Texas Takes Attacks on Austin to New Level With “Death Star” Law

On Sept. 1, a bill with the pithy title “An Act Relating to State Preemption of and the Effect of Certain State or Federal Law on Certain Municipal and County Regulation” will take effect in Texas. The bill —signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott in June—was given a much zippier name by its opponents: “Death Star,” because it could obliterate whole swaths of city and county laws and regulations.

“Basically, it’s the greatest transfer of power away from the public and into the hands of a few people in Austin that we’ve ever seen,” said Texas state Rep. John Bryant. “This handful of people that want to control our state do not want cities acting in their own interests. They do not want any city making policies that get in the way of their ideological and financial objectives.” Maybe Bryant and other Death Star critics are right—but we’ll know how big the transfer of power truly is only after everyone figures out what the bill actually says and does, and only if it survives the legal challenges several of Texas’ biggest cities have already filed against it.

The goal of Death Star is simple. The deeply conservative Texas Legislature wants to effectively deny cities—the state’s large Democratic-leaning cities, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin in particular—the ability to pass local laws and regulations in eight major policy areas: agriculture, business and commerce, finance, insurance, labor, natural resource law, occupational law, and property law. And it does all this in a bill that is 10 single-spaced pages long, nearly one page of which is legislative findings, not actual law. Which is where the problems begin.

Death Star does not aim to affirmatively lay out regulations at the state level; it simply attempts to thwart local regulations. Thus, the entirely of the provision that denies local governments the ability to regulate the insurance industry is just this: “Unless expressly authorized by another statute, a municipality or county may not adopt, enforce, or maintain an ordinance, order, or rule regulating conduct in a field of regulation that is occupied by a provision of this code. An ordinance, order, or rule that violates this section is void, unenforceable, and inconsistent with this code.” That’s it. It then repeats this language across all the various other fields, although in a few cases it adds an extra clause or two to identify specific subfields it really wants to make sure are preempted.

Problematically, as the city of Houston points out in the lawsuit it filed last month challenging Death Star as violating the Texas Constitution, these provisions lack any clarity. The new law, for example, never defines what it means for state law to “occup[y] a provision of this code” outside of the few explicit provisions noted above, making it very hard for cities to know what regulations are at risk. Houston has argued that it is unconstitutionally vague and that the Texas Constitution and state Supreme Court decisions have made this sort of “field preemption”—in which the state does not replace local law with a state alternative but simply declares whole areas ineligible for local rule making—unconstitutional under Texas law. San Antonio joined the lawsuit late last month.

The sweeping language of Death Star is likely seen more as a feature than a bug by the bill’s drafter, state Rep. Dustin Burrows, who all but brags that it is going to fall to the courts to decide what regulations are actually preempted. Importantly, the bill contains a provision that allows any individual or trade association to challenge any local regulation in court—and, if they prevail, requires the county or city to pay all the challenger’s costs and “reasonable” legal fees. Those who challenge a regulation and lose have to pay those costs only if the court finds the challenge “frivolous,” leaving the city to pay its own costs (though not those of the challenger) if it wins cases the courts see as non-frivolous. So, county and city governments assume financial risk if they attempt to defend a regulation and clarify Death Star’s reach.

e; added bolding (which wasn't in the original) and italicization (which was)