GOP Texas senators push shakeup of regional appeals courts in move likely to reverse Democrats’ gains

Dallas would be in a district with Austin – and Llano and San Saba – under Houston Sen. Joan Huffman’s consolidation plan.

By Allie Morris and Robert T. Garrett, Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN — The Texas Senate’s ruling Republicans advanced bills Thursday that would dramatically reshape state appellate courts, likely reversing the Democrats’ recent judicial gains in big cities and seizing control from Austin-area appeals court judges in major lawsuits on school finance, voting rights and redistricting.

Republicans on the Senate Jurisprudence Committee approved a bill that would consolidate the 14 court of appeals districts into seven, over strong objections from Democrats, civil rights advocates and jurists.

Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, described the restructuring as a much-needed way to slim down the number of courts while evenly spreading out the currently lopsided workload.

“The current system creates inefficiency and confusion for litigants,” Huffman said of her legislation, Senate Bill 11. “It is so important to the jurisprudence and judicial economy of our state that we address these issues.”

But justices from across Texas strongly criticized the proposal in the bill’s first public hearing Thursday. They warned the change would knock Black and Hispanic justices off the appellate bench and refocus attention on nettlesome administrative matters, just as the courts are facing a deluge of cases delayed by the pandemic.

“It seems to me like we’re taking a sledgehammer when a tack hammer could fix or resolve this,” said Chief Justice Robert Burns of the 5th District Court of Appeals in Dallas.

The overhaul would cut the number of appeals court districts in half starting in 2023 and rearrange them in ways critics say would disenfranchise voters from minority communities and rural areas.

The district that includes Dallas County would expand from six counties to 21 — and reach as far south as Austin and west to Llano and San Saba. Tarrant County would be folded into a far-flung district with corners in Waco, Wichita Falls and Texarkana.

Judicial candidates running in the larger districts would need more votes to win, and likely bigger campaign coffers to match, several jurists testified.

Voting rights concerns

Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen, suggested the way the districts are redrawn could violate the federal Voting Rights Act, a criticism echoed by several others.

“The proposed maps are going to significantly dilute the voting strength of communities of color,” said 5th District Court of Appeals Justice Erin Nowell. Statewide, Nowell said she is the only African American out of 80 justices on the courts of appeals.

“It would make it such that, and virtually guarantee, that the number of justices of color that are on the bench right now would lose in the next election,” she said.

The suggested overhaul comes after major political swings.

In 2018, Texas Democrats flipped state appeals courts based in Dallas, Houston and Austin, which gave them control of seven of the state’s 14 appeals courts.

The victory in the Dallas area’s 5th Court of Appeals was ignited by eight Democrats running on what was called the “slate of eight.” A Democrat had not been elected to the court since 1992. But in 2018, Democrats seized the majority on the court, including the post of chief justice.

“It seems ironic that these changes are coming all of a sudden, now that Democrats are beginning to win these contests for the appeals court,” said Jeff Dalton, the political strategist for the 5th Court’s victorious Democratic slate. “We have probably flipped more courts of appeals benches than any other kind of race in the last couple of election cycles.”

Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, prodded Huffman on whether politics played into the redesign. He said he’s heard predictions that the rewrite could result in five Republican-dominated appellate courts and two Democratic ones.

Huffman said she didn’t know what the partisan breakdown would be if an election were held today. The districts were redrawn with the objective to address uneven caseloads, she said.

“We looked at trying to make it accessible to all citizens,” she said.

One of the few to testify Thursday in support of the overhaul was Texans for Lawsuit Reform, a group trying to curb civil lawsuits against business. General counsel Lee Parsley said the change is needed to decrease the number of appeals courts and eliminate overlapping jurisdictions.

“It is all a creation that happened over 100 years of building the court system in that moment to fix that particular problem,” he said. “We favor a change and this is as good a time as any.”

