Should Texas take over downtown Fort Worth? We’re doing just fine, thanks | Opinion

We regret to inform you that the Legislature is at it again, attempting to push bills that waste your precious time and taxpayer dollars by extending the state’s arm into your backyard.

We’re dealing with a twin set of dangerous bills built on faulty premises — this time that Fort Worth’s downtown and those of a few other Texas cities are uninhabitable pits of violent despair, desperate for intervention. If passed, House Bill 4078 and Senate Bill 2594 would unilaterally set the priorities for spending by “public improvement districts,” locally managed commerce-focused nonprofits serving downtown neighborhoods for decades.

The bills would mandate that the top two categories for expenditures would be for the “elimination” of crime and what the proposed legislation calls “vagrancy.”

The authors, Rep. Jeff Leach, R-McKinney, and Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, would achieve urban utopia by stripping local control from “public improvement districts” — locally managed commerce-focused nonprofits serving these neighborhoods for decades — and forcing them under the whims of fear-mongering suburbanites.

The bills would apply to Texas cities with populations over 900,000 but below 2 million, curiously leaving Houston out. They continue the march of decades of GOP leaders encroaching on how local governments conduct themselves. And really, Republicans are piling on Austin and Dallas for the ills, perceived or real, created by liberal leaders. They managed to sweep in Fort Worth, though, intentionally or not, despite its history of a well-managed downtown that is safe, clean and a popular tourist destination.

STATE WOULD TAKE OVER DOWNTOWN DISTRICTS IN NAME OF FIGHTING CRIME

Here’s what the bills propose: Sweeping levels of control over downtown areas, including how any public improvement district does its job and who is appointed to its board of directors. What you won’t find is just as important: there isn’t a single shred of evidence included that crime is a growing problem, nor details about how to “eliminate” homelessness.

We know crime in Fort Worth has been on the decline since the COVID-19 pandemic. (Dallas has been on the decline for four straight years.) And if you’ve been to Sundance Square in Fort Worth lately, you likely understand nobody is crouched behind the giant rhinestone cowboy hat waiting to abduct you from your happy hour. Even if the most cowardly fears of downtown life were true, and we were living in “The Last of Us” B-roll, crime is too complex a problem to address with control from a board chosen by politicians hundreds of miles away.

And what does it mean to “eliminate” homelessness? Because we also know shoveling people without homes from one street to another and razing the little they have left doesn’t help, either. Entrenched societal ills aren’t solved with a snap of the fingers in Austin, but meaningful collaboration between civic-minded citizens and a government that listens to all the people on the ground, including the most vulnerable among us.

Leaders of Downtown Fort Worth Inc., which operates the $3.6 million-a-year PID, said in a written statement that they “applaud the idea of more resources going into homelessness-related issues.” But they want partnership, not a mandate. “The State capture and upending of successful PIDs being pursued by the bills is inappropriate and completely contrary to the way PIDs are supported by assessment payers.”

“If the Legislature is committed to addressing crime and homelessness, we encourage the state to work with Texas cities to address the issues thoughtfully and not upend the core philosophy behind PID success: petition-based property owner participation to address property owner priorities.”

CONSTANT POWER GRABS, INCLUDING THE ‘DEATH STAR’ BILL

Worse is that our state and region have seen lawmakers make this reckless, power-hungry gambit before. In 2023, the “Texas Regulatory Consistency Act” — which detractors appropriately referred to as the “Death Star” bill — infamously restricted what laws cities could pass in their districts, particularly when they threatened to enact policies deemed too progressive. (Required rest and water breaks for workers, even in our sweltering and deadly summers, gained the most local ire and national attention.) A judge ruled the Death Star bill unconstitutional, and it’s still tied up in the courts.

We also have several examples of state government taking local public safety into its own hands, sending in fleets of state troopers to patrol city subregions. This approach to managing “high crime areas” in Austin resulted in arresting Black and Latino people at least nine times as much other ethnic groups, with the suspects usually accused of nonviolent offenses. In 2019, state troopers pulled over 12,000 people in Dallas traffic stops over seven weeks, roughly 255 people a day. Systematically soiling a majority Black and Latino community’s Fourth Amendment protections is no meaningful or sustainable form of crime prevention. Either way, the only thing “eliminated” by the state was any remaining sense of freedom or safety.

Texans don’t have to go this route again.

We can enjoy the distinct benefits of local democracy, seek out sensible ways to improve public safety, treat our homeless neighbors as neighbors, and trust the people nearest to the vaguely defined problem to run point on the solutions. But some of the Republicans in our house continue to put our community’s flourishing to the backseat of controlling how we live our lives. We shouldn’t tolerate it any longer.

Editor’s note: Star-Telegram president and editor Steve Coffman is a member of the Downtown Fort Worth Inc. board of directors, which opposes House Bill 4078 and Senate Bill 2594. Coffman abstained from the downtown board’s vote on the matter and did not participate in the Editorial Board’s deliberations on the topic.