But the decline is dramatic. A year ago, Combs forecast essentially flat sales taxes receipts in the budget year that started Sept. 1; instead, they’ve decreased by 12.9 percent in the first four months.
To meet Combs’ biennial revenue estimates, Texas needs to collect nearly $44 billion from its revenue workhorse, the 6.25-percent state sales tax. It produces 57 percent of state tax revenue and about a quarter of overall funds, including federal money.
But just one-sixth of the way into the new two-year budget, it has collected only $6.3 billion. Last year, collections from September through December were nearly $7.3 billion.
And the estimates of how big the deficit will be in for the next budget cycle is looking grim. There are “educated guesses” right now of a deficit somewhere between $10 – 20 billion dollars.
The last time Texas lawmakers had to cut the state budget was 2003, when they faced a $9.9 billion shortfall. Next year’s deficit very well could be bigger. Some guesses that have been posed:
$10.8 billion: John O’Brien, director, Legislative Budget Board
$15 billion: House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jim Pitts, R-Waxahachie
$19 billion to $20 billion: Sens. Royce West, D-Dallas, and Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso
Which brings us to the House Ways and Means Committee. The committee has a Democratic Chair, but an 8 – 3 GOP majority. Here’s what an “An Outside Observer Analysis” [.pdf] said last year when the committees were announced about Ways and Means:
Many projects receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies through Governor Rick Perry’s high-profile Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) failed to meet their contractual job-creation targets as the recession took hold in 2008.
An analysis of 45 TEF projects that received a total of $363 million in tax subsidies finds that a growing number of TEF recipients defaulted on their job-creation pledges in 2008, with even more defaults expected for 2009.
Key findings of TPJ’s analysis reveal:
* The Governor’s Office has awarded $363 million to 45 TEF recipients to create or maintain 47,735 jobs. These projects claimed 31,319 jobs in compliance reports covering 2008.
* Just 13 of the 45 job-related projects reviewed were performing well.
*As of October 2009 the Governor has penalized 11 TEF grantees for defaulting on their job creation commitments. These penalties, totaling $647,100, amount to just 1 percent of the $64 million in TEF funding that they received.
* The Governor has imposed the “death penalty” on just two TEF projects despite the fact that many other TEF recipients have qualified for termination.
* In February 2009, Perry declared that the TEF program had created 54,000 jobs since 2003. More than one-third of these jobs are pledges that have yet to materialize.
Unemployment Insurance Has Funded the Enterprise Fund
Texas’ Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund is running out of money to pay benefits to all the state’s laid-off workers, including those laid off by companies subsidized by the Texas Enterprise Fund. The irony here is that the state unemployment fund has transferred $161.5 million to Governor Perry’s job fund since the legislature authorized such funding in 2005. The Texas Workforce Commission recently announced that the unemployment-insurance taxes paid by most employers will almost triple in 2010 to cover shortfalls. In other funding, the legislature has appropriated $577 million for TEF since 2003 (though it snubbed Governor Perry’s request for $261 million more in 2009).
A Twitter report on last week’s Republican gubernatorial debate might have read something like this: Candidates say jobs good, government bad, Texas great.
Gov. Rick Perry spent much of the hour bragging about Texas’ job creation. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison countered that the state actually lost jobs in 2009. And activist Debra Medina pointed out that government accounted for the gains Perry was citing.
“That’s not economic prosperity,” Medina said. “That’s a greater burden.”
No one challenged her conclusion, not when government-bashing is a reliable GOP applause line. All three criticized the feds, ranging from Perry’s swipe at the Postal Service to Medina’s suggestion of doing away with the Environmental Protection Agency.
Ironically, the Postal Service is one of the few government groups in Texas to actually shrink in the past year. It lost 3,300 jobs in the 12 months ended in November.
Despite that decline, government added 88,200 jobs in Texas over the same period, with the vast majority coming in education. Schoolteachers, administrators, bus drivers and the like accounted for almost 70,000 of the new hires.
In a state that perennially ranks among the lowest in education, that sounds like a blessing to me.
It’s a huge increase for Texas — the biggest year-over-year gain in education jobs in the past decade, and probably in state history. It’s three times larger than the increase in 2008, before the Texas economy was reeling from the recession.
“That’s likely due to the stimulus,” said D’Ann Petersen, business economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “It’s made a substantial impact.”
