Updated at 6:50 p.m. with changes throughout.

AUSTIN — A bill that would have increased the state sales tax by a penny is dead — only four days after Texas' top three leaders hailed it as one of the most effective ways to deliver meaningful property tax relief for home and business owners.

House leadership cast the blame on the Senate. And the bill’s author, Rep. Dan Huberty, R-Humble, pointed the finger at one senator in particular who he said led a wave of conservative opposition to the bill: Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston.

"We could have forced the issue, but why do that if they're not going to pass a bill [in the Senate] and be supportive," Huberty told The Dallas Morning News after he pulled his bills from consideration.

Huberty said he and Bettencourt participated in GOP leadership meetings to plan how to generate revenue to lower property taxes this session, which resulted in a coordinated push to pass a sales tax increase. Bettencourt undermined their work and messaging, Huberty said, by publicly disparaging the plan after the bill was moving forward.

“We thought we were all on the same page. You can’t put a team of people together and then start peeling off,” Huberty said. “It’s not like we didn’t meet multiple times. We all walked out of the room saying this is what we’re going to do.”

Bettencourt, the Senate Republican Caucus chairman, has long been one of the most ardent proponents of property tax cuts in the Legislature. But he notably broke with GOP leadership and his longtime ally, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, to openly oppose their priority bill.

Huberty also called out Bettencourt for posting a video condemning the bill to his Facebook page Tuesday morning, the day it was scheduled to get a House vote.

Bettencourt said he has consistently opposed tax swaps.

“I spoke up on this issue weeks ago because, in my opinion, tax swaps don’t work,” Bettencourt said. He dismissed the House’s finger-pointing at him and the Senate.

“If they have the votes, they can pass their bill. Obviously, they don’t have the votes,” he said. “You can’t blame somebody from the other chamber.”

House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, R-Angleton, agreed with Huberty that the breakdown around the legislation started in the Senate.

"This legislation was an opportunity for lawmakers to further reduce property taxes ... It became clear that, even in the event of the House's passage, this legislation would be unlikely to pass in the Texas Senate,” said Cait Meisenheimer, Bonnen's spokeswoman.

Big three priority

On Friday, Gov. Greg Abbott, Patrick and Bonnen held a Hail Mary news conference to express their continued, emphatic support for a sales tax increase to lower property taxes as the final days of the Legislative session wind down.

But by the time they surprised the public with the plan — April 3 — the lack of a lengthy effort to educate the public and ensure legislators were on board placed the “Big Three” in a defensive position from the start.

Proponents cast the sales tax increase as revenue neutral because every dollar raised would be applied to lowering property tax rates. But an analysis by the Legislative Budget Board found that low- and moderate-income Texans would pay more in total taxes.

For the majority of the session, Abbott, Patrick and Bonnen have poured their energy into Senate Bill 2, a bill that slows how fast property tax bills grow by limiting how much local governments can collect. But Abbott said it became apparent to him that people demand more than just slower tax increases — they want tax bills to go down.

Increasing the state sales tax by one penny would have generated about $5 billion a year in revenue, which could lower school property tax rates by about 18 cents per $100 of valuation.

On Tuesday afternoon, Patrick minimized the significance of the sales tax bill and added that the Legislature is already delivering property tax relief in other ways.

“The Senate literally considered over 300 revenue sources to bring additional property tax relief to Texans — including the sales tax swap,” he said in a statement. “We are looking at other options to increase the size of the property tax cut for taxpayers, including our ongoing review of possible cuts in our budget.”

Abbott didn’t comment directly on the apparent end of the tax swap bill, which he’d spent several weeks defending in interviews and social media.

“We’re continuing to work with the House and Senate to deliver meaningful property tax relief to Texans,” Abbott’s spokesman John Wittman said in a statement.

Senate shake-up

House members on Tuesday morning said they were tipped off to the Senate’s resistance to the tax increase bill when a day earlier, senators took up their school funding bill. It was initially contingent on passing a sales tax increase to fund school property tax relief.

But a group of senators announced they'd identified $2.9 billion in existing revenue sources, including oil and gas taxes and expanded collections of online sales taxes, that they were diverting into property tax relief.

They stressed the new money would not raise anyone's taxes.

The property tax relief measures were added into the Senate's school finance bill, which senators passed, 26-2. The revenue sources would lower property tax rates by about 10 cents per $100 of valuation — a decrease of $192 for an average home in Dallas valued at about $191,000.

Sen. Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, who authored the Senate school bill, said he didn't intend for the Senate action on Monday to kill the tax swap.

"It is obviously on life support at this point," he said. "We will continue working to find ways to fund significant school property tax reductions."

House opposition

But even in the House, Huberty's bill faced challenges.

At least 60 House Democrats were prepared to vote no, according to Rep. Chris Turner of Grand Prairie, the House Democratic Caucus chairman.

Huberty's bill had two paths forward. He hoped to pass it as a constitutional amendment, which would require a two-thirds vote of both chambers and then a vote of the people. Presumably, the Democratic opposition was enough to block that vote.

But Huberty said he had the votes to pass the bill with a simple majority, bypassing the constitutional amendment, by pursuing a statutory change.

Some House Republicans also had a hard time with the tax swap.

Rep. Matt Schaefer, R-Tyler, said he would have opposed the tax swap bill because he's not confident it would keep taxes low in years to come. He said he believes other members of the conservative Freedom Caucus share his concerns about the bill.

"I would vote no if it came to the floor today," he said. "I don't think the other pieces that are important to me on the property tax side are in place to make me comfortable that this is a swap that stays and not a swap that fades."

Staff writers Lauren McGaughy and W. Gardner Selby contributed to this report.