TFCA Legislative Update February 7, 2025

Governor Abbott gave his State of the State address, where he announced his emergency items for the session. Emergency items are exempted from the constitutional restriction on legislation being considered within the first 60 days of a legislative session (before March 14th).

Here is the list:

• Property tax
• Investing in water infrastructure
• School choice (private school vouchers)
• Teacher pay
• Expanding career and technical education
• Bail reform
• Creation of a Texas Cyber Command

In the speech, he also discussed various other issues he expects to come up during the session. He specifically mentioned the importance of firefighting, honored the firefighters who fought the Panhandle and Los Angeles fires, and said that firefighters need essential tools like funding and air-tanker planes. Here is the full speech if you’d like to peruse it. Finally, we have six full weeks of bill filing remaining before the March 14th deadline. I’m told the legislative drafting agency has 9,000 drafts in que and is telling offices they have to prioritize drafting requests to make the deadline. This happens every session but usually later and will a smaller backlog.

See the TFCA Bill List as of 02-01-205 HERE.