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| SCHOOL MASTER: Shapiro’s leadership on school finance could be a stepping stone to higher office. |
You’d
think it would take a fire-breathing, hell-raising, all-knowing
political kingmaker who’d grin while going off a cliff to make the
Leader of the Free World cry. As it turns out, it only took a 5-foot-3
Republican state senator from Plano named Florence Shapiro. To be fair,
George W. Bush’s title at the time was governor, not president, but
even then he had an overwhelming aura of inevitability. Shapiro denies
that she made him cry—it would be poor form to brag about it—but that
only makes her seem more powerful. Because she knows she did it. She
knows why she did it. And, quite frankly, she doesn’t feel bad about it.
That
pivotal moment came at the end of the 1997 legislative session—we’ll
explain the details in just a bit—but here are the most important
facts: Bush placed his political capital behind a sweeping bill that,
among other things, lowered property taxes and expanded business taxes.
Shapiro, who was the chair of the Republican caucus, turned on Bush at
the last minute, torpedoing the plan. “Governor Bush came along with a
proposal—déjà vu—to change school finance,” Shapiro says today. “But
there wasn’t a crisis at the time, and I wasn’t going to vote for a
bill with more than 70 new taxes in it.”
Déjà vu, indeed. That
incident proves that politicians won’t respond to a problem until it
becomes a crisis, and now they’ve got one. When the Legislature begins
its regular session this month, it will be forced to tackle the state’s
most daunting and important problem: how to fund public education.
Nevermind
that lawmakers tried to fix the current plan, known to everyone as
Robin Hood, in a special session last April that was as successful as
the Hindenburg. The sides were too fractious, the special
interests too powerful, the leadership too flimsy. In fact, the
Republican-controlled House engaged in open rebellion by holding an
impromptu vote on Gov. Rick Perry’s proposal for the sheer delight of
shooting it down. Not a single lawmaker supported it, the legislative
equivalent of short-sheeting his bed, giving him a wedgie, then
stuffing him in a locker. To make matters worse, in September, state
District Judge John Dietz ruled that Robin Hood was unconstitutional
and gave lawmakers one year to fix the system. Now the crisis has a
time limit.
Shapiro has immersed herself in the problem and emerged as the go-to gal to find a solution. The Dallas Morning News
editorial page has consistently praised her leadership. She chairs key
education committees, and, during the 2003 session, she drafted a bill
with Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst to revamp school finance, which passed in
the Senate but died in the House. In mid-July, with the wreckage of the
special session still smoldering, Shapiro floated another plan to
encourage yet another special session. But House Speaker Tom Craddick
preferred to play dead while the courts had their say. Perry insisted
on forging a consensus before calling another session—though he did
little to bring the sides together. With leadership like that, no
wonder so many Texans are turning to home schooling.
So Shapiro
has been spending her time talking to anyone and everyone about how to
solve the problem. In September she spoke at a breakfast meeting for
the Metroplex Mayors’ Association. She wore a tailored pinstripe
pantsuit and enormous diamond earrings. Her frosted hair, which she had
to push out of her eyes every now and again, fell lightly on her
shoulders. She received a warm introduction from Mike Simpson, the
mayor of Frisco, and as he rattled off her legislative accomplishments,
he remarked that she is a mother of three. Shapiro, still sitting at
her table, cupped her hands around her mouth and exclaimed, “I’m also a
proud grandmother of two.”
At the podium, she launched into a
pitch-perfect breakdown of school finance. She pointed out that
two-thirds of Highland Park’s property taxes go to other districts.
Plano loses more than 30 percent of its property tax dollars and is
projected to run a $14 million deficit this school year. She noted that
more than 700 of the state’s 1,041 school districts have reached or are
approaching the property tax cap, which means they have no way of
raising additional money. “Everything else pales in comparison to this
issue,” she said. “It must be solved now, today. It probably should
have been solved earlier, but I wasn’t in charge.”
Yet Shapiro’s
main goal was to deliver bad news. She knew that many of them wanted to
levy a half-cent sales tax for local transportation projects, and she
was there to tell them why she needed every last penny for education.
Period. End of story. The crowd appreciated the way she built her case
and didn’t mince words. “Gee whiz, give me that all day,” Addison
Mayor R. Scott Wheeler said afterward. “She was also sensitive in the
way she did it. She didn’t get out a lemon and squeeze it into our
eyes.”
But she isn’t always as poised. Later that same day she
gave a similar speech to a group of retired teachers. The hall was
warm—a number of women were fanning themselves with their programs—and
Shapiro seemed off. “We are not in anonymity,” she said at one point in
regard to school finance. She paused, then laughed. “How about that
from a former English teacher? We are not in unanimity.” Twice in the
speech she lost her train of thought and had to double back. When she
discussed the problems facing diverse school districts, she said,
“Students in my district speak between 80 and 90 languages. Try finding
a teacher who speaks Croatian. It’s impossible.” The point would have
been more effective had a woman not raised her hand and said, “I speak
Croatian.” But if the teachers cared about the flubs, they didn’t let
on. Shapiro received a standing ovation.
