When I served as speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, there was nobody I could rely on more than Tom Luce — an unbiased confidant just a call away.
That’s one of the reasons I appointed him to the Sunset Advisory Commission in 2013, as a public member. In that important role, he would help undertake a comprehensive review of the state’s health and human services agencies for the first time since the late 1990s. Luce was already a legend at that time — as a lawyer, a public servant and a valued adviser to many Texas leaders — but there was a catch. A major part of the review process would focus on mental health, and Luce had just been named the founding CEO of the new Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute.
“Mr. Speaker, I would love to serve,” Luce told me. “But do you see any conflict because of my new role with the Meadows Institute?”
I replied, “Only if I have to pay you!”
That fateful conversation led to a historic decade of mental health advances in Texas, with more than $12 billion invested in new funding, the construction of more than 2,700 new psychiatric beds across 19 communities, and the delivery of urgent mental health access through Texas medical schools to more than 4.5 million students across 964 school districts, and counting.
Opinion
It all began with the work of the Sunset Commission in 2014. Before the commission reviewed these agencies, Texas did not know how much money it spent on mental health. News articles claimed we were nearly last in funding, but it turned out we were undercounting expenditures by more than $3 billion per biennium. Before the Sunset review, more than 18 state agencies acted without alignment; afterward, their behavioral health appropriations became coordinated through Texas’s first-ever Statewide Behavioral Health Strategic Plan. Before Sunset, Texas veterans with behavioral health needs had few care options beyond the Veterans Administration, and their family members had even fewer; afterward, Texas enacted an innovative partnership to finance over $120 million in expanded mental health services for Texas veterans and their families.
It would be too much to say that Luce set all of that in motion, and Luce would be the first to give the credit to the advocates and stakeholders who had been making the case for more investment for years. But none of the millions of Texans helped by these policies would have received care had Luce not articulated the vision and asked the questions nobody had asked before.
Luce could do this because he is a genius at public policy. He has a unique ability to gather input, simplify complex problems and make clear, effective and efficient recommendations that almost always work in the real world.
Before he ever worked on that Sunset Commission, and in the decade since, Luce has been employing his singular approach to public policy to improve public education, as well as all types of infrastructure, from roads to water to energy, all so that, in his words, future generations of Texans will benefit from the same types of blessings he had.
“I’ve always worked on what I call ‘systemic change,’” Luce said. “You’re trying to change large systems, and they don’t change overnight. If you want to change the education system, well guess what? You have to do it incrementally, and you have to have a strategic plan.”
After his time at the Meadows Institute, Luce founded Texas 2036, a nonprofit that provides actionable policy solutions grounded in data and long-term planning in advance of our state’s bicentennial. Texas 2036 has successfully advocated for an overhaul of our community college finance system, landmark investments in water infrastructure and more affordable health care.
In 2018, Luce received the prestigious Linz Award for his civic and humanitarian work. And last month, a group of longtime friends gathered in Dallas to celebrate his vision and unveil the Tom Luce Policy Fund, an initiative of the Meadows Institute that is dedicated to advancing effective and efficient mental health policy grounded in data and real-world, nonpartisan practicality.
“Policy is more important than money,” Luce said with a laugh. “But money is not unimportant.”
The dollars in the Tom Luce Policy Fund are earmarked to help realize the vision of treating mental health with the same urgency and consistency as cancer or heart disease. The fund will help ensure that Texas remains a national leader in mental health.
The fund couldn’t come at a better time. For the first time since Luce served on the Sunset Commission, HHSC and the Department of Family and Protective Services are undergoing sunset review, a process that will evaluate the last round of recommendations and determine what changes are needed moving forward to improve operations.
And while Texas has made tremendous progress in mental health over the last decade, work remains: the continued expansion of services for high acuity youth, operations funding for new psychiatric hospitals coming online over the next few years, and a renewed focus on early identification and a health-driven response to mental health emergency calls to divert people from jails and emergency rooms.
For Luce, the effort for continued improvement has always been part of the plan. “I have been blessed,” he said of his life and career. “I got a great public education. I started my own law firm, and lo and behold within the year I was representing Ross Perot. I was blessed, but I was worried about the future: Could we have the same opportunities for the young Tom Luces that we had had before?”
Thanks to Luce and the new fund that bears his name, the answer is almost certainly yes.
Joe Straus is a San Antonio businessman and fifth-generation Texan. He served as Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives from 2009 to 2019.