First major restructuring since early 1980s

If adopted, it would mark the first major restructuring of the state’s appeals courts since the early 1980s, Huffman said. Lawyers and jurists testified they had no opportunity for input before the hearing Thursday.

The bill passed out of committee on a 3-2 party line vote, as did another bill that would significantly change the appellate process.

Senate Bill 1529 could neutralize the influence of liberal Austin voters on courts that traditionally have handled big lawsuits against the state, which are typically filed in district court in Travis County. It would yank all appeals of complex suits involving state agencies and leaders from the currently all-Democratic 3rd Court of Appeals based in Austin and give them to a newly created appellate court, the “Texas Court of Appeals,” with its justices elected statewide. At the moment, all statewide elected justices — both civil and criminal — are Republicans.

In a statement of her intent filed with an analysis of her initial draft, Huffman cited a need for experienced judges “to apply highly specialized precedent in complex areas of law.”

Currently, the major state lawsuits are frequently transferred among the 14 intermediate appellate courts to equalize dockets, Huffman noted. That has a downside, she argued.

“These courts have varying levels of experience with the complex legal issues involved in cases of statewide significance, resulting in inconsistent results for litigants,” she said. “This not only brings volatility to the state’s jurisprudence, it does so at taxpayer expense.”

The cases that would be affected could include some of the most high-profile legal battles in Texas, such as decades of challenges to how the Legislature funds public schools.

Michael Gomez, an assistant county attorney in El Paso County, testified that the current structure works just fine.

“Creating a new appellate court would just create a non-necessary cost to taxpayers to enable state agencies to have a home-field advantage in a friendly forum,” he said.

Staff writer Gromer Jeffers Jr. contributed reporting from Dallas.

Need cash? Slap a magnet sign on your truck and say you’re a roofer. Forget the roof. This is Texas

By Dave Lieber, The Dallas Morning News

What happens after a monster storm? Storm chasers show up from who knows where and charm desperate homeowners in need of a new roof out of that first insurance check. Then it’s goodbye forever.

Texas is the only storm-prone state along the Gulf Coast that doesn’t make storm-chasing roofers touch a stitch of paperwork. This is embarrassing for Texas, and especially the governor and our Legislature, both of whom could easily fix this longstanding problem. Their inaction allows crimes to flourish.

Unlike hair cutters and plumbers and tow truck companies, no roofers’ license is required. No certification is demanded. There’s not even a state-sponsored website that offers a list of names, addresses and phone numbers of known honest, reliable roofers.

This type of theft happens every day of the year in Texas, and now there’s at least one guy saying enough is enough.

State Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, has introduced Senate Bill 1481, which calls for a registration system for roofing companies who do post-storm work. For a minimal fee, these storm chasers would get listed on a state website.

The senator says, “You hand somebody $10,000, and you’re not able to look up whether or not they’re registered in the state and have a contact number.”

It’s notable that he mentions $10,000 because I spoke this week with Joe Dickens of Arlington, who gave his roofing company that amount. Then the roofers said goodbye forever. No roof for him.

“He took the money and ran off, OK?” Dickens says of former House of Tomorrow roofing company owner Jorge Garcia.

Dickens is still bitter about being a victim in a huge scheme involving more than 100 homeowners in Dallas, Arlington and Forth Worth. Victims lost a total of $500,000 in lost insurance claims.

For both Dickens and for me this matter is highly personal. We both discovered that storm-chasing roofers often behave as if they are members of a crime syndicate. In fact, my roofing experience changed my life.

The first roofer I hired after a hailstorm 15 years ago got confused and roofed the house behind me instead of mine. He tried to make my shocked neighbor pay anyway.

The second roofer I hired fixed my roof, but then declared bankruptcy, leaving almost a hundred other customers roofless. He was convicted of theft and served prison time.

After that experience, I studied what went wrong and what I could do to prevent it. This is why I created a consumer rights movement called Watchdog Nation that shows us how to protect ourselves. I was my own test case, and that’s how that experience changed my life.

