Austin, TX
Texas House panel unanimously rejects bill to put Austin under Legislature’s thumb
A Texas House committee took the unusual step of unanimously voting down the bill to make Austin a district of the state and not a traditional city.
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A bill that would have turned Texas’ capital city into the “District of Austin” was dead on arrival in the House State Affairs Committee on Wednesday.
In other words, the “DOA” bill was DOA.
House Bill 274 by Republican Rep. Briscoe Cain of Deer Park sought to make many of the actions of the Austin City Council subject to review by the speaker of the House and the lieutenant governor.
Cain had cited crime and sundry mismanagement allegations as the basis for his bill. The 11 members of the State Affairs Committee apparently thought the measure was kind of silly. Sometimes when lawmakers want to kill a bill, they try talking it to death. This time, they giggled the life out of it.
State Affairs Chairman Ken King, a Republican from the Panhandle city of Canadian, chuckled as he said Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, had made a motion to pass the bill on to the full House for consideration.
Then when Geren actually voted no, there was a snicker or two. By the time King cast the final vote and announced the 11-0 tally, many on the House panel and in the committee room laughed out loud.
It was unclear whether Cain found the exercise, which took less than three minutes to play out, amusing. He doesn’t serve on the State Affairs Committee and he did not return a Statesman call seeking comment.