UPDATE - Rep. Vikki Goodwin files the “Natalia Cox Act” in honor of the young woman who was killed in 2021. Victims of domestic violence must receive information that helps protect themselves from further violence. HB 2229 will require the Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) develop a brochure with information about: 1) resources in the community, such as shelters and organizations that provide help to victims of domestic violence including phone numbers, 2) obtaining protective orders, and 3) moving and terminating a lease due to domestic violence. Knowing what resources are available could have saved Ms. Cox’s life, and we hope this information will save the lives of other women throughout Texas once passed.
From KVUE Defenders, Nov. 18, 2021 - Following her death, Masino said friends and classmates remembered how considerate, caring and kind Cox was – described as the “go-to friend” who was “incredibly generous.”
“I feel that a lot more could have been done should have been done to address her situation. She had warning. You know that this did not come completely out of nowhere,” Masino said.
Lester and LaKeshia are now trying to find a new way to navigate life without their bright light, while still remembering Cox’s impact.
“You think about power as strength. Yes, power is strength, but it's strength in love and strength in enduring and fighting for what you believe, and so that's for me – my baby represented strength,” LaKeshia Cox said.
Austin American Statesman, Dec. 13, 2022, by Ryan Autullo - A bill from Goodwin, filed the week after the November election, would legalize ranked-choice voting in Texas.
If approved, here's how it would work: Voters rank candidates in order of preference. If a candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, the race is over; that candidate wins. But if no candidate gets a majority of votes, the candidate receiving the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and that candidate's ballots are examined for second-choice votes. These votes are then assigned to the remaining candidates. This is repeated until one candidate has a majority of votes and is elected.
SPECTRUM NEWS-AUSTIN, by Charlotte Scott, NOV. 23, 2022
House Bill 284, written by Rep. Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin, would require reporting multiple semi-automatic rifle sales or transfers within five consecutive business days to the county sheriff.
“We simply want to make our community safer,” she said. “And there are some laws that we can pass — some very common sense laws — that would be helpful. And I think we all agree that we should be able to send our kids to school and not have to worry about a mass shooting in the school. We should be able to go to church and grocery stores and parks without having that constant threat. I just feel like we’ve gone so far in one direction of giving so many allowances to people with guns to be able to carry them anywhere. And it can be intimidating for those of us who don’t really want to feel like we have to be armed at all times to be safe.”
Representative Goodwin said local law enforcement usually knows their community well and can do some digging if something doesn’t feel right.
WFAA-UVALDE, Texas, Oct. 5, 2022 — Families of victims of Uvalde along with Texas Democrats urged action on gun laws in a press conference Wednesday morning. One by one, parents shared their heartbreak.
“The life I once had was ripped apart.”
“A weapon that’s used in combat should stay in combat, not here on the streets.”
The fight for stricter gun laws continues, four months since the Robb Elementary School shooting.
…the families of the 21 victims who lost their lives on May 24…. joined Texas Democrats demanding stricter background checks, red flag laws and raising the age limit to buy an assault weapon from 18 to 21.
“We must love and cherish our children more than we love and cherish our guns,” says State Rep. Vikki Goodwin.
Austin American Statesman, Guest Column, Vikki Goodwin, June 5, 2022 - The recent mass shooting in Uvalde – sadly, only the most recent of many – leaves so many of us in Texas struggling to find hope. Day after day we are confronted with horrific acts of violence. Compounding this hopelessness is the inactivity from our governor on the most obvious part of the problem: guns. In these murders, guns are the tools. Death and trauma are the results. The Texas Legislature and the governor need to pass the sensible and popular gun laws that will keep us safe.
While conversations about mental health are warranted, and school campus security should be reviewed, we cannot continue to ignore the fact that more guns on our streets makes us less safe. We have to address the obvious fact that guns are too easy to acquire. Weapons that belong on the battlefield are making it into the hands of angry people, mostly men, who believe their best option is to kill others, and often themselves.
