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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched a probe into nearly 1,000 Texas cities—including most of the state’s major cities—to ensure they’re following new requirements to comply with state auditing rules before raising taxes on their citizens.
Many of the state’s biggest cities, namely Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Corpus Christi, and Waco, were included. While Paxton hasn’t alleged any wrongdoing from these cities, the investigation serves as a strong warning that they are being watched and will be held accountable for their actions.
Charles Blaine, president of Urban Reform, praised the move from the AG’s office, saying: “None of those thousand cities that get this request know which one he’s just going to stop and take a look at, so it puts them all on notice to adhere to the law.”
This comes just weeks after the city of La Marque made headlines for allegedly violating the law when it tried to raise property taxes to cover a budget shortfall—despite not being in compliance with state auditing deadlines.
Blaine says smaller cities like La Marque, and even smaller municipal jurisdictions like MUD districts, should become the primary focus of these probes because “not only do you often find a lot of waste, abuse, and just outright fraud in them, but you also don’t have the level of accountability that you have in major cities.”
He added that those records would also be a lot easier to sift through than the multi-thousand-page records you’d get from bigger cities like Houston and Dallas.