Of course it’s anathema to anyone running in the Texas GOP primary that the stimulus is working, much less that government can create jobs. There’s much, much more on how state’s can create jobs as the Progressive States Network, State Job Creation Strategies.
It’s easy for some of us to see that trying to be “bipartisan” hasn’t worked. And if the President and his “people” think placating Joe Lieberman, et al.., is a good strategy than we will have a new GOP Speaker and Majority Leader in 2011.
There’s a lot, and I mean A LOT – (BOR, Dog Canyon,, Purple Texas, 538) – just to name a few, of opinion on what yesterday’s election in Massachusetts means going forward for Democrats in Texas and around the country. For me it’s simple, the people who voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in 2008 were expecting Democrats to come into office and help them – what Democrats have done in the past. So far the help hasn’t come. If Democrats want to win they need to start helping the people that voted for them – not the banksters. And that likely means they will have to make corporations and the wealthy folks in this country mad. But they can no longer have it both ways and stay in power.
One politician or one act, or non-act, is not to blame for what happened yesterday, or what’s been happening over the last year. It’s the inability of the elected Democrats, as a whole, to do what they were elected to do, help the people of this country that are struggling economically. Drew Westen has a great take on the situation, Obama Finally Gets His Victory For Bipartisanship.
The President’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge that we have a two-party system, his insistence on making destructive concessions to the same party voters he had sent packing twice in a row in the name of “bipartisanship,” and his refusal ever to utter the words “I am a Democrat” and to articulate what that means, are not among his virtues. We have competing ideas in a democracy — and hence competing parties — for a reason. To paper them over and pretend they do not exist, particularly when the ideology of one of the parties has proven so devastating to the lives of everyday Americans, is not a virtue. It is an abdication of responsibility.
What happens if you refuse to lay the blame for the destruction of our economy on anyone — particularly the party, leaders, and ideology that were in power for the last 8 years and were responsible for it? What happens if you fail to “brand” what has happened as the Bush Depression or the Republican Depression or the natural result of the ideology of unregulated greed, the way FDR branded the Great Depression as Hoover’s Depression and created a Democratic majority for 50 years and a new vision of what effective government can do? What happens when you fail to offer and continually reinforce a narrative about what has happened, who caused it, and how you’re going to fix it that Americans understand, that makes them angry, that makes them hopeful, and that makes them committed to you and your policies during the tough times that will inevitably lie ahead?
The one thing that’s I’ve thought over the last few day is that Obama’s problem is not that he doesn’t know how to work with Republicans to get things done. His problem is that he doesn’t know how to work with Democrats to get things done.
It’s easy to blame the President and I’ve obviously done some of that here. He deserves some, but not all of the blame. It’s no secret that I’ve wanted, not expected, more FDR from Obama. The illogical part in all of this is that the Democrats have done nothing to follow FDR’s blueprint that, as Westen said, created a “50 year” Democratic majority. And that’s the wake up call I hope all Democrats get from what’s been happening to them in election over the past 6 months. Start helping the people that need it and 2010 will be just fine. If not….
The Texas seasonally adjusted unemployment rate declined to 8.0 percent in November, down from 8.3 percent a month ago, and continued to trend well below the U.S. seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for November at 10.0 percent. The Texas Civilian Labor Force reached its highest level ever at 12.1 million workers in November.
Total nonagricultural employment in Texas increased by 17,300 positions in November for a total of almost 70,000 jobs over the past two months, while the nation as a whole lost 122,000 jobs.
“Texas employers added a significant number of jobs in most industries during October and November,” said Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) Chairman Tom Pauken. “Job growth coupled with a lower unemployment rate indicate movement in a positive direction for Texas.”
During November, Mining and Logging employment increased by 5,100 jobs, Financial Activities employment rose by 4,700 jobs, and Professional and Business Services added 3,300 positions. Leisure and Hospitality employment increased by 4,800 positions in November.
Kuff has a post today with links to a couple of articles about the economic snowball that’s heading towards Texas in the next biennium and beyond, State sales tax revenues way down. This TexasTrib article he links to states:
The people in government who look at spreadsheets — so the rest of us don’t have to — are getting nervous about the state’s finances.
Sales tax revenues have taken double-digit dives for five months running; in each of those months, the state’s income from those taxes has been more than 10 percent lower than in the same month the year before. In a state where a steady rise in sales tax money has become almost a rule, the intake for the last 12 months is down more than 5 percent. And budgeteers assumed not only that they’d match the old numbers, but that they would exceed them.
