In the Texas Legislature, "Rural and urban lawmakers have stood together in this session, a surprising alliance driven by changing demographics that yield common interests," reports Marcus Funk of the Dallas Morning News. "Rural lawmakers have seen their clout steadily decline as cities and suburbs have grown."
The latest example of rural-urban cooperation is "a bill that would use taxes on smokeless tobacco to lure doctors to underserved areas by helping pay off their student loans," Funk reports. "The bill helped both rural and inner-city Texans, and without one another's support, it could have faced longer odds in a chamber controlled by suburban lawmakers and the first House speaker from a metropolitan area in years."
The leading example of cooperation has been the rule that guarantees high-school graduates in the top 10 percent of their class admission to the state university of their choice. "Rural communities see it as a way for students from small communities to get into big state schools such as the University of Texas at Austin," Funk writes. "Urban lawmakers fiercely defend the law as an important factor in ensuring diversity at state colleges." Today, Christy Hoppe of the Dallas paper reports, the Senate sent Gov. Rick Perry a bill allowing UT-Austin to limit such automatic admissions to 75 percent of its 2011 frshman class. The rural-urban coalition successfully thwarted the original bill, which would have set a 60 percent limit at all state universities.
Ken Collier, professor of political science at Sam Houston State University in Nacogdoches, told Funk, "The rural interests did run the state for years, and sometimes I think that Texas is not really comfortable with its increasingly suburban nature. But legislators live in a world where the next issue brings a new best friend." (Read more)
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