For Clients of Perry's Advisers, a Troubling Budget

[w8liftinglady]

http://www.texastribune.org/texas-taxes/2011-budget-shortfall/clients-perrys-advisers-troubling-budget/

Gov. Rick Perry has delivered his fiscal message loud and clear: Balance the cash-strapped state budget with cuts, not with the Rainy Day Fund or new taxes. Yet in a legislative session that’s almost all budget, all the time, some of Perry’s most loyal advisers, past and future, find themselves representing clients beating a very different drum.

Former Perry speechwriter Eric Bearse, who has worked on the governor’s campaigns and helped write his first book, is managing communications for the Texas Association for Home Care and Hospice, which is facing steep Medicaid rate cuts that could force in-home nursing companies — some of them specializing in critically ill children — to close. The organization, which could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbying and attorneys this session, according to state filings, has called the budget cuts “cold-hearted.”

Delisi Communications, the public relations firm run by longtime Perry campaign consultant Ted Delisi and his wife Deirdre Delisi, Perry’s former chief of staff and the appointed chair of the Texas Transportation Commission, is advocating on behalf of the Providers Alliance for Community Services. That organization — which has contracted with the Delisis’ firm for between $100,000 and $200,000 this session, according to state lobby filings — has called on lawmakers to use additional Rainy Day funds to prevent “devastating” cuts for people with disabilities living in the community, and the redirection of health care costs to local jails and emergency rooms. (“Persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities deserve better,” the organization’s president says.)

Even Albert Hawkins, whom Perry appointed as Texas Health and Human Services Executive Commissioner in 2003 and served until 2009, is a registered lobbyist for the Texas Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, a group that has warned the House version of the budget — the slimmer version Perry has lauded — would lead to the closure of hundreds of nursing homes. That organization, which expects to pay Hawkins between $50,000 and $90,000 for the 2011 legislative session, according to state records, even commissioned a survey showing 52 percent of Republican Texas voters would be less likely to re-elect a lawmaker who cut funding for nursing homes.

Lobbyists and political consultants say these kinds of political discrepancies surface all the time; the budget is hardly the only realm. Bill Miller, a longtime lobbyist who has worked with clients on both sides of the aisle, said Perry allies who have been “dutiful and loyal” can go out and make a living without worrying how the governor’s office will respond — indeed, clients seek them out because of their relationship with the state’s top elected official.

[northoftheborder]

1. This budget will be devastating to Texas. Awful. Shameful

[TxVietVet]

2. I'm at the point in my life where I say

let the conservanazis have their way for we have one party rule now. Let them destroy Texas. I mean it seems to me that these bastards have no heart for the poor or infirmed. I guess that these folks can just walk down the street and people who can barely afford their own survival will support them

It's like a bully threatening you. Tell him to whip your ass and get it over. Keep giving tax breaks to the bribers and tax the property owners to death.