And an ongoing “structural deficit” — the kind of term that seems designed to scare people away from a conversation about money — creates an ongoing problem. In 2006, in an effort to lower property tax burdens, the state agreed to spend more on public education. Lawmakers created a new business tax, but it raises less than they agreed to spend on the property tax fix. The gap has to be filled every time they write a budget. Last time, the feds showed up like leprechauns with pots of stimulus money and kept Texas from choosing to use its Rainy Day Fund, raise taxes or make spending cuts. Next time, the stimulus money won’t be there, but the hole will be.
It’s impossible to see how that does not mean trouble for Texas, a state without an income tax that relies heavily on a statewide sales tax. And an ongoing, or structural deficit, means that the Perry/GOP tax shift of 2006 will cost middle class and poor Texas – because that’s who pays – even more money in the long run. As Kuff goes on to point out the other problem this creates is it will, again, put Texas public education back in the forefront.
In 2007, that gap was filled by surplus general revenue funds. More surplus funds were put aside that year to pay for the shortfall in 2009. Needless to say, no such surplus will be available in 2011. The Rainy Day Fund, assuming the votes are there to use it, might be able to cover both the revenue shortage and this structural gap, but I wouldn’t be too optimistic about that. But sooner or later, which is to say this session or the following one, that great big unaffordable property tax cut is going to have to be dealt with. The only thing that sustains me when I contemplate the possibility of another term for Rick Perry is the knowledge that this reckoning would have to happen on his watch.
Of course, I’m sure he’ll defend the property tax cut to his last dying breath, and if he has to provoke a budgetary crisis or two to do that, he will. But his options may be limited this time around.
We knew it back when the tax shift was passed in 2006 that it was only “kicking the can down the road”, so this should surprise no one. And for all of the credit Perry has taken for Texas’ economy doing so well, he’ll definitely be more than willing to take the blame for this….right?
These issues will continue to become bigger as we continue to move forward toward the 2010 primary and general election, and all candidates running for office need to be able to speak about how they will tackle them.
It applies to Alice once she fell down that hole and walked through the looking glass.
It applies equally to our Republican leadership in Texas.
Watching Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst accept and spend President Barack Obama’s stimulus money like drunken sailors then attempt to hide/rationalize/deny/avoid that fact, is getting more and more surreal and humorous — and more and more sad.
First, Perry slammed the stimulus and all its works in the Washington Times last February. However, he neglected to state that he had written a letter to Obama asking for the money just a day after Obama signed the bill. The ink wasn’t even dry, and Perry had his hand out.
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Now Dewhurst also appears unable to stay off the Wonderland bandwagon. Dewhurst wrote a column about “How Texas lives within its means” (Oct. 21) and points out that we have a balanced budget!
Of course, we all learn in sixth grade that Texas has a constitutional provision requiring a balanced budget, so we can’t fault Dewhurst for knowing that one. And the balanced budget mandate is a good thing.
But then he falls into the same rabbit hole Perry fell in. Dewhurst brags that he “led the effort to save $7 billion to balance the revenue shortfall we anticipated this year.”
That’s interesting because Texas spent $12.6 billion more this session than last session. How you spend $12.6 billion more while cutting $7 billion is a real feat.
Incredibly, Dewhurst adds: “It’s simply political fiction that stimulus dollars were necessary to balance our budget.” Now that, folks, is what we in Texas politely call total bull.
Don’t believe me. I’m just the chair of the House Committee on Federal Economic Stabilization Funding — in charge of monitoring Texas spending of stimulus dollars. I’m a Democrat, too, so maybe you should hear from a Republican.
How about what the Republican xhair of the Senate Finance Committee told the Fort Worth Business Press last week?
“In order to balance the budget this biennium, which is $182 billion, we used $14 billion in federal stimulus money to balance it,” said State Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan. “We’re not expecting a similar amount of similar money to be available in the next two years, because the federal government just doesn’t have it. So, assuming that’s true, you go into the next session with a $14 billion hole.”
Does that sound like responsible budgeting or what? We spent all the stimulus money in such a way that we will “go into the next session with a $14 billion hole.”
The problem with much of the current Republican Party leadership is not that they disagree with Democrats. The real problem is that they disagree with reality.
