By Eleni Himaras
reporter@ltview
In her sophomore term, Texas Representative Valinda Bolton put a strong focus on public safety and enjoyed, as she said, “spending fewer days where I felt like I was trying to get a drink of water from a fire hydrant.”

Two bills she worked to get passed came about because she was amazed to find they weren’t already law. Prior to this session, and barring a veto by Gov. Rick Perry before June 21, children of any age were allowed to ride on the back of a motorcycle and prescription medications did not require expiration dates.
Her bill, tacked on to another traffic safety bill, prohibits children five and younger from riding on the backs of motorcycles.
“Maybe next year we will try to increase the age to eight or 10,” she said. But for this year, “We looked at it just at a practical standpoint, we felt like we had to get something done.”
She felt similarly about the lack of requisite expiration dates on prescription medication and worked with San Antonio Rep. David Leibowitz to rectify the situation.
Two of her greatest victories in the public safety realm this session, she said, related to domestic violence.
“The bill I joint-authored increases the courts’ ability to do GPS monitoring on domestic violence offenders,” she said. “My bill says that victims will be notified when the suspect is no longer being monitored.”
She fought to give emergency service districts and volunteer fire departments more power to go directly to their residents to ask for tax increases or bonds for funding instead of going through the state.
“Like a school district, when they want to have a bond election, they don’t go to the state and say can we have more schools,” she said, “But if [ESDs} need another station or another truck or another ambulance, they must go through the process.”
That bill died in the House for lack of time but she did come away with a victory for those constituents, sponsoring a successful bill that allows ESDs and Volunteer Fire Departments to sell each other used, but still up-to-code, equipment instead of having to bid them out every time.
Bolton also worked to pass a bill that would prohibit any cell phone use while driving in an active school zone and prohibits teens from using their cell phones while driving at all.
In the transportation sector, she worked to have a bill passed that institutes a pilot program in four counties that would allow busses to travel on the shoulder of the road during peak traffic hours to alleviate congestion.
“It allows busses to bypass traffic and there are provisions that TxDOT sets out like, under what conditions, under what stretches of road and in what conditions the busses can do that,” she said. “It ties the speed of the bus to the speed of the traffic. They may only drive there during peak congestion and only where there is an improved shoulder.”
The pilot program will be in Travis, Denton, Baylor and El Paso counties.
She sponsored two successful economic development bills, the first of which allows Travis County to have its first ever special district for a development in the far west of the county. “It’s sort of like a MUD, only broader. But they do have some taxing authority and it’s a way to encourage more specific kinds of development,” she said.
Bolton also authored a very specific local bill that will allow Sunset Valley to use its hotel occupancy tax for family-oriented projects like playgrounds instead of limiting those funds solely to tourism or convention-industry related expenditures.
The two major bills that died in the house for either lack of time or pressure from other representatives was one that would designated the portion of Texas 71 in Travis County as a scenic highway, eliminating any new billboards, and one that created buffer zones for development in areas of the county not governed by local municipalities.
“The bill that we worked really hard with the home builders and other developers would have created some buffer zones to help combat incompatible use if you’re building in the county where there are no kinds of limits or restrictions. That was one of the bills that died for time; one I think we will definitely be revisiting next session,” she said.
While the overall atmosphere if this year’s session, she said, was far more open and comfortable, she said she was frustrating with the “chubbing” that slowed down the progress so much at the end of the session.
“Chubbing,” she said, is a term legislators use when someone, or a group of people, intentionally slows down the progress of a session to prevent a particular bill from being heard, which in this case, she said, was the Voter ID bill. While she said she didn’t support the bill, she also didn’t support a group of democrats working to slow down the progress to keep it off the docket.
“I think a lot of us, democrats and republicans had concerns about the Voter ID bill. There have been almost innumerable investigations, including by our attorney general of voter fraud at the polls,” she said, “There has not been one substantiated case of voter impersonation in Texas.”
While she said she didn’t support the bill, she also didn’t support a group of Democrats working to slow down the progress to keep it off the docket.
“I think a lot of us, Democrats and Republicans, had concerns about the Voter ID bill. There have been almost innumerable investigations, including by our Attorney General of voter fraud at the polls,” she said, “There has not been one substantiated case of voter impersonation in Texas.”
Even if she didn’t support the bill, she said the slowdown would not have been her method to combat it because there were so many other pressing issues that needed to be heard.
She went on to say that the mire didn’t begin in the House, as the Senate threw out their 2/3-majority rule to send something to the House, and then spent a week debating the Voter ID bill before it was sent with a less than 2/3 majority.
Overall though, she said she was extremely pleased with her second term and was looking forwards towards coming back for a third with even more knowledge of the process and time to prepare bills in the interim.