2025 Texas sessionsRegular and both called sessions have ended. This index covers House and Senate bills, not resolutions. Statuses come from official reports.

2025 · Regular session · House bill

HB3000

HB3000 creates a comptroller-run grant program to help counties with 68,750 or fewer residents buy ground ambulances for qualifying rural providers.

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Official caption: Relating to a grant program to provide financial assistance to qualified ambulance service providers in certain rural counties.

Signed by governorSource-checked explanation published

Official report lists House author(s): King, Ashby, Phelan, Frank, Landgraf. This does not identify sponsors or amendment drafters.

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Bill explanation published · Version and amendment review scope is stated below · Individual amendment records may not be separately annotated.

Bill highlights

Selected points from the published explanation. Follow each point to its source-linked context; conditions and limits may matter.

HB3000 creates a comptroller-run grant program to help counties with 68,750 or fewer residents buy ground ambulances for qualifying rural providers.
The county applies on behalf of a qualified provider, rather than the provider applying directly.
A county may submit one application per fiscal year, due no later than the 30th day after its fiscal year begins.
Grant money may be used only to buy ambulances, including necessary accessories and modifications, under comptroller rules.
The act took effect September 1, 2025; applications were authorized from January 1, 2026, with the program and rules required by that date.

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What does it do?

HB3000 creates a comptroller-run grant program to help counties with 68,750 or fewer residents buy ground ambulances for qualifying rural providers. Awards depend on money appropriated for the program and a written state–county agreement; eligibility is not a guarantee of funding. The maximum is $500,000 for a county with fewer than 10,000 residents, or $350,000 for a county with 10,000–68,750 residents. Final law.

The county applies on behalf of a qualified provider, rather than the provider applying directly. The provider must be a qualifying private emergency-services entity or public agency, licensed by the Department of State Health Services and operating predominantly in a qualifying county. The referenced definition of public agency is a municipality or county that provides or has authority to provide emergency services; the bill does not simply cover every organization that calls itself an ambulance service. An ambulance must be registered with DSHS as an emergency-medical-service provider vehicle. Provider definitions.

A county may submit one application per fiscal year, due no later than the 30th day after its fiscal year begins. If a provider receives a grant through one county, it cannot receive additional grant funds through another qualified county in that same fiscal year. The comptroller must consider a county’s ability to obtain other funding, including average per-capita taxable property value, per-capita income and unemployment rate.

Grant money may be used only to buy ambulances, including necessary accessories and modifications, under comptroller rules. A county receiving a grant may not reduce the provider’s budget for the county’s next fiscal year. The law permits advance disbursement before an ambulance order, but requires purchase and possession within five years after receiving the money. Pending availability, money may be held in an interest-bearing account and earnings treated as grant funds. Rules must cover applications, payment and spending deadlines, monitoring and return of improperly used funds.

The act took effect September 1, 2025; applications were authorized from January 1, 2026, with the program and rules required by that date. The governor signed June 20, 2025. Official history. Applicants should use the comptroller’s current application instructions, which specify the application window and reporting duties, rather than treating this law summary as an application form. The program guidance also requires receiving disbursement before ordering; the act itself states that advance disbursement is permitted.

What changed along the way?

The filed bill, House committee version, House-passed version and Senate committee printing had the same substantive provisions. They would have barred a county that received a grant from applying for another and required consideration of distance from the county seat to the nearest Level I trauma facility.

The sole indexed floor amendment, Perry’s Senate amendment adopted May 27, made these changes that survived:

Defined an ambulance through DSHS registration and replaced the provider’s broad “rural area” operating criterion with a qualifying-county criterion.
Specified that counties apply for providers and replaced the county’s permanent repeat-award bar with the provider’s same-fiscal-year prohibition on receiving funds from another county.
Required a written agreement and replaced the trauma-center-distance factor with the specified economic measures of funding need.
Expressly allowed necessary accessories and modifications, permitted interest-bearing deposits pending purchase, and removed a separate rulemaking item about types of ambulance vehicles while retaining the broader rulemaking and DSHS-registration requirements.

The House concurred May 30. The final grant caps, next-year budget protection and five-year possession deadline remain. Amendment index; text-version index.

For the full amendment record, open the official amendment index.

Official bill versions

Compare the published text versions in the official text index. A change is not attributed to a specific amendment here without a verified record.

Who could benefit—and who could bear the costs?

Rural counties and qualifying providers could replace or add ambulances without covering the entire purchase from local resources. Patients could benefit from better-equipped services, but the law does not guarantee faster response times, staffing, cheaper patient bills or an award to every eligible county. Counties must meet purchasing, budget-protection and reporting requirements and return improperly used funds.

The May 29 final fiscal note estimates $1.042 million in state administrative costs for fiscal years 2026–27, separate from grant funding: $683,000 in 2026 and $359,000 in 2027. It assumes three additional employees and a one-time $324,000 grant-system programming cost. Annual administrative costs are projected at $359,000 through 2030.

Actual grant costs depend on appropriations. Using 2023 population estimates, the fiscal note illustrates a maximum-award scenario of $84.15 million per year, or $168.3 million over two years, if all 201 counties in its assumed eligible group received their maximum amounts. That is an illustration, not money appropriated by HB3000 or a verified list of actual recipients. HB3000 itself appropriates no money. Earlier versions’ $864,000 administrative estimate assumed two employees and was superseded by the final estimate.

Official sources

Catalog report retrieved 2026-10-25. Check the official record for corrections or later changes.