A group of us were able to climb to the top of the Capitol dome and look down into the rotunda, and out across Austin. Rewarding and enjoyable experiences in the PAC as we play a small part in influencing our government.īut it’s surely not all work. Not to sidestep all the good work TREC does on Dallas issues and DISD, Lobby Day is the culmination of what we do in the two-year legislative cycle at the state level. While the trajectory of the legislature is set even before it began in January, the presence of our members in our legislators’ offices makes a difference, because they know we’re watching what they doing. Through our members, The Real Estate Council has continually put ourselves at the intersection of business and public policy. If you’re in the real estate business, you understand it’s a relationship business politics is just the original relationship business. The good news legislators have lots of creative ways to kill bills, sometimes a slow silent death buried in a committee, and other times, flaming over a cliff at 100 miles an hour on the floor of the House or Senate. While issues like transportation, education and taxes require plenty of heavy lifting and work, there are many issues before the legislature where we’d just prefer them to do nothing. While we are generally very proud of our North Texas legislative delegation and our relationships with them, not everything needs a law, and sometimes the legislative ‘solution’ might create something worse than the original problem. If you’re a doctor, you probably “have a pill for that.” When you’re a legislator trying to do something, you write up a bill, and you try to make it law. When your only tool is a hammer, all the problems start looking like nails. We talked about what was going right, what was going wrong, and made ourselves available to them as experts in our respective fields. We told them the stories about what we do, and how we do it as an industry. We met with our legislators and their staff. So, with that in mind, The Real Estate Council Political Action Committee made our biennial expedition down I-35 to Austin last week. There’s an old saying in politics, that “no man’s life, liberty or property is safe while the Legislature is in session.” That sentiment was surely on the minds of the founding fathers of Texas when they allowed the legislature to meet for only six months every two years.
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