Texas bill curbing power from cities edges closer to passage

The Texas House is on the verge of passing a bill restricting cities’ right to set local ordinances across a broad range of issues.

The GOP-controlled body gave initial approval to House Bill 2127 almost two-to-one on Tuesday evening.

The bill bans the state’s largely liberal-run cities from setting any policy more stringent than those passed by its conservative-dominated legislature across a wide range of domains.

These include cities’ ability to regulate issues like agriculture, labor rights or natural resources.

The preliminary vote proceeded largely along partisan lines. Only 8 of the body’s 65 Democrats voted for the bill, and no Republicans voted against it.

The bill has not yet formally passed, but its way is clear to the desk of Gov. Greg Abbott (R), and ultimate passage.

While the House bill still must pass a final vote — and its Senate companion remains in committee — the bill is supported by both Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who maintains tight control over the state Senate.

The bill’s backers have cast it as an essential step to protect local businesses against what they characterize as newly activist local governments, as The Hill reported.

GOP sponsor Rep. Dustin Burrows cast the bill as an aid to Texas businesses looking to expand operations to other municipalities, Houston Public Media reported.

Rather than constricting local governments, Burrows argued it would protect them from what bill supporters portray as an onslaught of spurious local pressure from environmental activists.

“It actually gives local governments a hand by giving them a simple reason why they won’t, in fact, be bringing to a vote the countless issues that activists have been harassing them to pass locally,” Burrows said.

City representatives have largely not been receptive to this helping hand — which gives private citizens in urban or surrounding counties the ability to sue local governments for damages if they pass ordinances more stringent than the state.

“We’re really in a catch-22, where the state doesn’t want to govern — and it also doesn’t want to let cities govern,” Austin city councilor Luis “Chito” Vela told The Hill.

“This just reeks much more of politics — and trying to kill local political forces that may disagree with, you know, the Governor and the Speaker and the lieutenant governor — than any legitimate policy concern,” Vela added.

The state business lobby was frightened by the mandatory sick-time laws several large cities passed in 2019 — even though courts later struck those laws down, representatives told The Hill.

“Cities can’t just sort of all of a sudden reinvent the wheel and start stepping outside of their jurisdictional powers, which are health and safety, and things like that,” Annie Spilman, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, told The Hill.

“It’s a very black and white, sort of stay in your lane type of bill,” Spilman added.

The local regulations that groups like NFIB warn against have long been a part of life in the state’s largely autonomous cities.

But in the hearings on Tuesday, state Republicans cast potential new bills — like a Dallas proposal to ban gas mowers — as a serious threat.

“We just need to nip this in the bud before it starts,” Hancock said.

By contrast, its opponents have argued that unlike a series of past legislation constricting cities’ authority — which targeted specific issues like cities’ ability to mandate background checks for Uber drivers or bar fracking within city limits  — this “super-preemption” bill is so broad that it will throw a series of wrenches into the works of urban government. 

To take just one example flagged by opponents, it would ban Austin and Dallas’s policies mandating rest breaks for construction workers and would ban other cities from setting their own heat guidelines.

Austin and Dallas require rest breaks of 10 minutes for every 4 hours, which the new legislation would nullify.

The pro-bill camp has argued that such legislations are the proper domain of OSHA and are unnecessary because Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) restrictions are far more stringent.

“Let me tell you, if you had a roofer in the Texas summer working for four hours in the heat of the Texas summer and only getting a 10-minute rest break, OSHA would come down incredibly hard on them,” Ned Muñoz of Texas Builders told the state Senate Committee on Business & Commerce.

Muñoz noted that Dallas has never cited a builder for failure to provide such rest breaks.

OSHA does not have specific regulations around heat, though a group of Democraticattorneys general called in February for the agency to create such rules. 

Agency data shows that while the agency sometimes cites workplaces for “general” safety failures, only 1 percent of 2022 actions were for exposure heat risk, as The Hill reported.

That constituted a total of 7 citations nationwide — in an environment where about 43 workers die per year nationwide.

The House bill represents a significant departure from nearly a century of precedent in which cities are left to manage their own affairs, Steven Pedigo, director of the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ Urban Lab, told The Texas Tribune.

“We’re at a real inflection point,” Pedigo said. “Does the state of Texas really believe in conservative government or does it not? That’s the big question.”

The law is a sign of the GOP’s embrace of a “goldilocks theory” of government, Bennett Sandlin, director of The Texas Municipal League, told The Hill.

“Federal authority — that’s too big. Local authority, that’s too small,” he said, nodding to the two domains of government that currently are run by Democrats.

“But state authority, well, that’s just right.”