tell, and they shouldn’t have to guess.
The Star-Telegram Editorial Board recommends voting against Proposition 6.
A Fort Worth City Council member can’t join the Texas State Guard, but a Tarrant County commissioner can. Honest, that’s the way it is under the Texas Constitution.
That council member could join the National Guard or any U.S. military reserve outfit. But not the Texas State Guard. The state constitution says no one can hold more than one civic office for which they get paid.
Prop 7 would change that by adding the Texas State Guard to a list of dual-office positions excepted from the constitutional rule.
A better way to do this, rather than holding an election every time some exception seems like a good idea, is to scrap the list and give the Legislature the authority to make exceptions by statute. Voters could hold the Legislature responsible for bad decisions.
The Star-Telegram Editorial Board recommends voting against Proposition 7.
A lot of people in the Rio Grande Valley want a federal veterans hospital in their area. There are nine such hospitals in Texas, but none in the Valley.
Prop 8 says it would be OK for the state to contribute money, property or other resources to help build and operate VA hospitals.
But the Legislature also passed a law to do the same thing whether Prop 8 is approved or not. Doesn’t that make Prop 8 unnecessary?
The Star-Telegram Editorial Board recommends voting against Proposition 8.
Question: How many miles of Gulf of Mexico beaches in Texas are publicly owned and open for year-round use?
Quick answer: All of them.
More detailed answer: 624 miles, from Sabine Pass on the Texas-Louisiana border to the Rio Grande, although some of those miles are hard to get to and some, in the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge and Padre Island National Seashore, are federally protected.
In the Nov. 3 constitutional amendment election, Texans have a chance to keep it that way. Proposition 9 on the ballot would incorporate into the state constitution the provisions of a 1959 law that reserves beaches for public use.
A lot of beachfront property owners would have it otherwise. The Open Beaches Act itself came about after a 1958 court ruling cast doubt on the state’s ability to control its beaches.
After that ruling, owners of homes and other developments along Gulf beaches seized the opportunity to erect fences and other obstructions down to the water line, reserving areas for private use.
Beachfront property is expensive. Much of it is owned by investors for rental use. Exclusive use of the beach is a plus; letting strangers roam the nearby beach at all times of the day and night a minus.
The Legislature, which in those days had a more populist bent than today, saw things otherwise. Under the leadership of Houston state Rep. Bob Eckhardt, lawmakers passed the Open Beaches Act in a July 1959 special session. The act staked a firm state claim to seaward land between the shore’s vegetation line and the Gulf waters.
The claim was grounded in common law. From the days of Spanish and Mexican rule and well before, those beaches had been used at will by fishermen, seafarers and others. When Texas was a republic, hard beaches were used as highways. A stagecoach and mail route ran along the beach from Galveston to San Luis Pass.
But here’s the most significant problem for beachfront property owners: the vegetation line moves, and the state’s land claim moves along with it.
It can move seaward, which increases the amount of property under private ownership.
More often these days, it moves landward, taking away what had been private property. Texas beaches are eroding, at least partly because rivers have been dammed and therefore don’t carry as much sediment into the sea to be washed ashore.
The biggest troublemakers are hurricanes, which wash away acres of beachfront land overnight. Recent years have not been kind to Gulf Coast residents on that score. First Hurricane Rita and then Hurricane Ike blew away many coastal homes, and they eroded the beach so much that many homes are now classified as being on state-controlled land.
Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson has been quite kind to property owners, allowing them to make emergency repairs, offering $40,000 grants to help pay for moving homes and allowing extra time for the vegetation line to re-establish itself before exercising state control.
Still, all coastal property owners know the risks when they buy. They know they could lose their homes in many ways. If the vegetation line moves in such a way that their home encroaches on the beach, they know they cannot get title insurance or windstorm insurance.
That’s sad for them, but the more important principle at stake is that the public has a right to use the beach.
The Star-Telegram Editorial Board recommends voting for Proposition 9.
