State vs. local control: Legislation could overturn downtown Fort Worth district’s authority
April 6,2025
See full Fort Worth Report article by David Montgomery here.
A perennial clash over state and local control is roiling the 89th Legislature as Fort Worth and other cities fight legislation to supplant the locally run management of downtown public improvement districts that play a fundamental role in shaping a city’s culture and character.
The bills by Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, and Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, would overturn the management of public improvement districts in four of the state’s largest cities — Fort Worth, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin — by bringing in a new seven-member board including appointees by the governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker.
The districts are typically known as PIDs. As with the other affected cities, the legislation has had a jarring impact on Fort Worth leaders and top officials of Downtown Fort Worth Inc., which has served for nearly four decades as a downtown management and advocacy organization for Fort Worth.
Property owners within the 543-acre Public Improvement District No. 1 pay special assessments above their property taxes for an array of services including beautification and security to further enhance the downtown core of the nation’s 12th-largest city.
“This legislation is a wholesale abandonment of property owner protections ensured by the state when the Legislature authorized PIDs in 1987,” said Andy Taft, president of Downtown Fort Worth Inc. In addition to the management restructuring, the two bills, which are almost identical, also call for state-mandated priorities to fight crime and deal with homelessness.
Coming just under two months before the Legislature’s June 2 adjournment, the PID legislation injected a hot new issue into the legislative mix and may revive old animosities from state and local skirmishes in previous sessions.
One such battle stretched throughout the last session in 2023, before the Republican-dominated Legislature enacted a measure by Rep. Dustin Burrows of Lubbock, now the House speaker, that barred cities and counties from creating local ordinances that went further than state law. Nicknamed the “Death Star” bill by detractors, the bill was designed to address what sponsors called a thicket of duplicative regulations both on the state and local level.
Other state and local disputes have played out over issues such as ride-sharing services like Uber and public funding used by local governments to conduct lobbying at the state capitol.
The PID dispute started when Middleton and Leach, who have thus far declined to publicly comment on the measures, introduced their bills in March. Neither has been scheduled for a hearing.
The legislation didn’t cite specific cities, but Fort Worth, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio are covered because they fall within the population brackets of over 900,000 and less than 2 million. Taft said Houston wasn’t included because it has a municipal management district and isn’t affected.
Reaction to the measures spread swiftly as officials realized the bill’s potential impact on the future of downtowns. Sundance Square, the about 37-block development owned by billionaires Ed and Sasha Bass — the largest property owners in downtown — registered opposition to measures through their spokesperson, echoing pushback from other officials.
“We join with the mayor and the City Council and the other property owners in downtown Fort Worth in strongly opposing this,” said Sundance representative Brian Eppstein.
Other local officials issued similar reactions.
“We think it would be negative, very negative,” Steve Montgomery, president and CEO of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, said of the impact of “relinquishing control” to state officials. “As much as I appreciate the state getting involved in issues like homelessness, this is just not the way to do it. The great thing about having local control is we were able to determine for ourselves what our local needs are.”
Rep. John McQueeney, a first-term Republican in Fort Worth, suggested that he may try to seek a compromise with Leach but didn’t offer specifics.
“I am aware of the concerns HB 4078 creates for the City of Fort Worth,” he said in a text to the Fort Worth Report. “I have an excellent working relationship with Rep. Leach and am confident the concerns of the City of Fort Worth will be addressed in the final version of the legislation.
“I strongly believe that downtown Fort Worth is the gold standard and its current organizational structure is a model for others to follow,” he added. “Based on my conversations with Rep. Leach, he agrees.”
Cities targeted by the legislation are also drawing reinforcements from smaller allies aligned with Texas Downtown, a statewide organization of small towns and cities whose members are being asked to contact lawmakers expressing opposition to the bills.
Tania Moody, the organization’s executive director, said potentially hundreds of members could call or write House members and senators to urge that the legislation be defeated. “It has a very long potential reach,” she said of the bills. “Once this happens for the big cities like Fort Worth, Dallas or some of the (other) larger city members, it’s bound to happen for the smaller members.”
She called the effort a “grassroots campaign” aimed at “everybody that’ll listen.” Moody recently wrote Sen. Charles Perry, asking the Lubbock Republican to “vehemently oppose” Middleton’s bill and calling it “a detrimental bill to downtowns across the state.”
The Fort Worth Report’s Texas legislative coverage is supported by Kelly Hart. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
Dave Montgomery is an Austin-based freelance reporter for the Fort Worth Report.
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.