Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office filed an amicus brief on Friday in support of a lawsuit against Dallas City officials regarding a number of last-second charter amendment proposals advanced at a Dallas City Council meeting earlier in August.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, three Dallas City Council Members — Omar Narvaez (District 6), Adam Bazaldua (District 7), and Gay Donnell Willis (District 13) — submitted proposed amendments to the Dallas City Charter, seemingly in a bid to negate three citizen-led amendments they disagreed with. A majority of council members voted to approve the proposed amendments and put them on the ballot.
Dallas voters will have a chance to weigh in on the amendments in the upcoming November election.
The addition of the proposed amendments submitted by Narvaez, Bazaldua, and Willis prompted a number of lawsuits filed by the nonprofit Dallas HERO and a paralegal named Cathy Cortina Arvizo. The litigants claimed that the council members’ amendments were meant to “mislead and cause confusion among voters, diminish the ability of voters to discern and distinguish the city’s propositions from other propositions on the ballot, and nullify the will of voters,” according to one of the lawsuits.
“[D]ue to the City Council’s eleventh-hour additions, the slate of charter amendments presented to Dallas’s voters — taken as a whole — runs afoul of this Court’s precedent in In re Durnin … and Dacus v. Parker,” wrote Lanora C. Pettit, the principal deputy solicitor general at Paxton’s office, in an amicus brief to the Texas Supreme Court.
She later stated, “The City Council crossed the Dacus line by proposing additional charter amendments without explaining that their ‘character and purpose’ was effectively to undo the charter amendments proposed by Dallas HERO.”
Noting that this situation creates an issue in which voters could possibly approve charter amendments that directly conflict with one another, Pettit wrote:
“Texas is aware of nothing in the proposed ballot language to inform voters that by voting for the city-proposed amendments, they necessarily render ineffective Dallas HERO’s propositions. That result is particularly concerning given that these amendments only arose out of citizens’ frustration with the same City Council’s refusal to enforce its own laws.”
If approved by voters, Dallas HERO’s charter amendments would bolster the City’s public safety resources, tie the city manager’s bonus pay to an annual community survey, and waive the City’s sovereign immunity in cases where officials fail to abide by the Dallas City Charter, Dallas City Code, and state law.