By shamelessly pretending that in is out and up is down, they have spun themselves into Wonderland.
Whether you like the stimulus or not, this misinformation is getting out of hand.
Harvey Kronberg has some of the grim reality facing the Texas economy right now in his News 8 commentary, Texans won’t escape recession.
As you know, truth is the first casualty of political campaigns. The simple, unavoidable truth is that were it not for the federal stimulus program pumping $16 billion into state and local budgets this year, Texas unemployment would have hit the million mark months ago. Plummeting tax collections would have forced the firing of tens of thousands of city, county and state employees; cops, teachers, and state workers as all government struggled to balance their budgets.
You can see the effects of the million unemployed everywhere. Sales tax collections have declined by double digits in each of the last four months. That has never happened since the sales tax was instituted.
Walk most neighborhoods and you will see for sale signs popping up. Home foreclosures in Texas are surging.
Southwest Airlines posted its first quarterly loss in my memory and airport traffic continues to decline. Even the Port of Houston revenues are down almost 20 percent.
You can see the effects of the million unemployed everywhere.
Friends with skin in the game tell me that commercial real estate has another 25 percent to drop in Texas and will not begin recovery until the end of next year. Meanwhile vacancies in prime office space continue growing and vacant strip centers are depressingly common.
Not all the news is bad. In fact, we should start to feel the recovery in Texas sometime next year. But campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, next month more than a million Texans will face one of the grimmest Thanksgivings in decades.
What’s hard to figure out is, are the Republicans running for reelection in Texas just going to ignore the pain that low and middle income working Texans are facing and just hope the economy turns around? Or are they actually going to face up to the issue and provide a plan for those struggling in this economy? That should become an issue now, and we need to start hearing answers from them.
Gilbert made fun of how Hutchison, Perry and former President George W. Bush were all either cheerleaders or yell leaders in college.
“How many times have you seen leadership from the sidelines?” Gilbert asked. “You need a quarterback leading, and I plan to be that quarterback.”
Gilbert said he planned to announce his transportation platform at an event in Fort Worth on Thursday, and he noted that Hutchison had announced her endorsement by the Texas Farm Bureau in the city.
“Where they had three Farm Bureau reps and her in that photo op, we’re going to try and have a whole backdrop of real farmers,” Gilbert said.
If elected, Gilbert promised to serve no more than two terms and vowed to require all statewide office holders to the same limit.
Gilbert also highlighted his plan to increase vocational training in public schools.
Students today “can show you the molecular structure of a file cabinet but can’t show you how to open or close the door,” Gilbert said.
The U.S. construction industry may have long crumbled under the weight of a slumping economy, but a glimmer of hope is seen in the public works sector, helped by a pickup in federally funded projects.
[...]
Growth in public works projects “is important at this juncture because you are really not going to see much expansion from the commercial and residential sectors,” said Robert Murray, vice president at industry research firm McGraw-Hill Construction.
[...]
The $787 billion federal stimulus plan approved early this year has about $130 billion allocated for public construction. The next two years will see more work involving a lot of engineering and design jobs, benefiting firms such as Jacobs, Aecom and URS, said Michael Dudas of Jefferies & Co.
A major portion of this year’s funds is allocated to low-margin projects such as repavement of roads, which will primarily benefit smaller contractors, Macquarie Research analyst Sameer Rathod said.
Companies such as Granite Construction, which gets half its revenue from highway construction, will see a pickup in 2010, when about 60 percent of the construction stimulus is to be released.
“With the second wave of projects next year … there will be larger and more meaningful works that Granite can participate in,” Rathod said.
In recent weeks, liberal groups have largely refrained from directly pressuring the White House on the public option — even as there’s been lots of grumbling behind the scenes that Rahm Emanuel is the leading force within the White House trying to trade it away in exchange for compromise.
No longer. A coalition of liberal groups is now openly calling out the White House, demanding it take a “stronger stand” in support of a robust public option — and in an unusual move, the letter is specifically targeting Rahm and demanding he make it happen.
A source sends over a letter signed by several dozen leading liberal groups — including MoveOn, the Campaign for America’s Future, the American Federation of Government Employees, the NAACP, the Progressive Congress Action Fund — that will be sent to the White House today.
Wow this is funny. When he said, “But my response is this: He’s just angry because the president doesn’t shoot old men in the face”, I spit coffee on my monitor.
