Opinion: HB 2127 Takes the Handcuffs Off Local Businesses

House Bill 2127 goes into effect Friday, September 1st. To the Metroplex Civic & Business Association (MCBA), this feels like much-needed regulatory relief for small businesses. Many have called or dubbed this piece of legislation the ‘Death Star’ bill. It effectively ends a significant amount of what many people see as meaningless “over-regulation” by local Municipal Governing bodies. While most media outlets are fearmongering about how this is damaging, let’s take a deeper look into what this Bill actually means.

Here are a couple of key facts:

1) HB 2127 preempts local ordinances & regulations that conflict with or exceed state law in 9 areas

2) Preempted codes and regulations maintained in defiance of the law can be challenged by injured parties, with cities given 90 days to comply with the law

3) Does not require cities to explicitly overturn or reverse ordinances, they can simply stop enforcing them as of September 1st, 2023

4) A wide range of local ordinances and regulations are invalidated, with implications for a wide variety of small businesses

Critics of this bill, such as the Houston Chronicle, have used captions such as, “New Texas bill ending water break mandates is a death sentence for construction workers, experts say,” to push their anti-HB 2127 narrative.

We dug into this claim deeper and found that the Texas Public Policy Foundation had submitted a Public Information Act (PIA) request to the city of Austin to ask whether its ordinance mandating water breaks has ever been enforced. The PIA question specifically asked: “how many violations the city of Austin has recorded since the passage of the city’s Rest Break Ordinance, Ordinance No. 20100729-047? How many citations have been issued, how many fines have been levied, and how much were the fines?”

The city responded to the Texas Policy Foundation with more than 9,000 pages of material (with just a few entries on each page). However, in all those pages of documented code enforcement actions, the city provided documentation for zero citations ever having been issued for violating this specific ordinance. Again, it has no documentation of any enforcement or any fines. So frankly, this ordinance didn’t need to be in place at all, as no one violated it to begin with.

If you look at the data over the last 3 years, so many companies have relocated to Texas from over-regulated cities and states. It’s crystal clear: Texas is open for business, and the large metropolitan areas have been the big winners of relocating companies and residents. Ironically, some of the largest cities in Texas have been losing population, while their suburbs have expanded rapidly. As we mentioned in a previous Dallas Express article, the City of Dallas’ population has declined 3.36% since 2020, during the same period, the Metroplex grew faster and larger than ever before.

You may ask, why is that? The answer can be heard from many of the MCBA Member companies who relocated to DFW from outside the state. They didn’t want to move from one over-regulated area to another. Dallas and many of the other core cities across Texas are following the same unfortunate path as other major cities like Chicago and San Francisco. This process always seems to start by slowly adding frivolous local regulations, which makes it harder and harder for businesses to stay in compliance and be successful. These ordinances make these major cities less desirable for people to live in and will eventually drive businesses out to less regulated areas.

An example of this, is current legislation regulating Landscaping and Tree Operators in the city of Dallas. The City regulates the private planting and maintenance of trees, as well as regulations the city places on tree maintenance and landscape maintenance companies, both those who operate privately and those who do business with the City. The more a city regulates, the harder it is for these small business owners to stay afloat.

The numbers don’t lie! The State of Texas is getting it right, and if it wasn’t, so many companies would not be moving here. The problem is our major cities are constantly getting in their own way, which hinders their growth. HB 2127 is a strong pro-business statement from Austin, which effectively takes the handcuffs off many small business owners.

It’s ironic that we have cities that are up in arms about meaningless ordinances that no one is violating while, at the same time, they are not prosecuting Felony charges. As mentioned earlier, Austin never issued a citation for the Rest Break Ordinance, yet KVUE ABC reports that the Travis County District Attorney’s Office threw out hundreds of Felony cases in 2020. They released these offenders without even seeing a judge. Some of the more serious rejected felony charges include aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, assault of a pregnant woman, aggravated robbery, and more. Reflecting on this more, the more regulations a city creates, the more it complicates and overloads enforcement. There then comes a point when there are too many regulations to enforce them all, and the city will then start to collapse.

It is critical that our major cities create the right environment for their citizens, and it’s clear that over-regulating their population doesn’t work. If you don’t take our word for it, ask any one of the thousands of business owners who have left Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston & New York and moved to DFW.

Our recommendation to the City of Dallas when it comes to regulation… Less is More.

The MCBA reviewed the City of Dallas Ordinances that would be in conflict with HB 2127, a preliminary analysis of which is in the table below: