For nearly two decades, Representative Donna Howard has served the Austin community as a member of the Texas House of Representatives.
Howard, who graduated from Reagan High School and has lived in the Austin area her entire life, began her journey toward public service at the University of Texas at Austin, where she received a bachelor’s and master’s degree.
“I have lived here my entire life, raised my family here, went to the University of Texas, got a Bachelor’s in Nursing, and a Master’s in Health Education,” says Howard.
And while Howard says she never intended to run for office, she was interested in government and found other ways to serve her local community. She helped to start the Good Health program while at Seton Hospital, was a district president of the Texas Nurses Association, and a member of parent-teacher organizations, among other things.
“I’ve always been interested in good government, responsible government,” says Howard.
In 1996, Howard changed her mind and decided to run for public office for the first time. She was elected to the Eanes Independent School District Board of Trustees where she held that position until 1999. At that time, she says she was the only Democrat on the board.
Then in 2005, following the controversial resignation of Representative Todd Baxter (R-Austin), Howard jumped into the special election for Texas House District 48 where she defeated Ben Bentzin in February of 2006, and, again, during the 2006 General Election when Bentzin withdrew from the race.
In 2010, Howard survived the closest Texas House election on record, defeating Dan Neil by 12 votes after a recount and a four-day hearing in the Texas House of Representatives.
Fast-forward to today and Howard has, and probably could keep, a safe seat for as long as she wants to serve. She won her most recent election with 83% of the vote. She says that when the time comes for a new voice with new ideas, she will embrace it but for now she has a lot to offer.
“Being here as long as I’ve been here, I’ve gained some institutional knowledge that is helpful in meeting the needs of my constituents and the entire state.
Howard’s district has seen a lot of change in her tenure. The Eanes Board of Trustees is now entirely Democrats – although, officially it is non-partisan – and the Austin metro area population has more than doubled since Howard was first elected to the House.
“We’ve grown, numbers wise. We have housing affordability issues. Traffic issues. Those have only gotten more severe,” says Howard. “We still have some common values and common goals. We value public education, higher education, a workforce pipeline. We value access to healthcare. Those things have not changed.”
The recent legislative session that just ended, which Howard describes as “the good, the bad, and the unsustainable,” was a demanding one in her view.
“The word that I have been using to describe it is brutal,” says Howard. “It was intensive. We had more late night, overnight type sessions and hearings than I have ever experienced before. We were tired and worn out.”
During the session, in addition to serving her constituents, filing more than 75 pieces of legislation, Howard was the chairwoman of the Texas Women’s Health Caucus, Vice Chair of the House Committee on Higher Education, and served on the House Appropriations Committee, an incredibly important position in the legislative body.
“If it’s not in the budget, you can pass a bill, but if it’s not funded, it’s not going to happen,” says Howard.
However, Howard raises significant concerns about how the state is managing its own fiscal house, and importantly to Howard, how it is communicating what it is doing to Texans. This is “the unsustainable” for Howard.
“It’s not really a surplus,” says Howard when talking about the excess state funding that has been discussed and dedicated to property tax relief, among other things.
“In a lot of cases these are Constitutionally-dedicated funds,” says Howard. “These are funds that we have determined can only be used for one purpose, and one purpose only but we haven’t appropriated them for that purpose yet. So, that money is sitting there and allows some to say we are balancing the budget.”
For example, Howard says there was $4.5 billion that was intended to be invested in public education, but was not in the 88th legislative session in the fight over education savings accounts. Those funds, according to Howard, are being counted as state surplus.
Another example is the remaining COVID-era funding from the feds. “We used the last of our federal COVID funding for criminal justice expenses,” says Howard. “And, going forward, we have to pay for that with state money.”
“And, what tends to come to the forefront is property tax cuts,” says Howard. “And that’s great because I am a property owner and I love having property tax cuts. But we have to keep paying for them. Right now, the amount we are continuing to have to pay for every year based on what we have done in the past couple sessions is $51 billion.”
Howard not only sees this as an unsustainable way to lower property taxes but also coming at the expense of other state priorities, like public education.
“My contention would be that when people complain about our schools and our students not doing as well as they should be doing, I would suggest that if we funded them all at the level of Eanes ISD, we might see better outcomes,” says Howard.
Eanes Independent School District, which is in Howard’s district and where she served on the school board, is one of the highest performing school districts in the state. Eanes is also one of the wealthiest school districts in the state, so, in addition to the equitable per student allotment that all school districts in Texas get as baseline funding from the state school finance system, the families and businesses in Eanes contribute to a non-profit that provides additional funding to the school district.
“Eanes Education Foundation was able to pay for an additional 77 teachers to have smaller class sizes, to be able to have robotics and other programs they wouldn’t have otherwise,” says Howard. “My point here is that money does matter. You have to have a certain amount of money to keep your class sizes small, to pay your teachers, to give them the resources they need and we don’t have that opportunity in many of our school districts.”
Howard says that the successful effort by the legislature to create education savings accounts or school vouchers is not the solution to declining performance in Texas schools.
“I think that the vouchers were a solution in search of a problem and the wrong solution,” says Howard. “I do believe that if we invested in our schools, we would see better outcomes.”
While the legislature did allocate an additional $8 billion in public education funding this session, Howard says this is only chipping away at a much larger deficit in education funding that goes back to 2011.