Texas Ed Spectator

Here’s a list of higher education projects vetoed by Perry as pork.

The body count: Perry’s higher ed vetoes

The body count: Perry’s higher ed vetoes

Too bad he doesn’t give a reason for all the pork he leaves in.

Perry signs budget, blasts higher education funding

Perry reiterated his demand, aired in February, that lawmakers place all higher education special items in a portion of the budget subject to his line-item veto. Thirty-six special items added late in the legislative session by House and Senate negotiators and costing $123 million wound up subject to his veto pen, and he vetoed 14 of them.

But scores of other special items worth hundreds of millions of dollars were sprinkled through the budget and therefore remained essentially veto-proof. For example, the University of Texas of the Permian Basin in Odessa, near Speaker Tom Craddick’s hometown of Midland, received $9 million for “instruction enhancement” and $7.4 million for “institutional enhancement.”

So how were items determined to be “special items” and listed separately subject to line item veto? How does “institutional enhancement” at Permain Basin contribute to state’s set goals for improving enrollment and graduation rates but a museum of fine arts at Angelo State University does not?

Now I don’t claim to know how these things were listed in the budget but it seems to me that if Perry could veto the community colleges’ group health insurance, he could have also found a way to veto other times that were “sprinkled” through the budget.

Does anyone know what Perry stands for and what he’s against in term of education issue?

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