Lawsuit questions constitutionality of Texas law chopping at Taylor’s outskirts
As landowners on the edge of Texas cities increasingly use a new state law aimed at getting out from under cityimposed development restrictions, municipalities are pushing back with legal challenges.
The first salvo is a lawsuit
recently filed by the North Texas city of Grand Prairie against the state in a Travis County state district court.
The lawsuit, which claims Senate Bill 2038 is unconstitutional, has since been joined by the city of Lockhart.
SB 2038 allows landowners to cast votes if they wish to remove themselves from a city’s extraterritorial jurisdiction, or the region immediately outside a city’s boundaries. Municipalities can speed up the request by agreeing to let the property owners out. The law allows some exemptions based on nearness to heavily populated areas or military installations.
So far, Taylor has not joined the civil action, but an attorney representing area homeowners wishing to decouple from the city said he expects to see more municipalities get in step with Grand Prairie and Lockhart.
“I would be surprised if more cities aren’t jumping in and getting involved,” said Chris Johns, a partner in Cobb & Johns.
Developers and some property owners have hailed SB 2038, saying the legislation frees them from cumbersome city regulations and taxation when they don’t receive full services. Municipal governments maintain it hobbles them from controlling unchecked development.
The Texas Municipal League shared the lawsuit with its member cities in its online newsletter and referred those interested to an attorney handling the case.
A spokeswoman for Taylor, which has lost more than 2,000 acres of its ETJ to deannexation since October, said any discussion about whether to join the suit would likely take place during a City Council executive session, or behind closed doors, as are most of the city’s legal proceedings.
If Taylor’s elected leaders decide to join forces with the other cities, the vote will be in open session.
If the courts find the law unconstitutional, Johns expects cities that approved deannexation petitions and elections will reassert jurisdictional control over those properties.
For now, he believes the bulk of the deannexation efforts in East Williamson County are over, he said. Johns’ firm is not representing additional clients in the Taylor area but said to expect a trickle of new filings in the coming months.
Last month, Taylor Assistant City Manager Tom Yantis told the East Wilco Insider — a sister publication of the Taylor Press — that owners of about 35 properties totaling 2,148 acres had petitioned the city for removal from the ETJ.
Elected officials approved the actions at two October council meetings.
While this pulls the removed land from the control of the city, it still falls under Williamson County development codes and restrictions.
To date, most of the deannexed property is in the southeast portion of the ETJ, including large and small plots just east of Samsung Austin Semiconductor’s 1,200acre holding, and stretching south of the manufacturing facility’s border to almost the southern tip of the ETJ.
A few scattered properties recently removed from the ETJ are west and north of the city.
The lawsuit involving Grand Prairie and Lockhart is prompted by concerns from landowners, including individuals and commercial and residential development companies, who have grown frustrated with the city-imposed restrictions and what they term fruitless negotiations that limit possible profits.
For the cities’ part, the deannexation law is a blow to the use of ETJs for the last 70 years to control growth immediately outside the city limits and to keep pathways open to acquire right-ofway easements more easily for expanding utilities such as water and sewer.
“The legislation creates pockets in the ETJ and infrastructure is based on straight lines, like those for water lines, sewer lines and roads,” Yantis told the Insider in the November issue. “We don’t know how many and when properties are going to leave the ETJ. It really makes it hard for the city plan for the future of the city’s infrastructure.”
A frequent complaint is that cities, including Taylor, often don’t provide services for decades to those areas outside the city limits but which are still effectively under their control.
Johns is advocating for numerous Central Texas landowners in the deannexation process now that SB 2038 has passed, including about 50 in the Taylor area.
He said the Grand Prairie lawsuit against the state doesn’t come as a surprise as cities find a way to claw back their lost powers through the courts and in future sessions of the Legislature.
In the 1980s, there was a process in place that would allow neighborhoods or properties to be removed from special districts such as ETJs if services such as sewer and water weren’t provided within a certain time frame, Johns said.
“Cities had to fish or cut bait,” he added.
That law disappeared from statutes over time and remedies for landowners were hard to come by. The new law, which Johns said he helped draft, reasserted those rights.
The Grand Prairie lawsuit contends the new law, which took effect Sept. 1, went too far and, as written, does not expressly allow landholders to remove themselves from an ETJ simply by filing a petition that a city is then forced to approve.
Grand Prairie has denied approval of several petitions to leave the ETJ outside the city of about 206,000 people between Dallas and Fort Worth.