There will be hard choices when in comes to balancing the state budge in Texas in 2011. With sales tax revenue slipping, and no federal stimulus, hard choices that wereavoided in 2009 will have to be faced in 2011. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst penned an Op-Ed for the AAS today, where he wants to set the factual record straight about what happened regarding the budget in 2009.
Given recent comments about our state’s budget, I feel it is time to separate fact from political fiction. The fact is, in stark contrast to the U. S. Congress, the Texas Constitution requires the Legislature to balance the state budget every two years, and that would have happened with or without any federal stimulus dollars.
[...]
So it’s simply political fiction that stimulus dollars were necessary to balance our budget.
Dewhurst’s point, which is well taken, is that the budget had to be balanced in Texas last session, with or without the federal stimulus money. Either taxes would have been increased, programs and services cut from the budget, or some combination of the two to balance the budget. Our current state leadership won’t raise taxes on the wealthy, so it’s likely budget cuts and fee increases, that would have hurt working Texans most, as was done in 2003, would have been used to balance the budget.
But in the coming biennium hard choices will have to be made. Which, as soon-to-be former Senate Finance Committee Chair Steve Ogden (R-Bryan), tells us we are facing in the next 2011 legislative session, Serious gaps expected for 2011 state budget.
“In order to balance the budget this biennium, which is $182 billion, we used $14 billion in federal stimulus money to balance it,” said State Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan. “We’re not expecting a similar amount of similar money to be available in the next two years because the federal government just doesn’t have it. So, assuming that’s true, you go into the next session with a $14 billion hole.”
Ogden forgot to add something to his statement that starts, “In order to balance the budget..we used $14 billion in federal stimulus money to balance [the budget]“..in a politically popular way without cutting programs and services and without raising taxes. And from Ogden’s statements he clearly knew last session that this was coming.
Ogden said committee members decided to stay out of Texas’ rainy day funds in the 2009 session in anticipation of the $14 billion budget hole legislators will have to fill in the 2011 session.
Along with the hole federal stimulus funds covered in 2009, another issue worsening budget concerns is an expected shortfall in oil, natural gas and sales tax revenues because of dropping energy prices and the economic downturn.
“Sales taxes are clearly not growing fast enough to fill that hole,” Ogden said. “And the rainy day fund probably won’t beat $14 billion. But it’ll be significant enough that… it’s not going to wreck the car.”
It’s a big hole and it’s going to hit transportation the worst.
Ogden said he doesn’t want or expect to see the state raise taxes to fill the budget gaps, but said he hopes for creative efforts at stimulating economic growth.
“I don’t think you can raise taxes enough to fill a hole like this,” Ogden said. “And, to a certain extent, raising taxes is always counter productive. What you have to do is get the economy growing and the economic growth in the economy will throw of the additional tax revenue you need.”
State Sen. Chris Harris, R-Arlington and a member of the 2009 legislative session’s Senate Finance Committee, said Texas could lose as much as $6 billion from lost severance taxes, creating another hurdle for the next budget.
“We’ve got area after area where our economy is being hit, and that results in a lessening of the future budget,” Harris said.
Harris said he expects the state’s transportation budget to be one of the hardest hit areas in the 2011 session, adding that he hopes to see a version of the Texas Local Option Transportation Act, which did not pass the legislature in the 2009 session, to pass in 2011.
The Local Option Act would have given counties the power to create local funding options to raise money for local transportation projects. Proposed funding options in Tarrant County included a drivers license fee, an increased motor fuels tax and a new resident fee. Once a county chose a set of funding options, voters would choose which options to take on in a bond-style election.
“I think what we have to do is set up some formulas as far as highway funding,” Harris said. “And, make it to where local areas, and I want to see it city-by-city, where the local areas can vote to have, say, an extra $10 on the license plate [fees]. I think it’s imperative to see something done on [the state highway] fund because the federal fund is broke.”
[...]
“At the end of the day I think we’ll have to come up with different ways of financing, and that is inevitably if we don’t raise gasoline taxes, which drives us to the only other possibility and that is toll roads,” Ogden said. “You can’t do it any other way, so I think what it means is we build more toll roads.”
TLOTA, the local option gas tax will be back, but a serious debate about raising the statewide gas tax should finally occur. As many have stated before, a highway system is good for economic development for the entire state, therefore it would be best if the whole state shared in the cost. If the gas tax isn’t raised it will be toll roads all over Texas.