KVUE ABC Austin, Tanvi Varma, June 3, 2022 - State Rep. Vikki Goodwin laid flowers for the 21 people who lost their lives in Uvalde. For her, it's a painful reminder of her own tragedy. "Every time one of these tragedies happen, it just reminds me of my own loss. My father was shot and killed in 1990," said Goodwin. That's why she's going to push for a special session on gun legislation reform. One thing she wants is to close loopholes on universal background checks.
"One example is someone with a revoked or suspended license to carry can go into a gun store and use that license to get a gun without getting a background check. Other examples would be online sales and gun shows. There are some loopholes there as well," she said.
Goodwin also wants to raise the age to buy assault-style weapons from 18 to 21. She also wants waiting periods between when people buy a gun and when they can actually get the gun.
CBS Austin, by Christian Flores, May 27, 2022 - "Every time something like this happens, we think maybe the Republicans will change their stance. Maybe they will agree to some sort of universal background checks. Maybe they will agree to some red flag laws," Goodwin said. "How do our red flags that are currently in place work? We do have protective orders in some jurisdictions. I don't know if there are any in Uvalde. But that's the thing. We have a patchwork set of laws throughout the state. Travis County has some protective orders in place, but the average person - even myself - does not have a full understanding of how they work. What does it mean if I see something on social media? Who do I report it to? What's going to happen if I report it? I think there's a lot more education that needs to be done and clarification, and it would be better if we had a statewide law as opposed to patchwork."
Goodwin Journal - March 7, 2022 - On a recent trip to South Texas, Rep. Vikki Goodwin visited with landowners on the Rio Grande river to hear their view of the border wall being built by both the federal and state governments. Click on the photo to read one of the stories written about this trip. As depicted in the photo, some property owners do not want a wall built on their land, and they consider it a waste of state resources.
The Austin Chronicle - This week’s People’s Summit, led by state Rep. Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin, and joined by many Travis County lawmakers, was intended to put a question to the Texas Legislature: How can the state walk away from a man-made catastrophe a year ago that led to hundreds of deaths?
The answer, it appears, is “very easily,” even in an election year. Last year’s regular and three special sessions of the 87th Texas Legislature were brutally devoid of much acknowledgment of the actual human toll of February’s Winter Storm Uri, as opposed to its consequences to state energy regulators at the Railroad Commission (oil and gas) and Public Utility Commission (electric power) and the grid managers at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. “We were caught unprepared,” Goodwin said in a pre-summit press conference. “That’s not acceptable. We have to learn from what has happened. And so that’s why we are here today.”
Courthousenews.com - A year after Winter Storm Uri brought freezing temperatures to Texas that triggered catastrophic power outages, a group of Democratic state lawmakers held a truth and reconciliation hearing Tuesday to discuss the death toll, what went wrong and whether legislative reforms to shore up the state’s grid went far enough.
“We call this event or this incident Winter Storm Uri and that always frustrates me because this was not a natural disaster, this was a man-made disaster. It was entirely predictable. And it hasn’t been fixed. And it will happen again,” said state Representative James Talerico.
The state’s official count of 246 deaths attributed to Uri came under fire with Representative Vikki Goodwin questioning why just 77 out of the state’s 254 counties reported deaths. She said it was surprising there were 28 deaths in Travis County, home to Austin, and none in neighboring Hays County.
CBS AUSTIN, Texas — Exactly one year after last year's deadly winter storm, state lawmakers are pointing the finger at themselves for not doing more to reform the power grid and improving its reliability.
On Tuesday, a group of Democratic state representatives gathered at the Texas Capitol to plead with their Republican colleagues to call for more changes to the power grid.
"We have to learn from what has happened," said state Rep. Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin, who organized the event. "The purpose of today is to to make sure we're holding our legislators accountable for passing initiatives and policy that will make us more resilient in the future."
CommunityImpact.com - Several state representatives held a hearing Feb. 15 to recount Winter Storm Uri on its one-year anniversary. The event featured testimony from health care professionals, government representatives, climate experts and Texas residents.
“We were caught unprepared, and that’s not acceptable,” said Representative Vikki Goodwin of House District 47. “We must be prepared because what we’re hearing from climatologists is we’re going to have more extreme and intense weather in the direction that we’re going.”
