Meet the mayor of a tiny Texas town who wants to limit how cities can govern
Meet the mayor of a tiny Texas town who wants to limit how cities can govern
Art Martinez de Vara’s influence on Texas local governments - The Texas Tribune
A push to restrict local governments’ power is having downstream effects in tiny towns and big cities like Dallas.
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’s personal website lists 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.