Texas House Ag Committee Head
Outlines Legislative Program

DUMAS, Texas — There is a bumper sticker on a file cabinet in David Swinford's office at the Dumas Co-op. It reads, "All I want for Christmas is lower taxes and less government."

Although there have long been discussions about such things over hot coffee on cold winter days at co-ops across the country, Swinford is in a position to do something about it.

Come January, Swinford will leave this town and the biting winter winds of the Panhandle for Central Texas and the milder, if perhaps more contentious, climes of Austin and the state Capitol.

The next session of the Texas Legislature begins Jan. 9.

"Everybody's safe until then," Swinford grins.

As the duly elected representative of Moore and Potter counties, Swinford chairs the Texas House Agriculture-Livestock Committee, a ticklish business in the best of times, but in a state whose urban population is growing and whose rural population is shrinking, Swinford and other rural representatives, including Speaker of the House Pete Laney of Hale Center, face increased problems.

Swinford describes it as a battle between rural and urban interests rather than Republican versus Democrat.

"If you draw a line from Wichita Falls to Denton and then start sweeping down and coming out at El Paso," Swinford says, "there are about 18 House members there."

Based on the population from the most recent census, that area will be redistricted with only 16 representatives.

"You've got to do a little creative drawing to not lose two," he says. "It's almost a lead pipe cinch that we're going to lose one."

He says rural East Texas and central West Texas are also facing the same problem.

"There's probably six or eight rural seats that will be lost," Swinford says.

The other part of the issue is people like Swinford. He represents Amarillo and Dumas.

"When I'm gone, who is the representative going to be?" he asks.

About 92 percent of the votes in his district are in Amarillo.

"We need to import some people or we're going to lose some representatives," Swinford says.

He says that when he first went to the legislature in 1991, there were about 84 members from primarily rural districts or from districts where agriculture was the most important industry. By 1999, there were about 65.

Swinford says there are 32 or 33 seats from the Houston area while there are only four state representatives from Hale Center north in the Texas Panhandle, an area about the size of New England.

The problem is that seats are lost as populations drop in rural areas and through redistricting when rural areas are combined with urban areas.

"Over time we've moved from a rural majority to a minority," Swinford says. "Really, redistricting comes down to urban versus rural more than it does to Republican versus Democrat. Some folks don't understand that."

Swinford says a number of the more questionable bills that were pre-filed have been brought up before and will probably die a quiet death before reaching the floor of the Texas House of Representatives. Others may become law.

"I didn't see anything that concerned me a whole lot one way or the other," he says of the pre-filed proposed legislation.

In the agricultural arena, Swinford met with Texas Agriculture Commission Susan Combs before Thanksgiving, and they discussed several agricultural bills they both want to see pass.

One of them is the ag district bill.

"It's pretty complicated," Swinford says of the legislation.

The bill is the result of Speaker Laney sending House committees on the road to explore the conditions of various aspects of agriculture in the Lone Star State.

In addition to Swinford's committee, the joint Senate-House Ag Policy Committee and the House Rural Affairs Committee held a series of meetings around the state to focus on problems in the rural areas of Texas.

"The old saying about 'I've been everywhere' is true," Swinford laughs. "We had meetings all over the state. I've been places I didn't even know we had."

The major problem is one of declining population in rural areas, the legislator says, and of continued consolidation of businesses, farms and ranches.

"Certainly, we're going to have a tendency to shrink politically out there because we don't have the folks," he says.

Swinford believes that will bring about a focus on rural life in the upcoming session.

"One real important deal this time is redistricting," he says. "We will lose some rural votes on that."

Swinford insists that farmers and ranchers are caught in the middle of economic issues.

On one side are multinational companies selling feed, seed and fertilizer.

"It's not a direction our farmers can go," Swinford says. "They can't do that."

On the other side are other multinational corporations that take the farmers' and ranchers' products and process them into something else.

"We don't have enough of those folks doing enough in Texas," Swinford contends.

According to the Texas Department of Agriculture, every one percent increase in value-added processing means a billion dollars to the state's economy.

"The ranchers and farmers are in the middle," Swinford says. "The people on the left and the right are not taking any risks. The guy in the middle, the farmer or rancher, is taking the risk."

Swinford says the producer has tried to become more efficient by buying out his neighbor, and as a result, he has more risk.

"He's locked in, and he's building risk, and whenever you finally get down to the bottom line, you find a guy who's long land and long product and short capital because he used all of his capital to expand to stay efficient so he can stay in business. So there he sits, locked between multinational corporations, being the risk-taker with no capital."

Swinford says that's how the committees found the producer's situation.

"What I've tried to do is to focus in on that situation and say, 'let's just talk about how do we fix this guy,'" Swinford continues. "You don't just fix him out there by himself. At the same time, you've got to have some economic development in your communities out there. You've got to start looking at that situation."

The legislator says the American Farmland Trust did a cost of government survey in Central Texas and found that a person living in town was paying about a dollar in taxes and getting about $1.26 in services. A rural resident was paying a dollar and getting about 33 cents worth of services in return.

