Agenda Information Sheet
DEPARTMENT: City Manager's Office
CM/ ACM: John Cabrales, Jr.
Date: December 6, 2016
SUBJECT
Title
Consider approval of a resolution of the City of Denton, Texas, adopting the City of Denton's 2017 State Legislative Program for the 85th Texas Legislature; and providing an effective date.
Body
BACKGROUND
The 85th Regular Session of the Texas Legislature begins January 10, 2017. The proposed 2017 State Legislative Program is provided as Exhibit 1, for your consideration. Our program consists of position statements regarding issues we anticipate the Texas Legislature may consider, based on previous sessions, interim reports, and discussions with our partners and stakeholders. Staff has worked with the Texas Municipal League (TML), the TML Big City group, our legislative consultants, and other cities to identify legislative issues of interest to Denton. These issues primarily relate to state initiatives that could impact city finances, land regulation, regional transportation, utility, and public safety issues. The legislative program gives city representatives the ability to react quickly to proposed legislation, and respond appropriately on behalf of the City.
Each session, the Texas Legislature files a large number of city-related bills, the majority of which propose impediments to the ability of cities to govern from a local perspective. For the 84th Regular Session of the Texas Legislature (2015), legislators filed more than 6,000 bills, and more than 1,600 were city-related. Pre-filing of bills began November 14, 2016, and already the Legislature has filed almost 700 bills (as of November 28). For the last several sessions, legislative leaders have continued to file and support bills that would impose a local revenue cap, lower or broaden the current cap on annual increases in property tax appraisals, enact costly unfunded mandates, or generally erode municipal authority to conduct local affairs.
We do not anticipate the...
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