Business View Magazine | July 2019

343 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JULY 2019 TEXAS MUNI C I PAL LEAGUE state leagues, so we have kind of an umbrella organization that keeps us closely aligned.” According to Sandlin, the number one issue is artificial caps on cities’ ability to raise revenues or make expenditures, or what are called revenue or expenditure caps: “Our governor is pushing for a 2.5 percent cap on property tax increases, which is the number one revenue source for Texas cities. We’ve been struggling against that for over 15 years. But that is just one of issues. We have over a hundred positions in our legislative program that we adopt. Because so many things affect cities, we have to track hundreds and hundreds of bills each session. But the artificial revenue caps would be issue number one.” “We do real brick-and-mortar things,” Sandlin continues. “Over 6,500 bills get filed in a typical five-month Texas legislative session. No city, not even the largest, has time to read all those bills. We have over three people that read each bill and we, essentially, mine what’s going on in those bills and at the capital, then we communicate that information to our cities. That alone is a legislative service that no city alone can provide. You could call us a lobby association, but we don’t make campaign contributions, we don’t wine and dine legislators. We just collect the data and what’s in the bills, and communicate that back to our member cities. They do the hard work of lobbying. They are the grass roots. We just tell them what the legislature is up to. We’re located here in Austin, the capital, but they’re busy at home doing the things cities do, and don’t have time to engage in a process until we tell them what’s in the legislation. “We are 100 percent non-partisan. We don’t give campaign contributions. We don’t favor one party over the other. There is no party that’s universally good to Texas cities. Some really good things happen for cities under both parties, but bad things can happen under either party. Parties sometimes break on different issues that are better or worse for us by party, but just as soon as we solve one of those issues the other party will do something not so good. So we don’t have one party that we say is friendly to cities. We try pictured Port Arthur, Texas