Texas lawmakers finalize bills on flood safety, bathroom use, abortion pills

AUSTIN, Texas — The second special legislative session at the Texas State Capitol has ended.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick signaled his intention to adjourn sine die in the Senate on Wednesday night, and the upper chamber officially adjourned early Thursday morning. 

With the end in sight, it was a mad dash at the Capitol Wednesday to get as much as possible done and avoid another special session.

Gov. Greg Abbott put 24 items on the agenda. Lawmakers sent bills on many of these topics to the governor’s desk, including congressional redistricting, flood warning sirens and ivermectin sales.

But on what House and Senate leaders hoped would be the final day of session, they were dealing with some unforeseen hiccups.

Youth camp regulations, disaster preparedness and early warning systems were a top priority for the second special session.

Texas lawmakers advanced a pair of bills that make major safety changes for Texas youth camps. Both Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 1 passed both chambers and are headed to the governor’s desk. 

The devastating July 4 weekend flooding killed at least 138 people, the majority of them in Kerr County, along the Guadalupe River. Ten people died in the flooding in Travis County.

A total of 27 campers and counselors died at Camp Mystic as the flash flood swept through the camp and surrounding areas. Several parents who lost their daughters in the flooding have been vocal in the wake of the tragedy, as they pushed state lawmakers to make significant safety changes for Texas youth camps.

“There were tragedies. The most horrific of which is a parent losing a young little girl, swept away in the middle of the night,” Abbott said during an event in Waco on Wednesday. “There’s no way you can say anything, no way that you can fund anything that will replace that loss. But what we can do is to dedicate ourselves as those parents requested us to do to ensure the loss of their daughter’s life was not in vain.”

SB 1, authored by Republican State Sen. Charles Perry, will ban youth camp cabins located in floodplains and strip a camp’s state license to operate if it does not comply.

The bill will also require all camps to have an emergency plan for any type of disaster, like flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, epidemics, unauthorized individuals on premises and aquatic emergencies like drowning. Camp leaders will have to submit those plans to the state.

A copy of the plans will also be required to be given to parents and legal guardians of campers. The parents or guardians will need to sign statements acknowledging they were informed when they are notified of floodplain locations.

“When parents drop their child off, they will know with greater certainty their child will be safe from any potential disaster,” Abbott said.

The emergency plan will need to outline procedures for identifying and locating campers during an emergency.

Each camp will also be required to hold safety orientations for campers at the beginning of each session and train their volunteers and camp staff annually on the emergency plans.

SB 1 will also require camp leaders to make some physical changes to their facilities, including installing emergency rooftop ladders in cabins and keeping all evacuation routes lit at night.

The bill requires camps to prepare to evacuate at any time the National Weather Service issues a flood warning, and evacuation routes will have to be displayed in all camp cabins.

There has been some pushback from people who don’t want government regulation on youth camps. Three Kerr County camps sent a letter to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, saying they can’t afford to make the changes the legislation would mandate.

The camps – Camp Waldemar, Vista Camps and Camp Stewart – say that the cost of repairs from the devastating flooding, combined with the financial burden of the proposed state regulations, poses an impossible challenge.

“Collectively, our camps would face millions of dollars in mandated rebuilding costs for cabins subjected to the prohibition that did not sustain damage by recent flooding,” the letter said. “These additional burdens would come on top of already significant flood repairs, operational expenses, and existing loans.”

Both SB 1 and HB 1 now head to the governor’s desk. Abbott said Wednesday he plans to sign the legislation into law later this week.

Of the topics state lawmakers did not address, the most notable was THC, which was the catalyst for the first special session.

On the last day that the governor could veto bills from the regular session, in the 11th hour, Abbott vetoed a bill to ban the sale of all hemp products containing THC. THC is the chemical in marijuana that gets you high.

Banning all THC products has become a passion project for Patrick, who says it’s dangerous and unregulated.

The governor put regulating THC on the special session call, and the Senate quickly passed a bill to ban it during the first and second special sessions.

But for the last few weeks, it stalled in the House amid disagreements over whether to ban or regulate it. 

On Wednesday, at first it appeared a deal could be on the horizon. Sources told KVUE that last-minute negotiations were underway as state lawmakers tried to hammer out a compromise for some form of regulations for consumable hemp products. 

But around 9 p.m., Patrick said after long discussions between himself, the governor and House speaker on THC, they were not able to come to a resolution.

“My position remains unchanged; the Senate and I are for a total THC ban,” Patrick said.

Another key item for state leaders was property taxes. Lawmakers voted to increase the homestead exemption during the regular session, but Abbott has said he wanted more.

The solution in the Senate was Senate Bill 10, which would have reduced how much cities and counties with a population over 75,000 people can increase property tax rates year over year from 3.5% to 2.5%.

This would cap how much the tax rate can be raised before getting approval from voters. If a local taxing entity wants to raise property taxes above the rate, they need voter approval.

The bill hit a snag Tuesday, when the right flank of the Republican Caucus and House Democrats voted to reject a conference committee report.

The report from the conference committee, a group of lawmakers from both chambers who got together to hash out their differences and reach an agreement, eliminated nearly all changes the House made to the bill and reverted it to the Senate version.

“My concern is a lot of the things that we’ve done on the House floor are gone from this bill now,” State Rep. Tony Tinderholt (R-Arlington) said. “I support property tax relief like I think everyone in this building does. It’s super important to our constituents, but I think it should be equal and paired across the entire state equally, regardless of population.”

House lawmakers said the Senate’s version of the bill does not do enough to stop property tax increases.

“Unfortunately, this bill is not a property tax relief bill,” State Rep. Mitch Little (R-Lewisville) said. “As I understand it, this bill only brings within its ambit roughly 5% of the taxing jurisdictions in this entity who have essentially been singled out as being the problem as it relates to property tax.”

The bill’s author, State Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston), said that reducing the Voter Approval Tax Rate from 3.5% to 2.5% would result in a 29.57% decrease in property tax levy increases.

“This would be good public policy as Texas taxpayers are hard pressed to keep up with year-to-year county tax revenue hikes that are 3 times higher than school tax levies and city tax revenues of about 2.5 times higher than the same too,” he said.

The House version took the Voter Approval Tax Rate down to 1%, but the conference committee took it back to 2.5%.

In its most recent version, SB 10 only applied to cities and counties with at least 75,000 residents, but that is different from the House version, which applies to every city and county. 

The House added an exemption to public safety costs from being subject to the new limit, but that was stripped out in the conference committee.

Bettencourt said he can’t accept the House amendments on SB 10 because they “basically uncapped Truth-In-Taxation allowing an unlimited property tax revenue increase on public safety expenditures.”

The House approved the Senate’s changes to House Bill 8, which would replace the STAAR exam with a series of three tests administered throughout the school year. It now heads to Abbott’s desk.

HB 8 will eliminate the STAAR as an end-of-year exam beginning in the 2027-28 school year. In its place, students will take assessments at the beginning, middle and end of the academic year. Results will be returned within 48 hours.

On Wednesday night, the Senate signed off on the House changes to Senate Bill 8, officially titled the “Women’s Privacy Act” and known to many as the “bathroom bill.”

SB 8 will require people to use only the bathrooms in government buildings and public schools that align with their biological sex. The bill will also require inmates to be housed in the correctional facility according to their biological sex, and family violence shelters to only provide services to female victims if their biological sex is female.

The bill now heads to the governor’s desk for his signature.

The upper chamber also passed House Bill 7 on its third reading, sending it to the governor’s desk. The bill allows private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, mails or provides abortion medication to or from Texas.

Abbott has not announced if he will call third special session to deal with items that didn’t pass this time around.