Texas Veteran Peer Network Has Run on Flat Funding for 13 Years

Texas pays 56 peer service coordinators to reach veterans in crisis across 254 counties. The state has not raised that budget since 2013, and senators heard Aug. 26 what the gap costs.

“We have more veterans, more need, and we haven’t increased the resourcing for that program in 13 years,” said Sean Hanna, vice president for veterans and public safety at the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute. He gave the panel a comparison. “L.A. County has roughly 200,000 veterans. The county funds their veteran peer access network at $6 million per year,” Hanna said. Texas runs the statewide program on $5 million.

The Senate Select Committee on Veteran Affairs took its transition charge first and gave it roughly three hours and 18 minutes, about half the hearing. Sen. Brent Hagenbuch, R–Denton, chaired. Because this was an interim hearing, no votes were taken.

Witness after witness told senators that Texas is aiming at the wrong window. The federal Transition Assistance Program runs in the months before a service member separates. “The transition assistance program is important, but tap alone cannot make a successful transition,” said Mike Bertolino, president and chief executive of the military affairs committee serving Sheppard Air Force Base. “That takes communities.”

Scott Efflandt, director of the military talent pipeline at Texas A&M University-Central Texas, answered Vice Chair Bob Hall, R–Edgewood, with the sharpest version of that argument. Asked whether the state should plug into the federal program, he said no. “The strategic question that confronts the veteran affairs in Texas in terms of workforce development is, do we want to connect to the transition assistance program at DoD? I would say no. I say we need to look at how we can engage sooner.”

Efflandt gave Sen. Pete Flores, R–Pleasanton, a concrete example of the waste. “Sheppard Air Force Base trains almost every single aircraft maintainer in the United States Air Force at some point during their career,” he said. “But a very small percentage of them ever become FAA certified mechanics.” Sen. José Menéndez, D–San Antonio, made the same point about medicine: service members “have to go through academia and to get state licensing to do the very same job they were doing in a military hospital, in theaters of war and Europe.”

The transition itself is the danger zone. Mike Eastman, a 30-year Army veteran and director of the national nonprofit Onward Ops, told members the year after discharge “is called in the academic literature the Deadly gap. It’s when the pressures of a loss of identity, a loss of purpose, a loss of tribe, relocation, loss of medical coverage — all these things converge in a very compressed period of time.” Most of the people falling into it are young: “70% of the folks get out of the military every year are young enlisted folks that have joined out of high school. They are not prepared to navigate this major life change on their own without a lot of support.”

Mia Garcia, executive director of the Texas Veterans Network, coined the phrase the panel then borrowed. “So let’s call it the tap gap,” she said. “Tap informs well, but it doesn’t hand someone a transitioning service member to a vetted Texas organization in their destination county and confirmed the connection happened.” Her recommendation was a metric: “Measure confirmed contact. Not just a referral.”

Sarafina de Los Santos, founder and chair of the Joint Base San Antonio Workforce and Transition Alliance, said the tool already exists in statute. “With SB 1814, Texas now has the ability to proactively reach service members 12 months before separation,” she said. “So I would offer that the challenge is not a lack of programs. The challenge is connecting.” Her list of gaps included “insufficient employer engagement, and slow S.B. 1814 implementation, lack of statewide outcome data, behavioral health and housing gaps.”

Rural Texas made the arithmetic case. Wayne Vaughn, chief executive of Lakes Regional Community Center and chair of the veterans committee for the state’s community centers, took the peer network numbers apart at the microphone. “Miss Keller mentioned 56 peer service coordinators, and that’s to cover 254 counties,” he said. “So you can do the math on that. In our seven rural counties east of Dallas, we have 13,000 vets.”

Brenda Keller, who directs the veterans mental health department at the Texas Veterans Commission, confirmed the footprint: “TVC now has fully executed contracts with 37 local mental health authorities for a total of 56 peer service coordinators and six rural veteran counselors.” Hanna put the output alongside the input. In its last year under the health commission, he said, the peer network served “60,763 veterans service members and their families” through “more than 53,901 one on one sessions and 4500 peer support groups for over 214,000 total interactions on a $5 million investment.”

Menéndez asked what senators could do about it. “What can we do next session?” he said. “And I like what you said, Sean, about creating some metrics for TVC.” Hanna answered that part of the fix is not legislation at all: “I don’t think it would require legislation. I think it would just be TVC updating the contract.” The rest is money — Meadows asked for an additional $5 million a year in general revenue for the state’s veterans grant program in each fiscal year of the biennium, plus $10 million more for the biennium.

The panel also heard where the state has spent. Bob Geren of the Texas Veterans Leadership Program at the Texas Workforce Commission said the commission approved a $2.5 million military civilian employment program in May, and that a prior $8 million dislocated-worker grant served 1,370 military spouses at roughly an 84 percent employment rate and an average wage of $26.26 an hour. Hagenbuch closed by telling witnesses the committee would build its recommendations from the record. The 90th Legislature convenes in January 2027.