Texas’ 89th legislative session is well underway at the Capitol building in Austin. As lawmakers navigate their way forward, one issue that is top of mind is where and how to allocate the state’s roughly $24 billion budget surplus.
Both chambers have released draft proposals with much attention on money for creating a school voucher-like program, teacher pay raises, cutting property taxes and border security.
But what about voters in Texas? If they had their say on how the state spends its money, what might they say?
The Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston conducted a survey asking Texans just that. Mark Jones, political science fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and senior research fellow at the Hobby School, joined Texas Standard with the findings. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity.
Texas Standard: So the budget proposals the House and Senate released set aside about $1 billion in their initial spending plans for education savings accounts – commonly referred to as school vouchers. So what did the public say? Where did that rank as a priority in your survey?
Mark Jones: Well, we asked directly about that. There was support for that legislation, and we found that two-thirds of Texans support the education savings account legislation that would benefit all parents. And if you limit it to only low-income parents, the support goes up to 72%.
So relatively widespread support across all demographics – was supported highest among Latino Republicans, white Republicans and Black Democrats, and lowest among white Democrats who are pretty much evenly split against it and for.
One issue came out on top as far as what Texans think the budget surplus should be spent on.
Well, half of Texans believe that the surplus should be spent on property tax relief for residential homeowners. Closest to that is the pay raise for public schoolteachers that 40% believe should be the use of the tax dollars that are left over – that is, the budget surplus.
Did anything stand out to you about the differences in how elected officials and voters want to spend state money?
Well, I think they’re pretty much in line – particularly on property tax relief for residential homeowners and for the pay raises for public school teachers.
One place where we saw voters favor a use that we aren’t seeing in the proposals by the governor and the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House is in expanding access to Medicaid, sort of following what 40 other states have done and expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. That was the third most popular use for the budget surplus. 34% of Texans wanted to see that happen.
But that’s unlikely to make much headway in the Legislature this session, in large part because while about half of Democrats ranked that as a top priority, only about one-fifths of Republicans do. And that’s before we associated it directly with the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Once that message was there, then the support would likely drop further.
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These are issues that have been talked about in Texas a lot. But did you get the idea from your survey respondents that they had a good grasp on what these proposals might entail for Texas? Or were there a lot of “I don’t know?”
Well, we provide a relatively large amount of information about the different options, particularly about education savings accounts – the idea that state money there would be given to parents that would use it for private school and that would be money that would otherwise find its way to the local school districts. So that, if you’re giving money to parents, that’s less money that the school districts are going to have.
In spite of informing people about that, we still have two-thirds support, which is relatively robust, but this is similar to what we found in other surveys where support always oscillates between three-fifths and two-thirds.
Well, this is just the first survey that the Hobby School plans to do this session. What else is on your agenda?
We’re going to have a report out later this week on immigration and border security. And then next week, we’ll have something on casino gambling as well as marijuana legalization and then gun control, abortion.
And we’ll look at election reform – things like having same-day voter registration or online voter registration or mail ballots for everyone, as opposed to just those over the age of 60 or 65 and older.
