Lines in the Sand
Austin Legislators Prepare to Redraw Their Own Districts -- While Doing Business as Usual
By Louis Dubose, Fri., Jan. 19, 2001
Rep. Glen Maxey, D-Austin
House District 51 (Austin)Capitol Office: E1.420
Capitol Phone: 512/463-0552
South Austin Democrat Glen Maxey routinely passes more bills than the three Republican members of the regional delegation file, and this year will be no exception. Maxey had 37 bills pre-filed before the session opened, and says more are in the pipeline. (Last year he filed 103 and passed about 75%.) "My No. 1 priority this session is reform of Medicaid, to get the 600,000 kids who are not enrolled into the program," Maxey said of the federal/state health insurance program for indigent children. He has also filed a telemedicine bill "to bring medical services to people who need them in remote parts of the state ... and, for example, to allow a resident of Austin who has cancer to save cost and travel to M.D. Anderson [in Houston]."
Maxey has also filed a privacy bill that would protect individual medical records. "We need to establish that that information doesn't belong to the institution that holds it, but to the individual patient," Maxey said. The privacy bill brings Maxey together with Suzanna Gratia Hupp, an extreme-right Lampasas Republican who has also filed privacy legislation. Maxey said he will again be working on an issue he was dealing with at the end of the session: closing the "grandfather loophole" by which outdated industrial plants continue to pollute in volumes not allowed by current state law. Maxey lost that fight in the closing hours of the last legislative session, when Gov. Bush prevailed with a voluntary program that the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission now admits is not working. This session, he says, the loophole can be closed without going through the House Environmental Regulation Committee chaired by Pampa Republican Warren Chisum. "The Sunset of the TNRCC will be used as a vehicle to make changes in environmental law this session," Maxey said. He is co-sponsor of a bill to close the loophole.
Maxey has served in the Legislature since 1991 and has 37 bills filed this session.
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