Ever since, I’ve watched storm-chasers pulling off their cons and nothing is done. This is considered normal in Texas, and it was reflected in an eye-opening video posted the other day by the Texas Department of Insurance. The video, called “Winter storm webinar,” is available on YouTube. It was supposed to be a primer on how to handle insurance claims like busted water pipes caused by the February storms.

But something surprising happened in this video. Members of the public hijacked the discussion away from burst pipes to pleas for advice on how to find honest roofers.

The hashtags for the video are #insurance #storm #disaster. But they should be changed to #roofers #scams #disaster. Here are the public’s questions, and the insurance department’s answers.

Do contractors have to be licensed in Texas? (No.)

Is there a way to see if a contractor has been involved in fraud? (Nothing official.)

Is it OK to ask to see their driver’s license? (Brilliant idea.)

Is there a place I can get information about my contractor for my piece of mind? (Check search engines to background the roofer.)

Is there a directory we can use to find good contractors? (Again, nothing official.)

How can we stop unsolicited phone calls and roofers coming to my door? (The calls are illegal, and little can be done. For door-knockers, TDI says ask to see their solicitor’s permit. If they don’t have one, call the cops.)

How can I do a criminal background check on a contractor and his staff? (Try a for-pay website.)

You can see from these questions what concerns the public. All of this could be solved with Sen. Johnson’s Senate Bill 1481, and its companion in House Bill 2777.

The bills require re-roofers (those repairing existing roofs) to register their company’s name with contact information. Any bad behavior would be reported. Violators could face a $500 civil penalty.

But the same lawmaker who killed the roofers bill in 2019 has told the state’s roofers association that he vows to do it again.

Rep. Ramon Romero Jr., D-Fort Worth, stomped on the bill two years ago like it was a snake that tried to bite him.

Romero would not talk to The Watchdog this week. But in 2019 when I profiled his stomping, he told me one reason he objected was because the bill’s author was not a contractor. “It really needs to be a contractor,” he said. (Did I mention Romero is a contractor?)

Truth is anybody can introduce a bill. But thanks to Romero, two years ago, the bill lost a 99-33 House vote. Since then, more Texans have been ripped off. I blame him.

Sarah Burns, who runs the Roofing Contractors Association of Texas, told me, Romero has “already made it abundantly clear that he intends to do the same in this session.”

Before talking to me, Burns said she was on the phone with a San Antonio homeowner.

“They hired the cheap guy,” she said, “and now they’ve got a $40,000 metal roof, and it leaks all over the place. They’re going to have to move out.”

If you’re wondering why this registry is such a problem, it plays into the notion, pushed hard by Gov. Greg Abbott and others, that we shouldn’t do anything that hurts business. And how about consumers? Meh.

“I understand we like Texas,” Burns says. “The reason we’re here is because we don’t want government in our business. But, unfortunately, this is a situation with no recourse for consumers.”

Johnson says his bill has a chance this year because the October 2019 Dallas tornado drew added attention to the crime spree. His bill awaits a hearing in the Senate Business & Commerce Committee. (Want to help? Call chairman Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, and say “Let’s move on SB 1481.” His office is 512-463-0109.)

The similar House Bill 2777 could use your help, too. It’s stuck in the House Business & Industry Committee, where chairman Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, released a statement to The Watchdog, saying: “In terms of this specific measure, I have not reviewed it, but I support efforts to reform the roofing industry to better protect consumers.” (Want to help? Promote HB 2777 for a hearing. Turner’s office is: 512-463-0574.)

Remember our victim, Dickens? Other victims were not as fortunate as the Arlington homeowner who lost $10,000. NBC5 did a report on his plight. That changed everything.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he says. “After that, a roofing company contacted me. There was a good Samaritan. He donated my roof. Who that individual was I have no idea, but I would love to sit down, shake his hand and have a cup of coffee with him.”

What an embarrassment. It takes an unknown angel to make up for what the Texas Legislature won’t do for its own people.