Environment Texas Blog

You may have read that many bills died last night as a result of the "voter-id" slowdown in the Texas House of Representatives. Despite the fact that many clean energy bills were placed on the Major State Calendar (the priority bills that get taken up first), the House hadn't yet debated them by midnight, thus killing them. But all is not lost yet. The Senate still has until midnight tonight to approve bills that have already been approved by the House (before the voter id showdown). These bills can be amended to include some of our priorities.

Yesterday, the Senate approved HB 1937 by Rep. Mike Villareal (D-San Antonio). The bill allows local governments to finance solar projects for homeowners and then get reimbursed via property taxes over the course of 20 years. This is a great way to help eliminate the barrier of needing 20-30k in cash upfront to get solar and should really help solar take off in Texas. Sen. Kel Seliger (R-Amarillo) carried the bill over in the Senate.

This morning, the Senate unanimously approved HB 821 by Rep. David Leibowitz (D - San Antonio). The bill requires TV manufacturers to pay to recycle old TV sets. Sen. Kirk Watson carried the bill in the Senate.

Today, the Senate will take up HB 1243 by Rep. Pete Gallego (D- Alpine), which addresses "net metering issues". Sen. Troy Fraser, author of SB 545 (the big solar rebate bill), is carrying HB 1243 over in the Senate and may attempt to add SB 545 to the bill. The Senate will also take up HB 2783 by Rep. Rafael Anchia(D- Dallas), which would require greater energy efficiency standards for new buildings (the energy savings from the measure will be enough to power 600,000 homes a year by 2020).

Afterwards, the Senate-amended House bills go back to the House for a once-over before going to the Governor's desk.According to Texas Business for Clean Air's Amy Hunt:

"Speaker Straus just made an announcement to the House about Senate amendments to House bills (specifically, about non-germane amendments).  The House is going to closely scrutinize the Senate amendments, but will do so primarily at the request of the House author.

If an amendment is non-germane, here are the recourses:

*The House may request a conference committee to work out the differences

*The House may send the bill back to the Senate without amendments in a take it or leave it manner

*Under Rule 13, Section 5(a), the Speaker may send back a bill to the Senate with non-germane amendments without a request from the member.

Because of the volume of bills, the burden will be on the bill's author to talk to the parliamentarian to get the non-germane amendments stripped out.

There is still a little confusion as to how this will operate in practice, but they're "working on it".

So, the take home message is, "it ain't over til it's over". Stay tuned.