In February, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit accusing Dallas officials of failing to adequately fund the city’s police department and violating a voter-approved measure requiring it to hire up to 900 new officers.

“I filed this lawsuit to ensure that the City of Dallas fully funds law enforcement, upholds public safety, and is accountable to its constituents,” Paxton said in a news release demanding that the city adhere to a 2024 change in its charter. “When voters demand more funding for law enforcement, local officials must immediately comply.”

The reason Paxton could pursue such action, the reason the Dallas city charter even requires hiring more officers, was due in large part to a man named Art Martinez de Vara. A private attorney with a law practice based in Houston and a tiny South Texas town called Von Ormy, Martinez de Vara was one of the driving forces behind the changes in the charter that opened Dallas up to such a lawsuit in the first place.

Martinez de Vara’spersonal websitelists him as a state historian, an anthropologist and an attorney, in that order. He’s also the mayor of Von Ormy, a community of 1,100 people. But over the past two decades, Martinez de Vara has been much more than that. He has made a name for himself in Texas conservative circles as the architect behind the formation of a handful of small towns with austere — nearly nonexistent — local governments.

His push for limited-government concepts is not out of the norm in Texas, a state that has long worn that badge with pride. But the so-called “liberty city” experiment, in which communities agree to lean governments, little to no taxation and scant regulation, never grew into a large-scale movement. So in recent years, Martinez de Vara and other limited-government advocates have taken a different tack: They’ve ramped up efforts to restrict local governments’ ability to decide how they spend their money and which policies they can adopt.

That’s what happened in Dallas.

Two years ago, Martinez de Vara joined a coalition of power players associated with a nonprofit called Dallas HERO, a group funded in part by Republican megadonor and Dallas-area hotelier Monty Bennett.

As HERO’s attorney, Martinez de Vara helped draft and lobby for ballot measures that required the city to dedicate a large share of its budget to hiring more police officers and significantly increase starting pay, even if it meant cutting other public services. Last year, the city agreed to fund hiring 350 more officers to begin meeting the new requirement, which has no timeline for compliance.

Another measure Martinez de Vara helped draft made the city more vulnerable to lawsuits from opponents of its actions, by stripping the city of its immunity from litigation.

The measures, the group argued, would make Dallas safer and ensure local officials were more accountable to their constituents. But Dallas’s elected officials, nearly all of whom were opposed to the measures, say the reality has been detrimental. They are cutting city services and staff to ensure they have the money for the new recruits,even as crime continues to drop. And they’ve already had to spend additional money to defend themselves against a lawsuit brought by a couple who argued that the city violated its own noise regulations by allowing the construction of a church basketball court near their home. (A judge dismissed the couple’s claims tied to the city charter amendment, but that ruling is now on appeal.) Paxton’s lawsuit — which Dallas maintains it still has immunity from — now puts a new microscope on the city more than a year after the propositions passed.

Source: Drudge Report