Rep. Harvey Hilderbran, R-Kerrville (on left) (2005 AP Photo/Thomas Terry)
The Texas House on Friday tentatively approved a bill that would extend for another decade a program that lets school districts help their communities lure factories and high-paying jobs by granting property tax breaks.
The 12-year-old program has drawn fire, though, because it has cost the state an average of $350,000 per job created.
Through its main school funding formula, the state prevents school systems from losing any state aid because they’ve lowered property valuations to nudge businesses to locate manufacturing, research and development, or renewable energy facilities in the district.
The bill to extend the so-called “Chapter 313″ agreements through 2024 advanced on a 127-6 vote.
Opponents were mostly tea party-backed Republicans. But none spoke during the debate, which focused mainly on whether to restrict payments made to the school districts by some companies as a condition of their getting the lower valuations for purposes of school maintenance and operation taxes.
The House’s chief tax writer said the tax breaks have been indispensable to state efforts to recruit new businesses.
“It’s the most important economic development tool that we have,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Harvey Hilderbran, R-Kerrville, said of Chapter 313.
“Without it, we would not have attracted Toyota [and] Samsung,” he said, referring to plants that were brought to San Antonio and Austin and that make, respectively, pickup trucks and semiconductors. “And we wouldn’t have attracted the many capital intensive projects we have in southeast Texas and in other places in the state.”
