Dallas should join the charge against Texas state overreach

Houston and San Antonio have filed a lawsuit against the state to block House Bill 2127, or the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act. It’s encouraging to see that some council members in Dallas support the city joining them.

HB 2127 is intended to “provide statewide consistency by returning sovereign regulatory powers to the state where those powers belong.” The lawsuit challenges the Legislature’s constitutional authority to enact the law.

This is a conflict over interpretations of the new law. The text of HB 2127 claims that the Legislature has constitutional authority to enact this law under Section 5, Article XI in the Texas Constitution. The lawsuit claims that lawmakers do not have that authority, citing the same section. Such are the legal times.

The bill’s purported purpose is to regularize a “patchwork of regulations” from differing municipalities. Its actual intent is to prevent city councils from passing ordinances that run afoul of the Legislature’s more conservative vision for the state.

It accomplishes this by requiring that municipal regulation in several categories be consistent with state law. Anyone negatively affected by local regulations that don’t comply with state law will be able to sue municipalities.

That isn’t entirely unreasonable; cities do sometimes overreach with regulation. Dallas’ now-scrapped plan to ban all gas-powered lawn equipment is one example.

The intention behind that ban was to address health, environmental and noise concerns, but it also would have created unfair expenses for small businesses, like sole-proprietor landscapers.

Other kinds of regulation, however, aren’t affected by the new law. The preemption section in the Health and Safety code wasn’t changed, apparently leaving a municipality’s ability to regulate the sale, distribution or use of tobacco products undisturbed, for example. That means local smoke-free regulations should not be affected.

There are many ordinances that will be affected, though. Perhaps most hotly debated are municipal ordinances requiring water breaks. In extreme Texas heat, city-mandated water breaks are a good protection for outdoor workers against abusive business practices. But they fall under the Labor Code, which is covered under this bill.

The bill does some good. The problem is it does more bad. It goes too far in handcuffing the state’s more than 1,200 cities that have all sorts of problems the Legislature can’t conceive of.

The Legislature meets for only a few months every other year, leaving communities with a small window to address concerns in their community.

Even if the Legislature did manage to get to every issue, regulation that works for one city might not work for another. On top of that, this bill likely means more time and money spent on litigation and legal research for drafting ordinances.

Whether or not the lawsuit succeeds, it’s good to see that some on the Dallas City Council want to join the charge against this kind of state overreach.

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