In The News

By Elizabeth Evans

U.S. Congressman Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, made a stop in Trinity last Wednesday to meet with county leaders and school officials to discuss the Secure Rural Schools (SRS) funding program.

Brady, who helped pass a two-year extension on this program recently, met with Trinity County Judge Doug Page, Precinct 2 Commissioner Richard Chamberlin, and Trinity ISD Superintendent Dave Plymale in the TISD administration building to discuss how the program will benefit Trinity County.

“I am really pleased that Congress passed a high priority of Trinity County, of both the judge, the commissioners and our school leaders’ superintendent, to extend Secure Rural Schools funding for two years,” Brady said. “This was part of a larger bill that was passed by Congress that I worked on and helped lead as well, finding a better way to pay our local doctors to treat Medicare patients. There’s been a crisis and it’s time to fix it.”

Brady said he’s worked on this bill for two and a half years in the Health subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee.

The Secure Rural Schools & Community Self-Determination Act revives a timber act that had expired in September 2013, causing a loss of funding for critical programs in schools and forested counties in Texas, including Trinity County.

“With the extension, our Texas counties are going to receive about 2.3 million dollars of funding this year and a comparable amount next year,” Brady said.

Trinity County for fiscal year 2013 received $361,914.34 from Secure Rural Schools according to the U.S. Forest Service, which Judge Page said was split 50/50 between the county and the four school districts, Trinity ISD, Groveton ISD, Apple Springs ISD, and Centerville ISD.

“This is critical funding for our east Texas communities and it helps avoid property tax increases or cuts in real critical services to roads and bridges and schools,” Brady said, “and this success today was a team effort. This is one of the highest priorities I hear from our county judge, our commissioners and our school superintendent.”

Brady said he was proud to be working with them on the funding until a permanent solution is passed, calling this an example of teamwork between local leaders and the federal government.

“This is a high priority for me every year in Congress because it is a high priority for my communities,” Brady said. “Just five of our counties in my district make up almost half of the Texas counties that will be receiving this funding. This is a big deal for me.”

Judge Page spoke about how Trinity County uses their portion of the funding to maintain county roads and bridges.

“I appreciate what [Brady] said and [his] efforts on that in the US Congress, like [he] said, this has been a joint effort between us on a local level, Texas legislature, Texas Association of Counties, Texas County Judges and Commissioners Associations, working hand in hand with you, and we appreciate [his] efforts on that,” Page said.

Page also hopes to find a long-term solution to this funding in the future. Page also assured Brady that this funding is very much needed in Trinity County.

“It takes some of the tax burden off of our local property owners and homeowners,” Page said.

Commissioner Chamberlin broke down how the money is allocated between the four precincts, with the most funding going to the precinct with the most county road mileage.

“Some of the precincts have fewer miles of roads that the others do, particularly my precinct,” Chamberlin said. “I only have 22 miles of county road that we maintain in Precinct 2, but we have a real high volume of traffic and a real high percentage of population.” 

Chamberlin would like to see high traffic volumes factored into future road budget decisions, an issue he plans to bring before his fellow commissioners at the next county budget meeting.

“For instance, my precinct gets about 10% of any of the monies that come in, whether its from property taxes, ad valorum taxes, grants,” Chamberlin said. “The other commissioners get 30-40% because they have 150 miles of road or 100 miles of road instead of 22.”

While Chamberlin did not have the precinct-by-precinct breakdown of how the SRS funding was allocated amongst the precincts, he did say that this funding is important to the county to rock roads and maintain paved roads and bridges.

He also mentioned his efforts on behalf of Trinity County to obtain a grant from the Hurricane Ike 2.2 GLO funding, which totaled $3.8 million for the county, which was used to rock 17 roads in Trinity County.

“It was just so excruciating that whole process from start to finish,” Chamberlin said, “the environmental studies that had to be done. I think we worked for three to four years from start to finish before they would release the funds and we could go out for bid.”

Brady said that in the case of the SRS funding, there aren’t any of these delays. Once the funds come to Trinity County, they can be applied.

Superintendent Plymale also addressed how the funding affected Trinity ISD. Trinity ISD receives a small portion of the funding for themselves, but as Plymale said, they feel an impact from how the county allocates their funds.

“We just get a small portion,” Plymale said. “As Mr Chamberlin was just mentioning, with the weather we’ve been having recently, we’ve had some situations where our buses can’t get down to pick some students up and parents can’t get up to where the buses are stopping, so we appreciate everything [Brady] is doing to help our county with our roads and bridges so we can make sure we get these kids to school.”

Plymale said that maintaining the roads would also help the TISD budget by putting less wear and tear on the school buses.

“With our budget, we try to budget one new bus a year, and with some of the roads that we have to go on, it really tears up our buses,” Plymale said. “We’d like to get two new buses a year to replace some of our old buses when they get torn up, but with these funds that the county is going to be able to use to help fix these roads up, it’s going to ease our budget as far as transportation and repairs that we use on buses.”

Each bus costs the district about $100,000, so Plymale hopes that this SRS funding will help extend the life of the buses.

Brady also addressed how a coalition in Washington DC has been pushing for a more permanent solution to this funding to allow counties to count on the funds year after year. 

Previous attempts to pass this legislation have died in the Senate, but Brady remains hopeful that this time it will. He also hopes that within the span of the extension, Congress will move towards that permanent solution.

“We bought two years for a reason in the extension, we think it will take that to get this done,” Brady said. “We’re doing all our funding bills through August, which will just eat up every second, so either later this fall or the first quarter of next year, we hope to move our House bill. Can the Senate get it done, we don’t know.”

Page suggested a tour of forest farms in Trinity County for environmental groups from Washington DC, which Brady said his office used to provide, but due to recent ethics rules, cannot do anymore.

Chamberlin also brought up the possibility of a bio-fuels plant in Trinity County, which would not affect the funding. Brady also discussed his efforts to keep Texas on an even footing with foreign trade and how timber remains Texas’ third agricultural product.

This measure passed the Senate on April 14, and authorizes $500 million to be dispersed through the SRS program for local schools, transportation infrastructure, emergency response and other critical services. 

This funding will help more than 720 counties and 4,000 school districts across 41 states and Puerto Rico. It also expedites these payments to the counties by requiring the federal government to make payments within 45 days of enactment.