The constitution allows creation of emergency services districts that can levy property taxes to pay for things like ambulance service and rural fire control within their boundaries. Prop 10 would allow the elected board members in some of those districts in and around Houston to serve terms of four years rather than two.
This is goofy. There’s no good reason that board members of obscure districts in Harris County should have longer terms than members of the Texas House.
The Star-Telegram Editorial Board recommends voting against Proposition 10.
Few issues have roused Texans’ ire in recent years so much as government’s use of -- or threat to use -- eminent domain to take property for public or not-so-public use.
Tarrant County residents have been somewhat ahead of the rest of the state. Beginning in 1995, Hurst drew public scorn for forcing longtime residents to leave their homes near North East Mall so that the mall could expand.
Arlington has taken private property to build Rangers Ballpark and more recently wiped out neighborhoods for Cowboys Stadium. Fort Worth took private land to build Texas Motor Speedway.
But the eminent-domain project that has ignited statewide protest like no other is Gov. Rick Perry’s 2002 proposal to build the Trans-Texas Corridor. In fact, public revolt against the idea of the state taking hundreds of thousands of acres of farm and ranch land and replacing it with a huge foreign-owned tollway has now killed the Trans-Texas Corridor altogether.
No matter that any public entity that wants to take property by eminent domain must prove that it has the right to do so and that it has offered fair compensation to the property’s owner. No matter even if there is a compelling public interest in whatever it is that is to go on that property, a park or a street or anything else that will be owned and used by the public.
Texans have grown to hate eminent domain.
Small wonder, then, if Proposition 11 on the Nov. 3 ballot passes overwhelmingly. Proposition 11 would add wording to the Texas Constitution to severely restrict use of eminent domain.
Chiefly, public entities such as cities, counties and the state could no longer use their power of eminent domain to take private property for someone else’s private use, as Hurst did with the land near North East Mall. Eminent domain could no longer be used as a tool for economic development.
That change was spurred by a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court case, Kelo v. City of New London (Connecticut), in which the court said eminent domain for economic development was OK. As was true in many other states, Texas lawmakers immediately passed a new law to say, "Not in our case, it’s not."
In part, Proposition 11 enshrines the provisions of that 2005 law in the state constitution. And in fact, the Texas Constitution could use some help in this area.
The constitution currently says simply that private property can’t be "taken, damaged or destroyed for or applied to public use without adequate compensation being made." It doesn’t define public use, and that’s a problem.
In Hurst’s case, tax revenue from the expanded mall appears to have qualified as a public use, as did the economic spinoff from Rangers Ballpark and Cowboys Stadium and Texas Motor Speedway in their respective cities.
Proposition 11 would require that any condemned property be held and used by a public entity for a legitimate public purpose.
It also would restrict cities’ ability to take and improve blighted property. Cities now can declare entire neighborhoods to be areas of blight; Proposition 11 would require that blight be proven on each individual property.
Finally, Proposition 11 would restrict the Legislature’s ability to award the power of eminent domain to any new entities. Doing so would require a two-thirds vote of each house, which is hard to accomplish.
There is no denying that Texans of late have been in a mood to restrict the use of eminent domain. With Proposition 11, that’s exactly what they would get.
The Star-Telegram Editorial Board recommends voting for Proposition 11.
Crime Control Prevention District reauthorization
On Nov. 3, Fort Worth voters can continue to take a bite out of crime.
That would be the proven effect of the city’s "crime tax," which is up for another five-year renewal.
The tax has helped engineer a 32 percent drop in the rate of the most serious crimes -- homicide, burglary, robbery, rape, vehicle theft, aggravated assault and larceny -- since 1995, when it was initiated, according to the Crime Control Prevention District.
The crime tax represents a half-cent of the 8.25 cents collected on every taxable dollar spent in the city; 6.25 cents go to the state; the rest goes to city operations and The T.
The tax generates about $50 million each year for safety measures ranging from police cars to graffiti abatement, from equipment for Code Blue volunteers to officers who fight gang violence.
