By Cyrus Reed
In the midst of what was looking to be a long hearing in the Senate Committee on Finance, as they officially opened discussion on the state’s two-year $280 billion budget, new chair, Joan Huffman (R-Houston), suddenly announced that, in view of expected rain and ice, they would be taking public testimony early, and then suddenly they stopped at 2pm as legislators chose to shut it down.
Those of us in attendance got our two minutes in the spotlight and left– you can see what I said on the proposed budget of the State Energy Conservation Office here or watch the recording here - (fast forward to the 2:30:00 to 2:33-ish mark). And then the Senate and House never met during the week, until the Capitol reopened for business Friday morning. As members came back, Senate Finance resumed and offices reopened. In between, there were thousands of residents and businesses suffering through outages caused not by grid failure, but falling branches, trees, and ice on the lines. While there were problems throughout the state, Austin itself appeared to suffer the most outages.
That also meant that very few bills were filed during the week, and meetings that we expected to happen (like our literature drop-off at the Capitol) had to be rescheduled.
Still, this week promises to be fast and furious. Senate Finance will be meeting all week to go over proposed agency budgets, while the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce will be discussing – again - on Tuesday fixing the electric grid in the wake of the storms and preliminary and controversial decisions made by the Public Utility Commission of Texas to change our market. They will also be discussing the recent outage in Austin and throughout Texas. Only invited testimony will be heard. Information about the hearing can be found here.
In the meantime, Sierra Club and our partners in the Texas Living Waters project will be holding our own legislative briefing Monday to discuss our water priorities. In the meantime, we await a key decision of House Speaker Dade Phelan - who will he name to the committees? Will we find out next week? Stay tuned!