Grapevine City Council members approved a legislative agenda for the upcoming session of the Texas Legislature, which begins next week.
According to Transparency USA, Grapevine spent more than $86,000 on taxpayer-funded lobbyists from January to December 2024.
“Taxpayer-funded lobbying” refers to a common practice among cities, counties, and school districts that hire lobbyists with local tax revenue. These lobbyists then work to advance policies that benefit local governments—often at the expense of citizens. Banning the practice is a legislative priority for the Texas GOP this session.
Grapevine Assistant City Manager Jennifer Hibbs said that the city has already started communicating with lawmakers and will work with the Texas Municipal League to help accomplish their agenda. The TML is one of Texas’ largest taxpayer-funded lobbying organizations.
Those agenda items were in a resolution passed Tuesday evening and included opposing legislation that would restrict the city’s right to regulate short-term rentals, monitoring changes related to sales tax sourcing, and opposing “unfunded mandates,” a term which is often used to characterize laws or regulations imposed by the state that require a lower level of government to take specific actions without appropriating funds to pay for them.
The city’s agenda also included opposing legislation that would make local elections partisan. Making local elections partisan is a priority of the election security organization Advancing Integrity. Its president, Christine Welborn, asserted that “Non-partisan government is a myth… Let’s stop playing games and tell the truth.”
The Grapevine agenda also opposed restrictions to a municipality’s right to hold elections and supports legislation to provide additional training for law enforcement with regard to “management of critical incidents and high-risk responses.”
Hibbs told the council that the legislative agenda doesn’t change much from session to session, as the city likes to “focus on local control of local issues.”
“We like to focus on local control of local issues and maintaining that and avoiding unfunded mandates. So I won’t go through it line by line, but I do want to point out that during the last session, there were some land use bills that preempted city authority that were pretty concerning and that we think have some energy to come back this time,” said Hibbs. “And those have to do with the regulation of minimum lot sizes, accessory dwelling units, and, of course, certain short-term rentals, which we have strong opinions on here in Grapevine. So, those items are in our legislative agenda, and we will work hard to communicate specifically on those items with our legislators.”
Grapevine’s 2024 lobbyists included consultants Brandon Todd Aghamalian, Curtis L. Seidlits, and Snapper L. Carr, and legislative and regulatory counsel Lynlie M. Wallace. The four work for Focused Advocacy, a lobbying organization that specializes in legislative advocacy, municipalities, utilities, and regulatory challenges.
You can read Grapevine’s full legislative agenda here.
The 89th Legislative Session begins January 14.
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