Despite heated public comment surrounding incentives for solar customers, Pedernales Electric Cooperative will nearly cut in half the amount of money paid back to customers who produce energy for the grid.
Rep. Vikki Goodwin, of House District 47, noted this might discourage people from moving to clean energy, which could impact our climate in the long-term, especially for the population of people generally covered by PEC.
“Solar power being clean energy is something that we should be encouraging and incentivizing,” Goodwin said. “We are going to have to take some bold steps to move forward towards clean energy.”
More than $5 billion in federal funds intended to help our students recover from the pandemic were diverted, and this diversion has mostly gone unnoticed. Those billions of dollars sent to the Texas Education Agency (TEA) were intended to help our students and teachers, and instead were absorbed into the state coffers to be spent on other things.
These are not intractable problems. Potential solutions include:
Require TEA to distribute any “surplus” to school districts or return it to property taxpayers.
Require the state to share equally in school funding, limiting the portion from local property taxpayers to no more than 50 percent.
Simplify funding formulas and minimize reliance on average daily attendance.
Goodwin said Cox’s situation highlights the need for a stronger law to protect victims and said Texas should permit extreme risk protective orders.
“If somebody comes to your door and threatens you with a gun, you can go before a judge and have the judge say that the gun needs to be removed from that person who's been a threat,” Rep. Goodwin said. “I do think that we can do better when there's a situation where someone's life is at imminent risk.”
AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Rep. Vikki Goodwin (D-Travis County), along with 24 members of the Texas House of Representatives, has written a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott asking him to end what she calls “illegal election audits” in the state of Texas.
Rep. Goodwin’s letter makes four arguments against the audit and cites the recently passed GOP-backed election reform bill, SB 1.
She says the Senate failed to confirm the last Secretary of State, Ruth Hughs, who has since vacated the office. She says the deputy director has called for the audits without transparency.
Goodwin also argues there is no legal authority granted by the Legislature or state law to conduct the audits, saying it has been 10 months since the election, and thus not “immediately” after the election as required under SB 1, which is set to take effect December 2021.
Abbott has chosen four of the largest counties in Texas for the audit, which Goodwin says is also in contradiction to SB 1, which allows for two small counties and two large counties to be randomly selected for an audit, once the law takes effect.
Many worry about the law’s vague language.
Rep. Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin, said in August that teachers should have the latitude to be able to nurture and engage with students’ interests in what’s happening outside of school.
“Helping students make connections between what they read in books and what they see in the public square is something that we should celebrate in our educational system,” she said, “not something that we should discourage.
State Rep. Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin, is one of the more than 50 Texas House Democrats who made the trip to Washington, D.C., to push for these kinds of reforms.
"It will make the ballot box accessible to all people. It will bring greater transparency," Goodwin said. "These things will all help our democracy stay intact."
This bill also proposes making Election Day a federal holiday.
On the U.S. Senate floor Monday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., specifically pointed to Texas' new state election law - SB 1 - as a reason he wants to get a vote on this new bill as soon as possible.
The law, signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in May, bans abortions when a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can occur at six weeks. It doesn't include exceptions for rape or incest but allows women to have the procedure for "medical emergencies." It is one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation.
Rather than having the state government enforce the ban, the Texas law allows private citizens to sue anyone who helps a woman receive an abortion after a heartbeat is detected. A successful plaintiff in such a case could receive at least $10,000 from the abortion provider or others in damages.
Rep. Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin, wasn't buying Abbott's folksy Texas kitsch. "He says he's going to round us up, corral us and 'cabin' us, whatever that means," Goodwin said. "It's just threats until he gets his way. And that's not the way democracy works."
Among its sweeping changes, HB 3 would prohibit the drive-through and 24-hour voting options implemented by Harris County election officials in 2020. Those options were welcomed by voters, but Republicans say they are prone to fraud; in Nov. 2020, the Texas Supreme Court threw out a case from conservatives alleging drive-through voting was illegal. Proposed requirements for mail-in ballots would result in counties dumping ballots, according to Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria. But lawmakers may not remember that, because Longoria testified at 5am on Sunday.