Part of the reason is
that she is one of them. A former schoolteacher, Shapiro quit her job
at Richardson High School in 1972 to have a baby. Several years later,
when she was an active volunteer in Plano, a friend suggested on a lark
that they go to City Hall and get information about running for City
Council. Shapiro did, and in 1979 she won her first election by 39
votes. When she ran for mayor, in 1990, she was unopposed.
A
year later, she attended the Cotton Bowl parade when her friend, Sen.
Kay Bailey Hutchison, who was then the state treasurer, told her that
she should run for state Senate. “She didn’t ask me to consider it,”
Shapiro says. “She told me, ’You will run.’” Hutchison believed that
Shapiro could win because Collin County, a booming Republican
stronghold, had been added to a district that was held by an incumbent
Democrat named Ted Lyon. But first she had to survive a bruising, messy
primary in which some of her campaign signs in East Texas were defaced
with swastikas. Shapiro and her husband Howard, who is also active in
politics, are Jewish, and she lost family members in the Holocaust. It
was her first taste of partisan politics, and she still considers it to
be her darkest moment as a politician. When voters went to the ballot
box, she was forced into a runoff with Don Kent. In that race, she won
7,793 to 7,609.
The general election wasn’t any easier. The race
against Lyon became a classic example of insults overshadowing issues.
Lyon’s camp said that Shapiro waffled on important issues and dubbed
her “Flip-flop Flo.” Shapiro’s staff fired back and accused Lyon of
misleading the public about his record. They referred to him as “Lyin’
Lyon.” The race became so ugly that the Morning News’
editorial page urged the candidates to stop their mudslinging with an
article titled “Voters Didn’t Deserve This.” In the end, Shapiro won by
13 points, and she credited the victory in large part to the man who
had supervised her campaign: Karl Rove. Since then, Shapiro has had an
easy time on Election Day. She has not faced any serious competition,
running either unopposed or facing a hapless slate of Libertarian
candidates.
Through the years, she has built a distinguished
Senate career. She knows everyone in town. She hosts fundraisers,
appears at ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and is a popular speaker. But not
all appearances follow the script. This summer, she threw out the first
pitch at a baseball game in McKinney—and plunked an assistant coach.
She is perhaps best-known for legislation she authored during the 1995
session, after a 7-year-old Plano girl was abducted from a park,
assaulted, and murdered. Her name was Ashley Estell, and as the city
mourned, residents learned that the man who had been arrested had
already been convicted of indecency with a child. Shapiro wrote a bill
known as Ashley’s Laws that increased the penalties for sex offenders
and provided better ways of tracking them after they left prison.
But
school finance now dominates her career. In speeches she remarks that
as a freshman on the Senate Education Committee, she cast the single
vote against the bill that would become Robin Hood. Today she is
determined to kill it.
So what happened in 1997? Bush had worked with House Democrat Paul
Sadler to get his bill into shape. The Senate passed a more modest
proposal—fewer cuts, fewer new taxes—and Bush turned up the heat on
Republican senators to accept the House version. On a Friday evening,
it looked as if all of the votes were in place, but by Saturday
morning, the landscape had changed. Bush pressed Shapiro for her
support, and when she turned him down, she uttered one of the most
famous phrases in Texas politics: “Governor, don’t make me drink that
Kool-Aid.”
According to Sadler, Bush couldn’t believe that his
own party had shot down his bill. “He started crying,” Sadler says. “He
just grabbed me and hugged me big.” Later, Sadler met privately with
Bush. “He got real emotional again, and I told him that the worst hurt
comes from family and friends,” Sadler says. “Bush and I both said,
’They are going to rue the day they didn’t stand up and do what we
asked them to do.’ And I hate to say it, but that’s exactly where they
are today. They can call it their own plan now, but all they’re doing
is modifying what we had, because there aren’t that many options out
there. There isn’t a silver bullet.”
Today, Bush and Sadler’s
prediction seems to have hit the mark. Shapiro’s last plan included
lowering the property tax rate, expanding the business tax, and
increasing the state sales tax—eerily similar to what Bush proposed in
1997. She promises to unveil a new plan before the start of the
session, though she says it will continue to center on a combination of
those factors.
What isn’t clear is whether Perry will support
any kind of tax increase. Forget abortion. The litmus test for the
conservative wing of the Republican Party is taxes—as in, how many you
can cut or kill? Voters in Republican strongholds like Collin County
are the ones who place such pressure on the party to hold the line on
taxes.
“Florence has a unique problem in school finance in that
her constituency is certainly the right wing, if not the hard right
wing,” says former Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff, a Republican. “Yet she knows
that to solve school finance, you have to pass a major tax deal. And
it’s hard to ride both those horses at the same time.”
Perhaps
that’s one advantage of Judge Dietz’s ruling that declared Robin Hood
unconstitutional: the Republicans can use it as cover if they raise
taxes, which Shapiro admits may be necessary. But the timing may be
right regardless. With cities like Plano feeling the pinch of Robin
Hood now more than ever, residents may decide that the pain of the
current system is greater than the pain of new taxes.
Photo: Danny Hurley
