BRYAN, Texas — As the 87th legislative session ended Sunday night, state representative John Raney was successful in navigating some important legislation through the House and Senate to Governor Greg Abbott.
From the pandemic to the winter storm, the 87th legislative session was unlike any other.
Despite the many challenges, state representative John Raney was still able to get important bills passed, like House Bill 1698 which enables local leaders to implement planning and development to support public transportation.
“It will still be up to the voters of Brazos County to decide whether they’re willing to pay $10 on their registration fee in order to do a little more planning for transportation in Brazos County,” Raney said.
In response to other bills passed, like senate bill 3 which creates protections and new statewide alerts in the case of power outages due to extreme weather Raney said he thinks they also need to talk about capacity.
“I’m more concerned, personally, because I’ve been a Texan all my life and I know how hot it gets in August,” Raney said, “What are we gonna do when we have rolling outages or complete outages because of heat? I think that’s probably a bigger concern than having another freeze like the last one.”
Texas is joining 40 other states with House Bill 1694 which creates a defense to prosecution for anyone who calls 911 to aid an individual who is experiencing an overdose.
Representative Raney said he thinks it took Texas this long to pass HB 1694 because there was concern people with poor intentions would use it as an excuse to get out of being prosecuted, Raney said he knows they’ve re-written the bill so there’s no more gray area.
“We feel like we have a solution that will save lives and hopefully get them on the road to recovery, in all ways,” Raney said.