Here’s what the CPPP had to say about how the federal stimulus, (ARRA), was used in Texas what’s coming in the next biennium, Federal Recovery Act State Budget Update.
ARRA has been a critical lifeline for Texas state services. Due to this important piece of federal assistance, our state has been able to maintain Medicaid and other programs along with pre- and K-12 education. The act also allowed a temporary injection of funds into public structures including highways, child care, job training, employment services, and others. The fact that Texas relied most heavily on ARRA funds to close budget gaps, however, should alert state policymakers to the pressing need to find other ways to adequately fund public structures once ARRA funds expire. Unless we shore up state revenue, Texas faces deep cuts in 2011.
And those “deep cuts” will hit working Texans the hardest. What’s needed, at the federal level to stave this off is a 21st Century WPA.
With the current unemployment rate standing at 9.8 percent, and with some economists predicting that the rate may well top 10 percent by early 2010, talk of a second federal stimulus package has become more common in recent weeks. There are hints that the Obama administration is thinking along these lines, but so far the White House insists that although it is considering a number of ideas to bolster the US economy, a second stimulus plan is not one of them. This may be a mistake.
With unemployment climbing – not falling – now is the time to consider even bolder action. Perhaps what we really need is a jobs creation program that puts paychecks in people’s hands as quickly as possible.
A tax credit for new job creation deployed over the next two years could complement these more traditional policies. According to our estimates, a tax credit for firms equal to 15% of expanded payroll costs would lead them to hire an additional 2.8 million employees next year. The cost of this program would be relatively low. Net revenue losses to the federal government would total an estimated $28 billion in the first year, but half of these costs would likely be recouped in lower spending on unemployment insurance, Medicaid spending, and other safety net programs.
An effective and comprehensive approach to job creation would include policies to both increase the demand for products as well as change employer incentives to hire new workers.
It’s likely a program like this, to create jobs, would help out all over that nation. Without jobs all the rest really doesn’t matter.
What all of this points to is that the next legislative session our state leaders will have a very different situation to deal with to balance the state’s budget. Obviously we know what Gov. Perry’s approach will be, draconian budget cuts like in 2003. What Hutchison would do, like with most things in her campaign at this point, we can only guess. Hank Gilbert is for raising and indexing the gas tax to pay for transportation.
Hard choices will have to be made in 2011. Help at the federal level in the form of good health reform would help ease the burden for sure. But anyone running for office in 2010 that wants to cut the budget to address the shortfall should be able to be specific, or else can’t be taken seriously. The same on the other side, if were not going to cut transportation, they should be able to explain where they will get the money. Hard choices, indeed.
Whether we feed the hungry is a moral issue. It’s long accepted that a basic test of a society is how it treats the least among it. And what’s been going on in Texas lately, regarding food stamps is immoral. Last week it was recommended that a federal czar be appointed to oversee the food stamp program in Texas because of the current troubles. On Friday we found out that two state Senators = 1 czar, Two senators to monitor food stamp problems. But from the looks of it more help may be needed.
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst has tapped state Sens. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, and Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, to monitor problems with the state’s food stamp application processing, Zaffirini said today.
[...]
Zaffirini said she thinks the state should be collaborating more closely with food banks.
Officials with the Texas Food Bank Network this week sent a letter to federal food stamp officials, saying that programs such as food stamps should not rely on non-profits to address their staffing needs.
“We worry that an over-reliance on comparatively small organizations like ours, while an obvious immediate solution, may divert attention and urgency from the broader, more fundamental failures in our state’s application system,” says the letter from Eric Cooper and Jan Pruitt of the Network to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s William Ludwig.
Also this week, eight Democratic members of the state House sent a letter to Ludwig, urging that the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service “take every possible action to bring Texas into compliance.”
The members who wrote the letter are: Elliott Naishtat of Austin; Sylvester Turner, Jessica Farrar and Garnet Coleman of Houston; Lon Burnam and Marc Veasey of Fort Worth; Rafael Anchia of Dallas and Ruth Jones McClendon of San Antonio. See that letter here: naishtatletter.pdf
While food banks can help some, in the short run, they cannot be relied on to for long to supplement the neglect at the state level, and certainly can’t take the place of food stamps.