MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
One of the most vexing questions facing Texas officials is why so many people in Kerr County didn't get more effective warning of last week's deadly floods or, in some cases, any warnings at all. Just this year, state lawmakers considered legislation that would have enhanced emergency response measures in Texas, and that bill failed. One of the bill's sponsors was Democratic state Representative Joe Moody of El Paso, and he's with us now to tell us more about it. Good morning, Representative. Thank you so much for joining us.
JOE MOODY: Good morning. Thank you for having me.
MARTIN: What would your legislation have done?
MOODY: So the legislation was built off of a lot of experiences here in Texas - you know, different types of emergencies. Like, we had Winter Storm Uri. We had the wildfires in the panhandle. We had the tragic shooting in Uvalde, right? Emergencies that brought up different issues related to communication and crisis and interoperability of these systems to perform so that people could either mitigate the harm of an emergency or maybe, to your point, avoid it altogether. And so that bill was built to create a council to foster state funds, to allow local governments to pull them down in grants so that they could put the infrastructure in place that they need for their particular - you know, whatever the particular emergency that could take place in their region. You know, it looks different across Texas. And that's what the bill was meant to do.
MARTIN: So just to be clear, though, this bill was taken up earlier this year. Would anything actually be different today if the bill had passed, or would this have phased in more money over time?
MOODY: It was structured over time. So the way we pass bills is it would not have been - become effective until September 1. This would not have been a solution for this tragedy. But I think it's hopefully opened a lot of people's eyes that we cannot pass up on opportunities to put this infrastructure in place.
MARTIN: So the bill passed in the House, but then it failed in the Senate. Why did it fail in the Senate?
MOODY: The only concerns I ever heard about it in the House were associated with cost and whether there was a need for it. It's unfortunate that it took a tragedy like this for people to pay more attention to a bill that was, you know, in our estimation, critically important earlier this year.
MARTIN: My read of the reporting from Texas was that, yes, there were some budget conservatives who felt that the price tag was too high. But a spokesperson for Texas' lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, told The Texas Tribune that state lawmakers have actually put quite a lot of new funding toward disaster response this year, including some $260 million for disaster response aircraft. Is that not sufficient, in your view?
MOODY: No, I think we do - look, the state of Texas is a gigantic economy, right? We have a number of things we spend money on, and including emergency preparedness. We do a lot of work in that area. The point of this particular bill was creating a structural council that is going to oversee the needs of local communities. Think about the folks in Kerr County who continued to tell us, well, the reason we didn't have these systems in place is 'cause they were too expensive. Well, this is the answer. When people talk about government and what it can and can't do, what the Texas government can do in this situation is bring its heft and its power to be able to help a community like Kerr County. This is what the power of government can do and can do these things for good, and we need to harness that power in circumstances like this.
MARTIN: This is just obviously a terrible situation. And the people who are most immediately affected are obviously dealing with the immediate, you know, needs of the moment. But I was wondering - if you are talking to your colleagues about it, perhaps some who were more skeptical about it, what are they saying now?
MOODY: We've had a number of conversations about what this special session was going to look like. You know, we're going to go back to Austin to start working on these issues.
MARTIN: You're saying there is going to be a special session starting later this month? The special session was already called, and you think this will be taken up again?
MOODY: Yes. So we have a regular session once every two years, and then if the governor calls us back, we can go back for up to 30 days. And so we're - we are already going back. We're already scheduled to go back starting July 21. So this is an issue the governor's indicated is going to come back up. So this work has already begun in earnest. I'll be back in Austin to start working on some of these issues with some of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle.
So we are earnestly trying to work on this right now, and there's two ways to work on this. There is the immediate need for these types of warning systems, right? And that answers the tragedy that we are looking at right now, and that's something that we can fund immediately. The other part of that is looking at infrastructure over time, and that's what this bill would have done. So those are two different ways to tackle this problem, and we have to do both at once. This is not an either-or situation. This is a both-and.
MARTIN: That is Texas state Representative Joe Moody. He is a Democrat and he's speaker pro tem of the Texas House. Representative Moody, thank you so much for talking with us.
MOODY: Thank you very much for the time. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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