Texas cities fear ‘Death Star’ law will wipe out regulations. How about Fort Worth? | Opinion

Houston, perhaps joined by other big cities, is suing the state over the Legislature’s “Death Star” bill targeting local regulations. So, where does Fort Worth stand?

House Bill 2127 prohibits cities and counties from creating regulations beyond what already exists in Texas law governing areas such as agriculture, business and commerce, finance, insurance, labor, natural resources, occupational issues and property regulation. (The term “Death Star” is a reference to the planet destroyer in “Star Wars,” of course.)

While Houston and Dallas are worried about losing all kinds of local regulations, City Manager David Cooke and City Attorney Leann Guzman told us that Fort Worth won’t feel much change at all, in part because it’s been less eager to regulate business to begin with.

“We think that Fort Worth fairly well came out, I won’t say totally unscathed, but not affected to the extent that you saw some of the larger cities who have been more assertive or aggressive in passing certain laws that are specific to business and that kind of a thing,” Guzman said.

Guzman, who has been with the attorney’s office for nearly 20 years, said her staff has tried to go through and “scrub our city code” to see where Fort Worth might be vulnerable to a lawsuit.

“There’s a lot of wait and see to see if we get sued or any of the other cities on a similar ordinance that we have,” she said. Still, she doesn’t think it’s “quite as bad for Fort Worth as it is for some of the others.”

Zoning rules, once thought to be a target of state lawmakers, were left entirely unaffected, so that should be a relief.

So far, the bill has gotten a bad reputation nationally, portrayed as Gov. Greg Abbott’s way to abolish mandatory water breaks for outdoor workers. That’s overstating it; two cities had enacted such rules, and the enforcement of such ordinances was almost nonexistent. Water breaks themselves are not abolished.

Here’s an even better example: Let’s say you own an HVAC company that serves businesses up and down Interstate 35W, from Fort Worth to San Antonio. Before the new legislation, there were various, local regulations all across the state. So one company would need to be responsible for knowing those particular rules for every city and following them — and some of them are quite tedious.

Some crews would be required to earn a certain wage and have various breaks, while other crews from the same company working in a different area might be required to be paid a different wage or follow a different regulation about breaks. In this way, the legislation might relieve some stress.

The city has driven the ongoing debate about local control, and specifically whether the conservative government in Austin is simply trying to override policies of the state’s Democratic big cities. That’s where Fort Worth had an edge. It’s the largest city in the state with a Republican mayor and, while voters lean Democratic, it’s far from the deep-blue domination of a Dallas or Houston.

While city officials might be in wait-and-see mode over other ordinances, they avoided the frustration that’s driving litigation. Guzman explained how.

“So our approach wasn’t to try to get it stopped entirely because we thought it was going to be successful at some level. So the approach was, ‘Let’s see if we can influence it along the way and minimize its impact on the city of Fort Worth,’” she said. City officials specifically worked with the bill’s co-sponsor, Republican Rep. Dustin Burrows of Lubbock to add language that would allow Fort Worth to preserve some of its own employee policies.

Another thing the city bargained for is what relief the law would make available to plaintiffs. Originally, when someone sued the city, the relief was more open-ended. Now, it’s much more narrow. Basically, the city would just have to stop enforcing an ordinance.

Fort Worth appears to be in good shape when it comes to overbearing regulations that might cause confusion. It won’t be piloting the X-wing starfighter mission to try to take down this Death Star. Houston can take that one-in-a-million shot.

This story was originally published July 21, 2023 at 5:31 AM.