A comprehensive Texas plan that would strip cities of their jurisdiction cleared the state Senate on Tuesday and is currently on the governor’s desk.
House Bill 2127 transfers a significant amount of municipal governing authority from the state’s largely Democratic-run cities to its Republican-controlled legislature. This authority includes laws pertaining to payday lending, construction worker rest breaks, and whether women can be discriminated against based on their hair.
Gov. Greg Abbott (R), according to the Austin American Statesman, has been an ardent proponent of the legislation.
Progressive opponents claim the measure, which a Texas city attorney dubbed “the Death Star” for local authority, is a new step in the conservative state legislatures’ attempt to limit the influence of communities with a liberal political orientation.
Representatives from each of Texas’ main metropolitan areas as well as a number of smaller ones, as well as civil society organizations like the AFL-CIO, are among the bill’s opponents.
They contend that the change in power it would bring about would limit cities’ ability to implement policies that suit their particular set of circumstances.
Local governments “step into that breach, to act on behalf of our shared constituents, where the state is silent, and it is silent on a lot,” state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt (D) told the Senate on Tuesday.
“We should be working and not micromanaging their work,”
However, state senator Brandon Creighton (R), who sponsored the legislation, said that it was essential to safeguard “job creators” from “cities and counties acting as lawmakers outside of their jurisdiction.”
Local regulation presents an existential danger to Texas firms, according to the legislation’s authors and the main business organization that supported it, the National Federation of Independent firms (NFIB).
According to Annie Spilman, state director of the NFIB, “small business owners are continuing to struggle in this economic environment as prices escalate, property taxes increase, and workers remain in short supply.” No matter how well-intentioned, difficult local regulations worsen these problems.
One set of standards controlling business across the state, according to the NFIB, would save costs by avoiding the “patchwork” of municipal and county regulations that now regulate Texas’s huge cities.
Despite the fact that the NFIB and the law are supposedly nonpartisan, Republicans have largely supported it.
After clearing the House in April with the support of just eight out of 65 Democrats, the measure was approved by the state Senate 18-13 on a vote that was almost entirely along party lines.
If passed, the law would have a vast scope, thus “preempting” large portions of the state laws.
It would invalidate a number of current laws, including the heat protection laws for construction workers in Austin and Dallas.
Additionally, it would prohibit any new regulations on puppy mills or payday loans, while current local rules would still be upheld – after a protracted battle.
Urban proponents claim that other particular municipal laws without equivalents at the state or federal levels, such as an Austin statute prohibiting discrimination based on hair texture or style, would also likely be overturned.
According to Austin City Councilor Ryan Alter, the bill’s failure to pass in the 2019 or 2021 sessions was partially due to the perception that it was overly broad.
However, Alter noted that “the bill has only gotten broader” with each unsuccessful attempt at passage.
Alter identified two areas where the state’s preemption of the Property and Business and Commerce regulations might have unanticipated effects on cities.
“We as the city do a lot of things as relates to property, land use, and issues concerning land, and we make a lot of decisions that impact business and commerce,” Alter said.
The Agriculture Code, Finance Code, Insurance Code, Labor Code, Natural Resources Code, and Occupations Code are other laws that the bill preempts for local and county regulations.
The opposition to the law is concerned with procedural issues.
Since the state legislature only meets once every two years, there are always a ton of unfinished legislation in each session. For instance, in 2022, the Legislature approved roughly 10,000 of the proposed measures, or 38%.
The Legislature, according to its detractors, is an institution not well equipped to overseeing the day-to-day operations of cities because of its few sessions and state-level concentration.
According to Adrian Shelley, Texas director for public interest advocacy group Public Citizen, “cities and counties across Texas will have to rely on the state’s part-time Legislature, which meets for only 140 days every two years, to address various issues and problems of local concern,” under the new law.
The NFIB’s Spilman has stated that the measure is required to tame unruly local administrations.
When Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio approved ordinances mandating companies to provide paid sick leave, the protracted push for the legislation that became H.B. 2127 got underway.
State and federal courts eventually struck down such legislation for violating state restrictions on increasing the minimum wage beyond the federal minimum wage.
However, the laws would have given local governments the authority to summon witnesses in order to look into any infractions, Spilman said in an April statement.
“I simply don’t see why anything like that would be included in a local code. For a small company owner without compliance officers, it is really terrifying.
She later emphasized that the law was urgently needed. We have no idea what cities may propose next if you go another two years without this protection.
Meanwhile, the measure’s opponents claim that since it is hard to predict how far it would go, the law will provide difficulties for companies.
In an April statement, Houston city attorney Collyn Peddie said that “if there is one thing businesses hate it is uncertainty.”
“[Self-governing] cities will not know what laws to police and, more importantly, companies will not know what regulations to comply,” Peddie stated. “2127 hardly bothers to identify the sectors that it professes to preempt.
The mechanism of enforcement, which would include litigation, is another issue that worries the bill’s opponents. This is similar to the state’s “bounty” abortion prohibition.
The proposed legislation would provide “any person who has sustained an injury in fact, actual or treated” the right to bring a lawsuit against towns and counties for enacting laws in regions that are now formally within the control of the state.
Such lawsuit winners would get compensation for their legal costs and damages.
Every time a city passes a significant rule, “people get clever in their lawsuits to challenge anything they don’t like,” according to Alter, the Austin councilor.
Additionally, there are many possibilities for citizens to find flaws in any measures that the city adopts since the bill is so wide.
According to Spilman, the NFIB maintains that the newly preempted powers aren’t being taken away from cities since they were never theirs to begin with.
The GOP sponsors of the bill concur. At a February NFIB event, Rep. Dustin Burrows (R) described the legislation as a “stay in your lane” law. “If you’re a city, carry out your essential duties. Do your primary duties if you’re a county.
The Texas Tribune reported in March that Burrows had characterized the bill’s detractors as “taxpayer-funded lobbyists” who were “out in full force trying to undermine this effort.”
Burrows used a strategy used often by Republican statehouse communicators around the country in those statements.
Groups opposing the bills, he added, “are beholden to special interest groups who cannot get their liberal agenda through at the statehouse, so they go to city halls across the State, creating a patchwork of unnecessary and anti-business ordinances.”
However, opponents of the measure countered that municipal laws are a “patchwork” since local circumstances are as well.
“Lawmakers who voted for this must explain to their constituents why they gave away local authority to lawmakers hundreds of miles away in Austin who may have never even set foot in their community,” said Adrian Shelley, Texas director of advocacy group Public Citizen.
Eckhardt, the state senator from Bastrop, argued the legislation “obliterates the local balancing of interests that creates the distinct local flavor from Lubbock to Houston, Laredo to Texarkana.”
House Bill 2127 and similar legislation “excuse the Texas legislature from leading,” she said.
“We are wasting our precious 140 days — when we could be doing statewide health, education, justice and prosperity policies — barging into bedrooms, locker rooms, boardrooms examining rooms and now city council meetings.”
