Open carry, school funding lauded and criticized by Texas lawmakers

Tarrant County lawmakers said Wednesday there was plenty of good — and bad — that came out of the legislative session they wrapped up in June.

Open carry, education funding, veterans benefits and border security were a few of the issues a group of four local lawmakers touched on during a post-session briefing at Lena Pope.

“That’s what I really like about working in the Legislature, it’s such a diverse group of people and the topics are so different,” said state Rep. Nicole Collier, D-Fort Worth. “One day we are talking about gold and the next day we are talking about marijuana.”

Collier, along with state Sen. Konni Burton, R-Colleyville, and state Reps. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, and Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, talked to dozens of local residents during the United Way of Tarrant County-sponsored forum.

Here’s a look at some of what the lawmakers mentioned:

Collier: “Some of the low lights for me ... would be open carry and campus carry,” she said of the bills that will let guns be carried openly by licensed Texans as of Jan. 1 and concealed on public college campuses starting next August. “I can’t say I had a great year because of those two bills.” But she did praise work to: make cannabis oil legal for Texans with intractable epilepsy, ensure emergency workers are prepared if they are going to treat someone with a highly contagious disease, preserve Hazelwood benefits for veterans, improve a balance billing mediation measure by state Sen. Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, and help low-income areas get grants for low income housing.

Burton: The freshman senator — who noted both parties “have distinct differences but we respect those differences” — praised GOP work in the upper chamber to scrap the two-thirds rule requiring 21 senators to agree before a bill could go to the floor for debate. They instead required three-fifths, or 19 senators, to agree. “The Senate got a lot of legislation passed and that is why,” she said. She praised funding for border security and talked about her policy to prevent taxpayer-funded lobbyists from talking to her office. And unlike Collier, she said she’s very glad the legislature took action on open carry and campus carry. “A right, to me, is very different from a law,” she said. “Anything we did in Austin was to help law abiding citizens. ... We are infringing too much on law abiding citizens’ right to carry and we wanted to get back to law-abiding citizens having their Second Amendment rights.”

Turner: He noted that this was his third session in the legislature and said it was “the most challenging of the three.” He said education, “the most important thing state government is involved in,” was under served financially and lawmakers may have to go back to the drawing board after the courts rule. “We had an opportunity to address an issue that we needed to address, but we fell short,” he said. At the same time, he praised lawmakers for approving a “long overdue” bond package with more than $3 million for construction projects at public universities statewide including the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth, the University of Texas at Arlington and Tarleton State University’s new local campus.

Capriglione: He said working on the House Appropriations Committee was the “hardest few months of my life” but worthwhile because lawmakers were able to produce a “very fiscally conservative budget.” He touted additional funding carved out for border security and noted that parks were fully funded. He also mentioned a bill he passed to create a Texas Bullion Depository, giving Texans, businesses and others a place to store their gold, silver and precious metals and “provide some sort of commodities exchange program.” And he touted House Bill 1295 that, as of Jan. 1, puts online a searchable database that lets Texans look through contracts with government entities to see who — brokers, consultants, lawmakers or others — benefited from them.

This story was originally published September 23, 2015 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Open carry, school funding lauded and criticized by Texas lawmakers."