State Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, was on hand for the Athens Chamber of Commerce luncheon Wednesday afternoon, which celebrated and honored the first responders involved with protecting the city during the Ag Services fertilizer fire on May 29.
After the program for the first responders, Nichols spoke to the chamber for a few moments.
He spoke about the aftermath of the fire:
First of all, I am very impressed with the way the emergency was handled. … It tells me you have a community and county working together.
He spoke about the economy Texas:
The state of Texas is a shining light in the United States. I am so proud to be a Texan. When our recession hit … we did not do like other states and raise taxes to cover our shortfalls. We tightened our belt, streamlined things, cut agencies, cut funding way down which (made) a lot people scream and holler. But because we did that, Texas was one of the first states to come out of the recession. We are roaring, the economy in this state.
And he spoke about the Legislature:
When we met last session, two years ago, we did not spend all of our money – the money we thought we would have. Because you never know when (the recession) can come back. We did cut taxes $1.3 billion on businesses. Our economy is still coming back. Our projections when we go into session (in 2015) is that we are going to have an actual surplus of $2.6 billion, in addition to $8 billion in the Rainy Day Fund. There is not one single state in the nation that can say they have an economy like ours because of the good decisions people have made and the hard work of the people in this state.
I will be on finance I’m pretty sure next session … it is a whole lot easier to tell people no when they want to spend money when you don’t have it. That’s pretty easy. When you’ve got the money and everybody knows it, it makes it real tough to say no. But when we go into this session, I think one of the things we are going to be focused on are additional tax cuts on businesses — this is a chamber of commerce — so we are going to work on that margins tax and see what we can do with property taxes and get all that down.
The 84th Texas Legislative Session is scheduled to start Jan. 13, 2015.