Collections from the tax fund 75 percent of the cost of neighborhood patrol officers and half the cost of officers posted in eight school districts within the Fort Worth city limits. The money helps provide video cameras in marked squad cars, mobile computers and a helicopter.
And the tax supports after-school programs that provide safe, productive activities for more than 12,500 students in grades three through 12 in 84 schools when they might otherwise be unsupervised or into mischief.
Some of the other major allocations in the budget for fiscal 2010 are zero-tolerance teams that rapidly respond to emerging crime problems ($5.9 million); technology infrastructure ($2.7 million); recruit training (almost $2.2 million); the gang unit (almost $1.3 million); a homeland security unit (more than $1.2 million); and an expanded narcotics unit ($1 million).
If approved, the new five-year cycle for the tax wouldn’t go into effect until the budget for 2010-11. However, the City Council opted to hold the election in November rather than wait until a spring election, which would have held up budget planning.
Voters overwhelmingly chose to extend the crime tax in 2000 and 2005, but only 3 to 4 percent of registered voters bothered to take part in those elections. Residents shouldn’t take reauthorization for granted this time.
Voters should take the opportunity to reapprove a program that has provided important resources for making the community safer.
The Star-Telegram Editorial Board recommends voting for continuing the Fort Worth crime tax another five years.
Arlington school trustees made a far-reaching decision last year when they adopted a budget for the 2008-09 school year. They delayed purchasing some big-ticket items like replacement buses and computers, planning to bundle those expenditures in a future bond election.
The future has arrived. Arlington voters must decide in a Nov. 3 bond election whether to allow their school district to buy those items, plus spend almost $115.9 million to repair and improve existing facilities and construct a new elementary school. The total spending up for approval is $197.5 million.
District officials estimate that if the proposal passes, the debt service portion of the school district tax rate will increase by 5 cents between 2011 and 2017. Taxes on a $100,000 homestead would increase about $40. Over-65 taxpayers with a homestead exemption would not see an increase, because their school taxes are frozen.
But the choice of avoiding that tax increase by rejecting the bond proposition is significantly worse. It would mean Arlington students will continue to ride in old school buses, 54 of which have more than 200,000 miles on them. That’s not acceptable.
The bond proposition includes $13.3 million for transportation spending. That would buy 120 new propane-fueled buses over five years, an environmentally friendly option that also will save money.
Rebates are available to the district on the purchase of propane-fueled buses, and the after-rebate cost is about half that of diesel buses, district officials say.
The bond proposal also includes $60 million in technology purchases. More than a third of the computers in district classrooms are more than eight years old and don’t run today’s most-used software. Rejecting the bond proposal means students’ technical skills would be handicapped. Approval would bring additional computer labs and classroom projection systems.
Approval also would allow the purchase of new band instruments, equipment and uniforms in all schools that have bands. District officials say many instruments currently in use are more than 30 years old. The amount of money in the bond proposition for fine arts expenditures is almost $8.3 million.
Before the trustees changed plans last year, the district had been buying buses, computers and band equipment annually out of its general operating budget. But after Texas legislators revised the state’s public school funding plan in 2006, the district could no longer keep up with the replacement costs. In fact, the district has been cutting jobs and expenditures and has taken millions of dollars from its reserves each year in order to balance its budget.
Shifting those purchases to bond funding supported by the debt service budget is "Plan B," what you do when "Plan A" doesn’t work anymore.
Still, this bond election would pay those bills for only five years. After that, buses will continue to wear out, computers will become out-of-date and band uniforms and instruments will have to be replaced. Another bond election might then be needed to pick up where this one leaves off.
The biggest part of the bond package is the almost $115.9 million for facilities.
Almost all of what it does is cover the basics, things like heating and cooling system replacements, roofs, floors, school expansions to eliminate portable classrooms, electrical system renovations, fire alarm systems and high school science labs to meet state requirements. Construction of an elementary school would relieve overcrowded schools in east Arlington.
The Star-Telegram recommends voting for Arlington’s school bond proposition.
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