"What's happened is our eager-beaver economic development guys got out and brought people in and built new schools or whatever," Swinford says. "Agriculture's taxes went up, and they were well overtaxed as to what they were getting out of this deal."

He also has what he calls the "Wal-Mart scenario."

"You bring in a Wal-Mart," he explains, "and they take out seven little stores in a community. Then at two o'clock every day, they go down to the local bank that's now a multinational and wire their money out to Arkansas. It stops all that money from turning over in a community."

Swinford says the various meetings around the state indicated that there wasn't just one problem.

"It's just a combination of a whole bunch of stuff out there that's killing us," Swinford believes. "The answer is to get our guys who are stuck in the middle some capital so they can move up the food chain, so they can process whatever it is they're doing in agriculture and at the same time return this money back to the people who live there so that they'll spend it in the community and trade with people in town to undergird the economies in these little towns."

That, Swinford says, is what an agricultural district is supposed to do.

"It's a non-contiguous district based on people's commitment to do this deal," he says. "It's not by geography."

Swinford says the way the legislation will be set up is that a group of people with a certain project can go to their county commissioners and ask for an election to establish that project. Only those producers involved directly in the project are allowed to vote, not the general public, because the general public is not involved.

Using an ethanol plant as an example, Swinford says that a group of corn farmers can go to the commissioners' court in the county in which the plant is to be built and ask them to call for an election among the members of the district. The project has to be specific.

If the members of the district vote for it, Swinford says, they become a governmental entity.

"Essentially, it's like a water district," he says.

Swinford says there is a provision in the bill that nothing will come off the tax rolls.

"If they're building something on a piece of land out there," he says, "that piece of land still stays on the tax rolls. They don't take it off."

They don't, however, pay taxes on the facility they build.

"The reason we do that is that we have to have some advantage for our local folks over the multinationals," Swinford explains. "That's about the only one we can give them."

Though they'll have to secure their own financing initially, after they are up and running, the district can issue tax-free revenue bonds based on its production.

"They will secure it by assessments on whatever they are doing," Swinford says. "It might be so much a bushel or whatever in case they need to make the payments on the revenue bonds."

Because it is a governmental entity, Swinford points out, it can't make a profit.

"What will happen is these same people may form a co-op, and their co-op's business will be run in this plant," Swinford says. "The plant will charge them what it takes to make their revenue bond payment. The plant itself will be revenue neutral."

In a co-op, he says, all the profits are passed back down to the individuals involved.

"Essentially, then," he says, "you would have farmers pledging corn to a plant and staying with that corn up the food chain until it becomes ethanol. You sell the ethanol, and you add the corn price and the ethanol price together minus your expenses and get the new price of your corn."

In the meantime, he says, they've created 30 jobs. The money also stays in the town.

Swinford says such a business would also generate other businesses, such as trucking firms to haul in corn and haul out ethanol.

Under the proposed legislation, it doesn't cost the government anything. The county still has the property on its tax rolls.

"The state doesn't put any money in it," he stresses. "What we're doing is giving opportunities for our folks and giving them a little advantage where we can."

Other legislation being generated by the Texas Department of Agriculture includes dealing with the grain warehousing industry and making changes to the Texas Agricultural Finance Authority.

With the exception of the agricultural districts, a lot of the legislation deals with correcting minor problems rather than creating large new programs.

Swinford says he will carry an ethanol bill that is designed to replace MTBE, a gas additive that has caused pollution problems.

"MTBE does two things," Swinford says. "It raises the octane, and it makes it burn cleaner."

But if it gets into a water source, it renders the water undrinkable.

"If you get oil on the water, you can go in and skim it off," Swinford notes, "but if you pour a little MTBE in it, it attaches itself to every water molecule."

While MTBE isn't a carcinogen, Swinford says, it makes water taste bad and smell bad.

"As little water as we've got, we don't need to be doing that," he insists.

The focus, Swinford says, will be on a core of legislation he wants passed.

"I'm doing my best to dodge 15 or 20 bills that people have brought me," he says. "I'm going to concentrate on the major issues."

He expects to concentrate on five or six bills.

During the last session, he passed 30 bills, but he says they were all good. The one he's proudest of is the Go Texan Program.

"The Go Texan Program that I carried last time, Susan has really been working on," Swinford says. "We're starting to see those labels on a lot of stuff."

Swinford says the program is a joint venture with private money and some state grants.

"It's making a difference," he says. "Some of the major stores like H.E.B. have a Texas section. You can go in there and buy Texas wine, Texas jelly, Texas jam. It's awesome."

Swinford says they are going to try to expand that program.

"I'll be carrying an expansion to that," he says.

Swinford notes that there is already a Go Texan license tag. Part of the $30 fee goes into the Go Texan fund. Personalized Go Texan plates cost $70, again with part of the fee going to the program.

"We need all the help we can get," Swinford says.