McAllen AFT News - December, 2009

 

 

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott ruled against the issuance of $500 checks to Teacher Retirement System retirees, which had been authorized conditionally by the legislature in May. 

 

"Retirees, who have not seen a cost-of-living increase since 2001, are once again left empty-handed," said Linda Bridges, Texas AFT president. "To dangle this money in front of retirees, then have it snatched away because someone used the wrong words in a bill is disgraceful."

 

Abbott said the legislature really gave him no choice in the matter, because of strings attached to the modest $500 bonus payments.

 

The legislature said the $500 checks could not be paid out unless the attorney general issued a "conclusive opinion that such one-time payments are constitutionally and statutorily permissible." Abbott zeroed in on the word "conclusive," defining its meaning as "irrefutable" beyond question, and said it's obvious that there's at least some legal question about the matter, as evidenced by the legislature's request for is opinion in the first place. In other words, he said, the legislative provision "on its very face makes it impossible for us to conclusively opine that such payments are 'constitutionally and statutorily permissible.'"

 

The history of this legislation makes it clear that the true author of today's decision is not so much Attorney General Abbott as it is Sen. Robert Duncan, the Lubbock Republican who chairs the Senate State Affairs Committee. Last spring Duncan made no secret of the fact that he never wanted to issue a bonus check in the first place. Hence he saw to it first that the amount was cut from the House-proposed $1,000 to $500. Then for good measure he crafted the legislative language that led to today's decision to kill the bonus checks entirely.

 

Thanks to Sen. Duncan, I guess the only thing conclusive about this legislation was that it left retirees waiting and wondering where their checks were while the attorney general pondered his decision for six months,” Bridges said.

 

The money for the checks (about $120 million) will now be used to increase the state contribution rate to the Teacher Retirement System a smidgen. But that little bump up in the state contribution rate will be a small fraction of the amount needed to enable the pension fund to deliver a true cost-of-living increase to retirees.

 

Meanwhile more than 200,000 retirees and their families receive no cost-of-living adjustment again this year--eight years after the last catch-up cost-of-living increase, years during which they have seen the real value of their pensions eroded about 20 percent by inflation. 

 

 

A half-dozen school districts led by Fort Bend ISD filed suit against the commissioner of education in an attempt to invalidate the new state law barring issuance of minimum grades that students have not earned by their actual work.

 

Though many districts have gone ahead and conformed their local policies to this new law, these six districts are claiming that the law applies only to grades on individual assignments, not to cumulative grades for entire grading periods. They want the court to declare that their interpretation is correct and the commissioner's (and Texas AFT's) is invalid.

 

Texas AFT general counsel Martha Owen filed a formal plea in intervention in the school districts' lawsuit in state court in Austin, asking the judge to reject the districts' attempt to undermine teachers' grading authority. Texas AFT's plea on behalf of our members asserts that, if the school districts prevailed in this case, the new law on grading policy "would be effectively nullified, thereby undermining the authority and responsibility of teachers to determine the student's relative mastery of an assignment/subject and to assign honest grades to students."

 

To our knowledge, no hearing has been set thus far on the school districts' bid to block enforcement of the grading-policy law. We'll have further reports as this story unfolds.

 

 

 

State Comptroller Susan Combs has reduced her estimate of the amount the next legislature will have in the state's Rainy Day Fund.

 

Combs previously projected there would be $9.1 billion in this reserve. In light of a recession-spawned decline of nearly 13 percent in state revenue from the sales taxes and similar declines in other tax receipts, the comptroller now projects there will be $900 million less--or $8.2 billion--in the Rainy Day Fund available to the next legislature.

 

The change in the comptroller's projection has prompted much viewing with alarm around the capitol, but this reduction of $900 million is really the least of the state's budget concerns. Three years ago the legislature dug a deep, long-term budget hole by cutting property taxes without replacing the revenue fully as promised from other sources.

 

The upshot is a potential shortfall in the neighborhood of $10 billion or more for the next legislature to confront in the 2012-2013 biennium. And next session, unlike this year, there's not likely to be a big federal stimulus package to fill the budget hole.